Chris Alexander: Canada’s failure in Afghanistan PAGE 3

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Vol. 26, No. 8 • October 2018 Editor In Chief Sarmishta Subramanian [email protected] art director Rachel Tennenhouse 3 Indefensible 17 A More Sentimental Man Assistant Editor The truth of Canada’s failure in Afghanistan Michael Ondaatje’s late style Bardia Sinaee The Politics of War by Jean-Christophe Boucher Warlight by Michael Ondaatje Associate editor and Kim Richard Nossal Moez Surani Beth Haddon Chris Alexander Poetry Editor 19 A Novel Bursts to Life Moira MacDougall The quiet brilliance of Helen Humphreys 7 On Looking, and Love copy editor Did captivity save the killer whale? Machine Without Horses by Helen Humphreys Patricia Treble Orca by Jason M. Colby Donna Bailey Nurse Contributing EditorS Nancy Macdonald Mohamed Huque, Andy Lamey, Molly 21 ‘We Don’t Need Art That Often’ Peacock, Robin Roger, Judy Stoffman 8 Evening in the West of Ireland Memorializing the artist who resists enshrinement ProofReaders A poem The Flame by Leonard Cohen Cristina Austin, Suzanne Mantha, Peter Stuart-Sheppard José Teodoro Sondra McGregor, Heather Schultz, Tyler Willis 9 A Boy Meets the World 24 ‘The Sly and Cunning Masquerade’ ADVERTISING/SALES Art from human bondage A brief history of literary fakes Michael Wile Washington Black by Esi Edugyan Literary Impostors by Rosmarin Heidenreich [email protected] Patrick Lohier Dennis Duffy business manager Paul McCuaig 11 Looking Out for Number One 26 ‘A Siege of Reading’ Board of Directors The unmentionable void in city planning Is politics diminishing a burgeoning Tom Kierans, O.C., Don McCutchan, Trina McQueen, O.C., Jaime Watt No Place To Go by Lezlie Lowe literature of the Middle East? corporate secretary Brian Bethune Pay No Heed to the Rockets by Marcello Vali Bennett Di Cintio and The Other Middle East 12 moody blues Advisory Council by Franck Salameh Michael Adams, Alan Broadbent, A poem Nora Parr C.M., Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald Crystal Hurdle Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Don Rickerd, 29 Letters C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, 13 We Are All Outsiders Now Margaret Moore, George Anderson, Bernard Schiff The triumph of individual autonomy George Elliott Clarke, Nyla Matuk, Poetry Submissions For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. Identity by Francis Fukuyama, The Once and Bernie Koenig Future Liberal by Mark Lilla, and The Lies LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK That Bind by Kwame Anthony Appiah 32 The Foreign-Baby Baby Problem Founded in 1991 by P.A. Dutil The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Christopher Dummitt A lesson on citizenship from contemporary Review of Canada Charitable Organization. Japan, and 1860s America annual subscription rates 15 Mystic Rivers Andy Lamey Individuals in Canada $56/year plus GST/HST. A poem (Libraries and institutions in Canada $68/year plus GST/HST.) Outside Canada, please pay $86/year for Anvesh Jain individuals, or $98 for libraries and institutions.

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2 LRC AD Learning to Die U of R Press.indd 1 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review2018-09-17 of Canada 10:59 AM Indefensible The truth of Canada’s failure in Afghanistan Chris Alexander

The Politics of War: Canada’s Afghanistan Mission, 2001-14 Jean-Christophe Boucher and Kim Richard Nossal UBC Press 300 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780774836272

ver fifteen years working in Afghanistan or tracking all aspects of the O conflict from outside, I’ve only once dared hope that peace was in prospect. It was May 2, 2011. Just after 1 a.m., Pakistan time, U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in a walled compound in Abbottabad, a kilometre from the Pakistan Military Academy. Surely all remaining illusions about Pakistan’s role in this war were now shattered, I thought: the whole world would confront The forty-year war: Soviet troops in Afghanistan, 1986. Pakistan’s “miltablishment”—the military and Photograph by Alexandr Graschenkov, RIA Novosti archive, via Wikimedia Commons intelligence agencies that had nurtured al-Qaeda and the Taliban, fielded their fighting forces, and in Afghanistan continues; “strategic cynicism,” fed a quest for “strategic depth” in Central Asia, provid- lied for them all along. by weakness of the will, prevails in every Western ing the spur for an extended, forty-year proxy war. How wrong I was. The Barack Obama admin- capital. About ten thousand people died in this The United States seeks to preserve the institutions istration kept its head buried deep in Syria’s sand. violence in Afghanistan last year. Today this bitter that replaced the Taliban after 2001 as well as a stra- The flash of brilliance at Abbottabad faded back reality haunts Afghans alongside an even more tegic partnership with nuclear-capable Pakistan— into cowardly drift. Within a few years, and after sombre anniversary: the Saur revolution of 1978 goals that are increasingly irreconcilable. a few rounds of bilateral recrimination, Asif Ali that saw Afghan president Mohammed Daoud All these imperatives—Kremlin and Pakistani Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, then Pakistan’s president Khan and his family murdered and replaced with paranoia amid contradictory U.S. strategic object- and prime minister respectively, had visited the Moscow’s hand-picked successors. Two more vio- ives—remain alive and well today, constituting a U.S. to meet Obama. Zardari attended a NATO sum- lent putsches in 1979 meant that, in less than two recipe for perpetual war. Afghanistan is locked in mit in Chicago, and Pakistan completed a purchase calendar years, three presidents and a U.S. ambas- the misery of this “Great Game”—the epic con- of F-16 fighters and munitions from the U.S. sador met bloody ends in Kabul. By then, the Soviet flict that has pitted Safavid Persia against Mughal As this deadly appeasement resumed, a new Union had invaded. The war that began forty years India; Czarist Russia against the British Raj; and the generation of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) hand- ago has never stopped. United States against the Soviet Union—because lers, logisticians, and enablers put fresh waves of The violence has been punctuated by the occa- after half a millennium of high-stakes rivalry punc- Taliban fighters into the field to kill Afghan civilians, sional hiatus—before the storm of the civil war in tuated by regular bloodletting, most assume great officials, and police, as well as NATO and Afghan the 1990s or in the post-Taliban euphoria of 2002. powers will go on playing it. troops. Thousands of Taliban field commanders, But each peace initiative, shura, jirga, and inter- As a result, the inviolability of borders or the IED specialists, suicide bombers, and assassins national conference—and they have been legion— principle of non-interference do not apply in were training on Pakistani territory with impun- has dissolved back into brutality. Afghanistan’s war Afghanistan. Afghan victims—a hundred thousand ity, while the doctor who’d tried to confirm bin seems impervious to resolution. since 9/11; as many as two million since 1978— Laden’s presence in Abbottabad was convicted on It’s not just by happenstance that this has are forgotten in the long litany of misery that pre- trumped-up charges and sentenced to thirty-three become a “forever war” against “the wrong ceded, and survives, them. Four decades of killing years in prison. enemy”—to quote the titles of excellent books by in Afghanistan have cost more lives than the Korean Seventeen years after 9/11, Pakistan’s proxy war New Yorker contributor Dexter Filkins and New War and almost as many as Vietnam (1955 to 1975). York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall. This is an In the postwar era, only Biafra/Nigeria, Bangladesh Chris Alexander was Canada’s ambassador intense, persistent conflict that excludes the possi- (1971), and unfinished wars in Sudan and Congo to Afghanistan (2003 to 2005), deputy special bility of peace precisely because the main parties— have seen higher death tolls. representative of the UN secretary-general for the Soviet Union, Pakistan, the United States—have In 2018, Afghanistan remains one of the world’s Afghanistan (2005 to 2009), parliamentary sec- actively pursued strategies that all but guarantee deadliest conflicts—alongside Syria, Yemen, and retary for national defence (2011 to 2013), and ceaseless, inconclusive war. Iraq, as well as Mexico’s cartel-driven slaughter. minister of citizenship and immigration (2013 to For the Soviet Union, invasion was triggered Yet alone among these twenty-first century con- 2015). He is the author of The Long Way Back: by anxiety over U.S. influence. For Pakistan’s all- flicts, Afghanistan has received almost every form Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace (2011). powerful military, an obsession with India fuelled of international assistance available from more

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 3 than one-quarter of the countries on the planet, all How did these national paradoxes come to pass Stephen Harper’s principal motive for holding them operating under a UN mandate. in a war defined by strategic lapses? This is the story was to point up divisions in the Liberal caucus. So why does the killing continue? that Jean-Christophe Boucher and Kim Richard But these divisions were real. I can recall On September 11, 2001, President George W. Nossal seek to tell in The Politics of War: Canada’s Stéphane Dion, during a visit to Kabul as leader of Bush said, “we will make no distinction between Afghanistan Mission, 2001-14. the official Opposition, telling Afghan ministers, the terrorists who committed these acts and those It’s a worthwhile effort. Boucher is assistant pro- American generals, and international diplomats who sponsor them.” On September 20, as the first fessor of political science at MacEwan University; at an official luncheon I attended that Canadian strikes were being prepared, he added, “from this Nossal is professor of political studies at Queen’s forces would have to come home to protect day forward, any nation that continues to harbour University. They know their stuff. By way of full Whistler and Vancouver for the Winter Olympics— or support terrorism will be regarded by the United disclosure, I know both authors from a number an embarrassing argument to make before allies States as a hostile regime,” pledging to give terror- of academic events. But our direct experience of whose troops were dying in combat for a shared ists “no refuge or rest”—to “pursue nations that Afghanistan didn’t overlap: both visited after my cause. On the same visit Michael Ignatieff, deputy provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.” six years there as Canada’s ambassador and UN Liberal leader at the time, said more or less the The failure of the Bush and Obama administra- deputy special representative for Afghanistan had exact opposite. In any case, Boucher and Nossal’s tions to match these words with actions backed by ended, in 2009. clear preference for purely executive decisions effective leadership have been the NATO mission’s Their book sets out to understand how on committing troops—in the tradition of the undoing. Within sixty days of Bush’s last statement, Canada—a country that had arguably not gone Canadian governments that authorized our mil- Osama bin Laden crossed from Afghanistan’s into a land war since Korea—managed the politics itary effort in Korea or Bosnia, without reference to Nangarhar province into Pakistan’s Kurram agency. surrounding this effort. It’s a very important sub- Parliament—strikes me as unconvincing. Surely the Thousands of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters did ject: Are today’s democracies equipped to mobil- best approach is to debate such missions fully, both the same. Yet the United States never attacked ize when real threats to the peace arise in distant to keep Canadians informed and to set the stage for “those who sponsor” the Taliban in Pakistan. places? The focus here is rightly on the federal arena, parliamentary oversight. In a democracy, no army It never treated Pakistan as a “hostile regime.” The with little attention to Canadian media coverage or succeeds without public support and no military U.S. and its allies chose respect for Pakistan’s sover- grassroots initiatives either for or against Canada’s operation finishes in the same shape, or with the eignty over Afghanistan’s stability, driving sharply involvement in Afghanistan. After providing some same force structure, it had when it started. upwards the cost of this mission in terms of Afghan, background on this conflict and the key phases of Boucher and Nossal also open on a tangent, U.S., and other NATO soldiers’ lives. A drone cam- Canada’s participation, they look mainly at three in my view—asking why Canadian politicians paign scaled up in 2008, peaked at 122 strikes inside major sets of issues: the way the mission was sold to refused to term Afghanistan a “war.” The fact of a Pakistan in 2010, then faded in 2015. The May 2 bin Canadians; the political realities at home, including wasting armed conflict was there, their argument Laden raid was an outlier, not a trend. the impact of Canadian federal elections; and shifts goes: Why not tell it like it was? The short answer in public opinion, influenced among other things is that we couldn’t. The UN Charter gives armed o country was more conspicuously unwaver- by the very public, and politicized, repatriation conflict and military action many definitions— Ning in working toward Afghanistan’s new ceremonies for Canadian troops. “breach of the peace,” “act of aggression,” “armed beginning—the ­largest, most sus- attack,” “individual or collective tained multilateral effort ever self-defence,” even “measures neces- mounted to secure and rebuild a poor sary to maintain international peace country—than Canada. Canadians A PM who had pledged in Kandahar and security.” “War” is not among were instrumental in ensuring NATO not to ‘cut and run’ did precisely that. them. Why? Because the UN aims invoked Article 5 in the wake of the “to save succeeding generations from 9/11 attacks. In 2003, Canada ensured It was a decision that left me ashamed the scourge of war”: it would have that the military mission authorized been inconceivable for the Security by the UN became a NATO-led mis- and very close to resignation. Council to use this term; nor would it sion. We supported national programs have been appropriate for a UN and for rural development, education, NATO member to make a declaration women’s health, disarmament, and, crucially, elec- Overall The Politics of War is thorough and of war. Besides, collective discipline on this issue tions. When ISI colonels in Pakistan assessed the detailed in assessing the evolving arguments used had many fans among allies anxious to bring Bush’s NATO-led coalition to be vulnerable to Taliban by Canadian political leaders to justify this major “global war on terror” down to earth with more attack in Kandahar in 2005, Canadian infantry expeditionary effort, which ultimately cost the lives achievable, circumscribed goals. inflicted heavy losses on the insurgent forces, for- of 159 members of the Canadian Armed Forces, Bouchard and Nossal, along with others, are cing them to rethink their tactics. one senior diplomat, and several civilians. An early certainly free to refer to the Afghanistan conflict as Canada’s forceful advocacy and outsized con- insistence on acting in Canada’s national inter- a war, but it serves little purpose to wonder why a tribution brought in new allies, new donors, and est evolved over the years toward a commitment participating country didn’t make official use of this new thinking, spurring a new era of Afghan hopes. to supporting allies and to helping Afghans bring term to describe a Security Council initiative. In my Its staying power from 2001 to 2014 was nothing peace, stability, and renewed opportunity to their experience, Canadians understood the rationale for short of remarkable; most NATO members were country. Part of the deeper background here is the our involvement. Would referring to the mission as far less reliable: countries such as Spain and the international crisis created in 2003 by the U.S. inva- a “war” more often have made it any more palat- Netherlands withdrew forces while the combat mis- sion, with strong British support, of Iraq; Canada’s able, or our military operations any more effective? sion was still on. fortunate decision not to join this coalition argu- I doubt it. Yet we failed to finish the job. After bearing the ably deepened the well of potential support for If this mission had a “missing link”—an argu- brunt of casualties when the insurgency spiked its mission in Afghanistan. The book’s analysis of ment the political marketing failed to make—it was in 2006, Canada refused to consider deploying speeches and briefings is illuminating, even if I, not the absence of straight talk about casualties or a larger force. By 2014, Canada’s military mission for one, have more confidence than do the authors “war”; it was the failure to describe the true nature in Afghanistan had wound up—even as our NATO that Canadians largely understood what was being of the conflict. While the UN mandates included allies deployed a new training mission. A country attempted on their behalf. authority to promote regional cooperation, no UN that unwaveringly championed humanitarian law The book is a fair-minded chronicle of the fault resolution has ever acknowledged the conflict’s and the protection of civilians refused to establish lines that emerged in Canada as the years rolled cross-border nature or threatened to sanction the a reliable system for protecting captured Taliban on and the casualties mounted. Boucher and states assisting the Taliban, most notably Pakistan. from torture and other forms of abuse. Politicians Nossal rightly characterize the partisan feeding The long view provided by Boucher and Nossal and officials who were among the first to con- frenzy over the detainee issue as a “distraction.” makes it clear that this is the crucial issue that clude that Pakistan was the main force sustaining They also bemoan the “laundering” of decisions should have been addressed more forcefully from and supporting the Taliban refused to lift a finger through Parliament, when the goal was not to build the start—in 2001. A small shift by a few leaders to stop them. cross-party consensus but rather to drive wedges. in the early going might have made an enormous Just as no country has been a greater propon- In their view there was no need for parliamentary difference to the shape of alliedstrategy—and ­ the ent of the NATO mission, none abandoned it more votes on extending the mission, or to authorize ultimate result. abruptly than Canada did in 2014. the follow-up training mission, and prime minister Boucher and Nossal argue the mission was

4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ­generally unpopular in Canada (especially as and international law? Clearly not. To his credit, institutions were also torturing prisoners. One of casualties mounted in 2006), but with regional professor Nossal published a prize-winning paper my jobs at the United Nations—certainly among variation. They tell the story of the “Trenton effect,” on the inability of Canadians to grasp the regional the most dispiriting—was to lead a team that docu- whereby ceremonies to honour fallen soldiers realpolitik undermining the mission. But the failure mented these abuses, which made it much harder returning home prompted Canadians to ask deeper on this account—in Washington, in London, and at to portray the Taliban as the brutal belligerents who questions, draining stores of goodwill that had NATO in Brussels—was even larger. The “politics of showed no respect for human life. initially boosted the mission. war” for this mission have yet to be explained to cit- At the same time, a parallel story was unfold- izens in societies across all of NATO, and the stakes fghanistan’s war is destined to continue. ing. Even as our troops came home in 2014, for this essential alliance remain painfully high. ANossal and Boucher see “rational reasons”— a poll reported that 48 percent thought the effort Of course, Canada’s role accounts for only some from opposing India to policy inertia—for why had been worthwhile. Spontaneous outpourings of the mission’s failings. The three greatest setbacks Pakistan pursues its proxy war. They are certainly of support for troops and their families—on the in Afghanistan have all been due to Anglo-American the arguments robotically deployed by Pakistan’s Highway of Heroes and elsewhere, including in mistakes: George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s invasion military leaders, but as the cost of this conflict Quebec—were also expressions of dogged national of Iraq in 2003, which put stabilizing Afghanistan has risen for Pakistan over the past decade most purpose, picked up by allies as well as audiences on the back-burner; Gordon Brown’s push to “talk observers have come to see them as irrational. in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Boucher and Nossal to the Taliban” in 2008, which gave Pakistan breath- Many Pakistanis now disagree with their govern- devote an entire chapter to wondering why large- ing room; and Obama’s time-limited surge in 2009, ment as these failed policies tip their country fur- scale opposition to the war “failed to launch.” Could which invited the ISI to wait us out. ther into dictatorship and the prospect of another it be that Canadians genuinely wanted to spend Apart from failing to end Pakistan’s perfidy, the IMF bailout. But they have little scope to influence and sacrifice, as we have done in the past, to ensure second-most tragic U.S. failure in Afghanistan— policy in the face of rigged elections; murders, exe- another war-torn country achieved peace? borne of the desire for vengeance fed by Dick cutions, and disappearances of political opponents The 2006 “Afghanistan Compact,” which as a Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others—was the and journalists; and mass censorship. UN official I had a hand in drafting, recognized substitution of torture and illegal detention for jus- The bald assertion that “the Canadian govern- that Afghanistan’s path to stability “was not yet tice and the law of armed conflict. ment could do nothing about…the role of Pakistan,” assured.” Twelve years later it is incomprehensible Boucher and Nossal rightly criticize both princi- as Boucher and Nossal argue at one point, is hardly to me that we have not yet had the courage to pal Canadian political parties for using the detainee credible when we did not even try. With Russia and embrace the right strategy. Instead, a prime min- issue as a “cudgel” to win political points. But they Syria facing tough sanctions for lesser crimes, and ister who had pledged in Kandahar in 2006 not to are wrong to see treatment of detainees an “issue of Iran under renewed pressure for spinning webs “cut and run,” and in whose government I sat (after subordinate importance”: the failure of the U.S.-led of terror, intelligent people need to stop making 2013) as a cabinet minister, did precisely that. coalition to treat prisoners humanely and support excuses for state sponsors of terror and start speak- It was a decision that left me ashamed and very a justice system capable of effectively punishing ing out and doing more to stop them. With the right close to resignation. In retrospect, Harper’s com- terrorism and other crimes handed the Taliban a incentives and leadership, it is still reasonable to mitment to the Afghan mission was much stronger long-lasting propaganda victory. The paltry sums expect that one day Pakistan will awaken and forge as the leader of minority govern- an enduring settlement with its long- ments than it ever was after he had suffering neighbour to the west. won a majority. Even before 2011, The devastation continues, as does To our credit, Canadians are gener- he had become deeply disillusioned the mission we did so much to ally modest about this country’s mil- with president Hamid Karzai and itary record. Most of us disregard the unconvinced the Afghan institutions champion. To argue Afghanistan will extent to which our early wars—from we were backing would endure. In the long Anglo-French conflict to the my strong view, we were wrong to never see peace is ultimately a form War of 1812—forged our national leave the NATO mission and wrong identity and shaped institutions we not to champion a tougher approach of geopolitical condescension. still cherish. At Vimy, Amiens, and in toward Pakistan much earlier. That the Hundred Days offensive, too— said, the decision to end Canada’s mission in 2014 spent by Canada, Italy, the U.S., and a few others on whose centenary we celebrate this fall—we won was very popular and supported by all three major justice-sector reform—a subject Canada’s Manley an independent voice for Canada on the world parties; the only discernable support for continu- Commission largely ignored—did little to correct stage, which we pledged to use in the cause of an ing was among a segment of the Conservative this mistake. even wider peace. This legacy was sealed by the caucus. Bagram, a district capital just sixty kilometres Second World War. Successful military campaigns The end result today is increasingly indefensible; north of Kabul, had a Hindu Kamboja ruler in to prevent a Communist takeover of the Korean despite all the lip service paid in Canada to peace- the third century BCE and was a summer cap- Peninsula, or secure peace in Bosnia and Kosovo, keeping, our country and France remain the only ital for Kushan emperors in the first century CE; have only enhanced our military reputation, as NATO member states without a single soldier in a Bagh-e Ram, or garden of Ram, testified to Hindu has our refusal to take part in misguided wars in Afghanistan—a UN-mandated chapter VII mission. and Buddhist influence. In the 1950s, an airport was Vietnam and Iraq. After leading support for Afghan-led national built there, where Dwight Eisenhower, the first U.S. Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan on solutions benefiting the whole population— president to visit Afghanistan, landed in 1959. In the the same day as Canada’s 2011 general election. a development-assistance best practice—Canada 1980s, Bagram was a principal Soviet military hub. It saddens me that so little progress was achieved lost its strategic vision. The blue-ribbon Manley By early 2002, hangars at Bagram Airfield had over my time as a member of Parliament—and Commission recommended in 2008 a new form begun serving as a “collection point” for detainees that Canada’s horizons have only narrowed further of investment. But the change was cosmetic; sig- sent by the U.S. to Guantanamo and elsewhere. since our withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014. nature projects with maple leaves were not what As the number of detainees ballooned, so too did Across Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces, the was needed to restore Afghan faith in government. allegations of abuse, punctuated by two deaths devastation of lives continues, as does the mission This was a failing military intervention: it needed in December 2002. In very short order, Bagram we did so much to champion, led by an Alliance of adequate military resources, backed by functioning became shorthand for detention without charge or which we remain a member. To ignore these facts is Afghan national institutions and a clear strategy trial; denial of International Committee of the Red to “break faith” with both the living and the dead. to deal with a cross-border threat. The failure to Cross access and monitoring; and total information To argue Afghanistan will never see peace is ultim- deliver these last two elements robbed Afghans of blackout— in other words, a revocation of many key ately a form of geopolitical condescension. the outcome we had all committed to achieve. principles of the law of armed conflict. But to make peace, strategic cynicism must yield When the Manley Commission failed to grasp Tragically, it became the template for an to strategic impatience backed by the right regional the nettle of Pakistan’s role in 2008, the die in archipelago of “black sites” and other U.S. deten- approach. Do we believe the rules underpinning our Ottawa was cast: a path toward early withdrawal tion facilities elsewhere in Afghanistan, Iraq, and own peace and prosperity—security from external was implicitly set. Did we use our larger effort and around the world. attack within sovereign borders—apply to poor sacrifice as an excuse to leave early? Yes. Was this With the U.S. undermining the very legal countries, as well as rich ones? Are we prepared a responsible approach for a country that has con- framework it had helped to build over several gen- to advocate the peace Afghans need and deserve? sistently championed alliances, multilateral effort, erations, it was no surprise to find Afghan security It is still not too late to do the right thing.

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 5 An examination of the challenges Russia faces in the global economy given its current foreign policies and globalization’s impact on its decision-making process.

Globalization proceeds apace, taking on new forms that affect global economic, financial and social processes. Interdependence is not simply strengthening the range of possibilities for national economies to participate in these developments, but expanding the opportunities that are available to them. The question is: how do states take advantage of these global developments? Although Russia actively participates in the globalization process, it is confronting greater economic, technological, structural and institutional problems than other countries. These problems exist alongside the risk that the gap between Russia and other economies in terms of economic performance and technological development and growth will continue to widen. The old model of Russian development has been exhausted and a new one must be chosen. Russia’s choice at this juncture will determine the future of its economic development for many years to come.

At a Crossroads: Russia in the Global Economy Sergey Kulik, Nikita Maslennikov and Igor Yurgens

“As tensions rise in the great game writ large in Eurasia, and as narratives polarize irreconcilably, some hysterically so, Tug of War offers a timely, coherent set of dispassionate, well-informed essays which together shed valuable light on the complex circumstances, record and prospects of negotiated solutions — and the many deep pitfalls in their paths.”

— Christopher Westdal, Former Canadian Ambassador to Russia and Ukraine

Few scholars have focused on the negotiation process or brought together the whole variety of seemingly disparate yet comparable cases. This volume examines negotiations that continue after the “hot phase” of a conflict has ended and the focus becomes the search for lasting security solutions. Tug of War brings together conflict and security experts from Russia, Eurasia and the West to tackle the overarching question: how useful has the process of negotiation been in resolving or mitigating different conflicts and coordination problems in Eurasia, compared to attempts at exploiting or achieving a decisive advantage over one’s opponents?

Tug of War: Negotiating Security in Eurasia Fen Osler Hampson and Mikhail Troitshkiy, Editors

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.

6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada On Looking, and Love Did captivity save the killer whale? Nancy Macdonald

Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator Jason M. Colby Oxford University Press 408 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780190673093

or seventeen days this summer a killer whale known as Tahlequah carried the F body of her dead calf through the steel-blue Pacific waters of the Salish Sea, the shared, coastal waters off British Columbia and Washington state. She nosed her baby above the chop, sometimes gently mouthing her flipper, diving deep to retrieve her whenever she lost her grip. Orcas have been known to carry their deceased young for hours at a time, sometimes even a day, in what scien- tists acknowledge are expressions of grief. But nothing like Tahlequah’s heartbreaking fifteen- hundred-kilometre journey of sorrow had ever been observed. It captured the world’s attention. To some, that seemed to be the intent. The unusually attentive matriarch is among the seventy-four remaining southern resident killer whales who summer in the Salish Sea. They’re dying at an alarming pace, with starvation the main Until the mid 1960s we knew virtually nothing about orcas. cause: local stocks of Chinook salmon, the rich, A Shamu performance at Seaworld in Orlando, Florida (2009). fatty fish they eat almost exclusively, are disappear- Photograph by David R. Tribble via Wikimedia Commons ing. Tahlequah’s daughter was born emaciated, lacking the blubber she needed to stay afloat. She and predators, Orcinus orca protect the elderly, “a transition that helped reframe our relationship lived just thirty minutes. This was likely the third injured, and diseased among them. So when with whales around the world.” time her twenty-year-old mother had lost a baby exhaustion kicked in, members of Tahlequah’s We were not always attuned to the emotional since delivering a healthy son in 2010. A few weeks tightly bonded pod carried the body of her bairn by lives of orcas. Until the mid 1960s we knew virtually later, scientists began injecting an ailing member turn, like pallbearers of the deep. They fed the griev- nothing about them. To scientists and whalers, orcas of the pod with antibiotics by dart, a last-ditch ing mother throughout her vigil. were bloodthirsty savages; to fishers of the Pacific effort to save the critically ill juvenile orca known The tale fits with a parade of such moving stories Northwest, who shot at them willy-nilly, they were as Scarlet. It has been three years since a southern about orcas. We know rather a lot about how these salmon-stealing vermin. The orca was “the demon resident survived infancy. If one doesn’t live to see cetaceans behave, and the historian Jason Colby of the seas,” the director of the Bronx Zoo William toddlerhood in the next five, the current genera- posits that the irony-rich reason we know all we Hornaday wrote in 1910; a creature with “the appe- tion could be their last. (The 309 northern resident do about these magnificent beasts is that starting tite of a hog, the cruelty of a wolf, the courage of a killer whales, whose territory stretches to Alaska, in the early 1960s we pulled them from the Salish bulldog and the most terrible jaws afloat.” are threatened, too, though the population is still Sea to put them on display. We have learned in The new era kicked off in Vancouver in 1964, relatively stable.) this way about the profound, cradle-to-grave bond when Moby Doll, Tahlequah’s ancestor from the What was remarkable for those watching that weds an orca mother to her young, and how J pod, was harpooned and towed to Jericho Beach. Tahlequah was not only the pathos of a mother the animals communicate: a bewildering range The following year Seattle installed a northern grieving her daughter, but also the tender response of vocalizations, melodic dialects distinct to each resident named Namu at Pier 56 on the waterfront. of the wider community. While most animals aban- community, often to each pod. The whales were sensations. The public flocked to don the weakest members of their tribe to disease Colby’s new book, Orca: How We Came to Know their enclosures in dizzying numbers. Scientists and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator, amounts and media flew in from around the globe to observe Nancy Macdonald is a reporter with the Globe and to an argument: that captivity saved killer whales. them. A dance craze, “the Namu,” was born. Mail. She is based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Only in the course of people seeing them up close New science began to pile up and the pub- On a whale-watching trip three days after she wrote were their remarkably tender natures revealed. lic’s opinion of the whales swung from terror this review, she saw a killer whale surface from Long-held fears dissolved as we began to see to rapture, from butchery to idolatry. These beneath the boat; it was Tahlequah, with her son. them as individuals and kindred beings, he writes, ­cetaceans know joy and fear, frustration and anger.

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 7 They understand their own motivations, their lim- itations. They learn. They teach. They dream when they sleep. They don’t just see and recognize the shapes and nature of their friends and enemies; Evening in the West of Ireland their sophisticated biosonar allows them to see inside them. There is virtually no other creature after Dobrinka Tabakova’s Concerto on the planet so intelligent, compassionate, and for Cello and Strings emotional. Inside their gargantuan brains we have discovered the same von Economo neurons that hardwire humans for empathy and love and self- I awareness—but in even larger relative numbers. Others have helped advance the idea that captiv- There are two types of longing – youthful, and later. ity, however ugly, forever bonded us to these beasts, And two storms: one that draws a hand to the head, notably Colby’s close friend Mark Leiren-Young, whose book, The Killer Whale Who Changed the Another that draws the body to a grave. And perhaps World, told the extraordinary story of Moby Doll; There are even two forms of radiance – one that is sleepy, unkempt, and Operation Orca, by historian Daniel Francis and marine biologist Gil Hewlett on the rescue of an And still warms the bed, and another more alert, more demanding. orphaned killer whale named Springer. But Colby, But there is only one moon, never the same, who teaches modern history at the University of Victoria, has produced an exhaustive, nuanced, Who will calm the birds, and for whom the door is now open. essential account of the captures, unearthing a for- Longing is mute, content to watch for headlights, back and forth, gotten bit of Northwest history. On an individual level, captivity was a catastro- To see what is briefly illumined, then fades. phe for all but a few whales. And it pushed the south- Storm sits in a chair by the fire, exhausted, ern residents to the brink. In Colby’s account, hunted orcas are buzzed by low-flying planes, scared into To gather some warmth and watch it die. traps by the deafening seal bombs exploding around And radiance is always hungry for more, until frozen into time. them. They scream in terror. They allow themselves to be caught to try to free their siblings. They cry and But there is only one moon, never the same, howl for their mothers. Their backs are broken. They Who will calm the birds, and for whom the door is now open. drown. They die gruesome deaths in hot planes, their “skin peeling away in sheets.” Yet Colby is not a dispassionate observer. His father, a former curator of Sealand of the Pacific in Victoria, was a “cropper,” as the orca hunters called themselves. While John Colby is rarely men- tioned in this book, the author’s stake in this story is clear. Critics may label him an apologist for sug- gesting that orcas owe their survival as a species to the humans who captured them for profit. Readers Peter Stuart-Sheppard may wonder whether there’s a boy in him some- where who wants to make his dad whole again by reframing the story. Peter Stuart-Sheppard’s work has been published in journals in Canada and abroad includ- Then in wanders Ted Griffin, the book’s tragic ing the Literary Review of Canada, The Stinging Fly, Contemporary Verse 2, The Antigonish hero. Griffin is equal parts American impresario Review, Southword Journal, and Crannóg. In 2015 he was a Forward Prize for Poetry and animal lover. At the age of twenty-six he nominee for best single poem. He was highly commended in the 2016 Gregory O’Donoghue opened the Seattle Marine Aquarium. He was International Poetry Competition and commended in the 2018 O’Donoghue competition. a cropping pioneer and the first person to swim He lives in Toronto. publicly with an orca: Namu, with whom he formed an obsessive, almost mystical relationship. Griffin was feted across America and consulted by the Pentagon. Hollywood based a movie on his friend- the doghouse with his family’s English mastiffs and are caught in the middle, trying to understand the ship with the whale. But then fates were reversed: built a makeshift dive helmet so he could explore complex mix of affection and callousness they feel the public’s opinion of captivity started to change as the marine world that so obsessed him. It seems for the whales, the torment caused to themselves an environmental movement centred in the Pacific almost understatement to say that he was above and the rapidly changing world around them. Northwest began to emerge. Griffin, the man most all else an animal lover—just as Colby’s dad and Orca is awash with players like Griffin: grizzled, associated with killer whales in the region, was so many involved in the industry, paradoxically, deeply guarded men haunted by their remorse, and hounded as a pariah, and fled Seattle. He’s now in are. Most have seldom been seen as anything by their respect for the whales. In Colby’s hands his mid-eighties and still receiving death threats but cartoonish villains. I spoke with Colby after I they emerge as complex, fully formed, if doomed from those who oppose the capture and display of read his book, and he told me that he showed his figures. In the view of the Greeks, tragedies don’t cetaceans. He refuses to speak about the era of cap- manuscript to Griffin. After reading it Griffin said happen to awful people. They happen to good tivity, in a way reminiscent of veterans who remain he understood, for the first time, why people had people who are awfully flawed. silent about their time at war. picketed and threatened him. As he finished his research, Jason Colby real- It would have taken an unusual writer to draw This is a book called Orca, but it is as much ized the last three southern residents ever taken out his story. The son of a man who nursed a sea- about the humans whose life’s work was chasing, from the Salish Sea had been captured by his dad. bird to health before turning around and selling displaying, and caring for these beasts. It tracks a John, by the time of this discovery, had turned it to a zoo perhaps knew where to probe. When shift in several overlapping narratives. The orcas against cetacean captivity. When the author called Griffin, who used to sleep on Namu’s back, admits went from feared to fetishized to suddenly envel- his father to tell him what he had learned, the line to Colby that he trusted the whale in a way that oped in human shame and guilt just as the Pacific went silent for fifteen seconds. This was news to he didn’t trust people—placed a faith in the crea- Northwest, a region built around the extraction of his father, too. “We wrestle with our sins our whole ture that, as Colby writes, exceeded what he was fish, logs, and seals began suddenly deifying the nat- lives,” Colby told me when we spoke. “My dad “willing to offer [to] or accept from any human”— ural environment. Looking back, it seems entirely was twenty-five years old when he caught those the reader understands this was a book that only obvious that those involved in the captivity industry whales. His whole life, he wrestled with wanting to Colby could have written. As a boy Griffin slept in should have known better. In Colby’s telling, they make amends.”

8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada A Boy Meets the World Esi Edugyan’s epic, and art from human bondage Patrick Lohier

Washington Black Esi Edugyan Patrick Crean Editions 432 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781443423380

ow do you make art out of slavery? Creative acts Hand imaginative efforts that bring forth art and innovation represent the pinnacle of the human condition, the bleeding edge of indi- vidual freedom. To create is to will into being, to make things from noth- ing. How do you put that endeavour in service to the human stain of slavery—to subjugation, to physical and psychological constraint, to the negation of will? The question becomes even more urgent for the contemporary black artist, who may, if determined and ambitious, aim to Wash’s travels take him everywhere from the Arctic to Morocco—he is a free yet grindingly solitary soul. contend with the dire ­modern-day Icebergs near Kosoak, from Arctic Explorations: Vol. 2 by Elisha Kent Kane (1856) via the Noaa library legacies of slavery—ongoing police brutality; chronic mass incarceration of black and intense lyricism, combining dialect and clas- ­purposeful life while also searching for elusive people; the dearth of black representation in the sical expression to create a fever dream of violence ­elements of his past that can help him define who upper echelons of power and income; the growing and fear. These varied approaches give each writer he is. Such a wide-ranging story skirts close to a tall racial wealth gap—to help us better understand opportunities to explore a reality—a state of being— tale or flight of fancy—but Edugyan sustains plaus- how we can and should live now. that boggles the modern mind. Their experiments ibility masterfully. Wash seems to have been spon- Over the past few years, a few works by broaden our appreciation of what slavery means taneously generated by the plantation on which writers of extraordinary talent and ambition and bring us as close to its visceral core as we may the story starts. He has no idea who his parents have grappled creatively with the challenge: experience in any medium (although, ultimately, are or were. Apart from the brand on his flesh that Colson Whitehead’s widely acclaimed 2016 novel Billie Holiday and Nina Simone’s renditions of the marks him as the property of the plantation, he is The Underground Railroad; Zora Neale Hurston’s song “Strange Fruit” may be the great ballads of our a blank slate. His self-conception is spurred by the previously unreleased nonfiction work Barracoon: heart of darkness). way others see him: “…he had looked upon me with The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” based on a In her new novel, Washington Black, the enor- his calm eyes and seen something there, a curiosity manuscript of interviews Hurston conducted in mously talented Esi Edugyan brings her ingenuity for the world, an intelligence, a talent with images 1927 with the last known living survivor of the to the subject. The novel, which has been long- I had until then been unaware of.” His innocence transatlantic slave trade; and Patrick Chamoiseau’s listed for the Man Booker Prize, is an epic tale of and yearning for human contact make him vivid. novel Slave Old Man. adventure centred on the eponymous hero and We feel empathy for Wash from the start. We root Whitehead takes a fabulist approach and turns narrator, George Washington Black, nicknamed for him throughout. The Underground Railroad from a metaphor into Wash, a young boy who escapes from slavery on Wash’s wide-eyed experience of the world and a literal subterranean infrastructure complete with a Barbadian plantation in the early 1830s. His his desire to be part of it, all while navigating the tracks and conductors. Hurston took an innovative fugitive travels take him to Norfolk, Virginia, the attempts of others to exploit, ignore, or destroy him. anthropological and journalistic approach that Canadian Arctic, Nova Scotia’s Bedford Basin He is a boy at the story’s start, but by its end, when brings the voice and unique linguistic cadences of region, London, Amsterdam, and finally to the he is in his late teens, Edugyan has established Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the Middle Passage deserts of Morocco, over the span of about six not just his rich and complex humanity, but also slave trade, to the fore. Her book is an insightful years. On the first legs of his voyages, to Norfolk his embattled engagement with the world. He is a and valuable act of preservation of the last remain- and the Arctic, he is essentially bundled up black man navigating societies that disdain him. ing voice of an era that must never be forgotten. and conveyed by a sympathetic ally, seeking to He is spiritually traumatized by a childhood spent And, in Slave Old Man, Chamoiseau fuses action ensure his safety after a bounty has been placed in bondage. And he is physically scarred by a ter- on his head. But on his voyages to Nova Scotia rible accident. The reader comes not just to observe Patrick Lohier is a Toronto-based writer. His debut and onward he is his own free yet grindingly Wash, but to inhabit a body that evokes immediate novel, Radiant Night, was published in September. solitary soul, seeking to create a meaningful and and visceral reactions from everyone with whom

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 9 its occupant comes in contact. Through all this, A mysterious and violent death on the plantation has been to never seeing or witnessing anything Edugyan convincingly depicts young Washington’s compels Washington to flee with Christopher on beyond the borders of Faith Plantation. extraordinary natural talents. He proves to be a fine an expedition in order to avoid certain execution. Washington is not only talented but persistent. illustrator and becomes an accomplished marine A bounty hunter is set after him as they embark on He doggedly pursues his destiny and his self-iden- biologist and engineer of aquatic habitats, collabor- their perilous journey, first to Norfolk, Virginia, and tity. He wants more than anything to find out what ating with leading scientists of the era to design and then to the Arctic in search of Christopher’s father, happened to Titch, to determine once and for all build one of the world’s first aquariums in London. who was last seen alive there while on his own sci- his own place in the world. Others help Washington The story starts in 1830 when Washington is entific expedition. Wash eventually loses contact learn most about himself: Titch loves him in his ten or eleven years old—“I cannot say for certain,” with Christopher, and a period of wandering solo way, but he is a man of his time and is limited by his he says. He lives among the slaves of the Faith takes him to Nova Scotia, where he meets a young own prejudices. When Washington confronts him Plantation in a state of such unrelenting brutality woman named Tanna, who also happens to be the about why he was pulled from the fields and given and terror that many of the slaves kill themselves. daughter of a famous marine biologist whose work the opportunity to learn and create, Christopher’s His main protector and primary human bond is Washington admires. response is telling: another slave, Big Kit, a strong-willed woman from “old Dahomey” who “You were a rare thing.” “towered over everyone, huge, fierce.” His glimpses of the extraordinary, “Thing?” Events are set in motion by the “Person. A rare person.” death of the plantation master and and his growing skills as an artist and then the arrival of a new one, the scientist, highlight how close he has Even his beloved Tanna, who has breezily sadistic Erasmus Wilde. also suffered rejection in English soci- Erasmus comes on the scene along been to never seeing any of this. ety because she is half Polynesian, with his younger, eccentric brother projects her own slightly warped Christopher, who rivets Wash’s atten- view on his identity: “Washington tion with his talk of science and flying machines. Throughout all of these adventures, we have a Black would never be a slave, even if he was born Washington is assigned to serve as Christopher’s sustained and compelling insight into Washington’s in chains,” she says. Washington responds angrily: manservant and is soon enlisted to assist with thoughts. He is a talented and wounded man, “You speak of slavery as though it is a choice. Or Christopher’s scientific experiments. Thereafter literally and figuratively. His quest to remain alive rather, as though it were a question of temper- begins an unusual friendship, as Washington helps and to live fully feels earnest and real, rounded off ament. Of mettle. As if there are those who are Christopher—or Titch as Wash calls him—in his by the reversals that make life life. Washington’s naturally slaves, and those who are not. As if it is work on an experimental aircraft, as well as in the talents serve as a reminder of the author’s own not a senseless outrage. A savagery.” close observation and cataloguing of the planta- abundant and exceptional creative gifts, and as a Washington Black is a captivating read. It is a tion’s flora and fauna. After seeing the extraordin- metaphor for human potential, lost and realized. lyrical and epic novel that reminds us of the enor- ary skill and facility with which Washington draws Although he struggles with crushing solitude and mous waste in human talent wrought by barbarity, the natural specimens they find, Christopher loneliness, Washington’s glimpses of extraordin- while reveling in the supremely redemptive power of encourages the young boy to cultivate his excep- ary things, and his growing skills as an artist and art to help us move on, to help us define who we are, tional abilities. scientist, serve to highlight how terribly close he and to determine who we can ultimately be.

Bombardier Abroad Organizing the 1% From Suffragette to Homesteader Patterns of Dispossession How Corporate Power Works Exploring British and Canadian Colonial by David P. Thomas by William K. Carroll & J.P. Sapinski Histories and Women’s Politics through Memoir Carroll and Sapinski provide a unique, edited by Emily van der Meulen In Bombardier Abroad, Thomas examines evidence-based perspective on corporate power several cases of Bombardier’s work in the in Canada and illustrate the various ways it di- A unique portrait into the histories of women’s high-speed rail sector in South Africa, rects and shapes economic, political and cultural suffrage and feminist and colonial history that Israel/Palestine and China/Tibet and argues life, and offer offer possibilities for placing corpo- blends memoir and scholarly analysis. that these projects are deepening existing social rate power where it actually belongs: and political tensions. in the dustbin of history. FERNWOOD PUBLISHING www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Looking Out for Number One The unmentionable void in modern city planning Brian Bethune

“Tim Hortons” and “angry pooper.” No Place To Go: How Public Still, the problems here are real Toilets Fail our Private Needs enough, even if most Canadians, and Lezlie Lowe Westerners in general, are happy to Coach House Books dwell in a flush-and-forget idyll. The 220 pages, softcover century-old infrastructure underpin- ISBN 9781552453704 ning our waste removal system is under assault from its own antiquity and from burgeoning urban popula- f there is a key statistic in tions. Far more people means far Lezlie Lowe’s deeply reported more excrement, metaphorical and I and engagingly anecdotal book real, than municipal disposal systems about Canada’s public-access wash- were designed for. Much of it goes room situation, it is ensconced deep down the toilet, and sometimes it inside, when Steven Soifer gets lost clumps together in what the British in some surprisingly appalling arith- call fatbergs, quintessentially con- metic. Soifer, CEO of the International temporary amalgams of tampons, Paruresis Association, is one of the condoms, cooking oil, wet wipes and few activists willing to talk openly human waste. In 2017, the largest about his condition, better known fatberg yet encountered, the size of as shy bladder syndrome. Classified eleven double-decker buses, was dis- as a social anxiety disorder in the covered, fittingly enough, under Jack American Psychiatric Association’s the Ripper’s old stomping grounds bible, Diagnostic and Statistical in London’s Whitechapel. An eight- Manual of Mental Disorders, parur- man crew laboured some ten weeks esis renders urination nearly impos- to remove it. sible when others engaged in the There are just not enough public bathrooms—glaringly so in cities But the big existential questions same task can be seen or heard. The where planners dream of walkable communities. about human sewage and human condition has been mined for its photograph by Martin Haase (Maha-online.de) via Flickr destiny are not the primary interest of comedic possibilities by more than the toilet activists—whose numbers one television writer, but it poses a special need in particular groups—people who need to change col- include Lowe herself—of No Place To Go. They the real world for those who suffer from it. Trying ostomy bags need shelving, while local authorities, are focused on the small existential questions, like to count off the proportion of the general popula- who believe all “extraneous” details are simply mag- equality, dignity, and having the freedom to move tion who, at least at times, are underserviced or nets for vandals and drug users, disagree—and into about their communities. The activists, as is only unserviced bathroom users, Soifer starts with those competing desires. Gender-blind bathrooms would to be expected, are primarily women. The public who have paruresis: about seven per cent. Add the be very helpful for non-binary people, who can face washroom “system,” such as it is, skews heavily incontinent, another seven per cent, then “throw hostile scrutiny, and sometimes worse, in a sexually male. According to the rule of thumb cited by Lowe, in menstruating women, parents with kids, people segregated system; safe-space-for-women-only seven of the eight daily washroom visits by healthy, with ostomies.” He stopped there, Lowe records, advocates—who acknowledge this reality—push able-bodied, middle-aged sorts are liquid in nature. and trailed off. He didn’t even get to the elderly. back against that particular solution. Men generally have minimal trouble finding an No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail our And, yes, this is a first-world problem, quite open urinal; failing that, trees, bushes, and grotty Private Needs may be far more descriptive than possibly the very epitome of that concept. The alleyways still abound. prescriptive, but it does a superb job of summing up developed world has perfected the art of whisking Women not only need actual toilets, they need the Canadian public toilet situation—which is, in a its waste out of sight (and smell). While Westerners them more often and for longer visits: studies word, crappy. And in making it very clear that while are engaged in a desultory debate over who gets show that women take up to fifty per cent longer everyone in this clenched-bladder Presbyterian to deposit her minute contribution where, almost to empty their bladders. They need more user end nation has an access problem—we don’t even like to 900 million people elsewhere in the world practice points than men, and have fewer. Side-by-side think about public loos, let alone build them—Lowe open defecation—which is exactly what it sounds male and female washrooms with equal floor space underscores the reality that millions of Canadians like. Water-borne fecal diseases kill one child every mean that the men’s room, through a combination have particularly acute issues. The plain fact is that fifteen seconds. Human waste, as noted in Rose of three or four urinals plus one or two stalls, will there are not enough of them, glaringly so in cities George’s seminal 2008 book, The Big Necessity, accommodate more visitors at a time than a four- where urban planners dream of walkable commun- is human health’s single greatest hazard. Even stall women’s. And that is just the physical situa- ities. Lowe also moves through details that matter to so, not all those 900 million live far away. Open tion, before the social norms are added in. defecation goes on in every Canadian city, and Women are much more likely to be accom- Brian Bethune is a writer and book critic there are powerful barriers between the homeless panied by members of the special-needs cohort, in Toronto. and toilet access—try googling, Lowe suggests, namely small children or adults for whom they

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 11 are providing care. Like a traffic jam that grows rapidly from a simple choke point, women’s line- ups arrive and expand almost spontaneously, and localized emergencies are as common as biological moody blues urges. (Full disclosure: Once, while coping with my elderly mother’s sudden, urgent need while record for January rainfall waiting for a medical appointment, I took her to the small women’s washroom that serviced several but for sun’s sly wink doctors’ offices. The entire two-stall space was fully on the 29th day occupied by one woman and five preschoolers, tail between its dogpaddling legs into the next two on the toilets and three holding their crotches indistinguishable slink running while hopping up and down. I wheeled out, parked through drizzle in pre-dawn dark my mother in the hall, went into the men’s—three trails afloat with swimming ducks urinals, one stall—threw out the teenaged boy sloshseep masochistic joy combing his hair, brought my mother inside, and becoming amphibious stood at the door, twice turning away very surprised men who tried to enter.) Gore-Tex rock-paper-scissors Lululemon You too, dear reader, have a toilet story to tell, water repellent baptismal although you may prefer to suppress it. Everybody mink oil sleekness has one, Lowe writes. She shares her own— an undignified girlhood accident while stuck in archetypal line at the women’s room and staring at the empty men’s—as well as the tale of the nanny who trained Ray Bradbury’s “The Long Rain” her three-year-old charge to pee on the back of crazed platoon an electrical box in an Ottawa park, one of public torrential planet Canada’s ubiquitous restroom deserts. (“I wasn’t pleasures of the sun dome sure,” commented the nanny’s employer, “if that figments was an attempt at privacy or a passive ‘Fuck you’ to Insanity about to reign on the next blank page Parks and Rec.”) his Washington state oozes my Moodyville Yet how easily we let those moments slide out of repository of wet secrets our consciousness. Most people can count on their paper becomes papier-mâché home bathrooms, on workplace or school access text melting to n o t h i n g n ess and, unconsciously, the benefit of the “pee tax”: buy a movie ticket or restaurant meal, and access to washrooms is automatically included. Sometimes, clouds smash against mountains as in a not insignificant number of purchases in concussed cafés, what we really want is the toilet: the coffee, open their warrior two arms which will only force many drinkers to repeat the release water balloons cycle, is an indifferently welcomed add-on. But not perfect aim everyone toils in an office. One of Lowe’s expert hands above head classic sky-is-falling pose “toilet ladies,” a sociologist studying the work- no defence ing experience of New York cabbies, found her research interests veering in a new direction after fact of life—west coast, wet coast she approached one taxi, only to find the driver a sodden gift busy filling a coffee cup with urine. Truck drivers, attempt to wring life from it who have nowhere to park their rigs once they leave the highway, are notorious for the “trucker bombs” that line the North American road network—plastic North Vancouver’s soil containers filled by driving-while-peeing truckers percolating sponge bursts and tossed out the window. catapults rainforest The constituency most emblematic of our stud- canopy of cedar and hemlock ied avoidance of the toilet topic is the elderly. Not head because their needs are more worthy than others, heels but because literally everyone, from gerontolo- pirouette in the wrong direction gists concerned with their health to governments land glides land slides worried about their health-care costs, wants them expensive Vancouver real estate to get out there and walk. Yet entire strategic dissolves into n o t h i n g n ess plans—Ontario’s Action Plan for Seniors, New Westminster’s Livable City Strategy, Toronto’s plan for breaking down the barriers that keep seniors Cleveland Dam thunder/s/urges housebound—don’t even mention toilet access. the Fish Hatchery They are all about green spaces, benches, traffic- salmon swirl into gyres calming measures, and accessible buses, even nearby reservoir churns acrid though, in terms of personal dignity, weak bladders the water unpotable are a much bigger factor than arthritic knees. not only the river boils But if anyone’s needs finally cause a thousand water water everywhere and loos to bloom in our toilet desert, it will be those of the elderly, with their exploding numbers and Crystal Hurdle high voting rate. Perhaps not this generation, too reticent to discuss the sort of personal details that might enlighten urban planners, but their succes- Hurdle’s most recent book, Teacher’s Pets, a novel in verse for young adults, was published by sors—baby boomers, who are about as stoical, gen- Tightrope Books in 2014. She teaches English and creative writing at Capilano University in erationally speaking, as thwarted toddlers—won’t North Vancouver, British Columbia, and is a former fiction editor of The Capilano Review. have that problem. Soon enough, someone is going to raise enough of a stink to make a difference.

12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada We Are All Outsiders Now The triumph of individual autonomy in politics, and everywhere else Christopher Dummitt

At the core of these polarized Identity: The Demand for Dignity political viewpoints are shared and the Politics of Resentment assumptions about the sanctity of the Francis Fukuyama individual self. The right and the left Farrar, Straus & Giroux disagree on which restrictions ought 240 pages, hardcover to be eliminated and who exactly ISBN 9780374129293 needs to be set free. But our political language and assumptions revolve, in The Once and Future Liberal: ever more tightly spun circles, around After Identity Politics the self. Politics has not always been Mark Lilla like this. It is worth stepping back and HarperCollins asking how this came to be in the first 160 pages, hardcover place. How did we come to think of ISBN 9780062697431 personal sovereignty as the highest goal of politics, and believe that the The Lies That Bind: basis for political outrage resided in Rethinking Identity gauging whether any law or custom Kwame Anthony Appiah infringed on the pure and true experi- Liveright ence of individual autonomy? 256 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781631493836 rancis Fukuyama’s Identity is an Fexcellent historical primer on the origins of this modern idea of the self e live in an age and how it has come to dominate our divided. This is partly politics. Fukuyama became famous W an American story about in 1989 for his “End of History?” essay Donald Trump and never-Trumpers, Both left and right today agree on the sanctity of the individual self. in The National Interest that captured about red states and blue states. It illustration by sÉbastien thibault the zeitgeist of America at the end is also about polarized views on sig- of the Cold War. Most recently, he nature issues like transgender rights or abortion The problem is social norms, religious thinking, penned a magnificent two-volume history of how where what you believe, on one side or another, and restrictive laws that deny individuals the humanity has governed itself from prehistoric defines who you are as a person. There are right choice to live sexually as they see fit. The fight for times until almost yesterday. Although he has been answers and wrong answers, but it depends on who trans rights reinterprets the very categories of sex known as a neoconservative, Fukuyama’s thinking is asking the question. and gender as regulatory impositions on individ- is in fact more complex and he has spent much Despite this polarization, it’s striking that there uals who simply want to be who they feel them- of the past decade offering a defence of govern- are echoes across the chasm, instances where the selves to be on the inside. ment. His last couple of books explain to those right and the left sound as if they are shouting the It’s easy to get caught up in the opposing view- who indulge in “fantasies of statelessness” that the same slogans. The right attacks government regula- points and miss the shared language. The right-wing central question of human government can’t be tions that impede businesses or stifle entrepreneur- Cato Institute urges free trade in order to promote whether to have states at all (sorry, tech-friendly ship. It complains of excessive bureaucracy, and the “dignity and sovereignty” of the individual, using libertarians and left-wing anarchists) but how to overly onerous environmental or labour regula- the kind of language that abortion-rights activists create well-governed states, and ensure that they tions, or the need for Indigenous consultation. The make about a woman’s control of her own body. stay that way. left attacks this kind of thinking as neoliberal— Individuals are meant to be sovereign, whether In Identity, he sets his sights on explaining the as the kind of individualistic corporate-serving to prevent unwanted pregnancy or to consume rise of Trump, Islamist fundamentalism, Brexit, and rhetoric that damages our collective life as citizens. and trade irrespective of national boundaries. identity politics. He weaves each of these different Yet the left’s own rhetoric echoes this insistence Progressive activists who lambaste governments strands together, arguing that “Demand for rec- on free choice and anti-regulation, albeit to fight for enforcing monogamy and heterosexuality may ognition of one’s identity is a master concept that different battles. The struggle for LGBTQ rights seem to have nothing in common politically with unifies much of what is going on in world politics is also framed, for instance, as a battle against a American Tea Party activists attacking Democrats for today.” It is hard to disagree. form of regulation—in this case moral control. enforcing socialized medicine via Obamacare, but Our modern idea of identity emerged, Fukuyama they make the same style of argument. In each case, writes, “out of a distinction between one’s true Christopher Dummitt’s most recent book, both groups assume that social values and institu- inner self, and an outer world of social rules and Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King’s Secret tions—whether age-old marital and sexual values norms that does not adequately recognize that Life, was a finalist for the Shaughnessy-Cohen or newly created schemes for a fairer healthcare inner self’s worth or dignity.” In all times, individ- Prize, the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, and the Canada system—are illegitimate because they prevent the uals have been at odds with their societies. “But Prize in 2018. pure freedom of an individual to live as they see fit. only in modern times has the view taken hold that

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 13 the authentic inner self is intrinsically valuable, and racially restrictive notion of citizenship. By the perhaps because of this, he is also a nightmare mir- and the outer society systematically wrong and end of the First World War, a universal male citizen- ror image of exactly what they have argued over the unfair in its valuation of the former.” And when ship, proven on the battlefield, had asserted the last several decades. it comes to conflict between self and society, “It is individual rights of white men at least. The monu- Trump practises his own brand of identity not the inner self that has to be made to conform ments at the end of the Great War were not to the politics, appealing to a white working class that to society’s rules, but society itself that needs to generals but to the everyman, the unknown soldier. feels left out of the mainstream, forgotten by his- change.” This idea lies behind some of the key The rise of a human rights paradigm and anti-col- tory and by globalized trade. These are people progressive changes of the last century. The switch onial struggles in the twentieth century pushed to who feel unrecognized. Moreover, they know who is perhaps clearest in our approach to disability. If universalize this idea of citizenship and end exclu- is to blame: the mainstream political, media, and someone in a wheelchair can’t access a building, it sions: There shouldn’t be sexual or racial barriers economic institutions. Like their opponents on the isn’t just their individual problem, it is society itself to who can vote and who can be a citizen. These left, they convey a message that social institutions that needs to change by designing cities better to movements extended the politics of recognition to are intrinsically untrustworthy. In trampling all accommodate the disabled. In this example the its logical conclusion—that each and every human standards of decency and social respect that are liberating potential of this view of the self is clear, being was owed a certain fundamental recognition supposed to govern presidential behaviour, Trump as is its moral appeal. of their unique value. also embodies the ideals of a society that broadly There are lumpers and splitters in the world What Fukuyama is doing in Identity is trying to no longer wants to be guided by social conven- of ideas, and Fukuyama decidedly sides with the show how so many of the key contemporary battles tion. He is demonstrating the extent to which the lumpers. He links, for example, the collective asser- of today are rooted in this history of recognition. ethic of authenticity has destroyed the set of shared tions of national recognition or religious belonging While the theory of liberal recognition won out long social standards, agreed to by even those of differ- with demands to end the gender pay gap or to ago, in practice, inequalities abound. This is why ent political viewpoints, that had previously silently have one’s gender identity recognized. All of these so much of modern politics is about validating the guided the political realm. have to do with according dignity to the self—in experiences of different groups who have historic- This is where Fukuyama’s book bleeds over into demands that society recognize who someone is ally been marginalized. The politics of recognition Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal, one of the most and whichever group they feel a part of (religious, inspires human rights movements, the struggle for controversial books of the past year. Lilla had a sexual, national). To some, this argument will be a LGBTQ rights, disability rights, and gender equal- discomfiting message for American liberals: Trump step too far. But one of Fukuyama’s most important ity. While the left frequently talks of group identi- wasn’t the crisis; liberalism itself was in crisis. If insights is that the quest for recognition takes both ties and collective struggle, the focus is always on liberals want to understand Trump’s success, they collective and individual forms, and that the two resisting some imposition on the selves within only have to look to themselves. Lilla was excori- are connected. that group or on expressing and validating those ated in some reviews, accused of being an apologist Fukuyama is on solid ground here, explicitly individuals’ experiences. Witness the popularity of for racism and an ivory-tower version of former Ku drawing on the groundbreaking work of perhaps the term “lived experience” in academic, activist, Klux Klan leader David Duke. Lilla is none of these Canada’s most important thinker of the twentieth and increasingly, journalistic circles. The struggle is things, but his book clearly hit a nerve. His tone is century, Charles Taylor. In Sources of the Self and against social forces—the state, social convention, polemical and, in full attack mode, he can be blis- then in several other key works on modern aliena- morality—that fail to recognize the experience of tering, displaying little sympathy for those whom tion, multiculturalism, and the politics of recogni- marginalized peoples. So group rights are invoked, he himself excoriates. Yet there are uncomfortable tion, Taylor argued that the modern era saw the but always to break down the power of an even truths that echo Fukuyama’s own analysis. elaboration of a new idea of the self. Where other larger group. Underneath it all is the free-choosing Lilla argues that after the 1960s progressives writers in the 1970s and 1980s were diagnosing a self, deserving of recognition. “lost themselves in the thickets of identity politics growing selfishness and narcissism, Taylor sug- Even economic issues are now primarily framed and developed a resentful, disuniting rhetoric of gested that there was much more to the story. He in terms of inequality among selves. That is, it isn’t difference to match.” Instead of an earlier politics argued that the sanctity of the self was itself the so much about absolute poverty, and defining how that sought to unite Americans underneath a civic West’s new moral imperative. To be true to yourself: much someone actually needs to live, as it is about identity in which all deserve equality, he contends, this mattered above all else. economic differences between different groups of the left celebrates social movements and political Fukuyama gives a more selective history than citizens. How much more money is controlled by change by judicial fiat, and denigrates the institu- Taylor, seeing the origins of this politics of recogni- the top one percent compared to others? Is this fair? tions of democracy itself. As a result, even during tion in Luther and the Protestant Reformation and And what are the psychological and other costs that the Obama years it was Republicans who gained in classical ideas of dignity. But both agree that it come with these disparities? ground at the local level, in cities, state legisla- was Rousseau who set out a series of assumptions Authenticity matters to this modern politics of tures, and Congress—the places where democracy that have become “foundational in world politics.” the self. Social institutions or religions no longer actually plays out. In the late eighteenth century Rousseau insisted provide, in themselves, standards of decency or We all know that Reagan-era neoliberalism that “a thing called society exists outside the indi- right and wrong. Our moral sense instead comes helped to create an age of market values and rapa- vidual, a mass of rules, relationships, injunctions, from being authentically true to ourselves, and cious individualism. Lilla insists that over the same and customs that is itself the chief obstacle to ensuring that others are allowed to authentically be period the left’s embrace of identity politics only the realization of human potential, and hence of who they are. This idea has especially gained ground reinforced the individualistic logic of the post- human happiness.” This assumption challenged, since the 1960s. The message of almost every chil- Reagan era. In the wake of the retrenchment of the among other things, older ideas of social recogni- dren’s book today is the same: be yourself. Don’t welfare state at home, and the collapse of commun- tion. In an earlier age, honour was due to indi- listen to social convention or to peer pressure. The ism abroad, the left increasingly embraced the pol- viduals who sacrificed themselves for something true answers are found within. What matters in this itics of recognition and identity as its raison d’être. greater—whether in battle or in service of the state. kind of politics isn’t necessarily evidence or reason, Both the left and the right in these years embraced We see echoes of this today in the idea that soldiers but how you feel. And when personal inner truth is a Rousseau-inspired individualism that saw society or firefighters are due a special recognition. But the what’s being expressed, it isn’t the content of what and the state as impositions upon a natural human modern age saw this idea thoroughly democratized is expressed that matters so much as who is doing freedom. Where conservatives focused on market so that recognition was due to individuals not for the expressing. That turns debate into an encounter and consumer freedoms and on excessive bureau- anything they had done but simply for existing— of power relations where, as Mark Lilla wrote in his cracy and taxation, liberals attacked social conven- for being human. 2017 book The Once and Future Liberal, “the winner tions and religion and social and state restrictions This is such a common unspoken assumption of the argument will be whoever has invoked the on sexuality, gender, race, and the free expression now that it is easy to forget how relatively new it is morally superior identity and expressed the most of the self. As Lilla convincingly puts it, “Identity is historically. When Napoleon’s armies swept across outrage at being questioned.” Reaganism for lefties.” Europe in the early 1800s, they took with them lib- That may sound like a description (or dismissal) Contemporary identity politics, of course, eral ideas of rights and sovereignty for both nations of any number of Twitter progressives, but it also emerged out of the kinds of struggles for recog- and individual citizens. The recognition demanded, sounds rather a lot like the so-called leader of the nition that have improved the lives of many— and eventually accorded, was still exclusionary. free world. The great irony is that while “being an idea that Fukuyama explores satisfyingly in Revolutionaries hotly debated whether women and yourself” has often been a progressive idea, its most his book, but which Lilla elides. Where Lilla is other “races” could share in the rights of citizen- triumphant modern exponent is Donald J. Trump. best is in dissecting the shoot-yourself-in-the- ship, mostly siding with a broader but still sexually As much as Trump is hated by those on the left, or foot righteousness­ of identity liberals. Although

14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Charles Taylor wrote about identity as a moral issue several decades ago, we still tend to think of moral- ity as a relic of the Victorian past, something pro- gressives, at least, have outgrown. Yet a preachy and Mystic Rivers controlling moral righteousness is again becoming a dominant feature of our political discourse, this We canoe on mystic rivers, time embraced by the left. It’s not surprising, Lilla Dance under southern Muskoka suns, points out, that the word “woke,” used (sometimes Taken to swirling, edifying waters ironically) by progressives to designate someone And wash away the unclean ones. who is “on side” politically, evokes the evangelical “Great Awakening.” This, argues Lilla, “is a giveaway Ancient rivers, old stomping grounds, that spiritual conversion, not political agreement, is Protean visions of Badlands, and the demand.” The much-hyped battles on univer- Drumheller calls to me. sity campuses are only tangentially political; they are really evangelical fights over moral purity. Jaded arrowheads bleed my soft, Indian feet. This is a morality deeply tied in with authenti- city. For the left, the very idea of the mainstream You took me from the Yamuna, is now inherently unappealing, best used as a foil Read to me by the Thames, against which to position someone else’s presum- Broke me on the banks of the Bow, ably more authentic and non-mainstream experi- Let me go over the prophetic Ganges. ence. In a Rousseauian world where truth is found within, why defend social norms, which are always Burn me, burn it all. society’s impositions on a more genuine individual Spread my ashes from Peace Bridge, experience? That twisting red contraption, So it is not surprising that those who feel left out Chinese finger trap. of this kind of politics have taken up their own self- serving version of it. You might dispute, as some do, the evidence for white working class disaffec- Sinking sediments, tion. You could point to statistics on employment Stepped on by bathing adherents. levels, police violence toward African Americans, Falling from the urn, and even to the historic importance of a free press Drowning below mourning prayers in Benares. in supporting democracy. But these arguments don’t fit with how Trump supporters feel—and in Bring me back to New Delhi, our times the validity of a claim depends on how Where the air cremates my tongue, it lines up with one’s own particular experience. Where it is brown, and dirty, When individual experience is prized above all else, And not so blinded by white snow. unwoke personal experience counts just as much as woke. After all who gets to decide who is and isn’t Paddle me up impossible rivers marginalized? Not you—at least not for me. Older than the mountains There are self-abnegating versions of this non- mainstreamism—the left allies of marginalized Hindu Kush, Christian Rockies, people who forcefully repudiate the privilege of Blown astray by a warm chinook. their own gender or sexual or racial identity in order to stand alongside their “allies.” And then Self-immolation at Banff, there are the right-wing rebel versions, those who Spirit vapour into smoke signals eschew the mainstreamism of elites or the govern- Polluting the endless prairies, ment. One side fights to take down statues of John Turning gold maize into a handful of dust. A. Macdonald and the other supports the new Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s “stick-it-to-the-down- Push me from Buffalo Jump town-elite” brand of politics. What unites them Bury me amongst familiar bones. is this insistence that they are the true outsiders, I’ll follow the well-worn grooves of Battle River, standing aloof from the corrupted mainstream. And make my way home to the Bengal. o is the best approach to use more reason— Sto point out the futility and imprecision of the Deposit me at Hudson Bay, whole identity game? This is what Kwame Anthony Forget me at Varanasi. Appiah suggests in the aptly titled The Lies That Let me rest there and become whole again Bind. Appiah urges a skeptical stance and a rethink- (Let me rest there and be made new again). ing of what is, but mostly what isn’t, true about our identity claims. Appiah is an anti-essentialist. He is the kind of thinker for whom pointing out one or two complications to an argument is proof that the whole thing is bogus. So we simply need to know that there are some humans who are born without the usual XX or XY chromosomes in order to see that our usual way of dividing the world between men and women just isn’t right. And if we know that the categories don’t always fit, then we can Anvesh Jain hold on to them more lightly. Appiah, a British-born philosopher and writer of mixed British-Ghanaian origin who is based in Anvesh Jain is an undergraduate student of international relations at the University of the United States, succinctly summarizes a lot of Toronto. He has lived in India, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. His work recent thinking about identity, introducing read- has previously been published in the Literary Review of Canada. ers to ideas of intersectionality and the fluidity and hybridity of any identity claim. He urges a kind of

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 15 worldly cosmopolitanism, where we recognize that a kluge, an inelegant fix that gets us a result we that state officials put national interests above their identities are never pure; they are always made up want even while not solving the basic problem in own; it helps with economic development when even if they can be invested with a great deal of the first place. countries focus on broad interests and not simply meaning. He sees danger in those who essential- One answer, in this case—and the one proffered the interests of a particular family or ethnic group; it ize about identity, and suggests that this usually by both Lilla and Fukuyama—is citizenship. Both creates a broad “radius of trust” when larger groups happens to exclude or to dominate. Each chapter writers are trying to break free of the usual partisan of people see themselves sharing similar interests; opens with an anecdote about an individual who bickering and to find a way forward. They come it helps to support a social safety net so that those at lived complexly between cultures and categories. to essentially the same position—that we need the top of the economic order see themselves shar- Although he suggests that we take class and social a work-around, a kluge, that better sits with what ing an identity with the less fortunate; and, perhaps status more seriously as markers of identity, he we know of human nature. The politics of recogni- most importantly of all, it is essential for liberal ends up insisting that the range of identities any tion isn’t going anywhere. And given how much democracy itself. particular person can take on means, ultimately, good it has done in combatting injustice, that’s Our political institutions depend on unspoken that it is the individual that matters most. probably a good thing. But it can be tweaked. Lilla customs and shared values—such as a belief in the Although Appiah might be alarmed at the urges Democrats to embrace a broad identity that free press, free speech, and certain codes of civil- comparison, this is exactly the argument made by can be used to forge bonds of allegiance and alli- ized speech. All of these shared customs are under Jordan Peterson in attempting to discredit femin- ance across divisions. Think of Martin Luther King assault right now from both right and left, often in ism or the Black Lives Matter movement. Identity Jr.’s civil rights message that the inequalities faced the same language: the media is corrupt; it’s all fake leads to more identity, more intersections, until by African Americans were unacceptable simply news; and liberal democracy is just hogwash meant people are cut through in so many ways that the because they were Americans. to disguise the oppression at its core. How do we only thing left is the individual. Where Lilla is impassioned and polemical, live together if each side assumes that the game is In real life, of course, humans are usually quite Fukuyama is rationally precise. If we are ever fixed, and the only legitimate standards of truth are happy with identities and assumptions that mostly to overcome the limitations of identity politics, based on their own unique experience? work. Our brains have evolved to make these kinds he argues, we need to do two things. First we need We are only beginning to come to terms of “good enough” assumptions quite quickly and to to actually deal with the real inequalities. Where with what our modern morality of the authen- stick with them even when presented with conflict- citizens are being gunned down by police based on tic self is doing to our collective life. Since the ing evidence. There is a huge psychological litera- the colour of their skin, then this clear breach of the Enlightenment, this idea that each individual is ture on this which is brilliantly summarized, and rule of law needs to be eradicated. After all, identity owed recognition simply by virtue of being them- applied to the political sphere, in Joseph Heath’s politics is, at its basis, often a genuine call to end selves has been the intellectual cornerstone of pro- Enlightenment 2.0. Heath’s own argument is that injustice. But attached to this should come an equal gressive and liberating changes to our collective it is usually better to trick our irrational brain into focus on shared citizenship. Fukuyama argues that life. But in the twenty-first century it is becoming acting in its own best interests. So if we want to for all its imperfection, non-ethnic types of national increasingly clear that this individualizing politics dampen down divisive strife between competing identity are incredibly useful and important in threatens many of the shared values that underpin social groups, we have to face the fact that this kind modern life. In this book—but even more in his last our democratic institutions. Our freedoms aren’t of tribalism seems to be baked into our evolution- two books on the history of human government— only based on what is unique and valuable about ary identity. If we can’t change it, we can choose he demonstrates how a strong shared national each of us individually. They are also rooted in to create a kind of work-around. Heath calls this identity improves the quality of government so what we agree to hold in common.

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16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada A More Sentimental Man Michael Ondaatje’s late style Moez Surani

Divisadero Michael Ondaatje McClelland & Stewart 288 pages, softcover ISBN 9780676979152

The Cat’s Table Michael Ondaatje McClelland & Stewart 288 pages, softcover ISBN 9780307401427

Warlight Michael Ondaatje McClelland & Stewart 304 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780771093786

n On Late Style, the book Edward Said was writing at the end of his life, he describes how I the work and thought of great artists “acquires a new idiom” near the end of their lives. For Said, lateness isn’t a temporal category, but a fork in the road. One path leads to serene works character- ized by a sense of harmony, which evince a rec- onciled artist. The other path is a bleak revolution. Characterized by intransigence, difficulty, contra- diction, and irony, this form of lateness confronts one’s illusions about oneself and one’s own life; the art produced in this clear-eyed stage is the harvest of a newly vexed terrain. It’s worth considering the implications of the novels that constitute Michael Ondaatje’s late style. Ondaatje, of course, has won a Booker Prize (1992’s The English Patient), a Giller Prize (Anil’s Ghost in An artist late in his career can choose serenity or bleak revolution. 2000), and five Governor General’s Awards (in fic- illustration by sÉbastien thibault tion and poetry). In July, The English Patient won the Golden Man Booker Prize, awarded to the best dramatize personal rebellions against the corrosive crimes? What are the personal costs of nationalism? work of fiction from the past five decades of the power of the mainstream. Vitality and originality After this trio of lauded mid-career novels, his prize. Along with only a handful of his Canadian lie at society’s margin. Ondaatje published with preoccupations and animating questions shifted. peers, Ondaatje, now seventy-five, combines small presses and wrote portrayals of people whose In Divisadero (2007), the book he published after critical acclaim with broad public significance. intensity manifested in a transgressive spirit. These Anil’s Ghost, a character quoting William Styron Delineating Ondaatje’s fiction into early, middle, works evoke an acute sense of isolation in which stands in well for Ondaatje’s own change: “ ‘You and late periods is fairly straightforward. His early, single friendships are prized and psychic loneliness know, I think I have already written the most intim- self-referential fictions, The Collected Works of Billy supercharges into eros. ate and profound book I will ever be able to write. the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976), His middle period—In the Skin of a Lion (1987), I don’t think I can go as far as that again.’ ” The English Patient (1992), and Anil’s Ghost (2000)— Ondaatje has published three novels in the past Moez Surani’s writing has been published broadens the spirit of transgression with characters eleven years: Divisadero, The Cat’s Table (2011), internationally, including in Harper’s Magazine, whose rebellions are explicitly politicized. These and Warlight (2018). They share a voice and tone, Best American Experimental Writing 2016, characters resist both a life of bourgeois capital and repeat specific preoccupations. Each of these Best Canadian Poetry, and the Globe and accrual and the profanity of day-to-day monot- novels is a coming-of-age story centered on literal Mail. Most recently, he is the author of the ony. Their main concerns are born from a critical or emotional orphans who cope with unresolved poetry book Operations and the custom scent attitude toward nations and nationalism: Is their pain and walk out into the world with an essentially installation Heresies. country virtuous? What are a country’s historical ascetic disposition—none of them seeks money,

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 17 status, influence, or material rewards. They desire mother’s ties. He gains access to the government narrowed. But in this late period there’s also a more intimacy, safety, self-knowledge, and the facts archive and uses this to look back and under- all-encompassing foe. about one another’s histories of love and pain. stand his childhood and his mother’s wartime Beginning on a farm in California, Divisadero activities. Meanwhile, Rachel joins a puppet the- So how do we discuss opens with a fragile triangle: two sisters, Anna atre company and has a child with the Pimlico the education of our children? and Claire, and an orphan, Coop, taken in as Darter. Two crucial motifs recur in this book: Teach them to be romantics a child and raised by Anna and Claire’s father. secrets and anarchy. Again, characters meet and to veer towards the sentimental? When their father finds that Anna and Coop are become close but retain their essential secrets. —“Tin Roof,” The Cinnamon Peeler having an affair, he explodes. This violence splits As Nathaniel says at one point: “I realized I’d lost the book into three paths: Coop becomes a gam- [my mother’s] living voice. All the quick-witted bler and Claire a lawyer in San Francisco; Anna intelligence she owned when young, all the secret he sentimental novel is often based on the goes to France to research the life of an author, life she’d stepped into and kept from us, now lost.” Tdistress of orphans and the suffering of those Lucien Segura, and uncover his past. When A personal wildness that points to the second excluded from society’s care. As they seek to arouse characters in Divisadero meet, the discussion quality, anarchy, is a sure way to win Nathaniel’s sympathy, pity, and consolation, sentimental fic- is rarely about the future or the present. Rather, admiration. But in a postwar historical fiction that tions have the potential to be both politically rad- they recount personal histories. Intimacy and gains gravity through the politics it implicates, ical and prescient. They democratize care: a fiction secrecy are key; characters meet and become what is the substance of the anarchy Nathaniel that persuasively illustrated the plight of a woman close, but retain their fundamental secrets. This extols? Nathaniel’s use of the term strips it of both in Victorian England, or an enslaved person in tension animates their relationships, yet keeps its political heft and community ethos. Instead, it America, inspired a shift in public consciousness them at a mystifying distance from one another. connotes an individual’s desire-fuelled volatility, and gave energy to the belief that all people were Divisadero also continues with a signature a joie de vivre amounting to a personal commit- worthy of being treated with dignity. Ondaatje trait: the absence of a nuclear family. ment to avoid routine. But stripped of systemic critique, a sentimental A difference, though, from his earlier work is how As Said demonstrated, it’s worthwhile to look story is a gym to exercise one’s sympathy. So why this absence plays out. There is no deconstruction beyond the curated sense of history a novelist has a writer as talented and lauded as Ondaatje of the concept of the bourgeois family here; the presents to what occurs parallel to the explicitly used the past decade or so to triple down on the conventional notion of family is so essential in invoked politics of the work. At the time in which sentimental strain in his work? A sentimental Divisadero that its lack overshadows these charac- the novel is set, Britain was the planet’s major mindset asks us to encounter the world with feeling ters well into adulthood. imperial power and had Crown colonies and before intellect, and with a sense that the activity Published four years later, The Cat’s Table protectorates (or, less euphemistically, subject of the world is sacred rather than oppressive or is the account of a child’s three-week trip from territories) across the Caribbean, the Middle ever coolly banal. Sympathy, gratitude, and pity Sri Lanka to England aboard the Oronsay with East, Africa, and Asia, including the country of are, of course, laudable processes, and Ondaatje’s 600 other passengers. The cat’s table, last three books model how they play to which the narrator, Michael, is out. But, crucially, these feelings lack assigned, is for the ship’s least priv- Are they the first of Ondaatje’s something essential: the critical, the ileged passengers. Michael maps characters who live in the country combative, the radical. the boat spatially and rhythmically, A sentimental mindset also has charting what happens where each they’re born into, and in alignment profound epistemological impli- day, and he takes an inventory of cations: it asserts that truths are those aboard. The Cat’s Table has with its aims? These are remarkable known through feelings. In Warlight, a hagiographic tone, which works Nathaniel repeatedly bumps up well in a child narrator looking up changes for his mostly dissident and against this limited approach to know- at a world of seeming giants, and ing: “There are times these years later, his narration is suffused with excite- exile-obsessed fictions. as I write all this down, when I feel as ment and deviousness. Children if I do so by candlelight. As if I can- swim in the first-class deck’s pool before sunrise, Ondaatje’s birth, Ceylon. The timeframe Warlight not see what is taking place in the dark beyond the there is the silent menace of a prisoner aboard, occupies coincides with the violent, decolonizing movement of this pencil. These feel like moments and there’s a stop in Aden, Yemen, where a curse partition of India and Pakistan and the tension of without context.” Nathaniel himself identifies the is fulfilled. The novel’s tone is saturated with the partitioned Ireland. This is the wider context that cause of his frustration: “I had already been too wonder of childhood as Michael ranges through Warlight, a story about the son of a British intel- sentimental.” When one can only know through the boat searching out secrets for the intensity ligence officer, occurs in. Nathaniel’s mother and what one feels, the world is indeed quite mysterious. and exclusivity they confer. As the ship goes to her peers are not simply living within this global With this limit, an understanding of one’s context is England, through the Suez Canal and across the power, but working through the foreign office to impoverished, which in turn weakens one’s ability Mediterranean, Michael’s sense of anticipation is strengthen its international interests. Are they to distinguish a grievance from an injustice. For an counterpointed with passages of the narrator as the first of Ondaatje’s major characters who are art form as capacious as the novel, a sentimental an adult looking back to understand his life: so, patriots? Are they the first who live in the country fiction without any actionable political inspiration is enchantment looking ahead and more rationally they’re born into, and in alignment with its aims? a remarkably constricted mode of human represen- minded disenchantment looking back. These are remarkable changes for Ondaatje’s tation. It subjugates context and justice to precise Ondaatje’s most recent book, Warlight, is mostly dissident and exile-obsessed fictions. shades of personal feeling, and in prioritizing what’s a sombre story of two siblings: Nathaniel, who Put another way, Ondaatje’s writing begins in most fragile in a person, it exiles irony, vulgarity, narrates, and Rachel. They are left in post-Second aggression, ages into political critique personalized critical thinking, and anything fun or absurd. World War London with a friend of their mother’s through wide-ranging narratives, and concludes in For the late-stage Ondaatje, these are costs whom the children nickname the Moth. Their par- a stage of reflective soul-searching. There is also no worth paying. In the two paths Said traced, ents’ cover story for having abandoned the children longer a denunciation of dominant regimes. Ondaatje’s late style is the one of serene, reconciled is that they are off to Singapore to work for Unilever. The tensions driving Ondaatje’s work are harmony. They are raised by the Moth and an ex-boxer nick- reflected in his antagonists. In his early works, In 2016, Ondaatje was named a companion named the Pimlico Darter. The children eventually combustible protagonists Billy the Kid and Buddy of the Order of Canada, the highest honour for discover the real reason for their mother’s absence: Bolden, each housing intensities of force and self- distinguished service to the country. The award’s she’s working for British intelligence. The Moth destruction, are their own antagonists. His middle biblically sourced motto, “they desire a better and the Pimlico Darter initiate Nathaniel into a period sees his characters fight against the unjust country,” is an interesting mixture that admits life of non-violent crime (trespassing, smuggling, activity of nations and their economic systems: national fallibility and projects a sunny idealism. etc.), none of which blemishes the characters. They class barriers, the limits and coercion of borders, This is a remarkable journey for a writer who, retain an amiable virtuousness, or, rather, this is the and a country’s ability to forget the cruelty it has after winning his first Governor General’s Award light in which Nathaniel sees them. authored. His late period returns to an inward in 1970, was criticized by former prime minister In part two of Warlight, Nathaniel, now an antagonist characterized by an inability to fully John Diefenbaker for writing a book that was adult, is recruited into the Foreign Office by his know another person. The stakes have cooled and un-Canadian.

18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada A Novel Bursts to Life The quiet brilliance of Helen Humphreys Donna Bailey Nurse

Machine Without Horses Helen Humphreys HarperCollins 288 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781443432498

erhaps for lack of a bet- ter word, Helen Humphreys, P one of Canada’s most beloved writers, is generally described as a novelist. She has written more than half a dozen novels, several award- winning. Leaving Earth (1997), the story of two Depression-era women who attempt to break an aviation record, earned her a Toronto Book Award. Inspired by the life and work of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Afterimage (2000) The real-life figure who inspired Humphreys’s latest novel: Megan Boyd at work. won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Courtesy of the American Museum of Fly Fishing Prize. Many of her novels, includ- ing The Lost Garden, Coventry, and The Evening ­self-effacing on the page that her stories appear static one. It’s watching through a window while Chorus, unfold in Britain. They explore her trade- to have written themselves. At the same time, her the action happens elsewhere.’ ” Does Humphreys mark themes of unconventional female experience, fiction serves a dual purpose. It constantly asks: share Raley’s sentiments? Does she agree that the natural world, and love and war, which for “How best can we use language to know some- poetry cannot “keep pace” with grief? Humphreys equals joy and grief. Her style is intim- thing or someone?” Even as she envelops us in Earlier, Gwen is devastated to learn that her ate, elegant, and unpretentious—an act of literary the world of her novels—in Coventry, for instance, favourite novelist, Virginia Woolf, is presumed seduction that leaves readers wanting more. where Harriet Marsh stands guard the night of the drowned. She recalls glimpsing the author one Yet, despite her enormous success, Humphreys German air strike; in The Lost Garden’s Devon, night in London before the war. has often expressed frustration with the limitations where Gwen Davis supports the war effort by of fiction, which partly explains why she refuses supervising the production of food—Humphreys is I saw the tall, slightly stooped figure of to restrict herself to novels; why she bounces always meditating upon fiction as an art form and Virginia Woolf walking through the night between genres—from fiction to history to mem- its ability to replicate life. Humphreys is not only a square in a flowing dress the colour of dusk. oir to essay—sometimes producing a blend of writer—she is a writer/critic in the tradition of the What words can I possibly use to truly cover all four that may incorporate elements of verse. poet/critic, T.S. Eliot for one. this experience? Humphreys is not opposed to categories, exactly. Humphreys started out as a poet. Between 1986 Rather she continuously experiments with form to and 1999 she published four collections. Anthem, Thinks Gwen, “There is a vocabulary to existing, determine the most fitting one for an accurate rep- her last, received a nomination for the prestigious to taking up living space in the world, that cannot resentation of life. This pursuit has led to some of Pat Lowther Award. Her novels—with lasting be translated over the chasm of death.” For women her most moving and original creations: The Frozen images, economical prose, and musical phrasing— writers, especially, Woolf symbolizes the desire for Thames, for example, her haunting assemblage of read like an extension of her poetic gift. After pub- a more nuanced fictional language to suit the full illustrated vignettes delineating life on the iconic lishing Anthem, however, Humphreys abandoned range of their emotions. But Humphreys seems to river during rare periods of deep freeze. Another poetry as precipitously as a one might flee a broken doubt such a language could ever exist. unclassifiable work,The River, recounts the history romance. (While she is completing a stint as poet Nocturne, Humphreys’s memoir, chronic- of the complex Napanee water system that flows laureate of Kingston, Ontario, she has not rethought ling the untimely death of her younger brother through Frontenac County in eastern Ontario, her position on publishing her own poems.) Martin, contains some of her most penetrating where Humphreys lives. A simple question graces A scene from The Lost Garden may offer a clue thoughts about fiction. Martin was a gifted pian- the back cover of that book: How can we know any- as to why. It takes place one night when the women ist and composer. The two grew up sharing their one or anything? Gwen is overseeing attend a dance at the local artistic dreams. In the memoir, Humphreys, who Humphreys is a consummate storyteller, so manor. In the library, she comes upon Captain addresses her brother beyond the grave, admits Raley, a soldier reading aloud from Tennyson’s envying Martin’s musical gift. Donna Bailey Nurse’s collection of essays Black “In Memoriam.” Raley’s best friend has recently Girls: Women of African Descent Write Their been killed in the war. “ ‘Poetry is no use,’ he says. I think of you sometimes as part of your piano, World will be released this winter. ‘I thought it might be, but the poetic moment is a your body simply an extension of the keys.

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 19 You must have felt both liberated and Ruth is one of Humphreys’s favourite charac- oppressed by the fact that the music lived ter types: a seemingly ordinary woman, an often through you, that you were responsible for untraditional female, living a solitary, independent making it happen, that without your body to life and involved in unconventional work. The set- ILLUMINATING animate it there was only silence. ting too is familiar territory: the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Despite its devasta- On the other hand, fiction remains frustratingly tions the war offered women a level of freedom, Oil and World apart from whatever it depicts. expanding their notions of work and woman- Politics hood. Like most of Humphreys’s characters, Ruth Something exists more fully as an object when is a figure in a natural landscape, defined here by John Foster it isn’t described. The description is merely the North Sea, the River Brora, the salmon, and A Canadian oil another object. The story alters the object. It her dogs. Humphreys’s preoccupation with the economist draws doesn’t experience it. beauty of nature suggests a British sensibility, and back the curtain in fact Humphreys was born in the U.K., in 1961. on the world’s Here again, Humphreys implies that language is But she is not romantic about nature in the man- biggest hotspots – inadequate to the task at hand. As Martin nears the ner of Wordsworth or Keats. She belongs more to Syria, Afghanistan end his music provides him deep comfort. On the the school of naturalism for which human beings Venezuela and more other hand, Humphreys’s writing offers her none. remain part of the animal world. In Humphreys’s $27.95 paperback Even so, she says, “Writing is what I have, and it’s novels, this manifests largely in the idealization of a how I make sense of experience. This is why in spite dog’s life, in a desire that people emulate the purity of my desire to give up writing, I am writing to you of canine affections and motivations. one last time.” Humphreys keeps the lines of the novel clean and simple. Her goal is to highlight the mechanics ENGAGING ecause Humphreys abruptly set aside poetry of creative writing. The “machine” of the title, then, Band because she sometimes expresses an also refers to the novel itself. Always evolving in her ambivalence toward fiction and because she rev- relationship with her work, Humphreys has entered els in creating new narrative forms with which a new phase. She appears more at peace with the Oil’s Deep State to explore the beauty of the natural world, her idea of fiction as artifice, manmade. Her thoughts Kevin Taft readers sometimes fear she will abandon the on fiction and grief seem tempered, as well. novel. Abandon them, as it were. Thankfully her An Alberta latest book, Machine Without Horses, is not only Life is so different from fiction. A random, government insider an enchanting work of fiction, it finds her in a far cruel event can occur in life, coming out of gives an explosive more conciliatory mood with regard to her literary nowhere and surprising everyone. A man can account of the effects art. Up until now, Humphreys’s theories have been be walking his dog and then he can be dead… the oil industry subtly woven throughout her books, but in Machine [In fiction], you cannot just kill them off with has on democratic Without Horses they constitute a central theme. no real warning. It will feel unbelievable to institutions and Indeed, the first half of the book is largely devoted readers and they will stop trusting your story. stopping action on to her critical ideas. global warming Edmonton #1 The book divides neatly in two. In Part One, we By the time Humphreys begins thinking about bestseller observe an author, an unnamed, lightly fictional- this novel she has lost her brother, her father, and $22.95 paperback ized Helen Humphreys, as she transforms the three good friends. Five deaths, she says breath- meagre facts of an actual life into a fully fleshed- lessly, in six years. In addition, the man she hires out novel. She stumbles upon her subject in the to teach her to tie salmon flies is a widower whose obituary of a Scottish woman named Megan wife has recently passed away. Later in the book Boyd, whose exquisite salmon fishing flies made an acquaintance of Humphreys hits his head and her world-famous. As Humphreys contemplates dies. This book, like most of Humphreys’s novels, is INFORMATIVE Boyd’s life—reading articles and letters, studying steeped in grief. Because of her own pain she knows pictures, researching the area where she lived, and how to comfort others. Humphreys realizes she can enrolling in lessons in how to make salmon flies— grieve and still write. Even better, her writing finally The Big Stall her imagination conjures various scenarios. becomes a solace. Then, in Part Two, to the reader’s amazement, Donald Gutstein the novel bursts to life. It is the story of Ruth What I know about writing is that it will take While Ottawa and Thomas, born in Surrey during the First World everything I can throw at it, and that it is a the provinces claim War. After her father returns from the front he comfort. I can fall into it and it will absorb to be tackling global moves the family from England to the shores of my sorrow, my ideas, my restlessness. It has warming, it’s the Scotland’s River Brora so he can work as gillie of a become a process for making me whole again energy companies large estate. Ruth’s mother and older sisters resent whenever the world breaks me down. that are writing the their new home. But Ruth is as thrilled as her father, new rules — rules and frequently accompanies him to work. After he Helen Humphreys is one of the most popular that enshrine their gives her a beautiful Blue Charm salmon fly, Ruth writers in the country, with a devoted fan base is “hooked,” so to speak. She develops a talent for that continues to flourish. She has proven equally $24.95 paperback interests at the expense of the making them herself. Eventually, she settles in a popular with critics, who regularly speculate aloud environment cottage overlooking the North Sea. Dressed in her on why her work has been largely overlooked by late father’s suit jackets and ties, she works steadily the major awards. Some attribute this omission to away at the desk in her shed. Her salmon flies win the slimness of her novels, which are modest in international admiration, including, later in her life, format, often running less than two hundred pages. that of a young Prince Charles, who occasionally But it may also be a consequence of Humphreys’s drops round for tea. modest style, the extent to which she remains invis- During the Second World War, Ruth volun- ible on the page. In short, readers are so deeply www.lorimer.ca teers to deliver milk to the town. That is how she focused on the world of the story, they tend to for- meets Evelyn, the woman who becomes cen- get about Humphreys altogether. As with her earlier Independent. Canadian. Since 1970. tral to her life. They attend ceilidhs where they work, Machine Without Horses is a small, compact book to read in one or two sittings. But the ideas it Made possible with the support of the dance together as the war is on and the men are Ontario Media Development Corporation away. Ruth’s favourite dance is called “Machine conveys and the portrait it paints will stay with you Without Horses.” a long while.

20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ‘We Don’t Need Art That Often’ Memorializing the artist who resists enshrinement José Teodoro

The Flame: Poems and Selections from Notebooks Leonard Cohen Edited by Robert Faggen and Alexandra Pleshoyano McClelland & Stewart 288 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780771024412

he death of Leonard Cohen was not a tragedy. He was eighty-two and loved Tones were near. He’d been working at a gallop, producing three albums over his last six years—three of his finest, as it happens. He’d recovered from financial ruin by touring the world, selling out colossal venues, performing long enough some nights to rival Bruce Springsteen. And, as always, he’d been writing—“blackening pages,” exercising the vocation that had occupied him since his youth and won him accolades since the publication of his first book of poetry in 1956. So no tragedy, yet Cohen’s fall through the mirror was nonetheless devastating to many. Perhaps because Cohen’s work possesses a highly par- ticular ability to mirror the experience of those who respond to it. One could argue that much of Cohen’s art was self-absorbed, yet it neverthe- If Cohen’s work was sometimes self-absorbed, it still seemed to speak intimately to its audience. less seemed to speak directly, intimately, to us, as Photograph courtesy Marc Cornelis, via Flickr (2013) though by examining his own inner life with such unflinching rigour he’d gained access to some col- and a transcript of Cohen’s acceptance address for themes are Cohen-perennial: a predilection for lective psychic well. the Prince of Asturias Award. There is more than love in retrospect or at long distance; the struggle Perhaps the poignancy of Cohen’s death was enough excellent work in this book to justify one’s to balance the dictates of art, faith, and desire; heightened by its lateness, by the duration of its interest, but upon closer inspection, The Flame, freedom as aspirational rather than realizable. anticipation. That this artist who had long held with its smorgasbord construction, inevitably In “Winter on Mount Baldy,” Cohen describes a mortality, apocalypse, and suicide as muses should begins to resemble a memorial, particularly when miserable monastic existence that no one present finally surrender to the void generates a wonder regarded as adjacent to a wave of recent enter- is willing to abandon. In “Crazy to Love You,” he that enhances grief. I’ve lost track of the number prises offering various positions on Cohen’s legacy. writes of “The gates of commitment unwired/ And of people who have commented on the sepulchral Cohen died in November 2016, and the intervening nobody trying to leave.” In “Dimensions of Love” arc of Cohen’s final record, You Want It Darker— years have seen the unveiling of projects such as the he writes, “longing kneels down/ like a calf/ in the released less than three weeks before his death— Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal’s expansive straw of amazement.” as though he hadn’t been reporting from astride the exhibit Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything and Cohen’s poems pay respect to beloved artists, grave for much of his sixty-year career. Art of Time Ensemble’s concert series A Singer Must such as fellow art-music troubadour Tom Waits, fla- This same twilight tenor permeates The Flame, Die. Memorializing Cohen is a prospect both com- menco singer Enrique Morente, and Cohen’s hero, a volume of previously unpublished or uncollected plicated and fraught, more so than in most cases, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Elsewhere poems, as well as lyrics, illustrations, material gath- given that everything in Cohen resists enshrine- Cohen offers a playful takedown of Kanye West ered from his vast trove of notebooks, a brief elec- ment—he was only ever valedictorian in jest. Can and “the great bogus shift of bullshit culture,” and tronic correspondence with poet Peter Dale Scott, artistic integrity be maintained in a mausoleum? pays homage to an anti-depressant. He writes of How does a publisher or curator render posthu- getting older, claiming to feel “curiously peaceful/ José Teodoro has written on literature and cinema mous material as though the subject were still alive, behind the apparent turbulence/ of litigation and for publications such as the Globe and Mail, Brick, and keep the vitality of the existing work from being advancing age.” He repeatedly expresses the desire Film Comment, and Quill & Quire. He is the author sodden by sentiment? to leave his house in order and muster strength in of several plays, including The Tourist. He is cur- Though the poems in The Flame are only the face of fading health: “I pray for courage/ At the rently developing a book of conversations with the intermittently dated, it’s clear that many were end/ To see death coming/ As a friend.” Swiss-Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler. developed over several decades. Some of the The prose poem “The Indian Girl,” dating back

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 21 to 1980—1978’s Death of a Lady’s Man is also heavy pages burns so brightly. The volume’s overall on prose poems—is one of The Flame’s strongest power is diminished by its too-delicate treatment NOW pieces. Its narrative, describing a secret tryst that of the deceased’s effects: In a culture increasingly preceded an untimely death, is rich in incident saturated with declarations of grief over the loss of and captivating detail: desire can be blessedly popular icons, this sort of posthumous publication AVAILABLE impersonal and a kettle can converse with a canary. could do with a ruthless edit. The poem, presumably autobiographical, prompts Which brings us to The Flame’s final two major one to wonder if Cohen shouldn’t have considered components: the illustrations—what Cohen him- writing a memoir. No doubt he would have said that self has referred to as “Acceptable Decorations”— his entire body of work constitutes all the memoir and the notebooks. Cohen’s illustrations, which he had in him. also decorated his previous volume, 2006’s Book of Wonderful as many of its poems are, however, Longing, are mostly self-portraits and aren’t objec- The Flame prompts questions regarding the routes tionable per se; rather, they are an unnecessary by which Cohen’s work reached its fullest fruition. supplement diluting the impact of the text by occu- In his foreword, Adam Cohen suggests that writing pying valuable white space. Blank regions can feel was his father’s only solace, “his truest purpose.” vital to a poem’s visual power and are in keeping But writing to what end? The Flame also con- with the fetish for the Spartan frequently declared tains a great deal of material that, like so many of by Cohen, that long-time denizen of anonymous Cohen’s poems, seems to have been apprehended hotel rooms. As he writes in The Flame’s “Homage en route to becoming song. Was music the final to Rosengarten,” “I love the bare walls.” draft of most of Cohen’s poetry? As far back as The notebook selections, alas, are also a dis- 1970, Michael Ondaatje claimed in his monograph service to the author, who, according to the edi- Leonard Cohen that “even [Cohen’s] earliest poetry torial note, signed off on the premise but was not contained the basic structures and the qualities involved in the final selection. In Book of Longing, of song.” So many of the poems, the later ones Cohen—who could go as long as nine years with- especially, favour short lines, rhyme, and meter. out releasing a studio album—wrote, “We don’t So many are rhythmically propulsive, with stanzas need Art that often…A little goes a long way.” This beginning with the word “and.” advice is not heeded here. Presented as a hundred- The tonal differences between the poems and page-long monolithic scroll, the notebook selec- the songs can be striking, so let us compare myth- tions largely read as meandering and formless. ologies. Cohen’s poems can be profoundly cruel, I’m as eager as anyone to discover diamonds in “In their simplicity and sordid, and defeated, with no grotesque aspect of the rough, but no one needs verses like “I never the self left un-scrutinized; the collections can be got the girl I wanted/ did you, Jack?” or “To lead a even-handed tone, the at times excessive, even maximalist or tautological private life/ like a pirate with his knife.” Nor is any in their thematic intensity—and I’m thinking of two reader enriched by encountering Cohen’s attempt letters achieve their of Cohen’s very best collections, Death of a Lady’s to rhyme “Harvard” with “garbage.” It is in no way author’s di cult aim: Man, with its prism-like verso commentaries and disheartening to discover that these verses wound steady refrain of marital disintegration and rage, up in Cohen’s notebooks—this is what notebooks they present as a literary and 1984’s Book of Mercy, with its myriad petitions are for—but they seem very distant from a state fit  ird Man, a friendly, to a creator. The songs, by contrast, are often spare, for publication. elegant, and exhilaratingly precise in word choice The curatorial approach of Robert Faggen and authoritative voice and melodic structure. The songs are riddled with Alexandra Pleshoyano appears to suffer from the darkness, yet they are most often uplifting in their perils of reverence. There are many repeated lines in the dark.” grace and warmth, their humbleness and impas- in the reproduced notebook poem-fragments, but —Literary Review of Canada sioned delivery, their playful line-readings and they sometimes read as the work of a poet attempt- sense of devotion. It is not for nothing that Cohen’s ing to get at something through repetition, rather later albums came to embrace rhythm and blues than that of a poet intending to use repetition as and gospel above all other genres: he aspired to a device. Faggen and Pleshoyano’s editorial note “Timely, lyrical, spiritual communion through groove and vernacu- explains that Cohen’s notebooks feature numerous lar, and I never witnessed a concert in which this revisions yet do not make explicit which version tough, accurate.” communion wasn’t achieved. was Cohen’s preference. Thus we are subjected to In Cohen’s late work we repeatedly see song- countless lines in which an alternate word is placed —Margaret Atwood craft eclipse poetry, largely through painstaking in parentheses. Could Faggen and Pleshoyano not reduction, such as can be heard in the delicate have made a call between “slave” and “work”? “My” spacing of vocals and guitar in “Crazy to Love You.” and “the”? “Her” and “you”? In some cases, they Like Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon,” “Banjo” imbues explain, a word was simply illegible—so why bother “A lovely, loving, and a single enigmatic object with siren-like doom: reproducing it at all? un inching work.” “It’s coming for me darling/ No matter where I don’t want to lay blame on the editors exclu- I go.” Some lyrics to “Born in Chains”—“I was alone sively; Cohen, after all, was a complicated crafts- —Toronto Star on the road/ Your Love was so confusing”—­ man: yes, he spent years composing “Hallelujah,” border on cliché, yet Cohen’s cadences, with their but as far back as 1964’s Flowers for Hitler he began cooed vowels, elevate them to something prayer- to show an intermittent disregard for economy ful. Likewise, “On the Level” features throwaway in his poetry that rarely affected his music. It is Available at better lines—“They ought to give my heart a medal/ For because of my admiration for his work, whose bookstores everywhere letting go of you”—that become utterly stirring in peaks are so frequently the products of a minimalist the context of a soul ballad. aesthetic, that I demand less, not more. and online. Cohen and editors Robert Faggen and Alexandra There are, of course, nuggets in the notebooks, Pleshoyano were right to include lyrics in The stray phrases that stop you in your tracks, some- Flame. Lyrics to familiar songs tend to look dead times with allusions to events far beyond the pur- Be With | 978-1-77196-243-8 | $17.95 on the page without the architecture of music. Yet view of Cohen’s direct experience.   Cohen’s printed lyrics create fresh sparks. One can hear his voice in every reading, yet new meanings I agree, it’s getting worse emerge by taking time with these words that the and they’re stacking up the chairs IBLIOASIS sweep of music doesn’t allow. that’s what comes from choosing life That said, not everything contained in these above the enemies’ prayers

22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Or this, the notebook section’s closing stanza: such as Barbara Gowdy, who recalled the day she public reception: this is about how an artist’s work interviewed Cohen—and the evening she declined actually lives in the world, even—or especially— Didn’t he live an invitation to hook up. in his absence. on an island in There were, likewise, moments of brilliant The most eloquent of all posthumous Cohen the Mediterranean sea reinvention in A Crack in Everything, the sprawling considerations—the farthest thing from The Flame’s with a mandate from God exhibition, taking up much of the Musée d’art con- unessential notebooks—comes from filmmaker to enter the dark temporain de Montréal, which closed earlier this James Benning and is a kind of situating of memory year. The show featured the work of dozens of artists itself. Benning’s film is forty-five minutes long and The perils of reverence: this is not, to be sure, a from diverse disciplines, so there was far too much, composed of a single fixed shot of a vast rural land- new element in the Cohen cosmology. Every Cohen but the highlights, all of them installations, were scape. Occupying the middle distance are a pair fan has encountered umpteen numbingly taste- truly remarkable, from the modest but lovely Ear of oil drums, a jerry can, tires. In one foreground ful renditions of “Hallelujah.” For every Roberta on a Worm, Tacita Dean’s 16-mm film depicting a corner a patch of tall yellowed grass makes for an Flack doing “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” bird on a wire, to the delightfully interactive Poetry impressionistic cloud. Telephone poles recede there are legions of Billy Joels doing “Light as the Machine, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s toward a haze-obscured sierra. Unseen aircraft Breeze.” Cohen’s art is a renewable resource; what it customized Wurlitzer, programmed so that each and birds create an undulating drone. Time passes. requires from those seeking to interpret it is owner- key plays a different Cohen recitation. Occasionally a rustling sound alerts us to a pres- ship, ingestion, individual understanding. MAC’s pièce de résistance, though, was Candice ence behind the camera—he’s waiting for the There was, thankfully, more Flack and Joel in Breitz’s I’m Your Man (A Portrait of Leonard miracle. And then it happens: the sun sets in three the tellingly titled A Singer Must Die, three nights of Cohen). The first room of the installation featured seconds and the night lasts two minutes. Screams tributes to Cohen, staged last February at Toronto’s a large screen on which the Shaar Hashomayim of astonishment echo from a distant campground. Harbourfront Centre by the Toronto-based group men’s choir sings all the back-up vocal parts to The eclipse ends, calm resumes, and then comes Art of Time Ensemble, and featuring a slate of poets, Cohen’s 1988 album of the same name; the second the film’s sole non-diegetic element: we hear writers, and musicians. Lou Reed also received the features a circle of eighteen tall, isolated screens, Cohen’s “Love Itself” play out in its entirely. deluxe homage from Art of Time after his death— each featuring a male Cohen fan of a certain vin- L. Cohen, which screened at this year’s Toronto must a singer actually die to get such an engaged tage—Cohen was fifty-four at the time of I’m Your International Film Festival, was made in memory reading of his work? The evenings featured stories, Man’s release, and I’m guessing Breitz’s subjects of its namesake, but it honours the stark integrity of poems and, of course, songs, their character often are all that age or older—singing the lead parts from Cohen’s work with no concessions to the aggrand- departing radically from Cohen’s recordings. The I’m Your Man in time with the choir. No musical izement of mourning. The film is a silent poem, shows seemed to value ephemerality over poster- accompaniment is heard, only the fascinating, a document of remembering in real time. We are ity: the best performers, most especially Gregory humorous and very beautiful intermingling of crisp granted languor to truly notice things, enough to Hoskins, played the room, not the archive. The per- choral work and amateurs sharing their heartfelt feel boredom and amazement, fleetingness and the formance took Cohen’s universal, metaphor-driven living-room renditions of songs that clearly reson- possibility of some understanding we didn’t pos- sentiments regarding the exhausting effects of ate with them on a longstanding personal level. sess before. In the lyrics to “Love Itself,” Cohen puts negotiating love and made them entirely personal. In keeping with Cohen’s singular capacity to elicit it best: “In streams of light I clearly saw/ The dust Rather than merely sing Cohen’s praises, some par- deep identification, Breitz’s brilliant construc- you seldom see/ Out of which the nameless makes/ ticipants chose to speak of Cohen’s vulnerabilities, tion dissolves the frontiers between private and A name for one like me.”

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October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 23 ‘The Sly and Cunning Masquerade’ A brief history of literary fakes Dennis Duffy

twentieth century. She transformed Literary Impostors: Canadian herself into Mazo de la Roche and Autofiction of the Early Twentieth came up with a romantic Old World/ Century New World ancestry in her mem- Rosmarin Heidenreich oir, Ringing the Changes, morphing McGill-Queen’s University Press into the be-furred and glamorous 352 pages, hardcover creature alighting from her limo ISBN 9780773554542 who bedazzled the young Timothy Findley. That compelling figure wasn’t an imposter. Money and fame hings can get complex had transmuted her. when you are considering Autofictions (of course, French Tthe relationship between theorists have come up with an life and art within the pages of a alternative: auto/fiction), those mix- novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby tures of truthful and fictional self- is actually a self-made man who creations of an author’s experience, has refined himself from the lowly earn critical plaudits today. But the Jimmy Gatz into the figure whose postmodern inventions of Karl Ove distinguished family hailed from San Knausgaard or Sheila Heti are not Francisco. At one point in his career, quite analogous to the work of the Gatz/Gatsby appeared in a photo writers selected by Heidenreich. Her with the Earl of Doncaster. At Oxford. subjects are producers of “autobio- All this happens within the fictional graphical” works found “to be fabri- bounds of the novel. Also fictional is cations, or works in which fact and the racist historical screed, “The Rise fiction were found to be inextricably of the Colored Empires,” which the interwoven.” What’s more, as she carelessly malevolent Tom Buchanan writes, “all but one of the writers who recommends to his listeners. But wait. produced them assumed false identi- Racist propagandist Madison Grant ties which they lived out…concealing issued his book The Passing of a Great or even obliterating their true pasts.” Race in 1916, and scholars agree that Here are some of the contours of that polemic gave Fitzgerald the idea this sizeable body of lies. Frederick for Tom’s book-of-the-week. Philip Grove, after his youthful prom- Now consider that in real life, an inence in German literary circles and African-American named Sylvester Quebec’s Ernest Dufault fashioned himself into the iconic cowboy Will James. imprisonment for fraud, flew to North Clark Long was translating himself, Will James, Sage Creek, Alberta, c. 1907. Photographer unknown. Special America. He ended up in Western Gatsby-like, into Chief Buffalo Child Collections, University of Nevada, Reno Libraries Canada, where he taught school and Long Lance, an Indigenous man with wrote novels and autobiographical roots in Alberta (hence Long’s appearance in this and career. These are the sort of tangles writhing works (appearing on many an academic syllabus) study of Canadian literary impostors). Fleeing the their way within Rosmarin Heidenreich’s engaging that kept at bay the truth of his earlier life. The truth racism smothering African-Americans in the South, study of seven Canadian literary impostors. was not exposed until Douglas Spettigue’s 1973 the well-practiced con man settled in Canada’s If the folk song from Aaron Copland’s Old account of Grove’s European years. Everybody now West, going on to star in a 1930 film, The Silent American Songs is correct—“Yes we’re all dodgin’/ knows that Grey Owl, the putatively Ojibwa sage of Enemy. Among the guarantors of Long’s authenti- Out away through the world”—and we are all Canada’s wilderness and poster boy for the whole city was no less an expert than eugenicist Madison conning our way through life, then the writers cultural enterprise of playing Indian, was in fact an Grant, whose knowledge of Indigenous Canadians appearing here are our Baudelairean “mon sem- Englishman, Archie Belaney, who took his act all was as sure as Donald Trump’s on Mexicans. blable, mon frère.” Heidenreich picks her targets the way to Buckingham Palace for an audience with Stretch your imagination beyond actuality and with precision (more on this later), but writers King George VI and the royal family. imagine that Fitzgerald substituted his own name such as Frederick Philip Grove (born Felix Paul Literary Impostors also settles on cowboy Will for that of his narrator Nick Carraway, supplying Greve, 1879-1948) are not aberrant outliers/liars; James, an author who came along in time for me. him with details from Fitzgerald’s actual upbringing I prefer to view them as dots along a spectrum. I saw the movie of his horse epic, Smoky, three Writers, like all public performers, do not just times as a kid, and devoured his true-life-you-bet Dennis Duffy has been reviewing books in various assume pen names, they can also assume extra- memoir Lone Cowboy—which was about what Toronto media outlets for more than fifty years. authorial identities. I planned to be when I grew up. He was born Ernest He also delivers occasional art talks at the Toronto Take gawky Maisie Roche, one of Canada’s most Dufault in Quebec in 1892, and drank himself to Public Library. popular and widely read writers back in the mid death in Hollywood in 1942, befuddled enough

24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada to will his slender estate to one Ernest Dufault, such literary impersonators as these to such con constructed a persona countering differing aspects that is to himself. Many believe in resurrection, but men of virtuosity as Frank Abagnale Jr. (subject of of that scorn. Edith became a writer steeped in not quite as literally as “Will James” seems to have Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can) and Count purist visions of an ancient and untainted Chinese at the end. Finally, sisters Edith (1865-1914) and Cagliostro, the grand faker of eighteenth-century culture. Winnifred’s Japanese disguise imaged a Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954), born of a Chinese France. In the meantime, the crew assembled plucky little nation drenched in cherry blossoms mother and a British father, chose to “pass” through in Literary Impostors present ample material for and full of twanging kotos. Her Japan displayed their writing as Asian rather than suffer the indigni- speculation. ancient charm without the threat of mass immigra- ties of being mixed-race white. Edith became Sui The con almost always needs a willing mark, tion to Canada. Sin Far, the Chinese writer, and Winnifred flour- a point argued elegantly in Caroline Rosenthal’s Laura Browder’s 2000 monograph Slippery ished as the Japanese Onoto Watanna. article on Grey Owl, which appears in the essay Characters analyzes how swiftly one man’s angular How does a reader make sense of Heidenreich’s collection Fake Identity? (2014). An impersonator fakery becomes another’s graceful nobility. A well- Santa Claus parade of shape-shifters, name- cannot function without an audience that wants to oiled cultural sausage machine can always grind changers, and masters of disguise? She is a profes- be fooled. Grey Owl played to a crowd in search of a series of gestures into something passing for a sor of literature after all, and therefore confines romantic images of the Indian as primitivist seer, person. This variety of transformation emerges as her gaze to the literary and cultural implications of exemplar of a Canadian wilderness who bolstered the subtext of Literary Impostors. Which brings these impersonators. The general reader may find colonial Canada’s self-image of cultural purity. In us to one very cogent reason for the enactment of her eyes skipping over the passages impersonation that we may not enjoy involving literary theory’s contribu- admitting, a motive that Philip Roth tions to the understanding of these Winnifred Eaton’s Japanese disguise caught in a 1984 interview. To him, figures, but any reader will be fascin- ated by the careers of the impostors, imaged a nation drenched in cherry the art of impersonation [is] is which resist generalization.­ the fundamental novelistic gift… One can note that the New World, blossoms and full of twanging Making fake biography, false his- as its occupiers and usurpers came kotos—ancient charm without the tory, concocting a half-imaginary to see it, offered prime ground for existence out of the actual drama shedding one’s old skin and starting threat of immigration. of my life is my life. There has to be over. Even though a newcomer cul- some pleasure in this job, and that’s ture can age (and petrify, apparently, it. To go around in disguise. To act into immigrant-hating nationalism), the urge (and fact, Parks Canada fastened onto Grey Owl as a a character. To pass oneself off as one is not. dream) of self-creation persists, like some dormant testimony to our possession of an unspoiled and To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. cell in our DNA. One can also, as the author does inspiring space. Sylvester Clark Long, as Chief too frequently for my taste, invoke some broad Buffalo Child Long Lance, was shrewd enough to Perhaps impersonation is less stressful than our notion of narcissism as a driver of the compulsion grasp that white racism held Indians in less con- publicly professed ethic would have us believe. to re-present oneself. I would also note, though the tempt than it did blacks. This was especially so if Halloween comes second only to Christmas as author does not, Jesus’s command to be born again the so-called Amerindian could be seen as a noble the biggest retail season. We all enjoy dress-up; and Saint Paul’s seconding the motion with his urge warrior of bygone days rather than as a persistent pranking thrills everybody except the victim. to put on the new man as a means of personal and delinquent, and present-day holder of mineral My earlier comment that Rosmarin Heidenreich’s social transformation. Christianity’s decline as an rights. As Long Lance he could, in Tonto fashion, study resembles a parade of impostors wasn’t affair of widespread observance in our culture has exemplify unthreatening racial nobility. quite accurate. It is rather a carnival that she pre- only increased the appeal of its self-starter myths. A similar utility, I would argue, emerges from sents. Carnival: clowns, disguises, noise, and most But presenting such an etiology demands quite the work of Greve/Grove, the European man of let- of all unbridled licence. Be who you want to be! another sort of study. ters immersing himself in the Canadian West and Recruitment posters urge us to be all we can be, Successful impersonators strut their way across demonstrating our territory’s cultural maturity. He but we all know the dirty little secret behind those the full range of human behaviour. A study pla- never made much money from his writing, but it inspirational words. The real message is, be big- cing these bookish frauds among a panorama of did plop Grove right into the heart of the Canadian ger than you are, be greater than you are, escape con artists could be engrossing. I would welcome academic literary canon. The Eaton sisters, like- reality’s grinding strictures, get back to where you a discussions as insightful as Erving Goffman’s wise, played their social role well. They were avoid- never actually were. Liberation was what these The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) ing the widespread contempt for Asian Canadians impostors were after. Perhaps, at times, some of that can also cover phony lives running from of mixed race that flourished in their time, yet each them found it.

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October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 25 ‘A Siege of Reading’ Is politics diminishing a burgeoning literature of the Middle East? Nora Parr

Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense Marcello Di Cintio Goose Lane Editions 272 pages, softcover ISBN 9780864928986

The Other Middle East: An Anthology of Modern Levantine Literature Franck Salameh Yale University Press 408 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780300204445

rabic letters are enjoying a well- deserved spotlight in the English-speaking Aworld. Since 2009 at least three publish- ing houses have turned their focus to the transla- tion of Arabic fiction: the American University in Cairo Press, which launched the imprint Hoopoe; U.K.-based Darf Publishers, formerly devoted to travel books and historical reprints; and Hamad bin Khalifa University Press, formerly Bloomsbury Qatar. Stoking English-reader anticipation for the Next Big Arabic Novel, a growing number of awards—the so-called Arabic Booker prize (the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which is affiliated with the Man Booker Prize), the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, and the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel—all include translation assistance to bring first-place works into English. A slew of gigantic regional book fairs gather publishers from Di Cintio expected to encounter hackneyed memoirs about ‘their grandfathers’ olive groves.’ across the Arab region as well as prospective trans- illustration by sÉbastien thibault lation houses. In parallel with the rise in available Arabic fiction than it does about the texts they describe. Both in Palestine. His aim, through literature, is to relate there has been a flourishing of its critics and com- works are a reminder to pause and think about how Palestine beyond the headlines. mentators. It is from within this burgeoning field we read, to assess the positions we take as readers The headlines, by Di Cintio’s account, have fos- that two recent works emerge. Both put literature and the pitfalls of our often-unrecognized assump- tered limited expectations for a Palestinian literary from the Middle East, rather than political events, tions. They remind us to ask, though not always scene. The author admits early on that when he front and centre, and suggest that a better under- explicitly: What do we ask of Arabic literature, first went to Palestine as a writing instructor, he had standing of texts will lead to a better understanding or other translated and international work? Are we expected to work with amateurs churning out hack- of the region. Aimed at what both call the “uniniti- becoming better readers? neyed tales of “their grandfather’s lost olive trees,” ated,” they propose to give new readers close insight Refreshingly, Marcello Di Cintio, a long-form as he puts it, or penning “narratives of humiliations into the Middle East. Putting the books in conversa- journalist and a Calgarian, puts his own precon- at the hands of checkpoint soldiers.” His investiga- tion reveals more about our own readerly position ceptions front and centre in Pay No Heed to the tion sets out to reveal a more complex story. Most Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense. The Palestine compelling is the life of Di Cintio’s own character Nora Parr is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of he writes of is cultural, and Di Cintio’s work is an within the study. He leaves in and even highlights Oriental and African Studies at the University of engaging, funny, and easy-to-read exploration of his naive and at times embarrassing questions. London. Her work for the Open World Research what it means to be a Palestinian writer today. He At one point Ramallah-based writer Maya Abu- Initiative project on Creative Multilingualism interviews novelists, essayists, and poets (who are Alhayyat responds bluntly to one such query: explores literature and translation. She has lectured also human rights lawyers, mothers, and alcohol- “I don’t know why you ask these kinds of questions, at King’s College London in comparative literature, ics), and sketches wonderfully evocative scenes of which I really hate and don’t enjoy answering.” The and was a visiting fellow in Jordan and Palestine Gaza City culture clubs, solitary studios, and smoky recurrent theme, not so subtle, is that the West may with the Council for British Research in the Levant. bars—places that nurture creativity and reflection be asking the wrong kinds of questions entirely.

26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada By his own admission Di Cintio goes to Palestine in April 2018 won the Arabic Booker for The Second he also includes Egypt). Salameh wants his readers looking for its humanity, to “find beauty.” An unset- War of the Dog, a dystopian-style rip-through of to find—as Di Cintio did—that which is human in tling logic lurks behind that lovely sentiment. Read despotic governments, set in a not-too-distant the Middle East. Where he takes the search for the backwards, it suggests that Palestine’s human- future where individuality—marked by the human human, however, reveals the dangers of this brand ity is not evident until he has—and we, through face—disappears in a world of clones. The futility of humanism. Salameh puts forward his selection him, have—read the work of Palestinians, met of old-style resistance, the temptation of corrup- of fiction to show that there is humanism in the their families, eaten their food. A related, rather tion, and despair for the future coincide in a work Middle East, but this humanism is specifically not dogged theme, near ubiquitous in writing about that looks head-on into the worst humanity can Arab. The Levant—in its true and human essence— Palestinians, is the reader’s temptation to under- offer. Readers in the English-speaking world will he claims, represents a “non-Arab Mediterranean stand the Palestinian psyche (as though there were have to wait for the 2019 translation from American heritage.” His claim is that contemporary notions of just one) by trying to read Palestinian portrayals University in Cairo Press but in the meantime could the Middle East as the “Arab World” obliterate the of Israelis, particularly soldiers. The Palestinian read Nasrallah’s playful historical fictions, which Mediterranean’s ancient heritage; and that despite writer who authors a nuanced and complex check- toy with the conventions of narrating the past in fifteen centuries of various Arab and Muslim rul- point soldier, for example, is held up as proof that a way that makes the past present (Time of White ers, the Levant is distinctly un-Arab. His aim in Palestinians are humane, are human. But must Horses, The Lanterns of the King of Galilee), or his presenting the anthology is, by his own description, Palestinian writers portray a teenage soldier with early experimental works Inside the Night and the “restitution of a Levantine secular polity, where all her acne and self-doubt to demonstrate their Prairies of Fever. Middle Eastern minorities, who had fallen under own humanity? None of these recent books make it into the sway of allogeneic Arab-Muslims of the seventh Di Cintio also admits he anticipates finding pol- Di Cintio’s review of the Palestinian literary land- century” reclaim their heritage and excise their itics in Palestinian writings. Instead he discovers scape, however. Born in Jordan to refugee parents, false “Arab-ness.” authors who transcend the expected “nationalistic Nasrallah, like a great many other Palestinian writ- Salameh claims that the Arabs—a race apart flag-waving” and “good-versus-evil and us-versus- ers, is writing from locations outside the borders of from the peoples of Levant—took over and trans- them” sentiments. One Gaza culture club organ- any possible Palestine. The assumption that borders formed once “placid” communities with a “nation- izer says members must check their politics at the (even Israeli borders) contain all that is Palestinian alist rigidity and cultural authoritarianism that door: “We talk only about books and about culture. is one that Di Cintio does not quite dismantle. have plagued the Near East of the past century.” He I think culture is more powerful than anything quotes one Lebanese intellectual of the early twen- anyway.” Di Cintio relates a conversation he had ranck Salameh’s newly released anthology tieth century who claimed that “fifteen centuries of with one author from Gaza City; both agree that Fof minority literature from the region works Arab domination were scarcely valid justification the expectation that Palestinian texts treat “war, to highlight some of what gets left out when we for one to become ‘oblivious or disrespectful to the occupation, women’s rights, Hamas” is an expecta- ask questions using current categories; from fifty centuries’ that preceded the Arabs.” There is tion that “wrest[s] control of a writer’s narrative nationalisms to religious groups. Like Di Cintio, little citation or substantiation, however, beyond like hijackers.” To come at a text with this expecta- Salameh sees his book as a corrective to common the anecdotal, of anything beyond an imagined tion is, Di Cintio argues, quoting link between this ancient population Palestine’s national poet, Mahmoud Darwish insisted on his artistic and the contemporary peoples of Darwish, “essentially a siege of read- the region. The anthology is not an ing.” In other words, to approach a right not to constantly address the academic study of the texts it collects, text through politics is to delimit and though it at times presents itself as diminish possibilities. To lift the siege conflict. ‘If I write love poems,’ he such. Rather, it uses the texts to sub- of reading would be to let the texts stantiate claims on the meaning and speak for themselves. Darwish— said, ‘I resist the conditions that identity of the Middle East. crowned the poet of resistance early One of many problems here is in his career—insisted on his artistic don’t allow me to write love poems.’ that the authors Salameh claims to right not to constantly address “the this vision are far more nuanced conflict.” “If I write love poems,” he once said, “I ­misperceptions of a region. The Other Middle East than he is. The contemporary Syrian poet Adonis, resist the conditions that don’t allow me to write “treats those works [that] do not fit the prevalent in an essay on “unfinished identity” that Salameh love poems.” assumptions of the media, the academy, or the translates here, reminds readers that “when one Palestinian literature, like any other, is also con- public discourse on a Middle East presumed cultur- speaks of Arabs, a clear differentiation ought to be stantly changing to reflect new social and political ally, linguistically, and ethically uniform, unitary, made between Arabs as individuals and human circumstances. The classics of Palestinian literature homogeneous.” Its aim is to bring “works that beings, and Arabs as an institution, as establish- grappled simultaneously with the political and somehow ‘did not make it’ into the accepted cor- ments, as regimes, and so on.” In theory, it is with the existential. The cousin protagonists of Sahar pus” to wider audiences, and to serve as a “repudia- the establishments that Salameh takes issue. Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns (1976), for example, quarrel tion of the exclusivity of nationalism.” In fact, he displays a thinly veiled prejudice. The about how best to preserve a Palestinian way of life Reading beyond the national, Salameh includes Levant Salameh imagines appears to be one that following the Israeli occupation of the West Bank two Anglo-Palestinian authors, one settled in the specifically excludes Arabs: “the term Levantine in 1967. One has never left his elite family home in United States (Fawaz Turki), the other in Britain may be used to refer exclusively to members of one Nablus and rails against the old class system; the (Samir el-Youssef), who broaden the scope of of the minorities living in Muslim- or Arab-defined other, politicized when he sought work in the Gulf, this literature. Turki and Youssef are bilingual, bi- countries, or may be limited to intellectuals and returns to organize workers against the occupation. national, and internationally mobile. Like many writers, and never to an entire society,” he writes— Their tender discussions reveal the complex inter- of the eleven authors collected in this anthology, never, that is, the Muslim Arab population at large. secting social priorities of class, land, industrial- they represent a key feature of the Middle East In Egypt this sort of atavistic reimagining is ization, exile, family, and politics. Emile Habiby’s that Salameh promotes: hybridity. Salameh writes called pharaonism—it constructs Egypt and “true” The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist: against a media discourse that flattens a Middle Egyptians as the descendants of the pharaohs, A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel, East that is in fact “humanist, multifaceted, poly- with the desired implication that any who are not meanwhile, is a darkly funny parody of Voltaire’s glot, cosmopolitan.” The hybrid authors Salameh descendants are not real Egyptians; they are invad- Candide. It follows the deeply feeling but simple- translates (and more often re-translates, as many ers, and unwelcome. Salameh correctly explains minded protagonist, Saeed, through his expulsion are canonical figures, already widely available in that this reimagining of national identity emerged from Haifa, the subsequent founding of Israel, English), rescues from the archives, and gathers for in Egypt around the 1920s, “around the same time and Saeed’s eventual “infiltration” or return to his the first time to build a sense of the region’s literary as Phoenicianism and Syrianism—both emphasiz- native city. The work’s satire hinges on the paradox identity, are, he says, “[s]triving to reclaim a certain ing a non-Arab Mediterranean heritage, and both of Israel as a new utopia that proves to be anything Levantine hybridity as a legitimate parameter of widespread and popular mainly among Christian but ideal for the returned Saeed. identity, and attempting to restore their Levant.” communities in Lebanon and Syria.” Salameh mer- In more recent writing the signposts of He uses Levant—a largely colonial-era term ges these trends into what he calls Levantism, and Palestinian political history take their place within to refer to the Near East—to consciously rename posits this as a corrective to nationalist currents, an increasingly complex spectrum of contemporary the southeastern Mediterranean, covering today’s which at the time were distinctly articulated in pan- life. Consider the work of Ibrahim Nasrallah, who Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel (though Arab sentiments.

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 27 The thing is, challenging the dogma of national- is self-reflective, even the authors Salameh quotes offers an excellent account of a view where “[t]he ism and pan-Arabism was what most authors of the who were staunch supporters of the Anti-Arabism stories of the books themselves proved as compel- period were doing, no matter their political or reli- movement were not anti-Arab. ling as the stories they contain.” His accounts and gious beliefs. The big question of the age, which to Adonis (featured in the anthology), for example, reflections of writers and their world are stunning— some extent remains, was: What does it mean to be reminds readers: but he has neglected the texts. Sadly, he incorrectly Arab? When colonialism framed the pre-colonial describes two classics of Palestinian letters by one period as one of backwardness and decline, writ- The Ottomans used to say: Westerners are of the founders of modern Palestinian literature ers and intellectuals were faced with the complex backward. After the downfall of the Ottoman Ghassan Kanafani. The titular protagonists of his question of what to make of their long and multi- Empire, Westerners took the place of the foundational work, Men in the Sun, perish in a faceted pasts, and how to keep them as part of the Ottomans, repeating the same clichés: tanker truck on the way to Kuwait, not Iraq as Di imagined future. These complex issues were not Muslims are backward barbarians, and we the Cintio writes, and the aging couple from Kanafani’s restricted to supporters of Phoenicianism or other Westerners are civilized; we’re more human! Returning to Haifa are, in the chaos of 1948, sep- similar ideologies, nor were they limited to minor- arated from their five-month-old son—not their ity groups. This is clear in the work of five-year-old, as Di Cintio states. (The the authors that Salameh highlights, infant is raised by Jewish survivors of one third of whom are Muslim (Shia Instead of a Middle East grappling the Holocaust death camps, and the and Sunni), with one Jewish-Israeli, short but powerful novella is about the one Druze, and the rest Christian of with the shifting realities of encounter of biological and adoptive various denominations. parents, and it is an excellent read.) In What Salameh makes of this postcolonialism, Salameh sees the U.K. edition of Pay No Heed pub- diversity is something wholly differ- minorities pitted against a lished by London-based Saqi Books, ent. Instead of a Middle East grap- which specializes in Middle Eastern pling with the rapidly shifting realities homogeneous category of ‘Arabs.’ work, many such inaccuracies have of colonialism, post-colonialism, and been corrected. This is good news. industrialization, he sees minorities The book’s intercontinental pitted against a homogeneous category of “Arabs,” Salameh’s intimations that Arabs defiled the revisions remind us of a broader truth here: that as if minorities were the only thinkers to grapple humanism of the Levant reveals more about his no work is ever perfect, and that the ideas in books with the ancient past. Egypt’s foremost writer of the own position than about the people of the Middle are also not necessarily complete—much like our twentieth century, Naguib Mahfouz—the only Arab East or the writers he translates. If he were to ideas about the world. The story of Palestine and writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—wrote have begun with the texts, rather than his own indeed the Middle East more broadly is, as Di Cintio extensively about the pharaohs. He even paralleled philosophy—or, perhaps more realistically, if he muses, “an unfinished novel…generations long, claims that pan-Arabism was the answer to the had allowed the texts to challenge his personal and counting, with no denouement. It is a poem region’s woes to the ancient story of Akhenaten, position, as Di Cintio does—the result would surely that never ends…[It] is something physical that a pharaoh who broke with tradition and claimed be different.­ exists in the present tense.” In an essay written in the existence of a single god. It is also relatively What everyone agrees on is that literature can French a decade earlier, Adonis agrees: “identity is common knowledge that Arabic dialects absorbed and will expand how we think about the Middle a never-ending work in progress, a work in progress ancient Egyptian or Phoenician words—part of East. Di Cintio, who does not read or speak Arabic, that defies death and goes on ever after.” what makes the rainbow of different Arabics, which persist despite the simultaneously unifying force of Modern Standard Arabic, the simplified Quranic Arabic that is mostly used for literary writing and speechmaking, and in news media. Salameh says he takes issue with the flattening of a diverse and multilingual Middle East into a singular and hegemonic Arab World. This is a fair criticism. However, even the era of what he calls Arab domination was more diverse than he lets on. Write. During those fifteen centuries, half a dozen dynas- ties ruled over various segments of what we call the Middle East. The seats of these dynasties were in modern-day India, Iran, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey— Grow. to say nothing of the century of European colonial rule. This is hardly domination by a homogeneous Arab invader. Language at the level of subject was equally complex. Only this year a ground-breaking Connect. discovery was made in Jordan: a Bedouin inscrip- tion in both early Arabic and Greek—side by side, We’re looking for the on the same rock found in the middle of the Hejaz desert and far from the “Levant” that Salameh 2020–21 Calgary Distinguished claims was the only site of a polyglot and cosmo- Writers Program Canadian Writer-in- politan Middle East. We would do well to recall that the imagina- Residence. Are you ready for the tion of the Middle East as a pan-Arab entity itself best year of your writing life? emerged in direct opposition to European coloni- alism. As the late critic Edward Said reminds us, “Western imperialism and Third World nationalism APPLY BY feed off each other,” and the resulting “fortunes JANUARY 15, 2019 and misfortunes of [Middle East] nationalism, of ucalgary.ca/cdwp what can be called separatism and nativism, do not always make up a flattering story.” Salameh has reason to rail against the flattening consequences of Arabism, but forgetting fifteen centuries of his- tory will serve the present now no more than the same exclusionary force of Arabism served the past. And because most literature worth its salt

28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Letters

Re: “The Age of Independence,” by soldiers are occupying their territory. Anderson’s ­sufficient capacity should be able to assert this right, George Anderson (September 2018) worry is that, even when the rights that I argue for up to and including sovereign independence? I have and justify are carefully circumscribed, political the greatest difficulty in imagining how this right, nderson’s line of criticism raises questions elites can use these arguments in a crude way, which Moore admits is “capacious,” could be insti- Aabout the contribution of philosophical rea- for evil purposes. While I am alive to his worry— tutionalized in international or constitutional law. soning to issues of international order, boundaries, we do, after all, live in the era of fake news—I do not Moore stops short of considering the serious issues territory, and the like. These are all decided in the think that a philosophical theory of the principles of international order or constitutional design that end by force and power, he avers, and this needs to underlying our international order can be held the application of such a right might entail. I would be recognized in the theory. Despite its respectable responsible for being decontextualized or misused. encourage her to enter the fray on these highly pol- lineage—Elie Kedourie made a similar argument I believe that to counter fake news and misrepre- itical questions. in his 1960 book Nationalism—I think this line of sentation, the best hope we have is to rely on the argument is deeply wrong and counterproductive. intervention of careful, reasoned argumentation. George Anderson In the past, territorial questions were decided by Philosophers shouldn’t stand aside; that’s exactly Ottawa, Ontario simple force—conquering armies, territories being why we should enter the fray. transferred by royal marriage, etc.—and there were very few issues of principle. But now when people Margaret Moore Re: “The ‘C’ Word,” by Andy Lamey make territorial claims, they advance philosophical Professor, Department of Political Studies (July-August 2018) arguments in support of their claims. My disagree- Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario ment with Anderson is that we can’t evaluate the enjoyed Andy Lamey’s very thoughtful critique claims without evaluating the arguments on both welcome the idea of philosophers entering I of those who vehemently oppose “cultural sides, and this is precisely what philosophical rea- I the fray on major political issues around inter- appropriation.” While I understand his point about soning can offer. national order, borders, and territory, and can only the inherent “capitalism” of the anti-appropriation Consider the 2017 Catalonian referendum endorse any appeal to careful, reasoned argumen- position, I don’t think his argument applies in the on independence, which Anderson cites. The tation. And I certainly do not believe that such case of indigenous people. In many cases, indigen- Catalonian regional parliament claimed that it was argumentation should turn strictly on force and ous people have been dispossessed culturally as a acting on what it regarded as a right of self-determin- power. There is broad room for moral argumenta- result of their subjugation by imperialist states like ation. Voting in the referendum was suppressed by tion applied to different contexts. Canada, whose robust “multiculturalism” policies the Spanish state, on the grounds that the referen- Where I come unstuck with Margaret Moore’s now enact the logic of the neoliberal state through dum was illegal, by which they meant in violation of argument is whether these issues are best rendered the supposed benevolence of “diversity.” In so the Spanish constitution (and so they invoked legal in terms of group rights. In her book, she advocates doing, a mixing of cultures—such as the appro- justice grounds). Immediately following the refer- a very sweeping “right” for territorial groups that priation Lamey describes—helps ensure the state endum, massive numbers of people on both sides meet her criteria but holds back from considering maintains a positive face (“We’re diverse!”) while came out to demonstrate, some in defence of the whether this could be a legal right of some kind. erasing the ugly reality of its settler-colonial past unity of the Spanish state, which they saw as a just Groups can have legal rights, so that is not the prob- and ongoing incursion into all aspects of indigen- political order, and others in defence of Catalonian lem. The problem is whether this proposed moral ous lives. self-determination. For both groups, a convincing right could become a legal right—and if not, what The Irish political theorist Ronit Lentin has writ- response will need to address the arguments of are we to make of it? ten very persuasively on this. There is nothing wrong both sides. A careful exploration of those normative The right in international law of colonial with scholarship written by, for example, white arguments would reveal that a one-off, binary, and peoples to independence is clear, based on a broad people, on indigenous experience or history, as in non-dynamic referendum on the independence international consensus, and has been largely Ilan Pappe’s watershed book The Ethnic Cleansing question is not synonymous with an act of collect- implemented. Some states now would broaden of Palestine, or James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains. ive self-determination; meanwhile the purely legal international law to extend this right to peoples The problem arises when the state takes advantage justice argument relies on an unacceptably narrow suffering extreme oppression—for example the of such appropriations to bury its continued oppres- understanding of justice, viz., justice according to people of South Sudan in the old Sudan—or to the sion and paternalism. the rules of the Spanish state. The political and moral units of federal states deemed to be in a process of vacuum that characterizes the current world order dissolution, such as Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia. Nyla Matuk on issues related to territory has in fact brought both There is less agreement on these extensions, but they Toronto, Ontario Spain and Catalonia to the brink of a political crisis. form the basis for serious debate and decisions. Anderson seems less concerned with what my Similarly, various collective rights in domestic actual arguments are than with how political entre- constitutions—such as to free association and to Re: “The ‘C’ Word,” by Andy Lamey preneurs might use those arguments. For example, religion—are usually fairly clear and operational. (July-August 2018) I ask in my book why we think that the people of And of course, federal and other decentralized Quebec or Scotland are the appropriate group to systems can constitutionalize the rights and juris- rofessor Andy Lamey is unreservedly correct to determine whether Quebec or Scotland should dictional powers of certain territories (states), and Pmaintain that opposition to alleged instances enter into negotiations for self-determination or even linguistic or religious groups. So there is no of “cultural appropriation” must not be based on secession, but don’t extend this consideration to the problem with certain kinds of collective rights in the blinkered idea that “black and Indigenous stor- people of Crimea. And in answer to that question, domestic law. ies can only be told when a black or Indigenous I do not argue in favour of the Russian position— But what would it mean to try to incorporate storyteller is available.” He rightly upbraids critics I reject it, not only because it fails the conditions for into international or constitutional law Moore’s of Robert Lepage’s recent shows, SL V and Kanata, the justified use of force, but because the referen- proposal in her book that any group with legitimate for protesting the colour-blind casting of mainly dum in Crimea could not possibly be conceived of occupancy of a territory, a shared history of cooper- white singers and actors, just because the shows as an exercise of self-determination while Russian ation, a collective desire for self-determination, and were supposedly made by the wrong people (racially

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 29 speaking). He is correct: that is an ugly argument. How different the headlines would have been had Re: “The Collapse of America,” However, the matter is less straightforward than Lepage and company utilized their undoubted cul- Charles Foran in conversation with professor Lamey thinks. The real problem with tural power to put Montreal’s over-policed, overly Chris Hedges (July-August 2018) SL V is not that it showcased first-class white jobless but very talented black youth on stage. performers singing primarily African-American Audiences would have been amazed—nay, morti- hile I largely agree with Chris Hedges, he spirituals, but that that offering—intended to fied—by the high calibre of talent that is generally Wtends to overstate his case. He is correct demonstrate that many cultures (including the permitted to waste away precisely because such that the decline of the American empire began Slavic, from which the word slave descends) performers seldom win entrée to elite stages. with the military-industrial complex, about which have suffered the evil of slavery—was discon- Lepage may also have desired to revisit and president Eisenhower warned. nected from, or oblivious to, the realities of revise Jean Genet’s anti-slavery and anti-colonial But the real decline began with corporate relative cultural power and disempowerment. play, Les nègres, clownerie (1959), which features thir- ascendency in the late 1970s and 80s. Recall stagfla- White performers surely have the right to sing teen black actors (five in white-face), who explore the tion. Back then, everyone blamed the government, “Negro” spirituals, but their right to explore dynamic of white imperialist oppression and “illegal” but stagflation was also caused by corporate take- marginalized—“traditionally oppressed” (an black resistance. However, the apparent disavowal overs. When a company is taken over, production Orwellian phrase, that)—people’s experiences of requisite context—socio-political and historical— declines, and when huge amounts of money are must be assessed in light of their simultan- resulted in SL V seeming like a white-face update borrowed, the money supply increases. eous power to displace the histories, narratives, and of Walt Disney’s Song of the South (1946). Where I disagree with Hedges is in the talk of fas- cultures of the dispossessed. The right—or rite—of representation of the cism. Fascism is a structure in which the politicians I’m sure that Lepage and the exemplary singer “other” must always be weighed in the bal- maintain control with the support of the business Betty Bonifassi wanted to condemn all experiences of ance against the power to displace the other, for the community. What we now have is the multinational slavery. Perhaps they also sought to gesture toward latter measure is oppressive and executes a form corporate structure in control with the support that great, progressive history of white Québécois of continued erasure, which is generally the fate of of politicians. As Karl Polanyi pointed out in francophones expressing solidarity with African black people(s) in Canada. The pretense of repre- The Great Transformation, the imposition of market Americans and (North) Africans opposing segrega- senting the “other” has to take into account just economies in the early eighteenth century led to tion, racism, and colonialism, which Québécois rad- who the other is, and what real means are avail- everything, including people, becoming commod- icals viewed as allegorical to their 1960-1976 Quiet able to them to represent their own “selfhood.” ities. With the corporate sector in control, workers, Revolution struggle against anglophone oppres- Otherwise, “universality” just becomes libertarian as commodities, were owned by the corporations, sion. These goals are (were) laudable. code for the ability of the comfortably empowered and thereby became serfs. What I see developing is However, Lepage and Bonifassi missed an excel- to subordinate all “other” experience to (white) not a form of fascism, but a new form of feudalism. lent opportunity to put onstage usually unheard supremacist notions of what experiences are and unseen African-Canadian or Afro-Québécois important in human history and who is best quali- Bernie Koenig singers to join them in celebrating the extinction fied to represent them. London, Ontario of slavery in colonial Canada and in Nouvelle- France (which had the largest number of proto- George Elliott Clarke The LRC welcomes letters. We reserve the right “Canadian” slaves—“black and Indigenous,” to use E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature to edit letters for length, clarity, and accuracy. professor Lamey’s locution). University of Toronto Email: [email protected]

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October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 31 Andy Lamey The Foreign-Baby Baby Problem A lesson on citizenship from contemporary Japan, and 1860s America

he practice of granting citizenship to ­create more government bureaucracy and oblige have descent-based approaches to citizenship also every child born inside a country’s border Canadians to fill out more tedious paperwork, out- have permanent disenfranchised populations. Tstretches far back in history. In recent years comes that conservatives normally oppose. Of course if Canada abolished jus soli it is however countries that once viewed citizenship There is a deeper problem. It can be seen by unlikely to result in the same patterns of exclu- a matter of jus soli, or a “right of the soil,” have considering the American experience with jus soli. sion as Japan or Kuwait, let alone nineteenth- changed their minds. When Ireland amended its The U.S. constitutionally enshrined the principle century America. But nativism and racism are constitution in 2004, for example, it meant that in the 1860s. Prior to this time greater government hardly consigned to history. In Canada’s current unconditional jus soli stopped being law in any discretion over who was a citizen saw African- climate, native-born Muslims who run afoul of the European country. Australia made a similar change Americans and Indigenous people targeted by laws law—and perhaps even some who do not—would in 1986. These and other societies now generally that systematically denied them citizenship. Even be at heightened risk of being stripped of their require that at least one parent be a citizen, perma- after jus soli laws were on the books, the country ­citizenship. nent or long-term legal resident. (Australia also experienced moral panics that saw it compromise The unthinking inclusiveness of our current grants citizenship to children of non-citizens if the its commitment to universal citizenship for the approach to citizenship means that we don’t go children live there until age ten.) native-born. A 1907 measure for example, memor- near that possibility. In this way the case for abol- The Conservative Party of Canada recently ably known as the Gigolo Act, said that American ishing jus soli is ultimately a bit like the case for called for Canada to make a similar switch. Our women who married foreign men took on their making the right to vote conditional on demon- current practice is to grant citizenship to practically nationality, and were no longer Americans. U.S. strating political knowledge. In theory a test that all children born on domestic soil (those born to writer Jeffrey Rosen has summed up the American would weed out low-information voters has some diplomats and other employees of foreign govern- experience, the consistent application of jus soli appeal: populist demagoguery would be less effect- ments are an exception). At their August conven- “has been a friend of oppressed minorities through- ive. In reality, whenever lawmakers have made vot- tion in Halifax the Conservatives resolved to “fully out our history, while the competing traditions, in ing rights conditional on literacy or similar tests, the eliminate birthright citizenship in Canada unless which citizenship descends by blood, or naturaliza- tests have been administered in unfair, often racist one of the parents of the child born in Canada is a tion is based on mutual consent, have been malle- ways. An inclusive policy regarding whose babies Canadian citizen or permanent resident.” able tools of nativists and racists.” get citizenship, like an inclusive policy regarding Debate over Canada’s citizenship laws has been Why might a descent-based approach to citizen- who can vote, means we avoid the possibility of set off by media reports of “birth tourism,” a phe- ship be a “malleable tool” of exclusion? The answer abuse or the risk of citizenship eligibility being nar- nomenon of foreign mothers-to-be who come to can be seen through a comparison to the legal rowed still further beyond what the Conservatives Canada to deliver their baby, thereby allowing the concept of hate speech. One of the original ideas have proposed. To think Canadian lawmakers child to obtain citizenship without having to apply behind hate speech was to penalize speech that can avoid these temptations requires a naive faith for it. Critics point to the practice to argue that jus “promoted hatred” toward racial minorities and in their ability to apply the law with Solomonic soli is a holdover from feudalism, no longer relevant other traditionally disadvantaged groups. Critics detachment. That kind of utopianism conservatives in the modern world. This however only shows that however, including many conservatives, have long are also supposed to oppose. feudal conceptions of belonging are underrated. suggested that the concept of hate speech has There is something unreal about jus soli coming Alternative approaches may sound nice in theory experienced the conceptual equivalent of mission up for re-examination in 2018. No one really knows but they have grim consequences in practice. Jus creep: it gets applied far beyond its intended pur- how many pregnant mothers come to Canada just soli is a crude and simplistic approach to citizen- view. A recent controversy at the City University to have the baby. Statistics Canada says that in ship, but rather than a drawback, that is its strength. of New York for example involved a student who 2016, 313 children were born across the country to The international trend against it is one Canada denounced scholarships to Israel as “sick Zionist non-resident mothers. Critics say the real number should resist. propaganda.” He became the subject of a formal is three times that official count. Suppose they are Canadians need proof of citizenship in order to investigation after another student objected that right. That is still less than a thousand births a year, obtain a passport or register to vote. Right now the “this is hate speech.” The student’s remark about or just over a quarter of one per cent of the 383,102 way to provide that proof is simple: produce a birth scholarships was intemperate. But did it really births Canada saw in 2016. This is a baby problem certificate. As the B.C. Civil Liberties Association generate hatred in people who were exposed to it? in more ways than one. has noted, abolishing jus soli means that the gov- Hate speech is notoriously difficult to define. The fixation on current births however is bizarre ernment will have to come up with some other way The approach to citizenship that considers it a mat- by itself. Canada has implemented some form of jus of verifying citizenship. One possibility would be ter of jus sanguinis, or a “right of blood,” meanwhile, soli since 1947. If the law itself were the problem, the introduction of a national identity-card system, is not. But what the two notions have in common critics should be able to point to people currently estimated to cost billions of dollars. Whatever the is that they both establish a fateful precedent. 18 or older who are unfairly enjoying the benefits new arrangement turns out to be, it is likely to be The concept of hate speech legitimized the idea of citizenship because their mothers snuck into the more cumbersome than the system now in place. that some speech should be penalized simply country years ago to give birth. It is noteworthy that Ironically, the Conservatives’ proposal would because of how prejudicial it is. Is it any surprise no one ever cites such people. It is also noteworthy that people began to deploy the concept against that we are not debating regulating birth tourism or Andy Lamey teaches philosophy at the University views they detested? Similarly, jus sanguinis legit- other more targeted measures that would not call of California at San Diego and is the author imizes the idea of significant numbers of people into question the country’s commitment to inclu- of Frontier Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis being born in Canada without becoming citizens. sion and equality before the law. If we believe in and What to Do About It (Doubleday Canada). That idea is even more ripe for abuse. It is one rea- those things, jus soli is a line we will always draw Twitter: @amlamey. son why Japan, Kuwait, and other countries that in the soil.

32 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada GETTING TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER

OCTOBER 25–30 2018

October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 33 Muscle on Wheels Louise Armaindo and the High-Wheel Racers of Nineteenth-Century America M. Ann Hall Beardmore 100 Questions about Women Cloth, 240pp, 40 photos The Viking Hoax That Rewrote History and Politics “Fixing a feminist gaze on the turn- Douglas Hunter Manon Tremblay of-the-century cycling phenomenon … Cloth, 520pp, 18 photos, 2 maps Paperback, 320pp an impressive account of a gifted and highly successful professional athlete How the sensational discovery of a Viking A timely book on the unfinished work and performer whose sensational career grave in northern Canada became a major of representative democracy that takes a spanned North America.” museum controversy when it was exposed comprehensive approach to demystifying –Nancy B. Bouchier, McMaster University as a hoax. the major issues dominating the study of gender and government. Indispensable Reading for Fall

Flesh Reborn Literary Impostors I’m Not Myself at All The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Canadian Autofiction of the Early Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Settlements through the Twentieth Century Kristina Huneault Seventeenth Century Rosmarin Heidenreich Cloth, 400pp, 140 colour images Jean-François Lozier Paperback, 352pp Paperback, 472pp Observes and reactivates historical art by The first study to offer an in-depth, women and prompts readers to consider A ground breaking view of how Indigenous systematic examination of literary what a less restrictive conceptualization of communities emerged in the heartland of imposture in Canada viewed through selfhood might bring to current patterns New France. the lens of autofiction. of cultural analysis.

McGI L L - Q U E E N’S U N I V E R S I TY PR E S S m q u p . c a Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @McGillQueensUP

34 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada