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Israel’s Religious Awakening Is the world ready for another theocracy in the Middle East?

PATRICK MARTIN

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pasha malla The lie of plagiarism sarah wylie krotz Men with boats ramin jahanbegloo & jalal barzanji Forgiveness and revenge

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EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarmishta Subramanian [email protected] 2 A Poetics of Forgiveness 21 The Language of Butterflies Crows ASSISTANT EDITOR Ramin Jahanbegloo in conversation with Jalal & Hanged Men Bardia Sinaee Barzanji A poem ASSOCIATE EDITOR 4 Loudly They Shine daryl sneath Beth Haddon A poem POETRY EDITOR 22 Men with Boats Moira MacDougall lynn tait Map-making, mythmaking, and the Canadian COPY EDITOR 7 The Believer wild Patricia Treble sarah wylie krotz Michael Ignatieff’s inheritance and legacy EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT ira wells 25 Anti-Know-Nothings and Great Evangeline Holtz CONTRIBUTING EDITORS 11 Israel’s Religious Awakening Unknowns Mohamed Huque, Andy Lamey, Molly Is the world ready for another theocracy in the The bittersweet lure of culinary nostalgia Peacock, Robin Roger, Judy Stoffman Middle East? ian mosby PROOFREADERS patrick martin 27 Dante and Beatrice Bookends Tyler Willis, Heather Schultz A poem DESIGN 14 Those Unlucky Tots Mark Goldstein, for the last time Leanne Shapton’s Trojan Horse of a book, and jake kennedy ADVERTISING/SALES the wistfulness of the best children’s literature 28 Birds of Cathedrals Michael Wile nicholas köhler A poem [email protected] 16 Against Originality laura cok ADMINISTRATOR Christian Sharpe Plagiarism, and the cipher of literary shame 29 People as Platform pasha malla PUBLISHER What Uber, bespoke perfume makers, and the Mark Lovewell 19 Spirited Away rest of us are building [email protected] Transforming birds, fireflies, and weed cookies in colin horgan BOARD OF DIRECTORS Eden Robinson’s British Columbia outpost George Bass, Q.C., Don McCutchan, 32 Letters Trina McQueen, O.C., Jack Mintz, C.M., j.c. sutcliffe Jaime Watt 20 Caged CORPORATE SECRETARY Sometimes survival means fighting the bad fight Vali Bennett andré forget ADVISORY COUNCIL Michael Adams, Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Grant Reuber, O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard Schiff POETRY SUBMISSIONS For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK founded in 1991 by p.a. dutil The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization.

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December 2017 reviewcanada.ca INTERVIEW A Poetics of Forgiveness Ramin Jahanbegloo in conversation with Jalal Barzanji

he political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo first gained renown in This adoptive home of Canada after his wrongful imprisonment in Iran became a human- rights issue a decade or so ago. Jahanbegloo was arrested in 2006, while visiting family in Tehran, on trumped-up charges of conspiring to over- throw the state. The author of such books as Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (1991), and an alumnus of the Sorbonne and Harvard, he was held in solitary confinement for four months, an ordeal he detailed in his previous book, Time Will Say Nothing: A Philosopher Survives an Iranian Prison. Jahanbegloo is currently professor and vice dean of the law school at Jindal Global University in Delhi, and executive director of the university’s Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace. His newest book consid- ers his experience ten years on, from another per- spective. On Forgiveness & Revenge: Lessons from an Iranian Prison (University of Regina Press) is a wide-ranging reflection on forgiveness through the philosopher’s lens. It’s an apt book for an annus horribilis that has supplied no end of opportunities to exercise forgiveness, patience, and resilience. The Kurdish-Canadian poet Jalal Barzanji has much in common with Jahanbegloo. The author of the poetry collection Trying Again to Stop Time and The Man in the Blue Pyjamas: A Prison Memoir (both University of Alberta Press), he was also unjustly imprisoned (in Iraq); he has spent a lifetime navigating questions of exile and freedom in his writing; and he, too, has had to negotiate moving past great injustice in his life. He and Jahanbegloo spoke via email about confinement, freedom, and the art of forgiving. tors, notably two swords that were given to him by without electricity or water. A school was opened Barzanji: I was very excited when I read in your his own father, which I eventually inherited. I lived there when I was seven years old, and books soon book that your father is Kurdish. Sanandaj is a under two regimes: the second Pahlavi regime and became my obsession. My father would chastise city of art, culture, and literature me whenever I was lagging behind [in Iranian Kurdistan], and I am during the walk to school; he not surprised to know that your Freedom of expression is a reality that would shout, “Hurry up, Jalal! I roots are in that beautiful city. is unappreciated and taken for granted don’t want you to walk through life Unfortunately, it is the destiny of blind like me.” That always stuck Kurdish people to be displaced, in Canada. In the Middle East it is with me. That school—and, soon which results in the loss of lan- after, my entire village—was later guage. But aren’t we lucky to have something we fight for—not a “thin firebombed in 1961. Two days other languages to express our following the bombing, he was feelings and thoughts about peace, paper” but a “thick action.” imprisoned. It would not be the freedom, and beauty? last time my hopes and dreams Jahanbegloo: Beautifully put. I was born in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The first one put my were taken from me by a government. Tehran and neither my parents nor I speak a word father in prison. The second one imprisoned me. Jahanbegloo: It was a great pleasure to read of Kurdish, but my ancestors came from Sanandaj. Barzanji: This is shocking but no surprise, and your book and I found many similarities with my They were descendants of a famous Kurdish tribe, we have many similarities in our lives. During the autobiography, Time Will Say Nothing. I was incar- the tribe of Jahanbegloo, which my Turkish friends darkness of Saddam Hussein’s regime, I spent two cerated in 2006. I spent 125 days in solitary, a dif- continue to call by its Turkish name, Cihanbeyli. years in prison; my father was also arrested, in ference from your ordeal. I was also psychologically My grandfather kept all the symbols of his ances- Erbil. I grew up in a small village in Iraqi Kurdistan tortured and interrogated for eight hours every day

2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada in order to confess to crimes that I had not commit- a focus of countless hours of blindfolded interroga- Jahanbegloo: Sometimes I think that only ted. But I survived by reading and writing. I wrote tions at Evin prison. people who come from our region of the world aphorisms in the backs of tissue boxes that I tore in Barzanji: At one point I stopped to reflect on can understand the strange mixture of agony and tiny pieces. Many of these aphorisms were confis- whether the group mentality, so prone to mis- empathy in those who can sing and dance and cated by my jailers, but I published the remaining in leading and descending into violence, makes the recite poems with the same passion and fervor with a Persian-language book entitled A Mind in Winter. process of forgiving easier for the victim. I lack any which they fight for a piece of land or for their pride. Barzanji: I would characterize my time in sort of ill will or animosity toward those that held We are both children of that heritage, a heritage that prison as uncomfortable, above all. It’s a strange me captive or put me in that state of perpetual is mixed with the horror of violence and of wants, word to decide as defining, but it was: the space, discomfort I described earlier, but I find it exceed- the triumph of self and of oil, but also with bravery the size, the smell, the routine, even where the ingly difficult to come to terms with forgiving, for and beauty as modes of life. prison was located. A library I enjoyed had been example, Ali Hassan al-Majid—Chemical Ali, as he Barzanji: Yes, truly our experiences in the turned into this prison; it was a place I had a deep is known—as the perpetrator of the Halabja attack. Middle East, and mainly Iraq and Iran, are unique connection to and frequented often, and it led to In 1988, I wondered to myself, if, like Arendt with to us. The millennia of cultures and stories of civil- a deep discomfort in me that it was now a prison. Eichmann, I saw a banal man at Ali’s trial, one that izations passed that are lost under the scrutiny At times I would find it so incred- of governments and ideologies ibly difficult to focus on anything (sometimes recovered, often lost but this constant and exhausting Exile has always been a sort of again) hum to us from beyond the physical and mental discomfort. second home to me—on the fringes, grave. As writers, I believe it is in My own prison life also entailed our nature to grasp at these loose being changed by those I shared a on the cusp. At times I long for the home threads of history that dangle from cell with. Many of them turned to library shelves and the dark cor- the idea of revenge, and it was dif- I left behind. That Kurdistan no ners of historical sites. I imagine ficult at times not to be swayed by not all your pursuits have been this groupthink. It’s an interesting longer exists, however. fruitful; I know a majority of mine thing being in such quarters—the have not, but it is in this pursuit individual becomes less that and more a single rep- simply internalized Baath party policy, would that that I find meaning when it escapes me in other resentation of a larger unit. make the process of forgiveness easier? Perhaps endeavours. It strikes me, reading your powerful book, that this would make me a Baath party sympathizer to Jahanbegloo: Camus said, “We live in terror much of your motivation for turning away from Kurds—just as she was a Nazi sympathizer and you because persuasion is no longer possible; because vengefulness is to break the so-called cycle of bar- are a Jewish sympathizer. man has been wholly submerged in history.” But barity as you describe it. You also touch on revenge Jahanbegloo: Maybe what perplexes individ- sometimes we need to stop the train of history and being motivated by other things, at times pride. I uals so much about the concept of forgiveness is get off, maybe because we need to write poems and wonder how much solitary confinement contrib- that forgiveness is seen and felt as a newcomer read poetry, in order to survive. uted to your ability to come to these conclusions? in our lives. Yet forgiveness is the common hori- Barzanji: You describe Dostoevsky in the You mention Gandhi; does the path to forgiveness zon of humanity, because it includes the self and book, and the idea that we must coexist and main- need a little time alone to come to terms with your- the other. Unlike revenge, forgiveness is not an tain a shared level of responsibility—that we are self—meditation, if you will? automatic response to injustice. It is much more all responsible to one another for our sins, and Jahanbegloo: Forgiveness is not an automatic reflective. All human beings can be reflective, in the responsible to one another for our happiness. I gesture. It comes with time, if it ever takes shape sense in which thinking about what one does is part have tried to bring beauty and the light to the dark- in one’s conscience. Some people never forgive of doing it. So why do we have difficulty thinking ness through my poems—at least in the way that I because of the weight and the force of the evil about forgiveness? This is a weakness that we have see it—but I have also tried to write in my memoir they have gone through. I think this is the case not only in the Islamic countries and in the Middle about the reality of what has happened to me. And with those who experienced the Nazi concentra- East (as many westerners think) but all over the I feel a responsibility to write about, and for, those tion camps. And then you have those who forgive world. I admire the Kurdish people, because they who were with me but who cannot write. but never forget. I think that we need to forgive in do not have revenge in their hearts and in their Your words are beautiful—the train of time order to turn the page. But turning the page does minds as a response to what they have suffered. For must stop occasionally, especially for writing not mean betraying history. We are responsible not them, every defeat is a new beginning and a new poetry. Even if it does not, I shall continue to write. only in regard to our consciences but also in rela- dawn of hope. Responsibilities, after all. Would not want to dis- tion to the future generations, who need to know Barzanji: There are a hundred different ways appoint Dostoevsky. what happened. This is the only way to put an end to look at the Kurdish struggle for independence. Jahanbegloo: Well, I must express my thanks to the cycle of violence. My perspective is built on the belief that the right for the stimulation I’ve received from your poems. While going through your book, I found that to self-determination should be given to those I’ve been impressed by the spiritual force and your writing is enveloped with tenderness and who seek it. I’m not ignorant enough or gullible systematic power in your work. I would say that compassion when you talk about your fellow pris- enough to think this is likely, or even possible, with there is no way for us to understand and practise oners, even your jailers. Even in the last pages of today’s political climate—but I suspect most who forgiveness if we refuse to acknowledge the need of your book, when you talk about the execution of have seen the dangers and impact of colonization humanity for poets, for a poetic sense of life. Truly, Saddam, who was a monster like Stalin or Hitler, or suppression of identity would come to the same it is in this common poetic potential that we can I feel no sense of revenge in your pen. I find a conclusion. A line from Fanon’s Black Skin, White find the fruits of recognition and reconciliation. humanistic innocence in your writings that I also Masks is strangely fitting for our situation: “Man Did you know that the young Stalin composed find in Albert Camus, who said that we should be is human only to the extent to which he tries to poems in Georgian? But years later, poets like “neither victims, nor executioners.” impose his existence on another man in order to Osip Mandelstam were victims of Stalin’s purges. Barzanji: I’m wondering how much easier be recognized by him. As long as he has not been Mandelstam wrote: forgiveness would be if we were all to take on the effectively recognized…that other will remain the Hannah Arendt way of thinking—it’s easier to theme of his actions.” The people need poetry that will be their own forgive an empty vessel. Perhaps we are all empty While our existence isn’t entirely ignored, it is secret. vessels in a sense, our nature contributing to empty difficult to come to terms with the idea that we will To keep them awake forever, movements. be, and are, effectively in the shadow of the recogni- and bathe them in the bright-haired wave Jahanbegloo: Arendt has played an important tion received by the countries which we were separ- of its breathing. role in my life. She is not the only Jewish thinker ated into. The very nature of our separation, for the with whom I feel close. I was lucky to know phil- interests of Ataturk’s Republic of Turkey, reflects Tyrants have always feared poets, maybe osophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Isaiah Berlin, this second-class identity that I believe has been because they represent the voice of nonviolence and George Steiner. They influenced my thoughts subconsciously stamped onto each of us. We don’t and forgiveness. and my writings and maybe because of this I was currently hold the ability to ask who we are without Barzanji: Saddam Hussein also attempted accused of being a Jew-lover by the Iranian author- that question reflecting interests that are not our poetry and novel writing. It seems the seed of ities. Certainly my connection to such scholars was own, collectively or individually. poetry does grow in everybody’s soul. But to do

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 3 it well…the process, as you know dearly, requires a deep vulnerability. You say tyrants have always feared poets, which is a great compliment to us. Perhaps this fear comes from our willingness to Loudly They Shine embrace our vulnerability. Perhaps I am giving us too much credit. I Jahanbegloo: Even today, our world tries to We give the tongue too much credence; make poets insignificant writers, but writing poetry as if your tongue were a gift from a giant. is the most passionate way of putting life into Your body is restless too, words. Roland Barthes says, “To see someone who made beautiful by loss. does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of Outside the door you’ll hear what he does not see.” It is our job, as writers, to try the sound of falling snow. to see what the people don’t see and to turn it into visible words. In today’s world, writers are tightrope walkers, because the war against words is always How can you tell? She wants the truth: waged in the language of utility and functionalism. Sometimes we go far from the world. Barzanji: I was born and grew up in a coun- When sorrow burns the mouth try that didn’t consider freedom of expression crammed with tiny beating hearts, important. My first collection of poetry [Dance of they’re closer to heaven than we are, the Evening Snow] was rejected twice by the Iraqi stones in the bellies of angels. censorship department before it was eventually published, in 1979. The regime looked at independ- II ent writers as criminals, and persecuted, tortured, What the soul doesn’t want, jailed, killed, and displaced them. This is why I keeps him awake at night. was thrown in prison for two years. I have a deep appreciation for Canada, a deep love not only for Grief is a snowdrift. the salvation it has given me and my writing but for the freedom it has given my entire family to pursue He likes the sound of its crystals. what we each hold dear without fear of persecution. The downside to this stability is the risk of falling I’m going to make shoes instead of music, into a routine. The same freedom you are given by a summer trumpet that makes no sound. the nature of the land does sometimes feel con- strained under the weight of responsibilities and A child’s breath is louder in the air, obligations. The opportunity to share ideas with you grey thief of another’s noise, has been a small break from that. I believe poetry served me in a similar way, some can sing, some can’t. under more duress and in a bleaker period of Yes, they like to be touched. my life, of course. I thank you for describing my poems as peaceful because, above all, that’s what I The ones who work with animals close by, intended them to be. Perhaps not for the reader—I am a firm believer that a reader must create their don’t show everyone what’s inside. own meaning—but for myself, assuredly. You spoke about our connection to the land and the III soil. During my incarceration, and perhaps even I wait till dawn for the birds to sing, more painfully my incarceration of the mind under and there is a lot of waiting. censorship, I felt distant from my surroundings, So many damaged wings from my home, my heritage—things I missed and but his tongue is wet and glistening. dreamed about. Writing poetry was my connec- He could be bird or angel. tion back to those things. I poured that longing for freedom into my words. This was a necessity for Soon no one will say: survival. You won’t feel a thing. Jahanbegloo: We share the same experience. The room sinks into silence. Though I grew up in a family of artists and intel- lectuals in Iran, my parents, and later I myself…we Think of all the blue things it could say. all suffered from political repression in the Iranian context. This is something which an ordinary Nothing you can do now. Canadian cannot understand. Freedom of expres- Even the cold goes hungry. sion is a reality which is unappreciated and taken That’s what’s missing in heaven: for granted in Canada. Freedom is something we the diphthong of wind and snow. fight for. It is not a gift which is offered to us on a golden plate. But very often we forget that revolu- Note: This poem is composed of lines from the book What the Soul Doesn’t tions in the name of rights and freedom were never Want by Lorna Crozier (Freehand Books, 2017) politically correct. No wonder that many people in North America take virtuous speech and political Lynn Tait correctness over freedom. This is also the case with the concept of law, which very often turns into what Martin Luther King called “a thin paper” Lynn Tait is a poet-photographer residing in Sarnia, Ontario. Her poems have appeared in and not “a thick action.” But in the Middle East, FreeFall, Vallum, Contemporary Verse 2, Windsor Review and in more than 90 anthologies. freedom is about thick action. We cannot take it She has published a chapbook Breaking Away (Wine & Cheese Press, 2002) and co-authored for granted. We need it as we need oxygen and we EnCompass 1 with four other poets (Beret Days Press, 2013). Her photography and digital art fight for it every second, every minute, every hour has been on the cover of seven poetry books. of the day. As a Kurdish author, you have suffered racism, exclusion, imprisonment, torture, and finally exile. Exile is more than a geographical concept. It’s a

4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada mode of being. In a certain sense, being a writer or Jahanbegloo: As writers, we are blunt critics of more. It is said that “all men are born equal,” but a poet is to live in exile, as an outsider. We need to humanity. It’s by being responsible and responsive that is not true. Those who suffer from poverty, vio- have the courage to live as outsiders. But for this, that we can raise moral questions. But we need lence, malnutrition, and illiteracy, are not born into we need to struggle for our exilic consciousness to speak up against any form of injustice, even in equal circumstances. But we see them and read and to develop a grammar of outsider-hood. It takes liberal societies. Forgiveness is not a virtue of our about them as temporary subjects, accidents of our considerable intellectual conviction and critical de-civilizing world, and it is the responsibility of glorious human civilization. The liberal language responsibility to stand outside the constraints of outsiders like us to think about it. Only a truly moral of exclusion easily lends itself to the invention of ideological and financial dependency. One needs conception of citizenship, which listens to the other a barbarian world. Take the example of the Kurds: to be guided by his or her sense of otherness and with empathy, which learns from the past, can The geopolitical offensive of the international com- outsider-hood. The pattern that sets the course for reverse the meaninglessness and thoughtlessness munity against the Kurdish referendum in Iraq and a writer or philosopher or artist as an outsider is of the de-civilizing process we are currently going Masoud Barzani resulted from the fear of destabil- best exemplified by the state of never being fully through. Let us be frank: The apathy that this order izing the Kurdish populations in Iran, Turkey, adjusted. generates in citizens all over the world is the real and Syria. Or the example of Catalonia, where the Barzanji: As you may know, I was named PEN threat. So the question is: Could we live in a world undemocratic argument of force has prevailed. Canada’s writer in exile in 2007. Exile has always without empathy? Most of the barbarities in the world are sustained been a sort of second home to me—on the frin- Barzanji: A powerful question, Ramin. Paul in the name of a reductionist view of civilization ges, on the cusp. At times I long for home. I long Bloom makes the case against it in his book Against and humanity. Here we have the total absence of for the Kurdistan I left behind. That Kurdistan Empathy. While it is an engaging read I found that the empathetic listening of the other. But we should no longer exists, however, and although I have a most of Bloom’s examples of the pitfalls of empathy never forget what Arendt writes on this subject, and deep appreciation and love for Canada, losing the suggested we needed more of it. For example, this is central to our debate on revenge and forgive- home of your mother tongue will always leave a Bloom cites our societal sympathy for the victims ness: “If it were true that sovereignty and freedom hollow space in your soul. Here in Canada, with of mass murder over the victims of murders that are the same, then indeed no man could be free, my deep accent and brown skin, it is difficult to occur day to day in crowded urban areas such as because sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising always feel as though I belong in the same way an Chicago. Is there a limit on how much empathy and self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to old Canadian man feels he belongs. This is not to forgiveness we are capable of, Ramin? Does our the very condition of plurality.” say my love for this country does not extend as far investment of empathy in one atrocity inevitably Barzanji: With the goings-on in Kurdistan, as his, but I do not share the memories of running lead to neglect in another? If this limitation posed Ramin, there are many online articles and think on its fertile ground as a child, hugging the tall- by Bloom does exist, what are the repercussions? pieces from the Kurdish media claiming that this est branches of its trees, or learning to swim in its Jahanbegloo: The language of exclusion has may be the last nail in the coffin for the Kurdish lakes. The place I do share those memories with become very present in our world. It might not people. Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, or perhaps has changed, to the point of non-recognition at show itself anymore in hard ideological language, after having been through so much, the resili- times. This has left me in my old age feeling con- but it certainly appears in the liberal fetishization ency of a people, or an individual, seems to me nected to two places so far away from one another, of legality. This is when justice is no longer about something that is not simply lost. There have been yet stuck between both. But in speaking with you I compassion, but only a table of abstract regulations other Kirkuks, other collapses, and yet we remain. I have come to realize that this distance from both that people use or abuse without care for the other believe we shall continue to endure, and with hope places is perhaps the reason why I am able to write person. The truth is that, especially in the liberal continue to forgive. without much bias. countries, we are not equipped for the truth any-

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December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 5 TOWARDS A BETTER WORLD

On Forgiveness & Revenge: Lessons from an Iranian Prison by Ramin Jahanbegloo

Upon his release from Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo began to grapple with having been unjustly imprisoned. On Forgiveness and Revenge shows how the politics of forgiveness can offer salvation in a world where revenge endangers the moral fabric of our lives.

“Anchored in Iranian and Moslem traditions as well as in the universal Republic of Letters, Jahanbegloo’s treatise is proof positive that suffering and persecution can ennoble the human spirit and open new horizons towards a better and more ethical world.” —Shlomo Avineri, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Participation made possible through Creative Saskatchewan’s Market and Export Development Grant Program.

6 LRC ON FORGIVENESS ad U of R Press.indd 1 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review2017-11-20 of Canada 2:32 PM The Believer Michael Ignatieff’s inheritance and legacy i r a w e l l s

The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World Michael Ignatieff Harvard University Press 272 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780674976276

n his lacerating novel Scar Tissue (1993), which was shortlisted for the Booker Iand Whitbread awards, Michael Ignatieff offers an intimate portrayal of losing his mother to Alzheimer’s disease. The novel’s characters are fictionalized, but the thoughts, reflections, and locutions are unmistakably Ignatieff’s. He rep- resents Alzheimer’s as a form of death in life, a curse that is genetic in origin but metaphysical in meaning. Ignatieff imagines the accumulation of amyloid plaques, the “dark starbursts of scar tissue” in the brain, as a familial bequest: “I have seen the inheritance,” he writes, “the family silver.” And he imagines how the disease will eventually come for him, too:

I know that at the very last moment, when everything I ever knew has been effaced from my mind, when pure vacancy has taken pos- session of me, then light of the purest white- ness will stream in through my eyes into the radiant and empty plain of my mind. Then I will be face to face at last with a pure and heartless reality beyond anything a living soul can possibly imagine.

A philosopher more at home in the world The story of Michael Ignatieff’s career, as told by (Detail from a photograph by Radey Barrack/Flickr) his immense literary output—sixteen non-fiction books and three novels—is the tale of a political philosopher who was never entirely at home in mary concern has always been memory—personal, himself as an “intellectual taxi; people flag me political philosophy, who instead wanted to see his familial, and cultural—and its potential loss. In down and give me destinations and off I go”), his ideas play out in the world, and sometimes even works like Scar Tissue and The Russian Album—his oddly endearing hypochondria (“students remem- onscreen. His two produced screenplays—one, an Governor General’s Award-winning family memoir ber him conducting tutorials from his bed, the cov- adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s novel Eugene tracing the history of his grandfather, a minister to ers scattered with books, papers, cups of tea and Onegin, features Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler; the Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, and his great-grandfather, biscuits”). Berlin’s vivid life in these pages is testa- other, 1919, starring Paul Scofield and Colin Firth, Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, a ruthless ment to what Vladimir Nabokov called “the refuge brings two of Sigmund Freud’s former patients Russian minister of the interior—Ignatieff’s pre- of art,” and Ignatieff tacitly agrees that it is the only together to commiserate about their treatment occupation with memory is central. Yet even his immortality we may share. after 65 years—represent an enduring side-interest more academic interests are infused with a desire Ignatieff’s writing on democracy and human in European intellectual history. Ignatieff cur- to conserve elements of the liberal democratic rights feels motivated by a similar sense of histor- rently serves as president and rector of the Central tradition he values. His biography Isaiah Berlin: ical obligation, to transcribe and document these European University in Budapest. A Life, considered by many to be his strongest precarious achievements, and to preserve our But, from another angle, Michael Ignatieff’s pri- achievement, is fueled by an impulse to record not common ideals against the forces—apocalyptic only the ideas of the pre-eminent liberal thinker but terrorism, nuclear destruction, environmental Ira Wells teaches literature and cultural criticism at also, in some more visceral way, the embodied life catastrophe—threatening to efface them. Ignatieff the University of Toronto. His work has appeared in of the man himself: his rapid speech (“the despair is, of course, preternaturally ambitious and self- the Walrus, the New Republic, American Quarterly, of typists and stenographers,” Ignatieff recalls), his confident, and he expects his work to survive. At and elsewhere. self-deprecating charm (the way he would describe times, particularly when writing about facets of

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 7 postwar liberal theory, he seems to be writing for a the values and ethics, which hold communities ence”—are “ordinary” in the sense that they are reader living hundreds of years in the future. In Scar together? Are disparate human societies coming to quotidian and unheroic, as well as unreflexive and Tissue, Ignatieff explicitly equates the purpose of speak a shared language of global ethics, or is the unconscious. The domain of the ordinary virtues his writing with the “time capsules” once assigned shock of globalization retrenching tribal divisions? represents, for Ignatieff, a sort of ethical substruc- to school children. And buried within the time Ignatieff’s purpose here is to question “whether ture upon which more deliberate, formalized moral capsule that constitutes Ignatieff’s body of work we moral globalization, in particular the spread of operations depend. To investigate the universal- find personal mementos and familial recollections, human rights, has changed the ordinary virtues, ity of these ordinary virtues, and to examine their alongside many other ancestral recipes and formu- whether the new global ethics of our time have relationship to globalization and the discourse las that belong to all of us: theories of democracy, made people more tolerant, trusting, and assertive of human rights, Ignatieff “set off on a journey of liberalism, human rights, and political freedom. For of their rights in daily life.” moral discovery that was to take us, over the next Ignatieff, these ideas represent the core of our com- That’s a worthwhile and fascinating question; three years, to four continents.” mon inheritance: the real family silver. “Memory is Ignatieff’s analysis, though, is rooted in several If that statement sounds like the voiceover script the only afterlife I have ever believed in,” Ignatieff loaded assumptions about contemporary global- for a movie trailer, that’s because The Ordinary has written. “But the forgetting inside us cannot be ization, starting with his belief that the phenom- Virtues is what we might charitably call “high stopped. We are programmed to betray.” enon is fundamentally “post-imperial” in nature: concept.” Having established his ordinary virtues, “For all the loose talk about neo-imperialism Ignatieff, along with his field team, visits various he origins of Michael Ignatieff’s latest book, and neo-colonialism in our day, for the first time exotic and far-flung locales—south central Los TThe Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a since the 1490s no imperial power dominates the Angeles, New York City’s Queens, Brazil, Bosnia, Divided World, lie in an inherit- Myanmar, Japan, South Africa—to ance of a different sort. In 1914, test his hypothesis and see how the Andrew Carnegie donated $2 mil- virtues play out “on the ground,” so lion to endow the Church Peace There is a shift in emphasis here to speak, close to where conflicts Union. That Union, which brought in Ignatieff’s liberalism. Those really start. While undoubtedly Jewish leaders together with those sincere in his intentions, Ignatieff from eleven different Christian inalienable human rights that once occasionally strikes the reader as sects, was given one job: end war. something akin to a 19th-century Not any particular war, but war in seemed to form the bedrock of ethnographic anthropologist, set- general. “We all feel,” Carnegie said ting off to probe the moral habits at the gathering of trustees, “that his thought are demoted in this of the natives. The book thus intro- the killing of man by man in battle duces us to Zimbabweans living in is barbaric and negatives our claim book to an “elite discourse.” shantytowns, Brazilians in favelas, to civilization. This crime we wish Japanese farmers, and former to banish from the Earth.” Violence gang leaders in Los Angeles. Do had proven useful for Carnegie at least once in his global economy.” Instead, all nations now fight it such people believe in human rights? Does their career: in an 1892 episode that Ignatieff does not out in the global “cash nexus,” a situation in which virtue resemble our own? Do all humans function address, Carnegie’s business partner, Henry Clay nation states themselves have ceased to be primary according to a universal operating system of shared Frick, dispatched 300 Pinkerton detectives to break actors, and can no longer ignore the voices of their virtues? The very attempt to ask such questions— a strike at one of Carnegie’s steel mills, resulting own citizenry. Thus, globalization, he argues, has never mind answer them in a culturally nuanced in one of the bloodiest conflicts in U.S. labour his- helped facilitate the widespread acceptance of the and sensitive fashion—will strike some readers as tory. By 1914, however, Carnegie—who had gone discourse of human rights. While asymmetries of hopelessly quixotic. (Come, reader: let’s spend a on to become one of America’s greatest cultural power persist, we have accepted equality of voice as few days among these people, and then draw some benefactors—believed that violence was not only a normative value around the world. As a corollary, generalizations.) And, admittedly the results are undesirable but that world peace was within grasp: Ignatieff speaks of systemic racist oppression in the mixed. so confident was Carnegie in this goal that his past tense: “As late as the mid-twentieth century,” Ignatieff’s first moral expedition finds him in endowment speech to the Church Peace Union he says, “hierarchies of voice still privileged whites the Jackson Heights neighbourhood of Queens, quickly turned to how they should use the money over blacks…[and] imperial holders of power over an entry point for many of the poorest immigrants after the matter of world peace had been settled. their colonial subjects.” While Ignatieff is here in America. He notes the racial makeup of the Specifically, they were to direct the remaining outlining a theoretical apparatus, critics of global- neighbourhood, and points out that despite the money to the “deserving poor”—that is, those who ization will question the extent to which this theory apparent diversity (there are Jamaicans, Chinese, “have not themselves to blame for their poverty.” reflects the phenomenon’s lived reality. Hondurans, Dominicans, Nepalis, and Orthodox Carnegie’s anti-war initiative was a nice idea, Ignatieff implies a similarly sanguine view Jews), each racial group tends to stick to their though the timing could have been better: four regarding other well-known sticking points for own. (Ignatieff emphasizes this note throughout: months later, Franz Ferdinand’s royal car made globalization’s critics, including unfair labour the most successful diversity, he suspects, also what had to be the most momentous wrong turn practices and the steep environmental costs of involves segregation. Multiculturalism involves in human history, bringing the Austrian archduke global profit: players in the global economy face groups living parallel, but not deeply enmeshed, within pistol range of a Serbian nationalist named “unprecedented regulatory pressure from states, lives.) Ignatieff describes what he sees on the streets Gavrilo Princip. The resulting chain reaction of wars vigilant monitoring by UN bodies, and constant (signs in English, Spanish, and Urdu), provides defined our history for a century. contestation by global civil society movements and basic statistics (47 percent of Queens residents Carnegie’s bequest, meanwhile, kept on the consumer.” Ignatieff is surely aware that critics were born abroad, for instance) and a smattering of accruing interest. By the time the organization on the left will view these assumptions as naked history (America’s policy leaders would never have (now called the Carnegie Council for Ethics in justifications for neo-imperialist capitalist hegem- envisioned their multicultural future when they International Affairs) was preparing for its centen- ony, while those on the right will frame them as the struck down the race-based immigration restric- ary, Ignatieff, its centennial chair, suggested that basis of a self-serving fairy tale for Davos jet-setters. tions, he observes), and does a limited amount of the council “take ethics out of the seminar room” to Ignatieff himself sees them as simply reflecting the reporting. He then gets back on the subway, “after consider how it shapes decisions around the globe. way things are. Let others debate the relative merits three days of walking the streets of Jackson Heights The result is The Ordinary Virtues, a book interested or shortcomings of globalization; Ignatieff treats it and talking to everybody I could,” and reflects upon in the interrelationship between globalization and as the sine qua non for any mature discussion of the what he saw. ethics. The material consequences of globalization book’s more explicit interests. Ignatieff is capable of forging some genuinely are comparatively easy to track, as people, jobs, Those interests lie in what Ignatieff calls the interesting connections between the places he dollars, and products circulate around the globe. “ordinary virtues.” The ordinary virtues are not “val- visits and the liberal political ideas that are his By the time the assortment of sapphire crystal, ues,” which are culturally inherited, but something métier. His elegant sentences are always a pleasure semiconductors, and other rare earth minerals deeper: a sort of evolutionary operating system that to read, and much of the ethnographic reportage are assembled into your iPhone, the device has governs human interaction and keeps us within works as a species of literary travel writing. At times, travelled 800,000 kilometres. But what impact has certain moral parameters. These virtues—“trust, such as when he describes how the decision to globalization wrought on the immaterial systems, tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and resili- pursue higher education can be difficult for first-

8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada generation immigrants in Los Angeles—for whom is foster stable institutions that allow for our natural “forever war” in which we are still enmeshed. The a university education might partially alienate them operating systems to replicate themselves, meme- book’s basic argument is that liberal democratic from their families—Ignatieff writes perceptively like, through quotidian interactions. Our ethical states must be prepared to sacrifice some of their and sympathetically about cultural experiences operating systems are not top-down impositions, civil liberties if they expect to win the war on terror. radically different from his own. At others, such but bottom-up manifestations of a shared moral Again, Ignatieff cannot be accused of simplifica- as when he reports “fairness…is a continual site of nature. Ignatieff cites Adam Smith’s The Theory of tion; nor does he mince words: torture, extraordin- contestation between the police and community Moral Sentiments (1759) as a canonical formula- ary rendition, targeted assassinations, and the groups,” the book merely states the obvious. tion of the idea that each individual possesses the suppression of civil liberties are, in no uncertain But there is no escaping the fact that the book’s capacity to feel sympathy, pity, and compassion for terms, “evil.” But such tactics may also be neces- seven field studies simply cannot carry the weight others—“when we either see it,” Smith writes, “or sary, he argues, if liberal democracies are to survive of an analysis of how globalization has impacted are made to conceive it in a very lively manner”—a the threat posed by Islamist terror. The fundamen- the manifestation of virtue in ground-level con- natural sympathy that forms the ethical substrate of tal moral distinction, he claims, lies in the fact that flicts across the globe. Moreover, The Ordinary the ordinary virtues. while agents of pure evil wield political violence for Virtues presents the reader with a minor reprise Ignatieff has long espoused some version of their own nihilistic purposes, liberal democracies of major issues that have emerged from Ignatieff’s Isaiah Berlin’s “negative liberty”: the idea that reluctantly embrace such tactics for the preserva- work during the past 15 years—much of which has responsibilities of the liberal state lie in eliminat- tion of their citizens’ safety and human rights. attempted to take his brand of liberal democratic ing obstacles to individual freedom, rather than What is most stunning about this argument for thinking “out of the seminar room.” In this case, to in guaranteeing their provision. Nonetheless, today’s reader is Ignatieff’s faith, at least at that his credit, Ignatieff was clear about time, in liberal democratic institu- the limitations of the approach tions to put the genie back in the from the start. His team would bottle. “Democracies have shown only travel to locations where the The Ordinary Virtues clarifies some themselves capable of keeping Carnegie Council’s global fellows key ironies that have defined Ignatieff’s the secret exercise of power under could serve as facilitators. That’s control,” Ignatieff states. The Lesser understandable, but the resulting career. Here, again, is the professor bent Evil remains one of the most book, and the voices it contains, eloquent and intellectual public seems highly determined by the on leaving the seminar room, with a justifications for the suspension institutional necessities that pro- of civil rights in a state of emer- vided its subject matter. The book book whose intellectual seriousness is gency. In practice, this amounted is circumscribed by its institu- to a validation of the Patriot Act, tional demands, and readers may compromised by institutional conformity. which provided expanded pow- wonder if the author is not operat- ers of surveillance to the National ing as a different sort of “intellec- Security Agency, authorized the tual taxi” (in Isaiah Berlin’s phrase) as he shuttles his writing in the lead-up to the Iraq war served indefinite detention of suspected terrorists with- between appointments made by the council. One as an important intellectual justification for the out charge or trial, and the increased presidential may be tempted to wonder why a writer of his enforcement of positive liberty in the global arena. authority to launch drone attacks that have killed status would make such compromises. But Ignatieff In a January 2003 cover story for the New York American citizens (and countless others) abroad. has always been more comfortable working within Times Magazine entitled “The American empire; The issue was not, as some of his critics on the institutional power norms than standing outside the burden,” later expanded into the book Empire left asserted, that Ignatieff had joined the ranks of with a placard, protesting them. Lite, Ignatieff framed the liberal argument for the the neoconservatives, but that he had marshalled military invasion and forced democratization of the language of democratic freedom and human ore broadly, The Ordinary Virtues involves Iraq. While Americans were understandably wary rights to help build a case that ultimately led to the Ma shift in emphasis within the terms of of the “empire” label, and correct to assume that erosion of those very ideals. The extent to which Ignatieff’s liberalism, particularly with regard to the demands of empire existed in opposition to Ignatieff would recognize this is unclear. In “Getting his treatment of human rights. Those inalienable its republican ideals, Ignatieff argued that the U.S. Iraq wrong,” a 2007 essay that appeared to be a rights, which once seemed to form the bedrock of should embrace its imperial destiny. He imagined quasi-mea culpa, Ignatieff claimed that even many his thought, are demoted in The Ordinary Virtues to the U.S. as “an empire lite, a global hegemony of those who were “right” about Iraq were still tech- an “elite discourse,” one thinly distributed through whose grace notes are free markets, human rights nically wrong, since the source of their right think- academics and NGOs throughout the world. It’s not and democracy, enforced by the most awesome ing had been ideological dogma and not analytical that Ignatieff’s belief in human rights has dimin- military power the world has ever known.” judgment. ished, but that he now concedes that most people, Despite its occasional rhetorical enthusiasm Public intellectuals, and especially academics, when confronted with urgent ethical choices, don’t for American military might, Ignatieff’s essay was often think of their raison (and defend the institu- consult UN declarations or grandiose, abstract by no means an unthinking war cry: he called tion of tenure) in terms of speaking “truth to power”: formulations. “Tolerance,” “multiculturalism,” upon American leadership to heed the lessons of that is, exposing the gap between the rhetorical “human rights”—these ideas sound good on paper, Vietnam (and, more distantly, Rome), and framed ideals of our democratically elected politicians and but they rarely enter into concrete decisions made the decision to invade Iraq as a choice between their actual behaviour. Ignatieff devoted his years by individual actors. Instead, Ignatieff argues, ethic- two evils. Instead, it was read as the thinking man’s at Harvard to the opposite aim, creating an intel- ally charged interactions proceed according to the war cry—an argument that provided a serious aca- lectual framework for those in power and offering “subliminal operating system” of those involved. demic imprimatur to many of the standard George public justifications for the curtailment of civil lib- For example, Ignatieff writes, most people do not W. Bush-era justifications for the invasion: the erties. As the author of Virtual War and an architect supposed weapons of mass destruction (including of the International Commission on Intervention construe tolerance as an obligation, as a nuclear weapons), Saddam Hussein’s sponsor- and State Sovereignty’s The Responsibility to Protect, proposition they were obliged to respect with ship of terror, and the utopian possibilities of a Ignatieff was among the preeminent scholars of all people. It was determined by the person in fully democratic Middle East. Obviously, Ignatieff human rights-based military interventionism and question, the situation, the history they had could not have foreseen the scope of the disaster nation-building in the early stages of a war that managed to create with each other. Tolerance that followed, nor was his own contribution to the would cost (according to the Lancet) 650,000 lives. was not a universal value, just a workaday pro-war corpus unique even among liberal intellec- Of course, by this time, the gap between Ignatieff’s social practice. It was an ordinary virtue, fra- tuals (whose ranks included Paul Berman, Thomas “academic” and “political” profiles had all but gile, contingent, easily damaged by violence, Friedman, and Christopher Hitchens), who had closed. Six months after the publication of The police brutality, or crime, dependent for its made the case for war palatable among the osten- Lesser Evil, Ignatieff received a fateful visit from survival upon nothing more than its humble sibly left-leaning centre. “the men in black.” As he relates in Fire and Ashes, reproduction in daily life. Ignatieff was by no means the Iraq war’s Henry his political memoir, these men—Alfred Apps, Dan Kissinger. But he did provide, in The Lesser Evil Brock, and Ian Davey, three Canadian Liberal oper- The ordinary virtues, in short, cannot be legis- (2004), perhaps the most cogent intellectual frame- atives who felt that the federal party was headed for lated into existence. The best that societies can do work for some of the most illiberal aspects of the an electoral train wreck under Paul Martin—had

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 9 come to make an astonishing proposition. Their The Ordinary Virtues, read through the lens of It would seem that Soros-style philanthropy has, intention, they said, was to make Ignatieff the next the recent history that produced it, clarifies some in Ignatieff’s affections, replaced an institutional prime minister of Canada. Ignatieff had found a of the key ironies that have defined Ignatieff’s commitment to aggressive, western-backed nation- placard he was comfortable waving. career. Here, again, is the professor bent on leaving building projects. Ignatieff has found a new cause, The rest of the story is a matter of recent public the seminar room, with a book whose intellectual but the relationship remains essentially the same: record. In a remarkably short span of time, Ignatieff seriousness is compromised by institutional con- Ignatieff’s “realist” (i.e., uncritical) assumptions rose within the Liberal ranks to defeat his old room- formity—in this case, by bending an argument about globalization replicate and defend the offi- mate Bob Rae for the party’s leadership. Perhaps his about the nature of virtue to fit the chassis of a cial viewpoint of a benevolent philanthropic class most consequential act as leader of the opposition project built for the Carnegie Council. Here is the whose financial munificence and good works are was the decision not to seize the prime minister- former politician, widely rebuked for his inability nonetheless profoundly implicated in maintaining ship by forming a coalition between the NDP and to connect with ordinary people, making the case the global economic status quo. The moral founda- the Bloc Québécois: Ignatieff wanted to win an hon- for ordinary virtue, whose motto he presents in tions of The Ordinary Virtues—and its obeisance est mandate from Canadians. bumper-sticker format: “Take people one at a time,” toward globalization and global capital—doesn’t He never would. The Liberal platform that lost he writes. Here is the philosopher of human rights radically revise the sentiments Carnegie himself in 2011 was not drastically dissimilar from the one concluding that, in real life, human rights, while outlined in “Wealth” (1889) and The Empire of that won in 2015: Ignatieff’s party ran on increased rhetorically accepted, don’t register in actual moral Business (1902). spending for the middle class (branded the “Family decisions: “Doctrine, dogma, formal teaching, Yet it would be wrong to conclude that Michael Pack,” which sounded like something sold at Pizza and generalized rules have become less salient to Ignatieff’s changing institutional affiliations rep- Pizza, and never failed to sound inauthentic coming moral decision making itself.” Here is the theorist of resent a cynical attachment to those institutions. from the erstwhile Carr professor of human rights humanitarian interventionism arguing that states Rather, they emerge from a sincere institutional- policy), to be offset by ending corporate tax breaks. should simply get out of the way and let individuals ism, an authentic belief in the power of liberalism The frequent rap against Ignatieff the politician is sort things out for themselves. to promote good in the world. Ignatieff no longer that he lacked the common touch. Doubtless, the Ignatieff’s newfound arguments against the writes in favour of western military intervention- campaign was also badly hurt by the rise of Jack pre-eminence of the state—a notable shift from ism. (Who does?) Alongside his own worldly ambi- Layton’s “Orange Crush,” and Ignatieff himself the author who celebrated the “awesome” power of tion, his writing has always been motivated by a proved to be eminently vulnerable to Conservative empire lite—do not entail a rejection of his faith in desire to defend, for posterity, the social wisdom attack ads. While “Just not ready” didn’t land with institutions. Rather, the locus of those institutions of liberal democracy. In his ongoing mission of voters in 2015, “Just visiting” and “He didn’t come has shifted. Early in the book, in what might strike memorialization, Ignatieff has added the ordinary back for you” proved deadly. Whether the attacks readers as an unremarkable sentence in praise virtues to our collective time capsule. We should had any basis in truth was beside the point: they of Andrew Carnegie, Ignatieff wonders: “Without earnestly hope, with Ignatieff, that these ideals will seemed true to Canadians, who handed the Liberals Carnegie, would there be a Gates, a Buffett, a Soros, prove useful in another age, while simultaneously their worst electoral loss in a generation. The elec- and the gigantic philanthropic enterprises of our heeding the prophetic and haunting words from tion reduced the Liberals’ total seats from 77 to era?” George Soros, as you may recall, is the hedge Scar Tissue: “We are programmed to betray.” 34; in a final indignity (or blessing), Ignatieff lost fund manager and philanthropist who endowed his own riding to the little-known Conservative Central European University (Ignatieff’s current Bernard Trottier. professional home) with more than $450 million.

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10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Israel’s Religious Awakening Is the world ready for another theocracy in the Middle East? pat r i c k m a rt i n

t haunts Israelis still—the image of a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, a medic with the Irank of sergeant named Elor Azaria, captured on video executing a wounded Palestinian prisoner who lay inert on the street in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Hebron. The Palestinian, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, was one of two young men who had stabbed and moderately wounded an Israeli soldier near a settlement of extremist Jewish activ- ists, that day in March of 2016. The execution was no act of self-defence. Azaria, who had treated the wounded Israeli soldier, was shown calmly handing his helmet to a colleague, cocking his rifle and tak- ing a few steps toward Sharif, then shooting him in the head. The video, recorded by a volunteer in the Israeli civil rights group B’Tselem, went viral. Azaria was duly convicted of manslaughter in January and sentenced to 18 months in prison. But his trial and the accompanying outcry have illuminated a deep and fundamental divide in Israeli society, one that is exacerbated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s contentious announce- ment on December 6 recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) quickly denounced the sol- dier’s action, as did then-defence minister Moshe Ya’alon, who described it as an “utter breach of IDF values and of our code of ethics in combat.” Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the early hours following the incident, described Azaria’s behaviour as unacceptable. In the days that followed, however, there was an outpouring defence minister battled openly over the case, and killing a mother, father, and their 18-month-old of public sympathy for the young Israeli: This was the tensions culminated in Ya’alon’s forced resig- child. Israel, he said at that time, must not tolerate a Palestinian terrorist, many said; the sergeant nation and Lieberman’s appointment as defence the targeting of those who are not Jews: “We must should get a medal. To others, the Israeli soldier minister. deal with terrorism as terrorism, whether it’s Arab was at the very least an innocent, like so many of After my many years covering the Middle East, terror or Jewish terror.” The Azaria case still domin- their own boys conscripted into the army. and Israel in particular, I can say that even more ates headlines today in Israel, almost a year after The Azaria sympathizers were encouraged by than the poll results, the fact that Ya’alon, a for- the verdict, and in late November, President Rivlin former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, him- mer IDF chief of staff, should be treated this way formally denied a request, signed by Prime Minister self an Israeli settler in the disputed West Bank, is an indication of how much Israel has changed. Netanyahu himself, that he pardon Azaria. Instead, and leader of the secular right-wing party Yisrael “It didn’t matter that he had an impressive mil- the president added his voice to those denouncing Beiteinu (which translates to Israel Our Home), itary record, opposed the peace process, or sup- the summary execution. For this, he has incurred who took pains to sit beside the soldier in the early ported settlement expansion,” Haaretz editor Aluf the wrath of the prime minister’s cronies, who have days of court proceedings. A public opinion survey Benn wrote in the U.S. journal Foreign Affairs. “In publicly portrayed their head of state as a traitor. soon found that 68 percent of Israelis supported Netanyahu’s Israel, merely insisting on due process The episode is just the thin edge of the political the shooting and a majority of them said the soldier for a well-documented crime is now enough to win wedge. In a controversial speech to the Israeli Bar should not face prosecution. It wasn’t long before you the enmity of the new elite and its backers.” Association in August, Israel’s justice minister, Netanyahu qualified his earlier condemnation and Nor is Ya’alon the only one. Israeli President Ayelet Shaked, rebuked the country’s Supreme announced he had telephoned the soldier’s parents Reuven Rivlin, a respected conservative from the Court for giving insufficient weight to Zionism and to convey his sympathy. The prime minister and his governing Likud party, also found himself on the the country’s Jewish majority when rendering its other side of the divide from his party’s leader. The decisions. “Zionism should not continue, and I say Patrick Martin was Middle East correspondent for president, who is elected by a vote of the Israeli here, it will not continue to bow down to the system the Globe and Mail, based in Jerusalem from 1991 Knesset, had made clear his views a few months of individual rights interpreted in a universal way to 1995 and from 2008 to 2012, with several work- before the Azaria killing when young settler extrem- that divorces them from the history of the Knesset ing visits to Israel before, in between, and after ists stood accused of firebombing a Palestinian and the history of legislation that we all know,” those postings. home in the West Bank in the middle of the night, she said. A so-called “nation-state” bill now being

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 11 advanced by the government, Shaked vowed, will national home would be “in Palestine,” rather than whose values are drawn from its religious be a “moral and political revolution,” putting civil be all of Palestine. For another, he didn’t like the tradition, with the Bible the most basic of its rights in their place. acknowledgement of “existing non-Jewish com- books and the prophets of Israel its moral Indeed, the political rift within the Jewish state munities” in what he hoped would be the Jewish foundation. A Jewish state is a state in which goes to the heart of some fundamental questions: homeland. True, this was the first official inter- Jewish law plays an important role. A Jewish Do civil liberties apply equally to all citizens? What national recognition of the Zionist claim to any state is a state for which the values of the are the rights of an Arab in the occupied West Bank? national home in Palestine, and for this Weizmann Torah of Israel, the values of Jewish tradition Would the Jewish majority in Israel be content to and others were grateful. But Weizmann worried and the values of Jewish law are among its take away those rights and liberties from non-Jews that the recognition of another people in Palestine, basic values. in Israel and the occupied territories? The appar- whose rights needed to be safeguarded from the ently affirmative answer to that last question sug- Zionist enterprise, would create problems down the This is a new definition of the State of Israel. gests that the Jewish majority no longer believes road. As indeed it did, before long. “Shaked’s concept of Jewish ethnic superiority the land that lies between the Mediterranean and Nevertheless, that was the view of Zionism rests not only on a closely held ideology, but on the Jordan River can support both the Israeli and embedded in the mandate of Palestine adminis- the politics of fear,” Daniel Blatman, a historian at Palestinian peoples. tered by Britain following the First World War and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote in an article which was practised by the thousands of mostly for the Haaretz newspaper. That political current is o President Rivlin and to many others, this young, secular pioneers who worked the land and in line with a xenophobic conservatism on the rise Tmoral and political revolution betrays the toiled in the cities that sprang up. The dual nature of in a number of western countries, but in his article, real Zionist ethos. Theodor Herzl, Blatman, who is head of the who fathered modern Zionism in Institute of Contemporary Jewry the late 19th century, held that a In this new Israel, which is beginning to at the university, identifies a more Jewish state would not only safe- troubling parallel: the American guard Jews fleeing persecution in sound a little like an Islamic republic, South of the 1930s: Europe but would be a model of civil and political rights. Herzl’s it is not only non-Jews who are finding Instead of white supremacy, vision, set out in his 1896 booklet, their rights at risk, but also Jews who are we will get Jewish supremacy, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) together with an ethnocentric- and his 1902 novel, Altneuland not considered Jewish enough. racist vision that will allow for (Old New Land) was of a promised some vital economic practical- land that would be shared with ities. After all, Shaked’s Jewish local Arabs—which was not surprising, since about this Palestine was the basis of the 1947 UN partition state doesn’t want to separate from the 90 percent of the population of Palestine at that plan that laid out the contours of an Arab state and Palestinians, and certainly doesn’t want to time was Arab. He foresaw a democracy in which a Jewish state (as well as an inter make them citizens. Just as in the American Jews and non-Jews voted, where women were fully national trusteeship to safeguard Jerusalem South the segregation and political discrimin- emancipated, and there was clear division between and its holy sites). Most importantly, it is the ation against blacks created a brutal, racist religion and state. Judaism and all religions, Herzl view embraced in Israel’s 1948 Declaration of social and political order, so will Shaked’s new liked to say, would be kept in their places of wor- Independence: “The state of Israel will promote the national-Zionist state, which won’t be pre- ship just as the military would be kept in its bar- development of the country for the benefit of all its pared to bow its head before universal defin- racks. In this idyllic world, there was little friction inhabitants…[and] will uphold the full social and itions of individual rights. between Arab and Jew; Arabs held some of the political equality of all its citizens without distinc- highest offices in the land. tion of race, creed or sex.” It specifically assures “the Moderates in Israel are concerned that the This was also the vision of Zionism endorsed Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel” that they will Jewish state, having inoculated itself against such by the predominantly secular Zionist Organization enjoy “full and equal citizenship and due represen- universal values, will continue to oppress minor- (now the World Zionist Organization) in its numer- tation in all its bodies and institutions, provisional ities as well as those who disagree with the state’s ous congresses, and it was the movement endorsed or permanent.” new ideology. Already, Education Minister Naftali by Britain in the Balfour Declaration, the 100th Such democratic values are, today, in retreat. Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, has anniversary of which was marked in November. The Jewish nation-state law, now being voted on in introduced an academic code of ethics for post- It was not without its tensions. On that cloudy the Knesset, will have citizens pledge allegiance to secondary institutions that will prevent faculty from day in London a century ago, Chaim Weizmann, the “Jewish state of Israel.” It will remove Arabic as voicing political opinions in the classroom or even the unofficial but effective leader of the worldwide an official language—reducing it to a language with on campus. Academics are outraged at what they Zionist movement, waited nervously outside the “special status”—and, overall, give Jewish interests see as a restriction on freedom of speech. British cabinet office while the ministers of David priority over individual rights. Shaked, the justice But what is at stake is not only free speech. An Lloyd George’s government debated the merits minister, champions this controversial law, which amendment this year to Israel’s entry law allows of recognizing a claim by “the Jewish people” to places Jewish community interests over all others. authorities to deny a visa to anyone who advocates a homeland in Palestine, which, in the midst of The law also has the resounding support of the for boycotts, divestment, or sanctions against Israel. the First World War, still was part of the Ottoman right-wing and religious parties that make up the (BDS, as the movement is known, is a pressure Empire. Finally, Mark Sykes, a Middle East advisor governing coalition. tactic used in support of Palestinians in an effort to to the government, emerged holding a document. Shaked, a secular Jew whom many see as a persuade Israel to end the occupation of the West “Dr. Weizmann, it’s a boy!” he exclaimed, appar- future national leader, made her worldview known Bank and the border restrictions placed on Gaza.) ently assuming that the declaration he carried, several months ago in an essay for the U.S.-based In November, the new law was used to bar entry to signed by British foreign minister Arthur Balfour, journal of Jewish ideas, Hashiloach: members of a delegation of European parliamen- would please the Zionist leader. tarians and French mayors because they had called But Weizmann, an eminent scientist, could not It is the natural right of the Jewish people to for a boycott of Israel. And it has even allowed the hide his disappointment. In his memoir, Trial and live like every other nation. A Jewish state is government to turn away Jews who are members Error, he wrote: “I did not like the boy at first. He a state whose history is combined and inter- of an advocacy group known as Jewish Voice for was not the one I expected.” The sticking points woven with the history of the Jewish people, Peace. were in this passage: “His Majesty’s Government whose language is Hebrew and whose main Israel’s national religious right has welcomed view with favour the establishment in Palestine of holidays reflect its national revival. A Jewish the changes, seeing them as Shaked asserting pri- a national home for the Jewish people, and will use state is a state for which the settlement of ority for the Jewish community. “These things are their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement Jews in its fields, cities, and towns is a primary so vital today, they have to be at the centre of our of this object, it being clearly understood that noth- concern. A Jewish state is a state that nurtures educational work, and certainly in law,” said Rabbi ing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and Jewish culture, Jewish education, and the Haim Druckman, head of a network of Orthodox religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities love of the Jewish people. A Jewish state is the religious schools and a founder of Gush Emunim in Palestine…” realization of generations of aspirations for (Bloc of the Faithful), a vanguard settlement move- Weizmann was disappointed that the Jewish Jewish redemption. A Jewish state is a state ment. “We must place the needs of the community

12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada at the top of our priorities—the people of Israel, the Conservative communities were pleased at this 1990 and, at his funeral in Jerusalem, it was Eliyahu, Land of Israel—and not the needs of the individual, significant concession. then Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, who delivered a as much as they are important…The needs of the The problem, however, is that the government eulogy. Kahane had cherished his relationship with community take precedence.” did not speak for the Haredi authorities, who Eliyahu, and had said that Rabbi Eliyahu gave him continue to insist that mixed prayer is forbidden “religious legitimacy.” n this new Israel, which is beginning to sound a and that if the government gives official approval Through the past three decades the dream of a Ilittle like an Islamic republic, it is not only non- to these apostates, as they see the non-Orthodox Jewish kingdom as well as violent means of trying to Jews who are finding their rights at risk, but also communities, the Haredi parties within the coali- drive out the Arabs have been kept alive by far-right Jews who are not considered Jewish enough. When tion will bring down the government. Flexing their Kahanists. Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli military it comes to religious authority it is the Haredi, or muscles, the Haredim this past spring dispatched doctor who used the Jewish holy day of Purim to ultra-Orthodox, leaders who determine such things members of a settler yeshiva (religious school) kill 29 Palestinians at prayer in the Sanctuary of as who is a Jew and the place of women in Jewish to occupy the area designated for future egalitar- Abraham (also known as the Cave of the Patriarchs) practices in Israel. The Chief Rabbinate, made up ian prayer. The pressure tactics worked—in June, in Hebron in 1994, was a Kahane disciple. As mostly of Haredi chief rabbis in several jurisdictions Netanyahu announced that the plan for a mixed was Yigal Amir, who assassinated prime minister in Israel, frequently rule that people who convert prayer area was on indefinite hold. Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. For years after, Eliyahu to Judaism as Reform or Conservative Jews (the Ironically, all this intensification of Orthodoxy joined with other, mostly settler, rabbis in seeking majority in North America) are not recognized as is being done in the name of “religious Zionism.” amnesty for Amir. real Jews and therefore not entitled to claim Israeli Yet, for decades, the Haredim wanted no part of The most extreme example today of such vio- citizenship or partake in religious lence is carried out by a group (Orthodox) activity. of settler youths led by Rabbi This has been the case since Remarkably, Theodor Herzl foresaw this Kahane’s grandson, Meir Ettinger. the state was established, but the They call themselves the Revolt, number of decrees and the pub- moment. In his novel, Altneuland, the title of Menachem Begin’s lic backlash against them have memoirs about the pre-state ter- increased in recent years and an anti-Arab party took shape and ror group, the Irgun, of which spilled over into public holy sites, ran for election on a platform of Ettinger’s great-grandfather had particularly the Western Wall. been a member. Members of Known as the Kotel, this tow- driving out “the outsiders.” the Revolt today are believed ering wall of enormous Herodian responsible for that fatal 2015 fire- cut-stone blocks is the last por- bombing of a Palestinian family. tion of the ancient Jewish temple in the Old City Zionism and certainly no part of a secular state of Outside their home in the West Bank village of of Jerusalem still standing, and a favourite site Israel they considered sacrilegious—a Jewish state, Duma the attackers spray-painted the words “Long for prayer by Jews of all persuasions. Access to they said, must wait for the coming of the Messiah. live the Messiah King” in Hebrew, a slogan of those the wall, however, is controlled by the Haredim. That has gradually changed since Israel was born. seeking theocratic rule. Accordingly, there is a large area designated for While the Haredim reject modern culture and want These Jewish terrorists were all ultra-religious men, and a smaller adjacent area for women, sep- little to do with the state, their numbers are grow- extremists and treated that way by the authorities. arated by a screen. However, women, even in their ing greatly, as is their political influence. Today, But their dream of a theocratic state is shared by a own space, are not permitted to wear prayer shawls about 17 percent of Israel’s Jewish population is growing number of more mainstream Israelis and or other religious garb, nor to hold Torah scrolls. ultra-Orthodox, as are 29 percent of Jews under by well-positioned elements within the Netanyahu Nor are female rabbis permitted to conduct servi- the age of 20. As it grows, this community is deter- government. ces. Failure to abide by these rules can bring down mined to make Israel properly Jewish, as they see For his part, Rabbi Eliyahu, following his time the wrath of the ruling Haredi leadership, who it. According to the Pew Research Center, some 86 as chief rabbi, became the spiritual mentor of frequently dispatch gangs of Orthodox youths to percent of the Haredim want Israel to be a state gov- the National Religious Party, known as Mafdal in intimidate the offending female worshippers, who erned by Halacha, Jewish law—a theocracy rather Hebrew. It was he more than anyone who guided mostly are members of the Reform or Conservative than a democracy. the once-moderate religious party into linking with movements. The work of overturning the secular state began elements of the Haredim to promote settlement In January, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that in the early days of the young country, starting in construction and the permanent occupation of the women could pray as they wish. The trouble is, 1950, and one of the guiding lights who ushered in West Bank, or Judea and Samaria—integral parts of the Haredi authorities do not accept this ruling. the theocratic political currents that hold so much the historic Land of Israel. This Har-dal movement, So a kind of compromise has been worked out so sway today emerged during this period. The late as it is known, was responsible for the construction that, at sunrise at the start of each Jewish month, Mordechai Eliyahu, Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel of the two largest West Bank settlements, Beitar Illit a group of women, known as Women of the Wall, from 1983 to 1993, was one of five yeshiva stu- and Modi’in Illit, both completely ultra-Orthodox. pray in the women’s section and proudly hold the dents who founded a terrorist group known as Brit Its dream of a theocracy lives on in the Jewish Torah. Dozens of Haredi youths still turn out to HaKanaim (Covenant of the Zealots). The group, Home party, the home of Bennett, the education oppose the “infidels,” but the women are protected which grew to two or three dozen, firebombed minister, and Shaked, the justice minister, who last by a great number of Border Police officers pos- cars that were driven on the Sabbath and butcher month called out secular U.S. Jews who, she said, itioned between the women and the hostile Haredi shops that sold pork, all for the sake of establishing, lived comfortable lives and didn’t understand the men. As a long-term solution, this arrangement is according to their manifesto, “an Orthodox regime, fears of Israelis. untenable. based on the principle of God’s justice, a dictator- Remarkably, Theodor Herzl foresaw a movement At the same time, Reform and Conservative ial regime with no democracy.” The zealots met such as the Jewish Home more than a century ago. Jews, who wish to be able to pray at the wall as their downfall, however, in an attempt to smuggle In his novel, Altneuland, an anti-Arab party took married couples or families, have sought the help a bomb into the Knesset on the day when the shape and ran for election on a platform of driving of the government and the courts. Three years ago, members of the Israeli parliament were debating a out the “outsiders.” The radical group was defeated Prime Minister Netanyahu asked Natan Sharansky, proposed law to conscript women into the military. in the polls and the disgraced leader left the coun- the one-time Soviet dissident, now chairman of the Eliyahu and three others were sentenced to prison try. Not so in today’s Israel—the xenophobes are Jewish Agency, to negotiate a suitable arrangement terms of between six and twelve months. winning and Zionism’s dream of democracy is tak- that would be acceptable to both the Reform and Years later, in 1998, Rabbi Eliyahu told me in ing a back seat. “We didn’t come here to establish Conservative organizations and to the government an interview that his views of a theocracy had not a democratic state,” says Benny Katzover, a long- of Israel. The result, approved in January 2016, changed, only the means of achieving it. However, time leader of the settlement movement in Judea was a plan to build a plaza in front of a part of the he continued to support others who used violence and Samaria. “We came here to return the Jewish wall that extends south of the main section. In this to bring about a purely Jewish state. He was a friend people to their land.” Trump’s announcement rec- area, separated from the traditional prayer area and spiritual advisor to Meir Kahane, a radical ognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital will only serve by a stairway to the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League in to strengthen both the country’s settler movement Mosque, mixed prayer would be permitted. It was North America and the anti-Arab Kach (Thus) party and the religious extremists who seek a theocracy a second-class arrangement, but the Reform and in Israel. Kahane was assassinated in New York in over all the ancient Land of Israel.

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 13 Those Unlucky Tots Leanne Shapton’s Trojan Horse of a book, and the wistfulness of the best children’s literature n i c h o l a s kö h l e r

memoirs? Bricolage never fits, and Toys Talking the strange insistence that a book Leanne Shapton with the line “You are rather too Drawn & Quarterly particular” (spoken by a melancholy- 44 pages, hardcover looking pig) belongs in the “juvenile ISBN 9781770462984 fiction” section, as the back cover of Toys Talking tells us, may be Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Shapton’s way of tweaking a pub- Children’s Literature as an Adult lishing industry—and readers—still Bruce Handy suspicious of authors who combine Simon & Schuster words with pictures. Her work tends 336 pages, hardcover to be sent to the children’s corner ISBN 9781451609950 or comics ghetto or the bookstore’s novelty table anyway, this insistence onfronted with writer seems to suggest—so why not write a and illustrator Leanne Trojan Horse of a kids’ book? CShapton’s latest book, Toys That mixture of text and image is Talking, bookstore clerks must face Shapton’s natural habitat. Born in a quandary: Where to place it? An Mississauga, Ontario, she has been intriguing and beautiful little picture art director of Saturday Night maga- book, it looks and claims to be aimed zine, of the National Post’s double- at children—so much so that it will truck Avenue pages, and of the New undoubtedly trick many aunts and York Times op-ed pages, and she is honorary uncles, and quite possibly co-founder of J&L Books, a not-for- some parents, into picking it up for the profit publisher of art and photo children in their lives. Say a prayer for books based in Atlanta and New York those unlucky tots. City, where Shapton now lives. “You are wrong to be angry with And yet, beyond the combina- me,” says one teddy bear with a bow tie. “Never necessarily dislike this book, which is dedicated to tion of words and pictures, there’s something mind that, come as you are,” insists another. “I have Shapton’s young daughter, Tomasina.) else—and something more essential—that con- often had sleepless nights,” confesses bunny. “You This isn’t Shapton’s first literary prank, nor is it nects Toys Talking, and much of Shapton’s other are joking,” says monkey. her first picture book for grown-ups. Toys Talking work, too, with children’s books in general: their The text-to-illustration ratio reads as board- purports to be for kids in the same way her second preoccupation with time, nostalgia, and with loss. book-for-toddlers, as do the exquisite, delightfully book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property For Shapton, those concerns may be rooted in her expressive ink illustrations, the youth as a competitive swimmer curved corners of the crayon- There is something foreboding about (with thwarted Olympic ambi- coloured pages, and the volume’s tions), a formative moment when square shape. (Like most books how Shapton draws her toys: they are time and shaving milliseconds published by Drawn & Quarterly, of it from a performance was Toys Talking is a pleasure to look like the inanimate objects that press crucial to success. “Time passes at and hold.) But the snatches with precision in a workout,” she of dialogue appear lifted from themselves against the eyes of the writes in Swimming Studies, her an adult comedy of manners—a critically acclaimed (and less Julian Barnes piece starring a protagonist in a Sartre novel. elaborately illustrated) memoir cast purchased at a toy store. And of her longtime relationship with upon closer inspection there is something forebod- From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold water, “every minute—every second—is felt and ing about how Shapton draws her toys: they are Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, accounted for. In other words, time passes slowly.” like the inanimate objects that press themselves from 2009, purports to be—and looks exactly like— If Shapton’s fixation with time and its passing is against the eyes of the protagonist in a Sartre novel. an auction catalogue, but is really a lavishly arted idiosyncratic, for children’s books it is foundational, If Toys Talking is a board book for very little kids, novel about a love affair and breakup (with photo- linked to the inescapable reality of their being writ- then these little kids are going to grow up to be graphs starring the Toronto writer Sheila Heti, an ten and often read out loud by adults who were very demented adults. (Not to say children will occasional Shapton collaborator). once themselves children. It is not merely due to Shapton’s books are frequently designed to look the exactitudes of bedtime that a toddler’s first book Nicholas Köhler is a Toronto-based freelance writer. like one thing when they are really something quite is (so often) Goodnight Moon—rather than Hello! His work has appeared on This American Life, different. Hence the bookshop clerk’s dilemma: Or simply due to narrative expediency that the final NewYorker.com and in Maclean’s. Are they graphic novels? Art books? Novels or Winnie book, The House at Pooh Corner, ends with

14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Christopher Robin, not so young anymore, saying author of 1947’s endlessly abiding Goodnight Moon, (“You have them, I’ll amuse them”) and his first wife farewell and forsaking the Hundred Acre Wood as well as 1942’s The Runaway Bunny: “What really died by suicide. Sendak, who could nurse a grudge, for good. The wistfulness that collects around the distinguishes her books is her sense of poetry and once joked that he’d “called up the Ayatollah” on death of a spider named Charlotte, or the felling language, and her wit, her ability to seed simple Salman Rushdie after Rushdie wrote a review of one of The Giving Tree, connects with that haunting declarative sentences with peculiarity”—traits that of his books that Sendak did not care for. sense of inevitability we must all admit to feeling Handy notes Brown borrowed from one of her Wild Things is less good during those very occa- when an aging stepmother seeks to wipe out the favourite writers, Gertrude Stein. sional moments when Handy’s enthusiasm falters. competition she sees ripening in Snow White by You could say versions of all these things about If you don’t like Little Women, why risk being giving her a bad apple. No matter the variations on Shapton and, in the same breath, class her pic- dull to write about it? That’s especially so when the theme, the success of kids’ books depends on ture books as literature—which is how Handy’s titans of the canon—Dahl, Kenneth Grahame, S.E. their remembering the thrills and anxieties of time penetrating and immensely readable Wild Things Hinton, among others—are present here largely, past—childhood is a temporary condition—and treats Brown, Keats, Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss, and inexplicably, via their absence. Handy calls without sentimentality. the Brothers Grimm, Beverly Cleary, C.S. Lewis, Canada’s own Anne Shirley, of Anne of Green But it is stunning how Shapton has done this, and E.B. White. That is, to narrow it down to what Gables, a “sunny, cheerful, detestable orphan” over and over, for adults. Although before jettisoning her for good—in called a graphic novel, her Was She a footnote. (Even when Handy is Pretty?, first published in 2006—a Sendak, who could nurse a grudge, once bad, then, he can be quite good.) treatise on jealousy, past lives and Would it have killed him to point romantic loss—looks like nothing joked that he’d “called up the Ayatollah” out the edition of Grimms’ tales so much as a picture book, with he quotes from, deliciously, in illustrations facing pages of text on Salman Rushdie after Rushdie wrote Wild Things (“The little arm kept that often do not go on for more a review Sendak did not care for. reaching out of the grave…”), given than a sentence. “Kelly and her the enormous variety available, boyfriend Len kept running into some better than others? And women he ‘used to know,’ ” reads one sentence, Handy writes about White’s 1952 masterpiece while Handy is often very good about the way he here surrounded by a trio of awkwardly smiling Charlotte’s Web, as “fearless, organic, and beauti- handles the less-than-woke antique thinking in faces. “Martin had never mentioned his haunt- fully crafted—which is to say it is a work of truly many favourites (a highlight is his inclusion of a ingly beautiful ex-girlfriend Carwai to Heidi,” reads first-rank literature.” Not for the kiddie table at the passage written by Osage Nation writer John Joseph another. Was She Pretty? almost entirely dispenses banquet, therefore. More than once, Handy com- Matthews as counterpoint to the glimpses of racism with narrative, and the spell it casts upon the reader pares a children’s book author to Henry James. He found in the Little House books, parts of which are relies solely on Shapton’s marriage of drawings and uncovers Graham Greene’s fascinating, if five-and- set on Osage territory in Oklahoma), once or twice offhand yet beautiful sentences. dime, psychoanalysis of Peter Rabbit progenitor it appears a strain. But these are quibbles, and Wild Her Sunday Night Movies, published in 2013—a Beatrix Potter. John Hersey, the New Yorker jour- Things more than does its job: It leaves you itching series of grisaille-rendered watercolour stills nalist who wrote the sublime Hiroshima, was an to reread books worthy of attention into adulthood; culled from classic films—is about the fleeting- early champion of The Cat in the Hat (1957), which not just for nostalgia’s sake, but as a reader of good ness of cinematic time, half-remembered black- Seuss cobbled together from a list of 200-odd words literature. and-white images, and perhaps the vanishing pre-approved by his publisher for book-cracking There’s that word again—is it a bad word? from mainstream culture of the idea of old movies beginners, and which Hersey called a “gift to the art Nostalgia. Those who indulge in it flirt with pre- altogether—the chance viewing of a late-night TV of reading.” Handy even quotes Gore Vidal on the ciousness and, as with all things cloying, it’s a mode movie now a fetish of times gone by. Likewise, one topic of the Land of Oz. (Dorothy, Vidal assures us of recollection that can leave a bad taste in the of the saddest artifacts on auction in Important with characteristic authority, “is a perfectly accept- mouth. Any discussion of picture books for adults, Artifacts, the ersatz catalogue, is a collection of Éric able character for a boy to read about.”) or books celebrating the reading of children’s lit- Rohmer DVDs, with Claire’s Knee, the creepy story A Vanity Fair contributor, who at one time wrote erature by the over-18 set, must grapple with this of a middle-aged man’s narrowly focused romantic for Saturday Night Live, Handy is a children’s-books question, especially today. That is: In an era in conquest, missing. DVDs, like the letters and post- enthusiast whose love for the classics of the cat- which lots of grown-ups are turning to YA titles, cards also celebrated in the book, and now super- egory reemerged while reading to his own children. or graphic novels, and when our cinemas almost seded by social media, aren’t a thing anymore. Like any enthusiast he is at his best when extolling exclusively screen superhero epics, do we really Published three years after Facebook opened to the virtues of the books he loves. The sections of need more help appreciating the childish and the public membership, Artifacts now reads as a wistful Wild Things covering Lewis’s Narnia books, Cleary’s less-than-mature? farewell to the corporeality of the pre-social media Ramona series, and Charlotte’s Web, Laura Ingalls Handy, for one, makes a good case for how cru- era. The Native Trees of Canada, a book of arboreal Wilder’s Little House novels, and even those on the cial a writer’s respect for her audience—a reader- portraits based on an old federal government refer- schlocky if inventive L. Frank Baum (Oz, Handy ship of children—is to the best kids’ books. “This ence book, and published in 2010, appears specif- writes, “reflects…our national susceptibility to— might seem like a simpleminded epiphany,” he ically designed to take you out of the immediacy of and gift for—con artistry”) are rollicking fun, full writes, “but it is so easy and tempting to condes- the Internet: it is less a book for reading than it is of deep reading, surprising connections, gossipy cend to children.” The greats of children’s literature an object of contemplation, its purpose to remove detail. Of the geniuses of kids’ lit Handy asks: “What all direct a cold but tender eye at the realities of us from time. to make of the fact that so many were, for whatever living. It is a body of work with quiet yet arch power. reason, childless? And that so many didn’t even Sometimes it feels, when reading Shapton, that What to make of it? We could ask of her output seem to care much for children?” the cloying, cringe-worthy side of memory and loss what Bruce Handy, in his recent Wild Things: The In that same vein, is it too reductive to wonder is her great subject—the past as a vast and haunt- Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, whether their genius for speaking to children didn’t ing receptacle of what-ifs and could-have-beens, asks of the format in general, although he is asking spring from that subterranean darkness so many of a form of nostalgia as fantasy that Shapton is busy the question on behalf of children’s books actually them seemed to share—encompassing everything gently skewering. Incidentally, the prototypes for meant for children: “Why haven’t picture books from Brown and Potter’s compulsive industrious- Toys Talking, maybe even the live subjects for that earned the same pop culture cachet that comics ness to the famous curmudgeonhood of Roald book’s drawings themselves, show up in the final and graphic novels have? Picture books are like Dahl, the man behind the small yet Byronic Willy pages of Important Artifacts, the post-breakup auc- poetry to comics’ prose, a form every bit as sophis- Wonka? For decades, C.S. Lewis shared a home tion catalogue, as Lot 1327: “Four stuffed animals,” ticated if not more so, and no less worthy of adults’ and may have been romantic with the much, much with an estimated price of between $150 and $195. attention and enjoyment.” Later, Handy quotes the older mother of a dead friend. Seuss, born Theodor Looking at the reader reproachfully, they are the British children’s book critic Brian Alderson on Seuss Geisel, was the scion of a Massachusetts sad remnants of romance gone rotten. The stuffed Ezra Jack Keats, whose The Snowy Day, from 1962, brewing family, and probably would have turned animals in Toys Talking, meanwhile, are something is a picture book classic: “The revelation with Snowy brewer himself had Prohibition not intervened (he more mysterious and menacing, and while they Day was that there was something central to him- first signed his work Seuss in Dartmouth College’s speak in the jargon of the adult cocktail party, what self that he could articulate with a picture book.” humour magazine after getting suspended for serv- they really seem to be saying is quite a bit clearer: Handy himself writes of Margaret Wise Brown, ing bootleg gin at a party); he was childless also Don’t come back.

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 15 Against Originality Plagiarism, and the cipher of literary shame pa s h a m a l l a

poets make it into something bet- or post-secondary ter, or at least something different. instructors, catching a student The good poet welds his theft into Fplagiarist inspires a range a whole of feeling which is unique, of feelings: dismay; fatigue at the utterly different from that from impending paperwork; sometimes which it was torn; the bad poet a facetious kind of glee; and, if the throws it into something which has offending text is especially obvious no cohesion. and Google-able, forehead-slapping incredulity. Plagiarism can feel like an Of course the indignation pro- insult not just to the writer whose work voked by Pierre Des Ruisseaux and is stolen but to the reader targeted as Richard Kelly Kemick wasn’t a result the potential dupe. How could any- of their failure to create “something one think us so stupid, we wonder, different,” but due to their apparent while cannier cheats dance tauntingly attempt to deceive—to not just steal beyond our grasp, diplomas in hand. or even imitate, but to pass off some- As mortal sins go, although pla- one else’s work as their own. A clear giarism doesn’t crack the top seven, enough intellectual crime. Yet rather it does seem to provoke comparable than summarily dismissing these and outrage. And a teacher’s exaspera- other similar episodes of plagiarism, tion hardly compares to the wrath we might treat them as test cases of incurred by the pirating novelist or “The Dog of the Marriage.” Both stories are about how and what we consider literary poet, who inspires a disdain usually reserved for protagonists at the tail-end of failing relationships theft. Kemick vs. Hempel, in particular, offers an history’s more malevolent dictators. That sense of who find solace among canine companions; both opportunity to explore what constitutes an accept- betrayal speaks to readers’ trust in literature, which begin with an ending (Kemick: “The last thing my able level of influence and what inspires moral approaches a marriage’s compact of faith and fidel- wife and I did together…” Hempel: “On the last condemnation, and what those distinctions might ity. And so, whether purported non-fiction turns night of the marriage, my husband and I…”) and reveal about the culture at large. out to be made-up, or the allegedly original words end with new beginnings: Kemick’s characters’ we’re reading have been copied from someone else, “unclaimed futures revolve somewhere ahead of ertainly many writers are guilty of steal- or a writer isn’t quite who he claims to be, readers them,” while Hempel’s “wait, with perfect hope, Cing—conscientiously, unwittingly, or duplici- will renounce a cheat quicker than Joseph Boyden for the make-believe story to unfold.” That Kemick tously. I myself have published two books of found can say “Métis.” transplanted his adaptation to an airport hints at an material, one that churns transcripts of Frank A claim of literary plagiarism tends to follow the attempt to cover his tracks, which, depending how Capra’s “Why we fight” films through layers of same ignominious cycle: revelation, denunciation, cynical you’re feeling, is either the most redeeming Google Translate, and another, compiled with my public shaming, public apology, retroactive era- or damning aspect of the whole affair. Me, I’m not accomplice Jeff Parker, that attempts to reconfigure sure. In September of 2017, the posthumous discov- sure, but I’ll get to that. the words of professional athletes into poetry. I’ve ery that Pierre Des Ruisseaux, Canada’s former poet While it remains to be seen where Richard Kelly also cribbed stories from an episode in Jacques laureate, had stolen verses from Maya Angelou, Kemick’s literary futures revolve—on Twitter, that Cousteau’s The Living Sea (with attribution) and Dylan Thomas, and Tupac Shakur prompted bastion of measured comment, he has been called Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers” (without), and Éditions du Noroît to pull the offending title. Then, everything from “a pasty white dude” to “dumb & a my first novel features a number of characters who in October, Richard Kelly Kemick was booted from liar”—such a swift, punitive response suggests that speak entirely in lines lifted from other works of fic- the Journey Prize Stories for borrowing excessively the episode was a fleeting blight on the linguistic, tion and lyrics by the Wu-Tang Clan. from the work of Amy Hempel; the story promptly stylistic, and conceptual integrity of the very enter- In all of these cases, my hope is that my efforts vanished from the internet and its original pub- prise of Canadian short fiction. Except! Poaching might be exonerated of plagiarism due to their lisher, Maisonneuve magazine, announced that from other writers isn’t antithetical to the spirit of formal, thematic, or conceptual concerns, but the “the issue in which the story originally appeared literature, nor is it particularly anomalous. That old issue remains thorny and vague, both morally and will no longer be available.” Telling, too, was the maxim, “Talent borrows, genius steals,”1 apocryph- legally. “There is no working legal definition of requisite mea culpa: “[This] is certainly a misstep ally attributed to Oscar Wilde, and sometimes more plagiarism,” Tae Mee Park, a partner with Bersenas that I take responsibility for,” Kemick confessed to accurately (but still imprecisely) to T.S. Eliot, has Jacobsen Chouest Thomson Blackburn LLP, told the Globe and Mail. “I should have both acknow- long provided moral leeway to any writer for whom me over email. “The concept tends to encompass ledged [Hempel’s] influence and double-checked influence might provoke anxiety. Eliot’s essay, a much broader definition than what’s protected that my material did not overlap hers.” which excoriates the dramatist Philip Massinger under the law of copyright.” (Her firm frequently A “misstep” of “influence” that should have for his own lazy derivations, actually goes like this: advises and represents media outlets, journalists, been “double-checked” might seem a bit weak writers, artists, editors, and publishers in all aspects when one considers the evidence, some dozen-plus Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; of media law, including defamation and copyright.) passages more or less transcribed from Hempel’s bad poets deface what they take, and good Copyright is innate to any creative work, and apart from those paranoiacs who, like children plugging Pasha Malla is the author of six books, most in their monster-deterring nightlights, addend a 1 More succinctly, Picasso: “Art is theft.” Or a couple of recently Fugue States, a novel. He lives in Hamilton, millennia earlier, Bacchylides: “One pilfers the best of little circled C to their drafts, most writers worry Ontario. another. And calls it tradition.” Etc. less about being copied than producing work that

16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada is undetectably derivative of other writers. prietary posturing of hip-hop2 than the current criterion for originality is diction, we reduce even This is more or less in keeping with the law. discourse around books. And if the conversation the language of fiction and poetry to a functional “Copyright protects the original expression of ideas, around literary plagiarism, as it continued through tool, a vehicle deployed solely to convey informa- not ideas or facts,” Park explained. “Expression is the Romantics and Victorians, into the Moderns tion. The printed word offers a unique ontology defined by the exercise of skill and judgment to (for whom appropriation became a genre of its inaccessible to visual media, and it’s a good thing, produce something that is original, and copyright own), was often confrontational, at least people because books can hardly compete with the graphic infringement consists of the unauthorized taking of were talking. immediacy of cinema, television, and video games. that originality.” (It’s intriguing to think of plagiar- And yet, in this culture of spectacle, in which bud- ism not just as copying, but taking—a metaphysical hat seems to have set in lately isn’t just a ding short-story writers are taught to tell less and theft akin to the anachronistic fear that being Wlack of dialogue, but an oversimplification show more, we seem to struggle to honour the photographed might steal one’s soul.) Which is to of what plagiarism means in a literary context. experiential capacity of literature, which remains say, under the rule of law, it’s not so much what Although diction is not the only element of a pub- the only art form that can actually replace one’s writers say, but how uniquely they say it. Accepting lished work protected by law, recent accusations of thoughts with those of another person. these parameters for literary plagiarism, which plagiarism focus exclusively on phrasing. A writer’s Writers steal. The key is to do so openly, with echo most academic honesty policies at Canadian aesthetics and formal approach certainly require an intention and transparency. Had Kemick simply universities, assumes the primary criterion for “exercise of skill and judgment,” regardless of how copped to his influences—as Lee Henderson did literature to be its originality. This might sound skilled or judicious the execution might be. What when he acknowledged a story’s progenitor in his reasonable enough, except that, when removed about those contemporary novelists who have 2010 collection The Broken Record Technique (“The from academia and applied to literature, its logical made careers emulating (at best) and counterfeit- Runner, After John Cheever”)—perhaps he’d still be extreme implies that books should be produced ing (at worst) some antecedent style? Or those who up for the $10,000 Journey Prize jackpot. Kemick’s with aesthetic and conceptual autonomy—that is, blatantly copy narrative and formal tropes coined swindle might, if admitted, have broadened the without any discernible precursor at all. and perfected by another author? No one would themes of his own work beyond the literal, sug- Not only does such thinking deny the ways in think to embargo every Canadian fiction writer gesting a kind of conversation between the two which influence, allusion, and quotation operate whose domestic, relational, emotionally detached stories. A nod to the source material would also in poetry and fiction, but framing literature as a fiction owes its ethos to Alice Munro; for one thing acknowledge the communality that has informed practice of singularity and uniqueness obscures its we’d end up gutting half the nation’s literature, storytelling since its beginnings, with one author communal roots. Long before concerns of appropri- and the Journey Prize Stories would be a very thin building on and from another’s work.4 ation and imitation took form, literary works from pamphlet indeed. One can only speculate as to the motivation the Hindu Vedas to North American Indigenous Plot, too, seems to have become more or less behind Kemick’s subterfuge, but it does seem that folklores began in shared oral traditions, wherein fair-use material. Think about how one book’s com- if there were more openness in general about how the concept of a sole author was counterintuitive mercial success often occasions a trend, be it the fiction, at this point, is mostly built from previ- to how stories were created and shared among glut of teen wizard novels heaped upon the market ous fictions, he might have felt more comfortable people. This is partly the reason that the ascription for the past 20 years, or, if you prefer, all those recent declaring his intentions. Undoubtedly, his story of authorship to figures like Homer—and, centuries vengeful “girls”—on trains, dragon-tattooed, or would have been richer for it. Useful here is Fredric later, Shakespeare—remains a source of debate: simply gone. The initial dust-up over Yann Martel Jameson’s assertion that most contemporary litera- Were they solitary geniuses, collectives of storytell- plundering the premise of Life of Pi from Moacyr ture is essentially pastiche, a “blank irony” that, by ers, or self-aggrandizing careerists who co-opted Scliar’s Max and the Cats ultimately amounted to feigning uniqueness and not foregrounding its own communal material and called it their own? Of very little,3 and an allegation that Chad Harbach appropriative tendencies, neutralizes its engage- course, Shakespeare was a literal plagiarist as well, stole much of The Art of Fielding from an unpub- ment with the realities of postmodern cultural having flagrantly copied from Plutarch and Ovid, as lished manuscript has still yet to see its day in production and its own, actually unique place in lit- well as from his contemporaries Arthur Brooke and court. Most notably, neither author has suffered erary history. Instead of pastiche, claims Jameson, Christopher Marlowe. the public shaming heaped on verbatim plagiarists, authors might do better to aim for parody,5 which is Through the Middle Ages, too, the dominant nor has either had his career suffer comparably; an active and aware participation in predetermined mode of western literary culture, steeped as it Charles Green, Harbach’s complainant, has had his forms—and the beginning of a conversation. was in “coteries,” waged many of its more virulent claims roundly dismissed in the New York media as battles along the border of allusion and outright “spurious” and “a low-level menace.” ll writing is of course indebted to its ante- theft. With everyone quoting everyone else, from If you’re unconvinced that phrasing is the pri- Acedents, yet a culture whose dialogue with their peers down through antiquity, and a public mary, if not sole, area of discrepancy, consider history exists almost exclusively in terms of nostal- discourse that was as characterized by bickering the recent case of American poet and critic Jill gia, and which values the exclusivity of the new over and in-fighting as it was by artistic production, Bialosky, whose recent memoir, Poetry Will Save all else, seems to be influencing how we think about poets were especially sensitive to having their Your Life, has sounded the plagiarist alarm bells. books—as if each title exists as a shining jewel of work copied without attribution or consent. John One of Bialosky’s alleged victims is Wikipedia, a originality, less in conversation with the rest of Donne called out those who pilfered his verses in communally compiled, freely accessible, and, per literature than in competition with it. Of course, to “Satire II”: its own guidelines, neutrally written website that take this country as one example, that dynamic isn’t by design obscures authorship. The issue seems helped by the predominance of prizes and actual But hee is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw not that Bialosky has reproduced facts, which are competitions like Canada Reads, which seek to ele- Others wits fruits, and in his ravenous maw no one’s property, but that her sentences are a vate a single work apart from and above the field. Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue, little too derivative, even if the source material And while grumpy protestations about the “Giller As his owne things; and they are his owne, ’tis isn’t a particularly “original expression of ideas” in effect” are nothing groundbreaking, it’s worth true, the first place. Here’s Bialosky: “Although Lowell’s thinking about the confluence of the isolationist For if one eate my meate, though it be knowne manic depression was a great burden for him and supremacy advanced by our literary culture and The meate was mine, th’excrement is his his family, the exploration of mental illness in his how resistant we are to books that borrow too much owne. verse led to some of his most important poetry.” from other books. And Wikipedia: “Although Lowell’s manic depres- It’s an even more backward mode of thinking Little changed post-Reformation. Writing in sion was often a great burden (for himself and his when one considers today’s most fruitful resource the mid-17th century, Anne Killigrew, whose work family), the subject of that mental illness led to for not only a writer’s research, but also for catch- her friend John Dryden claimed rivalled that of some of his most important poetry.” Similar, sure. ing a suspected plagiarist: the internet. With sites Sappho’s, responded to her (male, obviously) But wouldn’t any rehash of that information be? accusers in “Upon the Saying That My Verses Were There’s something hopelessly literal about these 4 Per, if you like, Harold Bloom’s “revisionary ratios” of new Made By Another,” which concludes with the proto- parameters for literary plagiarism. If the main writers simply writing through, over, or into the work of their precursors. feminist lament, “I willingly accept Cassandras 5 “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of the particular Fate,/ To speak the Truth, although believ’d too 2 E.g. “Copy Me” by Migos: “You must got the rabies, you or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguis- late.” For centuries, these sorts of recriminations bite/ You copy my swag and I like it.” tic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral 3 Perversely enough, the Guardian had to retract its initial practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior and their responses were simply inherent to the coverage of the scandal after using quotations from the motives…” (from Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of writing life, a dynamic echoed more in the pro- New York Times without attribution. Late Capitalism.)

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 17 like Project Gutenberg and UbuWeb offering entire deviousness than to a limited and quixotic notion, not be an incredulous, “What does he think he’s libraries of fair-use material, it seems odd that writ- sustained by the publishing industry, of the invent- doing?” but rather “What is he doing with it?” If we ers would not be encouraged to plunder the riches iveness supposedly embodied by fiction. Most are able to create a space where intertextuality is of the past—especially when so much of it is avail- creative work is fundamentally unoriginal, and acceptable, the issue becomes less about treachery able legally, for free. Yet so much contemporary we’ve long been hearing that the novel, reduced to than intent. For example: Karen Solie’s poem “The fiction exists in a weirdly atemporal space that not a limited variety of mutations on an antiquated and Midlands,” from her 2015 collection The Road In Is only makes a practice of denying influence, but, per exhausted form, has passed its creative and popular Not the Same Road Out, concludes, “They speak the ad-speak of publishers’ marketing departments, best-before date. If the novel is no longer so novel, plainly. The lie must be inside you.” Very nice operates only laterally: Today’s authors are most perhaps one way to “make it new” (again) is to indeed. It’s also quite close to this bit by Tomas frequently compared to their best-selling peers and rethink plagiarism in a literary context, to embrace Tranströmer: “The visitor thought: you live well. rarely the greats who came before them.6 parody over pastiche, and to create a space where The slum must be inside you.” In Solie’s acknow- Wherever writers get their inspiration, accept- fiction writers, especially, can acknowledge the ledgments, she cites Mark Rothko and Nick Cave, ance that nothing is original, that everyone is bor- essentially communal nature of storytelling. but there’s no mention of Tranströmer, for whom rowing from somewhere, would facilitate a more I’m not advocating for the creative overhaul she has elsewhere professed admiration. Whether honest approach to influence and promote a more that David Shields called for in his 2010 manifesto, the similarity is allusion or unconscious influence sophisticated understanding of what it means to Reality Hunger, which implies that the only means or simple coincidence is irrelevant to most poets, “use” one’s favourite books. Amid this dismayingly to resurrect the novel is—I think?—for writers as well as readers. Why get worked up over one little ahistorical moment, perhaps literature might at to start poaching indiscriminately from every line? It’s more rewarding, as a reader, to consider least offer itself in context: everything owes a debt resource on offer. But perhaps softening the vitriol what effect is achieved through its use. A line that to the past. In a literary culture more tolerant of and ostracism directed at plagiarists might engen- in Tranströmer is a lament about crumbling faith what we consider plagiarism, and which acknow- der a more willing understanding of how literature becomes, in Solie’s iteration, an existential medita- ledges the role of history, authors could openly works—which is osmotically and symbiotically, tion on the self. address and explore how their work traces its liter- and essentially at odds with the relentless pursuit Even if it were outright theft, the lack of credit ary lineage, and how context can change and create of the new that is mostly celebrated in the digital would not bother me—perhaps in part because meaning—even of identically reproduced phrases. era. Books can’t compete with visual culture, but Solie is a “mature poet,” that sly breed of appro- It seems arbitrary to punish writers who perhaps they can offer refuge to readers seeking an priationist whom T.S. Eliot has encouraged to appropriate content but not those who appropri- occasional alternative to the sensory onslaught of cherry-pick their sources. But the acceptability of ate form—and also suggests that modernism and movies and TV.7 this breed of “plagiarism” speaks more broadly to postmodernism never happened. But this persecu- While in no way did Richard Kelly Kemick make the fact that, excepting the lunatic cultural thievery tion of literary plagiarists does reveal how form has Amy Hempel’s work “better,” “different,” or particu- of Pierre Des Ruisseaux, many of the best contem- become genre, and genre has been afforded the larly “unique,” his case supplies more than another porary poets engage conscientiously with previous sanctity of a marketing category. And the market, object of vilification. Perhaps the question should movements, discourses, and one another in ways of course, thrives on the illusion of innovation. The that most novelists do not—sometimes with attri- Kemick vs. Hempel affair speaks less to individual bution, and, perhaps liberated by a culture rich 7 Michelle Orange, writing in VQR: “As a term, television feels increasingly inapt, vestigial, at risk of acquiring the with cross-pollination, sometimes not. You’d think 6 I write this looking at the 1969 edition of Marie-Claire air quotes that presage irrelevance. Still, it refers to a fiction writers would welcome this sort of thing. Blais’ A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, the cover blurb of form—episodic, moving-image narrative—for which we After all, a lie can be very compelling indeed. which cites Kafka and Dostoevsky as reference points. have not yet found a better alias.”

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First First Voices Voices First First Texts Texts Spirited Away Transforming birds, fireflies, and weed cookies in Eden Robinson’s British Columbia outpost j . c . s u t c l i f f e

nor exoticized. This skill of observation is one of get away with that amount of obstreperous political Son of a Trickster the novel’s strengths, and it is demonstrated in rebellion and still be likeable. She’s a funny (but far Eden Robinson Robinson’s ability to portray people in economic or from ridiculous) feminist killjoy: “She’s unthink- Knopf Canada social insecurity without turning the characters into ingly accepted her oppression and it’s fucked her 336 pages, hardcover unrealistically saintly people or caricatures. up,” she says about her mother at one point. She ISBN 9780345810786 In Robinson’s grim, topsy-turvy, and darkly spends most of her sober time fretting about injus- humorous world, Jared, then, is the grown-up, and tice, and then hops over to Jared’s for sex, finding he main character of Son of a his mother and father are the children who haven’t time to give Jared a couple of political lectures while Trickster, Eden Robinson’s third novel yet learnt to self-regulate. They have all had some she’s there. T(and the first in a trilogy), is 16-year-old worse-than-average luck, and some strange prob- Jared, too, is believable: decent but flawed, per- Jared, renowned weed-cookie baker and adoles- lems, not to mention the ongoing post-colonial sistent despite being constantly undermined by the cent mess. But we first meet him, briefly, when he’s trauma cycling through the generations that is per- precarity of his life. This could easily have wound up five, learning that his maternal grandmother has petually lurking in the background (or foreground). as a feel-good tale of redemption, but Jared doesn’t never liked him because she believes he is Wee’git’s Yet Jared manages to find room for empathy for overcome anything, doesn’t reach a higher level, son. When they’re alone together, she addresses others. His mum is always telling him, “The world doesn’t beat the odds. He simply survives being a him as the evil spirit she knows him to be: “If you is hard. You have to be harder,” but it doesn’t quite teenager, doing all the ridiculous, crazy, dangerous, hurt [my daughter], I will kill you and bury you work that way for Jared. Despite his tough situation, oddly mature things that being 16 entails—and that where no one can resurrect you.” he’s a compassionate kid who stands up for the resi- is what makes his tale so warm, appealing, and uni- In an interview with CBC, Eden Robinson dent nerd, known as Crashpad, risking the wrath of versal. Heartbreaking, too: There is no easy solution explained Wee’git, the transforming raven: the cool kids, and who helps out his neighbours, a to the existential and social crises of our time, and “ ‘Trickster’ stories in Haisla and Heiltsuk culture kindly elderly woman with leukemia and her Czech this novel isn’t going to patronize us by pretending were all about protocol…They were told as funny, husband. there is. crazy stories, to teach you about our nuyums, or Jared is stoned so often that when the Trickster— As the magic becomes more prominent, and as protocols, by having a character that broke all and some other, less benign creatures—show up in what has hitherto passed for normal starts to fall of them. And I was trying to bring Wee’git into a his own life, it takes him some time to figure out apart, other creatures appear to Jared: a swarm modern setting. To see what would happen if he whether they are real or the result of some bad of fireflies hovering around Sarah, ape men that was running around in the world today.” hallucinogenic mixed in with his pot. This is magic show up randomly in the house, and even some By the next chapter, when we return to Jared as realism that works for readers who aren’t necessar- that pretend to be Jared’s dead dog or Sarah, to a teenager, life has become tougher and less stable ily fans of magic realism, partly because the whole lure Jared into the woods, before they turn into for everyone. His parents have split up, his dad thing could—at least initially—be explained away otter-people hybrids and viciously attack him. It’s has lost his job at the Kitimat Eurocan plant, along by the effects of drugs, and partly because the novel pretty clear to Jared that the supernatural is not just with 500 others in the town, and is now hooked on is premised on several characters’ skepticism of the imaginary when he loses a very real toe as a result oxycodone following a workplace injury. Jared’s supernatural. Eventually Jared does accept magic of this attack. The magic is bound up with Jared stepsister is about to have a baby, and his mother’s as being real, but it means some upheaval in how learning about what it means to be “part ’Namgis, house is full of lodgers, one of whom has made he thinks of himself and his family. part Heiltsuk,” to be part of his family in this time holes in Jared’s bedroom wall to spy on him. He With the portrayal of these characters, and the and in this place—to understand that his heritage, bakes weed cookies to help his dad make rent, but novel’s setting in northern B.C., a place where jobs, whether he chooses to believe in it or not, incor- he can’t use his own house for his culinary enter- hope, and money have become thin on the ground, porates both good and bad spirit beings. The lines prise because his mother and her dealer boyfriend Robinson demonstrates a profound understand- between magic and reality become blurred; differ- would eat them all. ing that we are all products of our time and place, ent characters have different levels of experience It sounds grim—and for the characters living it, especially characters who have been so deeply, and and belief, but ultimately magic becomes another it is. But there is also a lot of love, and comedy. Jared enduringly, affected by capitalism and by colonial- level of the novel’s reality, something that is just as and his mother, Maggie, have a tight bond, with ism and its aftermath. The reason Son of a Trickster much a part of its fabric as Kitimat or the adolescent hilarious dialogue that fizzes with witty wisecracks works so well is that she also genuinely feels we all friendships and fallings out. and smartass sarcasm. To other people, Maggie also have agency—that a novel in which characters Despite its dark subject matter, Robinson’s writ- is one scary lady: in one scene, she grotesquely are just passive recipients of history is no novel at ing is bursting with glee, exuberance, and wit. It was but inventively punishes a man who tries to break all. encouraging to see a funny book by a female author Jared’s ribs by nail-gunning his feet to the floor. The Sarah, Jared’s girlfriend, might write exactly that being shortlisted (Michelle Winters’ I am a Truck violence is graphic but mundane; rather than being kind of novel. She’s the granddaughter of Jared’s was another) for the Giller Prize. Son of a Trickster is titillating, it is a fact of life that’s neither condoned elderly neighbours, the Jakses, living with them often wild and over the top, like being in a dodgem temporarily to help care for them. Sarah is prickly car with someone who won’t take their foot off the J.C. Sutcliffe is a writer and translator. Her trans- and political and stops just short of being a walking, gas for a single second, but it all holds together. lations of Document 1 and Mama’s Boy will be talking slogan. As an adult character she would be This trilogy could shape up to be the new Canadian published by BookThug in 2018. annoying and two-dimensional, but teenagers can canon in the making.

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 19 Caged Sometimes survival means fighting the bad fight a n d r é f o r g e t

In The Cage Kevin Hardcastle Biblioasis 310 pages, softcover ISBN 9781771961479

he promotional jacket copy for Kevin Hardcastle’s new novel In The Cage Tcomes out swinging: “A feared cage fighter in mixed martial arts, Daniel is closing in on great- ness—until an injury derails his career,” we are told. “Out of work in his country hometown, Daniel slips into the underworld, moonlighting as muscle for a childhood-friend-turned-mid-level gangster.” Advertising this as unabashedly generic has its own kind of poetry, but one imagines it may also cause the typical reader of literary fiction to roll their eyes hard enough to induce vertigo. What more pompous decades referred to as “pulp fiction” may be riding a new wave of critical interest, but there remains something giggle-inducing about the phrase “a feared cage fighter in mixed martial arts.” Which is a shame, because the book is much more clever, and more nuanced, and just basically better than the marketing makes it out to be. Hardcastle is hardly a neophyte when it comes to the slash and gurgle of the crime thriller, but there is something almost Balzacian in his facility with descriptive detail. Down but not out in Kevin Hardcastle’s Ontario Hardcastle established himself as a thoughtful (Photograph by Russell Lee, 1938. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.) and candid chronicler of the rural Canadian work- ing class in his first book, Debris, a collection of changing and Clayton is consolidating his grip on story unfolds, Hardcastle doesn’t so much keep us short stories published in 2015. In The Cage brings the area’s drug industry by waging an escalating war in suspense as string us along with vignettes of the the gritty, realistic texture of his stories to bear on against the local bikers and other semi-organized hard life in rural Ontario that sometimes feel an a plot that is pulpier, and more archetypal, but the criminals. A particularly nasty hit job convinces awful lot like filler. There are decidedly too many link between the two is clear—indeed, In The Cage Daniel to wash his hands of the business, but reli- scenes where Daniel sits alone in his kitchen, drink- is a coda to one of the stories in Debris. When we able work is hard to come by, and eventually he ing beers and being stoic, and when hell eventually first meet Daniel in “Montana Border,” he is a young rolls the dice on a return to the boxing ring—with breaks loose in the last 30 pages, I was both moved mixed martial artist trying to find his way in the unfortunately brutal consequences. There’s not by the tragic inevitability of it and thoroughly world, drifting from fight to fight across the prairies much left at the end of the novel that isn’t bleeding relieved that something interesting, finally, was on both sides of the 49th. The story ends with him heavily. happening. holed up in a house with a redheaded girl named Debris was published two years ago, but In The This is not to suggest that Hardcastle isn’t doing Sarah, who is pregnant with his child, waiting for a Cage was written first. It shows. The short stories, anything new here. By splicing elements of the real- crew of bikers to get tired of looking for him. By the which garnered their author the Trillium Book ist novel and the crime thriller, Hardcastle dances time In The Cage begins, twelve years later, Daniel Award in 2016, are understated, deadpan accounts across the supposed divide between highbrow and Sarah’s fling has turned into a loving partner- of poverty, crime, and life on the edges of Canadian literature and low brow genre fiction. But the fresh- ship that revolves around respect, mutual support, society, but the novel has a sprawling, bloated qual- est thing about In The Cage is its depiction of crime and a daughter named Madelyn. ity; it runs to more than 300 pages, and one could and punishment in a rarely represented corner of When the theft of his welding rig derails Daniel’s easily imagine cutting 70 and losing nothing. central Ontario. Hardcastle never tells us the novel’s career, grinding poverty forces him to take up Hardcastle hangs his plot on a story arc that a events take place in the Midland-Penetanguishene clandestine work as an enforcer for Clayton, an old century of westerns and crime thrillers have made region of Simcoe County, but anyone familiar with family friend operating a crime ring out of a nearby commonplace: a compromised but essentially the area (or Hardcastle’s previous work—it is where Mohawk reserve. It is hardly Daniel’s first experi- good man goes clean, circumstances beyond his he grew up, and a setting he often returns to in his ence on the shady side of the law, but times are control pull him back into crime, loss drives him fiction) will immediately recognize the landscape to vengeance, mayhem ensues. Daniel has moral and its complex mix of cultures. André Forget is a literary critic and journalist whose scruples about working with Clayton and his Hardcastle’s Simcoe is defined by the sharp work has recently appeared in the Walrus, the deputy, Wallace King, but we can guess from the contrast between the local population (rural, poor) Anglican Journal, and Canadian Notes & Queries. beginning that Daniel, who lives by the proverbial and the affluent tourists and cottagers who invade it He lives in Toronto. sword, stands a good chance of dying by it. As the during the summer, but is also split along complex

20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ethnic lines. The Ojibwa of Christian Island, the Mohawks of the Wahta territory, and the French and English settler communities are connected in fraught and intimate ways, and one of the most remarkable dimensions of the novel is Hardcastle’s The Language of Butterflies navigation (fraught and intimate in its own way) of the small-p politics of being a settler writer por- Crows & Hanged Men traying Indigenous characters. Clayton, for example, is described early on as (with apologies to Heather O’Neill ) being one quarter Mohawk. His nephew Tarbell, the sociopathic hitman who emerges as the novel’s main antagonist, is also described as having Morphology 1: Ghazal, unrestrained Mohawk ancestry (though he grew up far from the reserve). Daniel may or may not be part Ojibwa (his father was “funny about” the possible family what without wings would we be but bodies connection to Christian Island), but Daniel iden- pinned to the earth for god’s fat finger to poke tifies and for the most part is identified as white, as does Madelyn. Daniel and Madelyn’s closest little Ghazal knows nothing of snow or silent friends, Murray and Ella, are Mohawks, and so are nights in a sadland of the damned: ask us several of Tarbell’s victims—this despite the fact that Clayton’s main rivals are the overwhelmingly about the monarch migration we do not know white biker gangs. The picture that emerges is of how she wakes in a warm bed to a war of remembering a community where ethnicity is always a factor in belonging, but is not always the decisive one; sounds that seek refuge, sear in, settle like vestiges, where enmity is not the inevitable result of identity tombs of monotonous chthonic thuds, bombs that linger politics; where violence comes not only from long- standing differences, but also from the friction of kinship. even here in the land of the blissfully oblivious The most important force in these characters’ where children chase butterflies & snowflakes world is poverty, and the most important survival tools are friendship and vengeance. If modern- desperately reaching inexpert hands & tongues ity is in part defined as the process by which the tripping over the practised welcome: ‘Us All Make Him’ impersonal forces of the bureaucratic nation-state displace the loyalties of tribe and kin, then despite peace be here where accidental little theologians the automatic weapons and rusted pick-up trucks, play together & tell stories about the innocent the world Hardcastle’s characters live in is essen- tially pre-modern. Violence is personal in this little girls in woods where bears & wolves hunt world, and so is justice. Just as the government freely roaming flower gatherers & den denizens seems unwilling to confront the structural prob- lems facing those down and out in Simcoe County, it is also powerless to stop the chaos unleashed by who always always find more than they look for Clayton and Tarbell. It is telling that Hardcastle what good is a lesson without the artefact to point to has Constable Smith, the police officer, function as a kind of Greek chorus: Smith observes, makes the powdery wings of the spent shells of the pages notes, and asks questions, and when the shooting of the books of fairy tales of the strange lands of starts he can be relied on to arrive several hours later and write up a report on the damage. When stories do not scare little girls like Ghazal who here under bluepaper skies disaster finally overtakes Daniel’s family, the brutal reach for snow white crayon jetstreaks whose silence means more than any god personal way he responds feels inevitable. Loyalty and retribution may be a fundamental part of the logic of many types of genre fiction, but Hardcastle’s real skill—and, I would argue, his most important contribution to Canadian literature at the moment—is in showing how true they can be for many living on the grey edges of Canadian society. There is something essentially conserva- tive about genre fiction, insofar as genre generally relies on (or perhaps it would be better to say is constituted by) a series of familiar tropes: the lone gunman against the gang of villains, or the old veteran coming out of retirement to set things right one last time. It is comforting because it presents a stable, balanced world in which the equilibrium is occasionally thrown off by some kind of recogniz- able evil. But this is not how many of us experience day-to-day life, and by blending the language and banality of realism with the violent, fateful narra- Daryl Sneath tive arc of a thriller, Hardcastle delivers something that is neither guilt-free entertainment nor dutiful Daryl Sneath’s fiction and poetry has appeared in journals such as the Antigonish Review, social commentary. His account of Canadian life Prism International, Wascana Review, Nashwaak Review, paperplates, Zouch Magazine, can neither be written off as dirty good fun, nor Quilliad, and FreeFall. His two novels are All My Sins and As the Current Pulls the Fallen enlisted to support some kind of predictable ideo- Under (Now or Never Publishing Co., 2014 and 2017 respectively). logical program. It is for precisely this reason that readers should look past the macho fists decorating its cover.

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 21 Men with Boats Map-making, mythmaking, and the Canadian wild s a r a h w y l i e k rot z

A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land Adam Shoalts Allen Lane 352 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780670069460

aps tell stories: their lines and names forge relationships M between people and the land, and among disparate communities; they assert beliefs as well as scientific facts; they not only record what is there, but they also dream places into existence. These dreams are especially visible on historical maps drawn long before satellite images filled in the unknown terrain, but even now, the idea of a completely knowable world is an illusion. For all the tales they tell about desire, power, and human journeys, maps also conceal a great deal. The apparent composure of these smooth and beautiful images belies the hardship and conflict behind the creation of their geographical knowledge and the delineation and defence of their territories. Adam Shoalts’s latest book, A History of Canada in Ten Maps, unearths such stories. In it we encounter the dreams, illusions, ambitions, bonds, conflicts, and failures undergirding some of the ear- liest European maps of what is now Canada. These A ground-level narrative of epic journeying maps, reproduced in a series of high-quality colour (Cropped stereograph image of Kasaan village, Alaska, 1900. Image courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Collections.) images at the centre of Shoalts’s book, range from a famous Viking map of the East Coast to one from John Franklin’s second Arctic expedition. Although After one reads this book, the maps at its cen- distance from the Rockies to Montreal is the same most are the products of exploration (including tre take on new significance: the time and labour as from Germany to Iran—that our modern sense Samuel de Champlain’s stunning map of New they represent (which encompasses the efforts not of “Canada” projects onto it an artificial sameness France, Peter Pond’s speculative river route to the only of the explorers who drew them, but of many that it never possessed for its early inhabitants, Pacific, and David Thompson’s meticulous but now others, including voyageurs, Indigenous advisors most of whom were, by necessity, acquainted only decaying map of the northwest, drawn with “ink and guides, women, and even children) become with small parts of it.” Shoalts’s History dispels this made from growths found on apple trees”), one more visible, as do the landscapes, communities, sameness; missing only the Prairies, it conveys both depicts Fort Erie, Ontario during its siege in the War and territories they traverse—Shoalts gives us vivid the variety of landscapes and First Nations cultures of 1812—a reminder that the shape of the country pictures of the intimate, sometimes messy on-the- that inhabit them, and the partial and haphazard was ultimately determined by armies and peace ground realities that the maps all but conceal. ways in which explorers came to know them. treaties. The mythical creatures (such as unicorns, The stories behind these maps are not new; they That this account is animated by Shoalts’s ostrich-like birds, a whale with two blowholes) and have been told before, in original exploration nar- investment in exploration and map-making is clear. intricate decorations of the earlier maps disappear ratives or in histories, or both. But Shoalts is both Following the maps is a photograph of the author in the later ones, showing the transformation of a gifted storyteller and an explorer in his own right, dragging his loaded canoe up a river through north- cartography from an art into an increasingly pre- and his version is compelling on both counts. His ern muskeg. Aligning his modern-day explorations cise science. But as Shoalts shows, they are all rich prose is direct and swift-paced, warmly conver- with those of the past, this photograph suggests that reserves of myth. sational and, at times, jocular (though with a few we also read this book as a sort of genealogical pro- more nudges and winks than I’d like). He draws ject, charting a lineage of which he, too, for better Sarah Wylie Krotz is an assistant professor in attention to compelling details, eccentricities, and and for worse, is a part. the department of English and film studies at the dramas that lend a distinctive flavour to these fig- None of its chapters detail his own explora- University of Alberta. Her book Mapping with ures and the history of which they were a part. His tions (which are the subject of his earlier book, Words: Anglo-Canadian Literary Cartographies, feel for geography is strong and physical. At one Alone Against the North), but Shoalts’s depth of 1789-1916 is being published by University of point he remarks: “It’s easy to forget that the geog- personal experience is arguably what brings the Toronto Press in 2018. raphy of North America is so vast and varied—the histories he describes to life. Although the book is

22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada narrated with much of the distance of a historical these descriptions “shocking,” archaeologists and clearest hero of this book (who could not like the survey, the author’s ability to imagine not just what oral histories confirm that such massacres took founder of the Order of Good Cheer?), with Hearne explorers and backwoods soldiers did but what it place, and, he adds, “there is absolutely nothing and Mackenzie close behind. Although Shoalts is must have felt like to be them makes for riveting in [Hearne’s account] that can’t also be found prone to romantic pronouncements—“The spirit of reading. He is an empathetic narrator who shares in accounts from ancient Greece and Rome, the the Vikings, their restless wanderlust,” he gushes, the insatiable curiosity and drive that propelled Vikings…or for that matter, contemporary conflict “lives on in the spirit of Canadians who continue many of his subjects. Moreover, his understanding zones.” Some of the passages he quotes are contro- to search for traces of these ancient wayfarers”—he of the physical and mental pain and exhaustion versial, however, because they embellish Hearne’s nonetheless gives us well-rounded portraits of men they endured brings us to the visceral core of these journals and field notes. As the literary scholar who erred as often as they succeeded, who relied human exploits. and historian I.S. MacLaren has pointed out, sen- heavily on their motley communities of fellow He makes their experiences palpable, often sationalized descriptions (most famously, that of a travellers, and who, while immortalized by history, uncomfortably so: the fear that must have gripped teenaged Inuit girl “twining around” her murderers’ more often than not died poor and unrecognized. David Thompson and his companions when they “spears like an eel”) appear to have been added by Not surprisingly, the figures that succeeded the contemplated wendigos or discovered footprints Hearne’s ghost writer, likely to satisfy his reader- most admirably were those who forged the strong- far larger than any griz- est relationships with zly’s (were they from Indigenous people, and a mammoth, or some who nurtured loyal net- unknown beast?); the The maps that anchor Shoalts’s story of Canada works of coureurs de nauseating terror and are linked threads of a history shaped not by bois, voyageurs, and grief of those who saw guides. This is not a their friends blasted the conquering of lands so much as by the story of solitary heroes, and slaughtered by but of alliances, col- American militia at Fort land’s unknowability. laborations, and part- Erie; the “foul stench” nerships that included that emanated from important friendships Franklin and his men when they were reduced to ship’s appetite for Gothic and exotic horror. While and marriages. “virtual walking corpses” on the tundra—all such Shoalts is right not to minimize the acts of war and It is undoubtedly a male-dominated history that scenes are rendered with vivid immediacy. Shoalts revenge that occurred during this period, he might Shoalts retells: men led these expeditions and drew registers with particular force those details and have acknowledged not just that this one would not these maps, and it is their perspectives that were plotlines that make readers turn pages, gasp, and have happened without Hearne’s expedition but preserved in published narratives. Yet there is some shudder. I will give this book to my twelve-year-old also that this narrative, like many others from this astonishing female heroism in these pages as well: son to read, but not before bed. era, is not a historical document but rather one that Erik the Red’s daughter, Freydis, “disgusted with The brutality that Shoalts highlights is not begins the work of mythologizing that he continues the cowardice of her male companions,” resolved to merely a plot device, however: he wants his read- here. While this book calls itself “a history,” Shoalts fend for herself; Marguerite de La Roque survived ers to contemplate “an era when violence was the is clearly interested in the generative power of myth for two nearly solitary years on an island (her ser- norm” and survival woefully insecure, perpetually that lies still only half-formed in these stories. He vant, lover, and their child were not so lucky) before threatened by cold, hunger, disease, rebellion, eagerly anticipates, for instance, that “[i]n a couple fishermen rescued her and returned her to France; mutiny, and the haphazard justice of a frontier in of thousand years, when history has mingled with and one wife of Hearne’s Dene guide, Matonabbee, which disputes were frequently solved by duels. The legend, [Alexander] Mackenzie might become to gave birth on Hearne’s Arctic expedition and kept land could be by turns breathtakingly beautiful and Canada what Odysseus is to Greece.” up with the party after 52 hours of labour, “carry- unremittingly harsh. Europeans, Canadians, and Some of the book’s epic heroes are more ing her infant and everything else required of her.” Indigenous peoples alike could be compassionately sympathetic than others: Cartier was prone to The book is perhaps the most tantalizing in these humane and startlingly cruel. piracy and kidnapping, Jean-François de La moments, leaving the reader wondering about How much truth is there here? Shoalts antici- Roque de Roberval to unduly harsh punishment these women, and the stories they would have told. pates his readers’ reservations most forcefully in (he marooned his relative, Marguerite, on an The grand narrative of epic journeying is also his chapter on Samuel Hearne’s expedition to the uninhabited island for two years as punishment for somewhat tempered by Shoalts’s attention to the Coppermine River. After quoting at length some of an illicit love affair), Pond to volatility and murder, textures of everyday life. His efficient, page-turning the most horrifying descriptions of Dene slaugh- Franklin to inexcusable arrogance, and at least one prose affords glimpses of a different sense of time tering Inuit from Hearne’s published account, of Franklin’s men to cannibalism. The generous and space: the monotony of interludes between he stresses that although many readers will find and peaceable Champlain emerges as perhaps the expeditions; long winters spent hunting and fish- freedom to read week February 25–March 3, 2018

Order Freedom to Read, Visit our Facebook page our annual review of current and join the conversation @Freedom_to_Read censorship issues in Canada, #FTRWeek Freedomand our 2018 postertoread at .ca illustration: jeff lemire

FTRW2018_dec2017_third_cmyk.indd 1 2017-11-14 1:54 PM December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 23 ing, staving off scurvy and dysentery, and trying to keep spirits high; false starts and long trudges back to forts for resupply; and relationships between Europeans and Indigenous peoples that developed Coming up in the LRC slowly rather than in sudden encounters. A few of the quieter parts of this book call to mind those languid scenes in Terrence Malick’s film, The New World, in which time seems to stretch out and grow heavy, days becoming fluid, existence a quiet The all-new David Frum and persistent response to rhythms of earth and andy lamey weather unfamiliar to most of us now. A History emerged in the wake of Canada’s 150th anniversary, but the best parts of this book are unconcerned with traditional nation-building How to raise a dinosaur narratives, nor do they provide unmitigated kate lunau celebrations of the odysseys that led to Canada’s creation. The maps that anchor Shoalts’s story of Canada reveal a slowly evolving understanding of geography that remained incomplete even at the The David Milne we don’t know end of the thousand-odd year period that the book sarah milroy covers. They are linked threads of a history shaped not by the conquering of lands so much as by the land’s unknowability. If nations are narrations, as Benedict Anderson suggests, Shoalts’s version Energy as human history emphasizes the illusoriness of any unified vision of alanna mitchell Canada, and instead reveals a country coming into being through the haphazard and random work of map-makers steeped in largely unattainable dreams. The North’s view of the North Shoalts’s mythmaking is nonetheless limited by marian botsford fraser a version of history and wilderness that has long held sway in Canada, and it is a version that, for all of the messy contours it exposes, keeps white male exploits at its centre. Although he repeatedly points to the Indigenous knowledge upon which these men depended, the book is most prominently a celebration of white-explorer heroism: theirs are the lines on the map that matter, theirs the story that defines the relationship between people and Z c

land in what was to become Canada. Shoalts tells Great reading. this story well, but without any of the kind of irony 3 gifts for V or critical reflection that might prompt readers to Great ideas. just $100! contemplate how much it erases. Some will justifi- Great gift idea! ably question his cartographic selections: other c maps—such as an Indigenous map (of which there Z are several in print, despite his apparent claim to GIFT #1: Gifts are from: the contrary), or one drawn by a woman (Elizabeth

Simcoe comes to mind)—would yield not only dif- Name Name ferent histories, but also different senses of land c OrgaNizatiON OrgaNizatiON and space. These other maps might not lead to that address address unattainable and mythologized place that Shoalts calls “wilderness.” He is drawn to explorers because City PrOv COde City PrOv COde they accessed what he ultimately argues—unfortu- nately without the nuance that might have rescued GIFT #2: c ORdER By 12 dECEmBER! him from triteness—is Canada’s wild “heart.” The c irony that he might have registered, in the end, Name q Please start or q renew my own: $ 56.00+tax * is that the history of exploration, while it brought q Plus ____ 1-year gifts for $40 each: $_____+tax * OrgaNizatiON many men and women into close contact with what * Please add GST/HST on $56 and $40 prices: they thought of as wilderness but others thought address ON: $7.28, $5.20; NL, NS, NB, PE: $8.40, $6.00; Rest of of as land and home, also facilitated the imperial Canada: $2.80, $2.00. $______Outside Canada: Add $30 each for postage: $______and colonial expansion that was this wilderness’s City PrOv COde undoing. Hearne was looking for minerals, many Z OR: 3 gifts for $100 and save the tax! $100.00 others for a trade route to China; Thompson’s GIFT #3: + _____ additional gifts (just $33 each!) $______maps of the northwest would draw others not (Enclose an additional sheet if necessary. Additional gifts are also tax-free.) included in these pages who were looking for—and Name Total Gift Order: $______found—arable land destined for mass agricultural OrgaNizatiON expansion. The very men who charted the so-called q Cheque enclosed q Please bill me later wilderness also foreshadowed its demise. This is a address Please charge my: q Visa q MasterCard story not as easily spotted on Shoalts’s maps, but it’s Card No. ______there, too, nestled with all the others in the tangle City PrOv COde Expiry: ____/____ Signature: ______we call Canada. LRC Gift Subscriptions, PO Box 8, Stn K The Literary Review of Canada is published 10

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24 LRC Xmas 2017 housereviewcanada.ca ad 171115a.indd 1 Literary Review2017-11-15 of 05:47:16 Canada PM Anti-Know-Nothings and Great Unknowns The bittersweet lure of culinary nostalgia i a n m o s b y

bounty of the now rare White Winter Pearmain— Cherokee, and other First Nations farmers and The Ghost Orchard: The Hidden History of don’t survive the winter. It’s here that Humphreys became so numerous that, as Humphreys notes, the Apple in North America begins the book: in an attempt to grieve and pro- “there were once ‘Indian orchards’ literally every- Helen Humphreys cess the loss of her friend by attempting to tell the where in what is now the United States.” HarperCollins history of a world that has been lost forever. The story, as one might expect, is a tragic one. 256 pages, hardcover The book, in other words, is a kind of medita- Humphreys suggests that, in addition to facilitat- ISBN 9781443451512 tion on death, loss, and memory that is as much an ing the creation of unique Indigenous varieties of autobiography as it is a history. And, to this end, apples—like the Equinetelle, Buff, and Nickajack Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race the so-called “hidden” histories that Humphreys apple varieties developed by Cherokee grow- Naben Ruthnum recounts are wonderfully sensory ones, shot ers—these orchards also attracted the interest of Coach House Press through with the tastes and textures of ripe apples, land-hungry European settlers. “First, of course,” 144 pages, softcover the smells of orchards, and memories of conversa- Humphreys writes, “the original owners had to be ISBN 9781552453513 tions with a beloved grandfather. vanquished. The apple thus became, in its infancy Structurally, at least, Ghost Orchard is organized in North America, a tool for colonialism.” The result, Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead: as a series of chapter-length historical vignettes. according to Humphreys, was the violent removal Recipes and Recollections From These include histories of the so-called “Indian of Indigenous peoples from both the lands where a Syrian Pioneer orchards” of the colonial period; of Ann Jessop, the these orchards once stood—with only the common Habeeb Salloum Quaker “Annie Appleseed” whose efforts to bring place name, “Indian orchard,” often remaining— University of Regina Press different apple varieties to the Americas predated but also the erasure of the apples developed by 336 pages, softcover Johnny Appleseed’s by nearly 50 years; the water- Indigenous farmers, as well, with “many apple var- ISBN 9780889775183 colour artists for the United States Department of ieties in the Indigenous orchards either renamed Agriculture whose late 19th- and early 20th-century when the whites took over the land, or…left to go number of both real and paintings are, in many cases, the only images we extinct.” imagined ghost orchards populate Helen have left of many apple varieties; and, finally, of the Humphreys’ reflections on these Indigenous A Humphreys’ beautiful, evocative book, orchards planted by the poet Robert Frost. orchards highlight both the opportunities and The Ghost Orchard: The Hidden History of the Apple Humphreys’ history of apples is meant to be dangers inherent in the book’s broader nostalgia- in North America. The most unsettling of these more evocative than exhaustive. The chapter on tinged narrative. The story itself really does come has to be the “glossary of lost apples” at the end Frost, for instance, is really less about apples than as a revelation, painting a portrait often at odds of the book. Little more than an alphabetical list about the American poet’s grief over the loss of his with the stories Americans and Canadians tell and brief description of a few dozen “now extinct” friend Edward Thomas, whose life was cut tragic- themselves about their pasts. But it never quite apple varieties, the glossary leaves the reader feel- ally short during the bloody and senseless final feels like the whole story. As Humphreys travels ing genuinely haunted. around Eastern Canada Even just the names— and the United States Anti-Know-Nothing, Humphreys at one point seems to describe the in search of this hid- Frazier’s Hard Skin, den history, the reader Great Unknown, Keep Senecas as going “extinct,” falling for one of can’t help but see the Forever, Republican present-day world as Pippin—makes these the oldest settler colonial myths there is—that a disenchanted one, a untasteable apples Indigenous peoples really did mostly disappear. landscape of longing appear on the page like and regret. Following a spectres of a lost world, scene where she drives of a time when our industrial food system hadn’t years of the First World War. Apples, here, are more to upstate New York in search of a lost Seneca yet reduced the number of commercial apple of an excuse to talk about life, loss, and friend- orchard and village—now “a scrappy gas station varieties from nearly 17,000 to the fewer than 100 ship—and to reflect upon Humphreys’ own life and and mini mart” and long-since plundered burial grown today. relationship with Joanne—than they are the centre mound—Humphreys writes: “The past is all around This ghost orchard glossary perhaps best cap- of the story. Other chapters, though, really do live us if we look carefully and can figure out a way to tures the tone of a book that opens with the line: up to the subtitle’s claim to be a “Hidden History read it.” “Last fall I was eating wild apples, and a close friend of the Apple in North America.” Many readers, While this is no doubt true, the problem is that of mine was slowly dying.” Both Humphreys’ friend for instance, will be particularly surprised by the nostalgia—particularly nostalgia for lost worlds Joanne and the wild apple tree—with its autumn history of the so-called Indian orchards planted and stories—tends to obscure as much as it reveals. and maintained by First Nations in the 17th, 18th, Although Humphreys was happy to make the drive Ian Mosby is a historian of food, health, and col- and 19th centuries. Though apples aren’t native to down to Geneva, New York, to stand on the site onialism in Canada. He is currently an adjunct North America, they were quickly integrated into of a Seneca ghost orchard with a tragic history, lecturer in the Dalla Lana school of public health at Indigenous agricultural systems alongside pre- she could have just as easily talked to some living, the University of Toronto and a postdoctoral fellow contact staples like beans, corn, and squash. They breathing Senecas about their own community’s in the department of geography at the University of were planted by Tuscarora, Seneca, Algonquian, story. After all, there are still a number of thriving Guelph.

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 25 Seneca communities in both New York state and Ontario, all of which are within two or three hours of Geneva. Instead, Humphreys at one point seems to describe the Senecas as going “extinct” in 1955 and later writes, rather tellingly: “It is no secret now that white settlers very effectively overlaid their culture on North American Indigenous society and made [the latter] all but disappear.” Falling for one of the oldest settler colonial myths there is—that Indigenous peoples really did mostly dis- appear, that they haven’t been fighting furiously for their lands, lives, and cultures this entire time— Humphreys shows how, sometimes, the stories we tell ourselves about the past say more about us than they do about the past itself.

he dangers of uncritical nostalgia, particu- Tlarly in the way they inform diasporic Indian writing, are the focus of Naben Ruthnum’s smart, slim volume, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race. Organizing the book as a set of three interrelated essays on the topics named in the book’s subtitle, Ruthnum attempts to both define and critique what he terms the increasingly dominant South Asian literary genre of “currybooks.” This is a genre that is often identifiable by the images of saris, mangos, or cardamom pods on the cover and that Ruthnum remembers lining the bookshelves of his Mauritian parents while growing up in Kelowna, British Columbia—books that he studiously avoided read- ing for most of his life. Ruthnum opens Curry with his own currybook story. It starts with his only ever trip to Mauritius as a nine-year-old in Bart Simpson pajamas and a Chicago Bulls cap—a trip that is originally planned which, since the 1980s, this genre has come to rant experience or a second-generation child living in order to visit his elderly grandmother but ends dominate the popular narrative of the Indian dias- in the west trying to find out where they fit in. Curry, up including her funeral. Food plays a prominent pora (at least, that is, in the minds of white North in such stories, acts both as a marker of difference role in his memory of a traditional Hindu funeral American and European audiences). and a powerful connection to homeland and cul- whose pyre and torches remind Ruthnum’s child- One of the reasons curry has emerged as such a ture. But it’s also a symbol of a kind of authenticity hood self of the Return of the Jedi, “the only referent central metaphor for diasporic experience, it seems, that simply cannot be found in a store-bought curry I had at that age.” is that it’s such a simultaneously familiar, exotic, powder or jar of Patak’s curry paste. Instead, it’s and endlessly flexible one, a “concept too large to something that can often only be found in the curry Before, or after, there was a curry. Vegetables, be properly controlled by a recipe.” There isn’t, after of the protagonist’s mother—a curry that can never a thick sauce, rice that I couldn’t get the knack all, a singular ideal of the true, authentic curry. It’s really be recreated by that second-generation child of clumping and thrusting into the sauce with a recipe and a concept that can’t even be captured or captured by a written recipe. the bird-beak grip my uncles and cousins by a common set of ingredients or cooking styles. Like Humphreys’ lost orchards, these “authen- demoed for me. It had been forks and knives What’s more, it continues to travel and change. tic” curries tend to trade in a kind of nostalgia that up until this day, as it would be afterwards. For Ruthnum, the immigrant cooks who invented does as much to obscure as it does to illuminate Tiny cuts I didn’t know I had at the base of my chicken tikka masala so as to better accommodate the past. And it’s a nostalgia that, for Ruthnum at cuticles tasted the curry as I did, the elements British tastes and preferences “weren’t undoing least, has become a kind of trap for South Asian of sauce that bit my tongue taking purchase in centuries of tradition” but, instead, “were innovat- writers. “South Asian Writer” Ruthnum argues, “is the blood there, leaving a sting that lasted. ing and adapting a living cuisine that had sustained an identity, not just a pair of adjectives and a noun.” itself not by pandering to foreign cultures, but by What’s more, it’s an identity that “establishes a tacit Ruthnum then adds: “This is how books like these absorbing them.” promise to an audience that is seeking it, whether are supposed to start, isn’t it?” After all, even the chilies that give curry its sig- the author intended it or not.” That promise, of Here, then, are some of the basic tropes of nature heat—that seemingly essential part of what course, is an authenticity “left behind in another the currybook genre. These are novels, memoirs, makes a curry a curry—aren’t native to the sub- time and place.” cookbooks, essays, and films that use some curry- continent but were, in Ruthnum’s telling, “planted In the end, then, it’s clear that the currybook infused variation of an awkward “coming home” on our shores by some spice-route jagoff.” Drawing genre isn’t a problem because it produces bad story like the one above or, perhaps even more particularly upon the work of historian Lizzie fiction (or memoirs, or films, or cookbooks) but common, the now-ubiquitous story of the second- Collingham, Ruthnum highlights the ways in which because it’s a kind of straitjacket for diasporic generation, westernized child trying (and usually Indian recipes for curry “have been adapted or South Asian writers. It’s also a narrative that tends failing) to recreate their mother’s famously authen- altered to suit rulers, visitors, and colonial intruders to reproduce the racial assumptions and colonial tic curry while living far from a diasporic family for hundreds of years.” Like the English language or imaginings of white North American and European and community. These are stories, in other words, complex identities like “Indian” or “South Asian,” readers. “Telling the same story of brownness over that “typically detail a wrenching sense of being in then, curry is “a colonial endpoint: everything and over,” Ruthnum argues, “doesn’t only express a two worlds at once, torn between the traditions of ended up in it, and it remains infinitely change- coherent notion of race and history to white read- the east and the liberating, if often unrewarding, able, even as its complex colonial roots became ers, it creates an impression of the commonalities freedoms of the west.” Looking at currybook tropes disguised as homeland authenticity.” among a brown audience who may come from as they appear in everything from an episode of Yet it’s the idea of the authentic curry—often vastly divided pasts, and have little in common in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and the film Bend It contrasted with the take-out Indian restaurant’s the present, other than they ‘all look the same’ in Like Beckham—all the way to the literary works of bastardized western version—that’s always being communities where they’re part of a box-tick min- diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie or Monica sought by the currybook’s protagonists, whether ority category.” Ali—Ruthnum tries to grapple with the ways in that’s a chef looking to create an authentic restau-

26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ooked at another way, though, the basic struc- Lture of the currybook—those personal stories and family histories as often told through culinary memories and metaphors—often works because Dante and Beatrice Bookends the sensory experience of cooking and eating is so profoundly evocative of both personal and collect- They face in the opposite direction ive memories. A good example of how this can be as if there was a final quarrel done well is the new edition of Habeeb Salloum’s and each—to preserve the dignity wonderful and revelatory Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead: Recipes and Recollections from a Syrian of their rep—chose silence Pioneer. (The original, published in 2005, was titled over accusations. The silence Arab Cooking on a Saskatchewan Homestead.) makes an elegance that together Expertly weaving recipes with both personal and collective histories, Salloum tells a complex and largely forgotten story of the early Arab immigrants with their famous intimacies to Canada that somehow manages to celebrate and makes us somewhat uneasy honour the foods of his childhood while avoiding and for a moment we distrust each other too. many of the nostalgic clichés and pitfalls inherent in the food memoir genre. In most literature the lovers must balance The hidden history at the heart of Salloum’s their poise with a snarling desire beautiful cookbook, memoir, and celebration of to fuck. How useless to say “the snow Arab cuisine is, in part, the story of his own family’s struggle as Syrian immigrants to Canada during the is falling on the lake” and “the stars early 20th century. Salloum’s father, George Jacob are bolted to the car’s hood” when fire Salloum, left the town of Qaraoun in the Bekaa is taking over the world and the bodies Valley of what was then Syria for the Canadian Prairies in 1923. His wife, Shams, and their two sons—including a one-year old Habeeb—arrived are charred on one side. They both see it a few years later to join him on their homestead in but from their conflicting points of view. Gouvernor, Saskatchewan, where they began their There were ascensions—the new lives in a house built using clay, straw and water. Habeeb Salloum was just one of the roughly grand ascension, he might be thinking. 3,000 Syrian immigrants who had settled in Canada We’re saved. But she’s done with guiding by the 1920s. But, as he reveals through a lovely and is bored with the law. mix of essays, recipes, and historical meditations, his family’s story is emblematic of a larger “silent saga waiting to be told”—a story that is now more relevant than ever given the arrival of tens of thou- sands of Syrian refugees in recent years. Although cookbooks often don’t get the kind of respect they deserve in literary circles or by profes- sional historians—something that has a lot to do with the fact that, for much of the past two centur- ies, cookbooks have been seen as the exclusive domain of mostly female readers and writers—they have, nonetheless, always been the most popular and arguably most effective form of food writing. This is because recipes enable a form of reading Jake Kennedy that doesn’t just happen on the page or in readers’ heads but that, one hopes, also moves its way into the kitchen, onto the plate and, eventually, into Jake Kennedy is the author of three collections of poetry: The Lateral (Snare Books, 2010), their mouths. It’s one thing to read about food, Apollinaire’s Speech to the War Medic (BookThug, 2011), and Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt it’s another thing altogether to sit down and eat it. by Children at Play (BookThug, 2015). He is also the recipient of the Robin Blaser Poetry What’s more, cookbooks have a potential staying Award (2011), the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing (2010), and the bpNichol power that isn’t really available to other forms of Chapbook Award (2007). His most recent book, Made Line Sing is an invented biography of non-fiction. A good cookbook, after all, is meant New York City poet-architect Madeline Gins (OPR, 2016). to really be used—to be read and re-read, to be stained with grease and marked with annotations— until you get that recipe just right and can start making it from memory. world’s major producers of chickpeas, this was petition on the market. Rather, it was the powerful An underappreciated strength of cookbooks, decidedly not the case during the interwar period. desire of Salloum’s family, like most of their Arab though, is their capacity for storytelling. Salloum, Arab immigrants like Salloum’s parents, it seems, and Syrian neighbours, to simply assimilate and be for his part, uses recipes as more than just lists of were the first to plant these hearty crops on the treated as ordinary Canadians. Arab food, after all, ingredients and instructions. Instead, he expertly Prairies and they were lucky that they did. Because acted as a powerful marker of difference during this mixes the culinary with the historical and the per- legumes like chickpeas and lentils were so perfectly period—something that Salloum learned early on, sonal, in the process telling a fascinating story of the adapted to Syria’s desert climate, they were among as his classmates regularly taunted him for being a people who, like his parents, were making bulgur, the only crops to thrive in the midst of the dust bowl “foreigner,” “black Syrian” and “garlic eater.” tahini, hummus, and yogurt on the Prairies decades that enveloped southern Saskatchewan during the It is clear in Arab Cooking on a Prairie before these foods would become common staples 1930s. Homestead that one of its main goals is to cele- in kitchens throughout Canada. Salloum’s neighbors, it turned out, weren’t so brate and commemorate the Syrian culture that As it turns out, it was these Syrian dishes—and lucky. “None of our fellow farmers were familiar his family kept hidden as much as possible and chickpeas and lentils, in particular—that enabled with lentils,” Salloum writes, “and we, like other that, as a child and a young man, Salloum had Salloum’s family to survive the harsh years of the Arab immigrants, kept the knowledge of cultivating actively tried to escape. “Like most Syrian immi- Great Depression. Although Canada is now the lentils well hidden” and “safe from the prying eyes grants of that period,” Salloum writes, “we wanted world’s leading producer of lentils and one of the of our neighbours.” The reason wasn’t fear of com- to become white—what we saw then as being

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 27 assimilation. “I have no doubt that if I had not left the farm,” he writes, “like the majority of the early Arab homesteading immigrants I would have dis- appeared into Anglo-Saxon society, too ashamed Birds of Cathedrals to expose my origin.” Added to this is Salloum’s realization, later in It must happen all the time — the dip and fall, life, of how much his own family’s survival on the dark flit of a bird through the eaves, Prairies was dependent upon the dispossession unpanicked, unperturbed, the great marble pillars of Indigenous peoples from their traditional lands with shadows of branches and leaves made strange. and territories. “No one acknowledged the fact,” Salloum writes, “that, like almost all the Western The builders had been half-crazed, ruin over ruin, pioneers, we were living on stolen land.” Even as a begging attention — these piles of stones, child subject to racist taunts and bullying, Salloum this volume of air. Ramp after ramp, remembers internalizing his white schoolmates’ close enough for God to see his face. racism toward their First Nations and Métis neigh- bours. “Feeling inferior, we aped everything our The bird narrowed through a hole in the ceiling classmates said or did,” he recalls: “This was espe- three hundred feet up, whole and holy, cially true when it came to our attitudes toward First Nations peoples.” and it was not stealing bits of gold leaf to adorn its nest, Food, in other words, is used in Arab Cooking on and it was not pausing to gaze at the face of the Christ child, a Prairie Homestead to evoke both bitter and sweet and whether I were there to mark its sudden wing histories, histories of plenty and want. Although and flutter, it cared not, neither did it spin. each chapter highlights a different food that helps to tell the story of Salloum’s Prairie childhood— whether it’s qawarma (preserved meat), chickpeas, dandelion, Saskatoon berries, kishk (powdered cheese), or yogurt—they also each tell compli- cated stories about what it meant to be a Syrian Laura Cok immigrant in Saskatchewan during these hard, lean years. The recipes, of course, are all chosen presumably because they’re delicious. But the book Originally from California, Laura Cok now resides in Toronto. Her work has been published allows you to do something else besides simply in literary journals including the Rusty Toque, Contemporary Verse 2, Prairie Fire, and Event. enjoy their flavours. It allows you to place these She recently won the University of Toronto alumni poetry contest. Her poem “Half-cursed” flavours in context, to think about what it meant to was published in the June 2017 issue of the LRC. make these foods on a lonely homestead in a very different time and place. Food writing, when done well, offers so much possibility. It can remind us that the things we take for granted are the product of complicated, ‘undeniably Canadian.’ ” The fact that the main The book, in other words, is somewhat nostalgic often unpleasant, histories and that these stor- Syrian immigrant lobby group in Canada success- for the food of Salloum’s youth and of his home- ies—whether they’ve been lost or hidden or have fully convinced immigration authorities to consider land, but not for his life on the Canadian Prairies. become dangerous clichés—can nonetheless allow Syrians as being “white” in origin during the 1930s He refers at one point to Saskatchewan as a land us to think about the world in novel and expansive shows that Salloum and his siblings weren’t alone. where he and his brothers “tasted bitterness.” And ways. We are what we eat, sure, but we are also a For Salloum, himself, it was only when he left the it’s not just the years of blowing dust and failed product of the way we think about what we eat. Prairies and moved to Toronto that he began to crops: The racist taunts from the other children Good food writing, then, is most nourishing when question his desire to escape his Syrian identity and colour many of his otherwise fond recollections of it asks us to rethink and challenge those stories we assimilate into Canadian society. “First I became Syrian cuisine. At one point, Salloum suggests that, thought we knew, or that we have always simply proud of my Syrian ancestry,” he writes, “then, as had he stayed in Saskatchewan with his parents, taken for granted. I became more enlightened, of my Arab heritage.” the price would have been nothing less than total

28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada People as Platform What Uber, bespoke perfume makers, and the rest of us are building c o l i n h o r g a n

Platform Capitalism Nick Srnicek Polity Press 120 pages, softcover ISBN 9781509504879

n Amazon’s Mechanical Turk job board, a recent posting simply read O“enter missing data.” The task was described as “add and edit data from a pdf.” The pay: 25 cents. Amazon describes Mechanical Turk, a website that has been operational since 2005, as providing “an on-demand scalable, human work- force to complete jobs that humans can do better than computers.” Indeed, that is the purpose of many of the Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) listed on the site: getting a human brain to figure out something that artificial intelligence is not able to do, yet. A vast network of people inform the automatic smart technology that is changing our world by making everything easier, from Google image searches to identifying objectionable content. Somewhere along the line, a human had to tell the computers what’s what. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is designed partly to find and fill that information void—the site’s tagline describes it as “artificial artificial intelligence.” Writing in 2014 for the technology site Gizmodo, Eric Limer described working as an MTurker—the slang for the roughly half-million workers in 190 The humans in the machine countries that Amazon says are available to com- (From a 1789 work by Joseph Racknitz explaining the workings of a chess-playing automaton. plete HITs. “If you have a functional cerebral cortex, Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) an internet connection, and a few minutes to spare, you can pick up a handful of odd jobs—the odd- wage, subject to volatility throughout the year. Of parallel cultural trend, the rise of hipsters, against est of jobs—and make a few bucks, pennies, and those jobs, one might, in time, prove to be a perma- this grim economic reality. In his paper. “ ‘Hipster nickels at a time,” Limer wrote. “It’s weird, fascinat- nent career. This is a reality of a job market that has capitalism’ in the age of austerity? Polanyi meets ing, perplexing, and a little depressing, all at once.” tightened in the aftermath of an economic down- Bourdieu’s new petite bourgeoisie,” published Limer was describing one small employment niche turn, and remains largely occupied by an older gen- earlier this year in Cultural Sociology, Scott argues in the mid-2010s, but he may as well have been eration working later into life than was previously that the new culture economy represented by this speaking much more generally. The last decade considered normal. Freelancing is, for many, all cohort—those “makers of bespoke perfume and has seen a transformation in not only the nature of there is—even with a status marker such as higher beauty products, niche microbrewers, boutique tea work, but also in workers themselves, and thus in education. That “on-demand workforce” that blenders, producers of ethical hair products, vint- our communities and cities. Amazon brags it can summon via its Mechanical ners and sommeliers, tattoo artists, purveyors of To speak to a young person today is to learn Turk site is much larger than the 500,000 potential recycled fashions and retro furnishings, independ- firsthand about the much-lamented “gig economy.” fulfillers of HITs; it has become a significant part ent vinyl record pressers,” and on and on—needs to Work in the post-great recession era has come to of the overall economy, particularly for its young- be explored via the lens of production, not merely mean, for this demographic, a personal schedule est cohort, millennials. Between October 2008 and as a pattern of consumption or a social phenom- filled with a handful of jobs, temporary or contract 2009, the overall category of self-employed workers enon. Whereas indulging in a specialty craft might, positions, which together might equal a livable in Canada grew by 115,000; last year, another 60,000 in decades past, have been seen as a rejection of, became self-employed. or at least deviation from, the mainstream, this Colin Horgan is a writer and journalist in Toronto. Australian sociologist Michael Scott situates a kind of small-scale production has now become

December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 29 the mainstream. Indeed, it now reflects the reverse platform came from, and where it might take us. competitors and subsidiaries (anything from engineering of what used to be called corporate He traces its rise in tandem with what he sees as a TaskRabbit to Instagram) are now key compon- cooptation. Rather than high street fashion retailers longer-term change in the economy, as far back as ents in the gig economy. They either provide work stealing the markers of cool—in the dynamic that the 1970s when, he argues, there was a shift “away directly or are the mechanism by which workers once made grunge a runway look, for example— from secure employment and unwieldy industrial promote themselves, either to sell their wares or today’s independent producers often aggressively behemoths and towards flexible labour and lean services or, in the case of social media, garner cash pursue the possibility of selling out. “The Man” is business models.” There followed the 1990s dotcom from brands using their accounts as advertising a benevolent presence, a pathway out of economic boom and bust, during which ongoing trends space (these are the so-called “influencers”). precarity. such as massive venture capital investment in Yet, as Srnicek suggests, the point of platforms This freelance employment movement, bred tech, increased outsourcing, and looser monetary is probably not really entrepreneurship. Behind by necessity, has in turn helped to deconstruct policies took root. Still, the aftermath of the 2008 the language of professional freedom and choice whatever barriers might have been left between recession for Srnicek marks a turning point, as gov- (“Work that puts you first. Drive when you want, the individual and the marketplace. Until the early ernments tightened their belts and key interest rates make what you need,” Uber’s recruitment site 2000s a rejection, real or apparent, of the structures dropped to near zero. It was an important moment declares) is all the information that is gathered of consumerist society in some form or another in the development of what is now an increasingly about every transaction, interaction, or activity remained a marker of cool. Now it is difficult to platform-driven economy, argues Srnicek, a digital the platform enables, whether directly on its inter- draw a line between the self and the system. In economy lecturer at King’s College London. That’s face (usually an app), or outside it. And, as far as the era of the gig economy and the social-media because, with the resulting reduced rate of return Srnicek is concerned, data ought to be considered personality, individuals are encouraged to monet- on a wide range of financial assets, investors seek- as something much more than simply tabulated ize themselves, and the assets they leverage are not ing higher yields had to turn to “increasingly risky information stored on servers somewhere. Data, merely apartments or cars—skills, talents, hobbies, assets—by investing in unprofitable and unproven he writes, is “raw material that must be extracted, and sensibilities all become saleable products. And tech companies, for instance.” and the activities of users [are]…the natural source selling those would not be possible without the Among these risky ventures are the platforms of this raw material.” Data extraction, he points out, simultaneous rise of another new economic arena: that have now so entrenched themselves in life they “is becoming a key method of building a monopo- the platform. are often used as verbs to describe the tasks they listic platform.” The more data that a company can “At the most general level, platforms are digital perform. Srnicek lumps them into five, occasion- gather, and the more it can link it to other data it has infrastructures that enable two or more groups ally overlapping, groupings: advertising (includ- or purchases elsewhere, the more refined its service to interact. They therefore position themselves as ing Google and Facebook); cloud (Amazon Web becomes. At some point, the platform becomes so intermediaries that bring together different users: Services, of which MTurk is a part, and Salesforce); good at what it does that it not only outperforms customers, advertisers, service providers, produ- industrial (GE and Siemens lease industrial equip- the competition, but also effectively transforms cers, suppliers, and even physical objects,” Nick ment, as well as sell it outright, thus becoming from luxury into necessity. Uber, for instance, wants Srnicek writes in Platform Capitalism. “Rather than providers as much as manufacturers); product its cars to be so efficient that everyone stops using having to build a marketplace from the ground up, a (Spotify); and lean (Uber, Airbnb) platforms. other modes of transport, be they public or private. platform provides the basic infrastructure to medi- It is the first and last of that collection—the The same goes for Facebook: when enough people ate between different groups.” advertising and lean platforms—that are perhaps organize their lives via the platform, so must every- From that anodyne description, Srnicek builds of most concern to the post–recession freelancer. one else, or risk social exclusion. an illuminating 120-page dissertation on where the Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and their smaller Defining data as a resource is a critical distinc-

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30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada tion for Srnicek, and its implications are potentially current state. Lean platforms like Uber or Airbnb ated by that disruption further contributes to job vast. First, it provides perspective to what we do may come under increased government regulation losses, and so on—something may happen to us, online. We are not, for instance, surfing waves of or more simple financial constraints, for instance. individually, too. The expanding platform econ- information so much as we are the waves. It implies Since Srnicek’s book was released, this has indeed omy could continue to undermine labour laws, something more for those facing a dire economic started to happen. Calls for regulating the major or change the traffic patterns of our cities, or the present and questionable financial future. If data is tech platforms—and even of trust-busting—have assumptions about the stability of our democra- the foundation for the platform economy, and we begun to gather momentum in Washington, D.C. cies—all of which would affect our lives. But, at a are all the providers of that data, then we are each in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, personal level, something stranger occurs. More in a certain way quite rich. The platforms need our and the retrospective accounting of how misinfor- of us, perhaps, begin selling the craft projects we activity and, as with Amazon’s Mechanical Turks, mation spread online during the campaign. In the make on the weekends on Etsy for extra money or our brainpower—not only to gather data but also U.K., Uber and other lean service-oriented plat- renovate the basement to accommodate travelers refine it and understand what it means. Does this forms have come under scrutiny for their failure via Airbnb. We, perhaps, also come to view our make us—all the users who shop and read and play to provide drivers and delivery people with things friendship networks as opportunities to market our games and share our reflections online—labourers like holiday pay or a minimum wage. In 2018, data social media accounts as ad space, rather than for of a sort, creating a lucrative product? Srnicek con- itself will be more closely regulated, at least in the old-fashioned human connection. Or, as we strap siders this idea. “If our online interactions are free European Union, which will require tech compan- more Fitbits to our wrists to learn the data of our labour, then these companies must be a significant ies to collect explicit user consents before they sleep cycles and steps to make our bodies better at boon to capitalism overall—a whole new landscape use personal information, as well further enshrine both, we become not merely interested in the data of exploited labour has been opened up,” he writes. the “right to be forgotten.” As the Financial Times we collect about ourselves, but driven by it, and “If this is not free labour, then these firms are para- reported in August, the sweeping changes could invested in the idea that it can describe us better sitical on other value-producing industries and cost tech companies millions as they move to and define us better than simple language might. global capitalism is in a more dire state.” Srnicek redesign products. For companies like Facebook, In short, we will begin to regard our world, believes the latter to be more accurate. the cost—this time—is manageable. But more legis- and all things in it, as either an opportunity for At some point, we will not matter as much to lation will come, as will more ad blockers and regu- efficiency, or as an untapped financial resource— that framework anyway. Once the deep learning lation about ad transparency, and the challenges or both. In so doing, we will travel well beyond has perfected its algorithmic pathways beyond a will mount for major platforms monetizing data. entrepreneurship, as we know it, or job freedom. certain threshold, it is conceivable that humans will If advertising cash dries up entirely, an expanded This is something darker. On the way to shaping no longer be necessary to refine data on Amazon’s internet of things—connected appliances and our economy to suit their own needs, the platforms Mechanical Turk site or, in the case of Uber, act cars—might allow Google to turn “every good…into will change us, too, making us more like them—to as nodes tracing the most efficient routes across a a service that charges by the use: cars, computers, borrow a phrase, a kind of artificial artificial intel- network of streets. A point will be crossed where doors, refrigerators, toilets.” Combined with con- ligence. Our lives will thus not merely be uberized human contribution becomes unnecessary, where tinued stagnant wage growth, and rising inequality, in an exterior sense; we will come to think of our- we cannot make the platforms and the systems they Srnicek writes, “this future depicts a world with a selves and what we do as a system, an algorithm, a have created any better. massively increased digital divide.” network. Each of us will become, more and more, a Srnicek argues that before we reach that junc- Along the way to that future—perhaps one platform. ture, the platform economy will have either mostly in which everything is “uberized,” where work collapsed, or become a pared-down version of its becomes ever more balkanized and the data cre-

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December 2017 reviewcanada.ca 31 Letters

r e : “ n o rt h e r n s h a d ow s ,” b y creative solutions to the dilemmas Marche articu- dren. They are Canadians.” Look out, Pierre Berton! s t e p h e n m a r c h e ( n ov e m b e r 2017) lates are thwarted at both larger and smaller pub- I’d much rather read a Stephen Marche short lishers. We are stuck, once again, with a Canadian story about those kids. I’m sure it would be true, ’m very grateful to Stephen Marche for his essay literary culture that offers few outlets for enlarging good, and inappropriate. Iabout CanLit’s colonial habit, which nails our our creative possibilities. two biggest blind spots: wilful ignorance of the randy boyagoda residential schools that destroyed Indigenous lives, stephen henighan toronto, ontario families, communities, and languages from 1880 to guelph, ontario 1996; and the exhaustion of the tokenistic model of r e : “ p r i m u s e x t r a pa r e s ,” b y m e l multicultural literature. r e : “ n o rt h e r n s h a d ow s ,” b y ca p p e ( n ov e m b e r 2017) One point that remains latent in Marche’s essay s t e p h e n m a r c h e ( n ov e m b e r 2017) is that the Canada Council’s formal position “oppos- y good friend Mel Cappe showers praise ing appropriation” threatens to impose token- read Stephen Marche’s typically brash and bril- Mon my book Prime Ministerial Power: Its ization on literary presses, many of which already Iliant essay with much interest, not least as a Origins under Macdonald, Laurier and Borden, hold their breath, fearing that their funding will be writer who can identify with any number of the but observes that the work “goes up to the line of jeopardized, each time they publish a book that experiences he describes. My own first novel, about insight, revelation and discernment, but does not diverges from the tokenistic model. Marche sug- a genocidal African warlord who moves to Canada quite go over.” I take that as high praise, though it gests that contemporary writers should approach and becomes a convenience store clerk, resulted in was not meant that way. I drove my research and their multicultural surroundings the way Alice a few awkward conversations on the literary festival my book to the limit of what documentation could Munro “watched the women she grew up around”: circuit; I had to explain that I was not African, had yield. His remark reminds me of the wonderful John “she judged them and betrayed their confidences.” never been to Africa, and had no plans to visit any- Hiatt song “One Step Over the Line,” which applies He writes, obviously, as an author published by a time soon. Instead, I relied on the arrogance of a very well to Cappe: large press. Those of us who have been doing just young writer and opined, to various audiences, that When I look into your eyes that outside the protective cordon of literary agents Dante never went to Hell before writing “Inferno,” See the world cut down to size and large commercial publishers are aware that the so why couldn’t a kid born and raised in Oshawa Baby don’t apologize Canada Council was already hostile to this sort of by Sri Lankan immigrants write about Africa? My Takin’ me one step over the line writing well before Simon Brault and Steven Loft next novel presented the opposite problem: the last made their declaration; now it will get worse. thing I wanted anyone to make of a novel about Sri Going over the line would be the prerogative As a white immigrant with no clear country of Lanka, published two years after the brutal con- of the able reviewer, Cappe, and not the writer. origin who has studied languages and eavesdropped clusion of its brutal civil war, was that I had some The subtitle of the book says it all; it was enough in different communities, my own attempts to kind of autobiographical capital by association that to fill 400 pages.Prime Ministerial Power was judge and betray have produced four novels writ- rendered the novel itself more relevant, authentic, written without the benefit of seances with the ten from the points of view of people who differ etc. My third book was a biography of a neocon- long-deceased (well, I considered it), let alone from me in culture, race, language, gender, and/or servative Catholic priest who lived most of his life in interviews with insiders who could provide unique sexual orientation. I won’t rehearse here all of the Manhattan. It yielded few questions about appro- understandings of “intellect, intuition, and intim- nervous cavils I heard from editors regarding these priation. My next novel is openly autobiographical, acy.” Readers can only be grateful for the generosity manuscripts (I’ve written elsewhere about some of if in a funhouse mirror sort of way, and if anything of insights only a gifted and witty insider like Cappe these experiences), but it should be obvious that, I will be accused of appropriating the experience could provide on much of the last 50 years. after 2017, it will be even harder to get into print of loved ones, which is an old, old story when it novels based on the activity—a natural one in any comes to writing. In Marche’s essay about the pol- patrice dutil large Canadian city—of listening closely to people itics of appropriation in contemporary Canadian toronto, ontario who are not of your own ethnicity, or, increasingly, literature, what matters is the modifier “cultural” of any conventionally defined ethnicity at all. and what it means, allows, prevents, and extends Marche says that his first novel, Raymond and in our ongoing conversation about what kinds of c o r r e c t i o n Hannah, wouldn’t have been published if it didn’t stories we seek to read and who should be allowed have Jewish characters. Reversing the lens, one to tell those stories. In Anne Kingston’s review of Doctors in Denial by could argue that this year’s Giller Prize win- To all of this, I say meh. Even the most self- Joel Lexchin and Health Advocacy Inc. by Sharon ner, Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Square, in which a aware and thoughtful of these contributions risks Batt from the October 2017 Literary Review of male Jewish author writes in the first person from at some point parroting the very tendencies it Canada, the number cited of deaths caused annu- the point of view of a woman who appears to be a seeks to call out and critique. For instance, after ally by adverse drug reactions was for the United Gentile, would be difficult to publish with a press persuasively attacking Canadian public culture for States and not, as was written, for Canada. While that relied on Canada Council funding. The Canada its simplistic approach to diversity, and pointing there are no good figures for Canada, Lexchin, in Council statement fosters a literary culture where to more interesting and recalcitrant examples of his book Private Profits versus Public Policy: The innovation, in the sense of getting beyond writing individuated pluralist and globalized experience— Pharmaceutical Industry and the Canadian State, as a spokesperson of your perceived ethnicity, is Naben Ruthnum’s, as in his new book Curry, for estimates that there could be as many as 5,600 stymied in its usual location on the bohemian mar- instance—Marche closes by narrating a contem- deaths per year in Canada due to adverse drug gins and can only find an outlet in the commercial porary Heritage Minute about his friend’s family, reactions. presses that can afford to take the risk. But com- recent religious converts: “His children are now… mercial presses are also the most beholden to the what? Should I call them Sikh Catholics? Does that market and the least likely to innovate. In this way, make sense? There’s only one name for those chil-

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