Colony of Requited Dreams China in Africa and the Emergence of a New Outsourcing Hub

On Shakespeare and Batman M J CanLit’s invisible hand • The upside of dying argaeetret H eer A & twood

$6.50 Vol. 24, No. 7 September 2016

Richard Poplak Colony of requited dreams China in Africa and the emergence of a new outsourcing hub

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Emma Hooper Why we sing

John Cruickshank Lying liars

Patrick Brown Another Trudeau in China

Robin Sears Canada’s busiest campaigner

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Back from the Brink Lessons from the Canadian Asset- Backed Commercial Paper Crisis by Paul Halpern, Caroline The Letter and the Cosmos Cakebread, Christopher C. Nicholls, and Poonam Puri How the Alphabet Has Shaped the Western View of the World Back from the Brink goes behind the by Laurence de Looze scenes of the ABCP crisis to examine how a solution was reached and In The Letter and the Cosmos, lessons learned that could prevent or Laurence de Looze explores how mitigate future crises. the alphabet has shaped Western civilization and our daily lives. Read it, and you’ll never look at the alphabet the same way again.

Female Suicide Bombings A Critical Gender Approach by Tanya Narozhna and W. Andy Our Battle for the Human Knight Spirit Over the past fifteen years, there Scientific Knowing, Technical Doing, have been over 150 reported and Daily Living suicide bombings committed by by Willem H. Vanderburg women around the world. This book introduces female suicide bombings This book probes into what is as a socio-political practice and happening to human life in the a product of deeply politicized, beginning of the 21st century and gendered representations. how technological thinking has influenced our lives.

Borderline Canadianness Border Crossings and Everyday Nationalism in Niagara

Constitutional by Jane Helleiner Amendment in Canada Borderline Canadianness offers a unique ethnographic approach to edited by Emmett Macfarlane Canadian border life. This authoritative study highlights the historical and contemporary implications of the Canadian constitutional amendment formula.

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Vol. 24, No. 7 • September 2016 EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarmishta Subramanian [email protected] 3 On Shakespeare, Superheroes and a 18 What George Did MANAGING EDITOR Michael Stevens Zoe Whittall’s brave new novel, The Best Kind Cat-Bird-Human CONTRIBUTING EDITORS of People, explores rape culture as seen from the A conversation Mohamed Huque, Molly Peacock, Jeet Heer and Margaret Atwood inner circle of the accused Robin Roger, Anthony Westell Adèle Barclay 6 Dept. of Misinformation ASSOCIATE EDITORS Judy Stoffman, Beth Haddon Daniel J. Levitan’s A Field Guide To Lies is a 19 Lives of the Poet POETRY EDITOR survival manual for the post-factual era The subject of much posthumous literary Moira MacDougall John Cruickshank snooping, the reclusive poet Elizabeth Bishop is revealed in her work, suggests Eleanor Cook COPY EDITOR Madeline Koch 7 Colony of Requited Dreams Bardia Sinaee China in Africa, and the making of the next ONLINE EDITORS outsourcing hub 20 Blue Notes Diana Kuprel, Jack Mitchell, Donald Rickerd, C.M. Richard Poplak In Tim Falconer’s memoir-cum-study, Bad Singer, an answer to why we sing PROOFREADERS 10 Lost in Syria Emma Hooper Madeline Koch Deborah Campbell’s haunting account of EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS her search to find her fixer, and friend, in 22 Reasonable Doubts Ali Houston, Bardia Sinaee A Disappearance in Damascus The gap between religious rights and the rights RESEARCH Juliet O’Neill of the rest Rob Tilley Suanne Kelman DESIGN 13 The Orient Express James Harbeck 25 Adventures of a political Barbarian Lost, Alexandre Trudeau’s whirlwind, ADVERTISING/SALES and sometimes cliché-rich, tour of China gun-for-hire Michael Wile Patrick Brown In Campaign Confessions, John Laschinger tells [email protected] 14 Last Words tales from his 50-odd campaigns in Canada and DIRECTOR, SPECIAL PROJECTS beyond Michael Booth Powerfully intimate, frustrating, illuminating and Robin V. Sears DEVELOPMENT OFFICER gratifying, Ellen Seligman’s editing was a kind Erica May of alchemy, writes the last author guided by that 26 A Defence of Dying PRODUCER hand A secularist takes comfort in the final outcome Michael Mooney Steven Price we spend our lives fighting, in Andrew Stark’s ADMINISTRATOR 16 Poems The Consolations of Mortality Christian Sharpe André Forget PUBLISHER Small Boat: i Helen Walsh Kate Braid 29 Welcome to the Machine [email protected] Kate Eichhorn on the surprising political and BOARD OF DIRECTORS Literary Soirée cultural legacy of the photocopier, in Adjusted Patricia Young George Bass, Q.C., Tom Kierans, O.C., Margin Don McCutchan, Trina McQueen, O.C., jungle dreaming Alison Lang Jack Mintz, C.M. Genevieve Lehr ADVISORY COUNCIL 32 Letters and Responses Michael Adams, Ronald G. Atkey, P.C., Night’s Work Darin Barney, Clive Veroni Q.C., Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Kelly Norah Drukker Carol Hansell, Donald Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Grant Reuber, O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard Schiff, Reed Scowen, Jaime Watt 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 Cover art and pictures throughout the issue by Michelle Simpson. Review of Canada Charitable Organization. Michelle Simpson is a professional illustrator and graphic designer. She graduated from Sheridan College with ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION RATES Individuals in Canada $56/year plus GST/HST. a bachelor of arts in illustration. Her clients include Rubicon Publishing, Swerve / Calgary Herald, Modern Dog, (Libraries and institutions in Canada $68/year plus Focus on the Family, Guide Magazine and Canadian Running. For more see michellescribbles.com GST/HST.) Outside Canada, please pay $86/year for individuals, or $98 for libraries and institutions.

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September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 1 CIGI PRESS ADVANCING POLICY IDEAS AND DEBATE cigionline.org

COMING OCTOBER 2016 Look Who’s Watching Surveillance, Treachery and Trust Online

Fen Osler Hampson and Eric Jardine Edward Snowden’s revelations that the US National Security Agency and other government agencies are spying on Internet users and on other governments confirmed that the Internet is increasingly being used to gather intelligence and personal information. The proliferation of cybercrime, the sale of users’ data without their knowledge and the surveillance of citizens through connected devices are all rapidly eroding the confidence users have in the Internet. To meet the Internet’s full potential, its users need to trust that the Internet works reliably while also being secure, private and safe. When trust in the Internet wanes, users begin to alter their online behaviour. A combination of illustrative anecdotal evidence and analysis of new survey data, Look Who’s Watching clearly demonstrates why trust matters, how it is being eroded and how, with care and deliberate policy action, the essential glue of the Internet — trust — can be restored.

October 2016 978-1-928096-19-1 | hardcover 978-1-928096-20-7 | ebook

The authors have produced a clear, timely and essential book about the importance of trust as an engine for the Internet. We must foster that trust if the global Internet is to continue to flourish. — Michael Chertoff, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Chertoff Group, and former secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security

Minding the Gap The Dragon’s Edited by Pamela Aall and Footprints Chester A. Crocker Alex He Minding the Gap: African Conflict The Dragon’s Footprints: Management in a Time of China in the Global Economic Change focuses on the role of Governance System under the mediation and peacekeeping in G20 Framework examines China’s managing violence and political participation in the G20; its efforts crises, looking at new ideas to increase its prestige in the and institutions emerging in international monetary system the African space, as well as at through the internationalization of the structural and institutional its currency, the renminbi; its role obstacles to developing a truly in the multilateral development robust conflict management banks; and its involvement in capability in Africa. global trade governance. March 2016 978-1-928096-21-4 | paperback September 2016 978-1-928096-23-8 | paperback

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2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada INTERVIEW On Shakespeare, Superheroes and a Cat-Bird-Human Jeet Heer in conversation with Margaret Atwood..

his fall sees the publication of not one but two works by the redoubtable TMargaret Atwood: a fictional adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and a graphic novel, her first. Hag-Seed is the fourth book in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project in which contemporary authors, including (so far) Jeannette Winterson and Howard Jacobson, reimagine their favourite plays by the Bard. As for the comic book, the fantastically titled Angel Catbird is an apt rebuke to anyone who expected a graphic novel of the restrained Marjane Satrapi or Seth variety: an unabashed homage to classic Marvel comics, it is centred on a human- feline-avian hybrid who is all sculpted pectorals, and wrestles with an intriguing romantic dilemma. Critic, editor, journalist and comics authority, Jeet Heer is the author of Sweet Lechery: Essays, Profiles and Reviewsand In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman. He is also a senior editor at the New Republic, and a contributor to the New Yorker, the Paris Review and other publications. He spoke with Margaret Atwood in Toronto.

JH: You were just at Comic-Con [comic book convention]— MA: I was just at Comic-Con, yes. You get a load of press there too— JH: I wish I’d remembered to bring this to you, because you mentioned Little Orphan Annie in your introduction, and I had seen a Little Orphan Annie all the birds and you are going to get many more MA: I wouldn’t even call that political. I would strip from 1948 that takes the opposite position on forest-eating insects and that means more dead call it just, you know, this is where we live. You want cats and birds—where, like, Harold Gray [Annie’s trees and that means more forest fires, and that to stay alive, you’d better deal with the oceans. creator] defends cats eating birds. This is very much is also bad for one of our key industries, which is Because if they die, you are going to choke to death in keeping with his politics. wood products. of oxygen deprivation. MA: Of course, in those days the birds were not So, put it all together, and we should be sup- JH: In both this book and I think the Maddaddam suffering a precipitous decline. As they are now. porting migratory songbirds if not simply for trilogy there is the use of fantasy and science fiction JH: That’s right. He did actually get letters of aesthetic reasons—we like them, they make nice allegory to emphasize the continuum, that humans complaint from birders. songs, they look cute, all of those things. The eco- are a part of nature. The Angel Catbird is a cat, a bird MA: Yeah, but they would object just to the nomic value that they bring is huge. They found and a human. destruction of an individual bird. We’re now [this], for instance, in India, where inadvertently MA: Well, I am trying to show both sides, indeed seeing— they were using an antibiotic that killed vultures. three sides, of the question. You can do that by JH: Species decline. There was a precipitous decline in vultures, and showing an argument, or you can do that by show- MA: Not only that, but numbers within species there was an immediate outburst of wild dogs, ing an identity conflict. decline. rabies and rats. So, things are connected. [Laughs] So my character has an identity conflict. And, JH: Let’s start with this, because although it’s a JH: Sure. as you will see in volume two, he has two love very entertaining book, there is a kind of political MA: There is a strong seabird and fish connec- interests, one of whom is part cat and the other of message, and it is something that often comes up in tion. If you restore seabird colonies, you get more whom is part bird. So what is his choice? Does he your writing, especially on Twitter, about, well, cats fish. Why is that? It’s the nutrients that the birds want to have an egg or does he want to have a kit- and birds. Do you want to talk, talk about where bring into the water fosters the growth of phyto- ten? [Laughs] that passion comes from? plankton, [which] fosters the growth of small fish JH: [Laughs] The romantic interest is tough. But MA: I grew up with it, and I grew up with a and therefore fosters the growth of bigger fish. So you reminded me a lot of—which I’m not even sure biologist. We are in an era of precipitous migra- there have been big seabird restoration projects, and you would have read—the 1960s superheroes of tory songbird decline, and that has been bad news I’m putting those in volume three of Angel Catbird. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby where— for Canada, because it is the migratory songbirds JH: So that’s sort of the political background, but MA: Yeah, it came in with Spiderman. I mean that weed the boreal forests of insects, so eliminate I also want to— there was the Lois Lane kind of thing going on but

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 3 we never really believed in that, and we thought that the action of a volume, and then everybody com- which is the action of The Tempest. He is essentially the love interest of Batman was actually Catwoman, ments on that, then I break it down into blocks controlling and directing through his special effects but nothing came of that either. [Laughs] and then into pages and panels. And everybody guy, Ariel. It is the closest we get to Shakespeare JH: Or Robin. comments on that, and then Johnnie [Christmas], showing us an artist at work. So naturally I would MA: Now, now. Yes, they all had sidekicks in my co-creator, starts to draw it, and he starts with be very interested in that. It is also the closest that those days. You probably don’t remember the thumbnails, little sketches, leaving space for the he came ever to writing a musical. Human Torch and Toro. writing, which goes in the last. And then he does JH: How so? JH: Oh, the fiery guy. pencils, more detailed, and then he does inks, and MA: If you think of it, it is more singing and MA: Yeah, they were both fiery guys, but Toro everybody sees these at every stage, and then it all dancing, and music used as a controller, signalling was the smaller fiery guy. goes to Tamra [Bonvillain, the colourist], who puts and transforming. Those things interested me a lot. JH: Jules Feiffer said he always resented the in the layers of colour, and the very last thing is that But also the very peculiar epilogue—that is a weird sidekick when he was reading in the 1940s, because the lettering is dropped in. So that is the process thing for him to say at the end of the play. The last he said, “You know, I wanted the hero, and the side- and it’s very collaborative. three words are “set me free.” So you then think kick was an annoyance.” JH: Where is the stage at which you add the “Okay, this is Prospero, who has been controlling MA: Well, the sidekick I think was supposed to dialogue? the action of his own play, and now he is asking the be for child readers, somebody they could iden- MA: The dialogue is there from the beginning. audience to set him free. From what?” And then you tify with. But what the child readers really identified It’s in the script. go backwards and you realize that everybody in the with was the superhero. I mean, who wanted to JH: One of the things I was struck by was the play is imprisoned in some way or another, at some be a sidekick? You wanted the full shout-out. You flow. Sometimes, if you have someone who is a time. It is about imprisonment and release. And wanted to be a powerful grown-up superhero. novelist or writer working in comics, they tend to it’s also a revenge play that does not carry through JH: That’s right. So you have this to the ultimate revenge. So it is issue of identity, and which side do Hamlet, if Hamlet had stopped and you choose, but there is a sort of The Tempest is a revenge play that said “Hey, wait a minute, I’m gonna concern of science out of control forgive them.” or science that’s used for corpor- does not carry through to the ultimate JH: [Laughs] Yeah. ate interests rather than a broader MA: That is the hinge moment human interest. revenge. It’s Hamlet, if Hamlet had of the play. For sci-fi and aliens MA: As it is. stopped and said “Hey, wait a minute, fans, it is particularly interesting JH: As it is. because that reversal, that moment MA: Science is like anything else I’m gonna forgive them.” of forgiveness, is instigated by a in the human world: there’s good of non-human being. Very peculiar it and bad of it. The old 19th-century and interesting. For all of these rea- age of the gentleman scientist, that was long ago overemphasize blocks of text. But this isn’t like sons I have always been pretty fascinated by it. But over. So the question we need to ask is, okay, who that—it does flow like a comic. So that comes out of also he is one of those magician figures, and they is paying the scientists, and to do what? And that is the collaborative process. always have a dark side and indeed they always why we need public science, divorced from corpor- MA: Well, it comes out of the fact that I spent the have a slightly fraudulent side. The chapter in A ate interests and divorced from political interfer- 1970s writing television scripts and screenplays. Writer on Writing on that particular aspect involves ence. And what you had during the Harper era [Laughs] And before that, you know, once upon Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, another one of those was a lot of political interference. These are public a time, I ran my own puppet show when I was in controlling figures, and then you have the moment scientists—we pay for them. Why should we not be high school, and [I did] acting, drawing stuff over where the curtain falls down and he is this little old allowed to hear what they have to tell us? the years. [I have been] pretty much immersed man [laughs] who’s yelling “I’m a good man but I’m JH: One of the other interesting things with in the medium from the 1940s. This is where I grew a very bad wizard!” So, is the magic real or not? In Angel Catbird is the use of what we know about up—I grew up in comics because there wasn’t any The Tempest it is real. animal behaviour to shed light on human behav- TV then. JH: Yes. iour, like the sexual attraction between the two lead JH: You are working with very good collabor- MA: Magic is real. But it has a dark side. And characters, and how that’s expressed in cat terms. ators. I know Hope [Nicholson, project advisor] a that is pretty interesting, too, because the things that MA: Well, cat terms are very different from little bit— Hag-Seed’s mother, Hag, [laughs] is accused of— human terms. Or we think so. MA: She is very thoughtful and of course she has Sycorax [in the play, Caliban’s mother]—are all the JH: That’s what I am curious about, because is read everything in comics, and it was she who said, same things that Prospero himself has done. So why there a way in which, if we think about ourselves “Okay, here’s a number of different illustrators— is he good and she is bad? Why? We ask ourselves. as biological creatures, as part of a continuum with which look do you want?” I said, “I want something JH: Yeah. cats and dogs— that looks like a classic superhero drawing type of MA: And the other fascinating character MA: Yeah, we are not really actually very similar thing.” in The Tempest is Caliban. There have been to cats. Cats appeal to us partly because, like owls, JH: It really feels like those 1960s Marvel comics. Calibans played sympathetically, there have they’ve got big front-facing eyes and small chins, so MA: Or even earlier. We also wanted all ages, so been Calibans played for laughs, there have been to us it says “baby.” you’ll notice there is no swearing or naked sex in it. Calibans played as villains. But Shakespeare is JH: Cute. JH: [Laughs] And you’re gonna do this for three Shakespeare because he is always pretty ambigu- MA: Cute, cute, cutie, cute, cute, cute. We love volumes? ous about those things. So Caliban, number one, things with big eyes that look like babies. So that’s MA: Yes, we have already done volume two, so is a potential rapist. Bad. But number two, he has why, for instance, crabs and snakes don’t get much that will come out in February, and volume three is some of the most poetic and romantic lines in the hugging love from humans—because they do not in preparation right now. play about the island, and he has these wonderful look like babies. But when we get to Count Catula— JH: I want to talk about The Tempest novel. dreams, and he is also exploited. because we’re gonna see more of him in volume MA: Let’s talk about The Tempest novel, called JH: He is the voice of the oppressed. two, he is part bat, part cat and part human—I’ll Hag-Seed, which means, in a word, son of a witch. MA: Well … be careful about that. You see, it is just point out to you that [there were only] “three [Laughs] Shakespeare. Yes, he is enslaved; yes, he also, the wives of Dracula.” But Count Catula, being part cat, JH: [Laughs] Which, of course, comes from an first chance he gets, kicks that over and says, “I’m has lots more. Many more wives of Catula. [Laughs]. insult that Prospero calls Caliban at one point. going to have a new bunch of enslavers [laughs]. JH: You’ve cartooned for a long time, since the This is part of a series [reimagining and noveliz- I’m going to pick some new enslavers, basically, 1960s, I think. ing Shakespeare plays], and you got to select The and let’s go murder people. And rape Miranda MA: Oh, before that. Tempest. Why was this the play you chose? some more.” So it’s not all good. JH: Before that, too; I just think of the printed MA: I’ve written about it before, in my book JH: No, of course not. material. When you were working on this, did you A Writer on Writing, which used to be called MA: However, Freud is right in that the repressed write out a script? Negotiating with the Dead, but I guess the pub- returns as nightmare. So how to play Caliban is one MA: It’s very similar to working in film or lishers didn’t like that “dead” word. So Prospero of the big mysterious things about every produc- television. You have a team. I will first block out is producer-writer-director-actor in his own play, tion: Are we going to play him as sympathetic? Are

4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada we going to play him as a sort of tantrum-throwing child? How are we going to do this? Every production has a different answer. In our age, of course, he is much more likely to be seen as the voice of the oppressed than he would have been in the 17th century. But he was even in the 19th century already seen as that. JH: It’s a wonderful play, but I am also wonder- ing … it is a play where Shakespeare is speaking at us, it seems, most directly as the artist. And he is writing about what it means to be a magician. MA: That’s what we think. There is no objective evidence—the gorgeous thing about Shakespeare is that there is no Shakespeare who can turn up and have an interview like this with you. So he is in a way an open area where people can bring themselves. But he was also so inventive. JH: There is in Hag-Seed, as in many of your recent books, a real celebration of that inventiveness. MA: Well, we should probably just set the scene a bit with Hag-Seed: it is a theatrical director [named Felix] who has been expelled in a coup at the theatre company— JH: Which happens! MA: It does! People have ganged up and just got rid of him. And he goes off to sulk in the wilderness, and then he gets a chance to get back at the people who have done the expelling of him. So he has been teaching Shakespeare in a prison, which also happens, and he decides to put on a production of The Tempest in the prison—which will also be a revenge mechanism against his enemies. JH: I want to talk about revenge a little bit because that is one of the two great plots. It is either people fall in love or they get revenge. MA: Or they are power grabs. So Julius Caesar is a power grab play, but then it becomes somewhat of a revenge play in that there are two opposing factions. But not so much revenge as power grab. Macbeth is a power grab play—the corrupting effects of power. But in The Tempest it is the misuse of your power, because Prospero’s predicament is really, in its origin, his own fault. JH: Yes. MA: He was the duke. He didn’t pay attention to being a duke, and he went off and immersed himself in magic instead, and what was he doing making the dead walk, anyway? What was that for? [Laughs] So, because he wasn’t paying attention, his brother took control and kicked him out. Tried to kill him, basically. Shakespeare is very interested in power—right uses and wrong uses. He is also very interested in revenge, good effects and bad effects. And late Shakespeare often takes motifs that he has seen through to a tragic conclusion earlier and takes them almost there, and then makes it come out all right. SAVE THE DATE JH: One big thing is in getting to this happy ending, Felix has to let go of the dead, right? MA: He has to, yeah. First of all, he has to forgive. November 10 - 13 And then he has to let go of the past. JH: Yeah, and I was thinking about that title, Our New Tribalism Negotiating with the Dead. How important is it for The 21st century has brought unprecedented change when it comes to per- the imagination, for writers, to speak to the dead, sonal freedoms. What were once distinct, assigned roles are inhabited more but also let them go? freely. Many greet this ﬂ uidity—whether it be cultural, sexual or political— MA: Well, they also have to let you go. Don’t with open arms. Others continue to seek ﬁ rm identities, clinging now more they? than ever to the tribes they most identify with. What does this mean for our JH: [Laughs] That’s right. communities here in Canada, and for the world? MA: One of the big themes for a writer is the descent to the underworld, the conversation with the dead, the learning from that and then the bringing back up. To bring something to the community. www.spurfestival.ca And that is a very old shamanistic task.

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 5 Dept. of Misinformation Daniel Levitan’s survival manual for the post-factual era. John Cruickshank

his 2006 bestseller, This Is Your Brain on Music: market income inequality and another when the A Field Guide to Lies: Understanding a Human Obsession. But this book question is income after taxes and transfers. Critical Thinking in the Information Age is a more direct descendent of his 2014 work, The Interpreting business trends or global temper- Daniel J. Levitin Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in an Age of ature movement, say, requires, at the very least, Allan Lane Information Overload. Both works promote intel- strict attention to baselines, units of measurement 285 pages, hardcover lectual hygiene through rigorous mental exercise. and measurement periods. But, as data visualiza- ISBN 9780670069941 The Organized Mind focuses mainly on the evo- tions and infographics keep growing in popularity, lutionary reasons we must engage in constant it is worth remembering that not all of the informa- self-questioning. Rationality is an achievement of tion we get scrolling through charts on Twitter may hether or not he can bring mental effort, not a natural endowment. Field Guide be put through this rigorous process. “Bad statistics America’s jobs home, Donald Trump instructs us in how to interrogate others—even the are everywhere,” says Levitin. Because you do not Wis certainly keeping one group of well-meaning authorities who once enjoyed our know whom to trust, you need to be capable of test- workers gainfully employed: fact checkers. The automatic trust. ing all assertions for yourself. cottage industry that has arisen as a result of The tone sometimes resembles Baden-Powell’s That may be easier said than done. One source Trump’s refusal to acknowledge error or prevari- Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in of honest but potentially devastating error is in the cation in his campaign shows no sign of shrink- Good Citizenship, worthy and hortatory. Pay critical application of probability. Levitin tells of a surgeon ing. Which is ostensibly a good thing. As Michael attention to everything you hear or read, he urges, who persuaded 90 women from a high-risk group Kinsley wrote in Vanity Fair, it has at least shifted because no matter what the source, the assertions to have their healthy breasts removed because he public focus from gaffes—those old standbys of could be wrong. All received truths and accepted had understood that 93 percent of breast cancers campaigns—to lies. On the other hand, even when wisdom must be put to the test. occurred in women with the related genetic mark- exposed, the falsehoods—whether about rates And indeed some of the material he cites is so ers. But as almost 60 percent of all women fall of crime committed by immigrants in the United outrageous it makes his sometimes starchy tone into this high-risk group and only eight percent States or America being the highest-taxed country easy to condone. Consider the California anti- of women overall have cancer, his patients’ risk of in the world, or Trump doing more for veterans marijuana crusaders who claim that grass users in getting breast cancer was actually only 13 percent— than anyone else has—have done little to shake the state have doubled each year since possession not 93 percent as he thought. Trump’s large and devoted following. A similar laws ceased to be enforced in 1982. As Levitin notes, Levitin offers a relatively simple way of calculat- dynamic played out in the Brexit vote, where the if there were merely one Californian toker in year ing conditional probabilities; that is, a determina- leaders of the “leave” campaign repeated exag- one—an unrealistically conservative assumption— tion of probabilities influenced by several factors gerations and fabrications long after they had been annual doubling would raise the druggie count to such as genetic makeup or family history. It is the publicly disproven. They acted as though the truth between 8.6 billion and 11 billion users today. As kind of tool that can help with complex medical and were a trivial riposte to the more profound story that result is in excess of the population of the entire legal decisions. they were telling. earth, you have to wonder what those drug busters The news media, too, come in for criticism for Lies and half-truths have always been put to have been smoking. sometimes forgetting that “the plural of anecdote use by the unscrupulous in the political arena, Well-meaning campaigners against anorexia is not data,” as Levitin says. The media also rank but this bare-faced indifference to truth is a rare do no better when they claim that the illness kills story ideas according to how much they appeal to and more disturbing phenomenon. The timing 150,000 young American women a year. Only about the instincts or interests of audiences, and not how could not be better then, for Daniel J. Levitin’s 8,500 girls and young women die of all causes they conform to reality, he charges. Five times more new book, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking annually. people die of stomach cancer than of drowning, but in the Information Age, a survival manual for the Equally nonsensical assertions are made by you would not know it from watching or reading the post-factual era. Political campaigners are hardly people who ought to know better, Levitin writes: news. Cognitive science has found that media can the only guilty parties. Dismayed by the virulent a Science magazine article claims the cost of a create huge misperceptions of risk, leading people spread of misinformation in the socially networked telephone call has fallen 12,000 percent in recent to pay too much attention to some matters and too world, Levitin offers a set of intellectual tools to years, while a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of little to others. Most of us know rationally there is help distinguish the real from the unreal, and often Management Development lauds a customer-care not a psycho killer or predator on every block, but surreal. “Sometimes the people giving you the program that reduced consumer complaints by we nonetheless make decisions for our kids, and facts are hoping that you’ll draw the wrong conclu- 200 percent. In the real world, when 100 percent ourselves, based on an inflated sense of risk. sion; sometimes they don’t know the difference of a cake is eaten, there is nothing left but crumbs. Levitin is of less help when it comes to dealing themselves,” Levitin says. “And misinformation is And yet serious researchers and writers continue with people who are indifferent or inimical to the promiscuous—it consorts with people of all social to talk about losses or reductions of more than truth. Hostility to the gathering and interpretation and educational classes, and turns up in places you 100 percent. of information marked the tenure of Prime Minister don’t expect.” Much confusion enters the world through mis- Stephen Harper and his regressive Conservatives. A McGill University psychologist and behav- chievously labelled charts, incomplete graphs and Nothing symbolized their purposeful retreat into ioural neuroscientist, Levitin is celebrated for distorting averages. While it is true that humans ignorance more than the suspension of the long- have on average one testicle, the number is as form Canadian census and the muzzling of govern- John Cruickshank is co-chair of Canadian useful as knowing that the average temperature in ment scientists. Press and the chair of the Canadian Journalism Death Valley is a temperate 25°C. Likewise, some When power ignores the discipline of truth, it is Foundation. He was publisher of the Toronto Star of the most confusing, and frequent, political argu- only answerable to competing power. And that can and president of Star Media Group from 2009 until ments are conducted between people who have an initiate a descent into brutishness. For this, Levitin March 2016. Prior to that he did stints with the underlying difference in how they define the terms offers no answer. But for much else in the struggle CBC, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Vancouver Sun they are using. The crucial debate about inequality against error and ignorance, lies and mistakes, he is and The Globe and Mail. in Canada has one character when it focuses on both engaging and rewarding.

6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ESSAY Colony of Requited Dreams China in Africa, and the making of the next outsourcing hub. Richard Poplak

n 1414, Admiral Zheng He, This constructed kinship—a Grand Eunuch of the Three sort of brotherhood of the recently ITreasures, set out from the oppressed—has, since Mao, Chinese port of Canton on an underpinned China’s engagement extraordinary journey. His naval with Africa. The modern era of retinue dwarfed anything the China/Africa relations starts in the European powers of the time could mid 1950s, and was subject to the possibly muster—62 galleons, vagaries and shifting alliances more than 100 auxiliary vessels, of the Cold War. The Sino-Soviet 868 officers, 26,800 soldiers split in the late 1950s led to Beijing and sundry courtiers, eunuchs defining itself in opposition and servants. This great naval to Washington, Moscow and procession, part ceremony and their respective European allies, part an act of genuine cultural and apart from the developing curiosity, was called the Star Raft. world. The 1949 launching of “About the middle of October their “Five Principles of Peaceful 1415,” wrote the pre-eminent Coexistence,” based on mutual China/Africa historian Philip non-aggression, mutual benefit Snow, “as Henry V’s army trudged and equality, looked good from through the mud of northern an African liberation hero’s France towards Agincourt, a giraffe perspective. But as the Cold War from Africa arrived in Peking.” Five crawled on, China proved itself hundred years later, the giraffe was less adept than its enemies at hailed as a symbol of the revival understanding and managing the of the relationship between Africa proxy battles unfolding across and China by a Beijing newspaper. the continent. The Chinese were The symbol is a tough one to expelled from country after parse. Indeed, along the east coast country for their troubles. of Africa, there are archeological Nonetheless, the People’s remnants from Chinese merchants that date back whether there is any measurably fair quid pro quo Republic left a footprint. In 1964, following foreign a millennium, all of which are faintly mixed in with at play here. Is this the dawn of a new colonialism, minister Zhou Enlai’s much-touted African tour, Arabic and Kiswahili trading histories along the they wonder, a new scramble for Africa, in which China provided the continent with 53 percent of its east African littoral. There were small numbers of the continent is once again left in tatters, its borders loans, interest free, to be repaid over an extended black slaves in China during the Tang and Ming redrawn and its people left destitute? period of time. (These conditions took their cue dynasties, referred to by the pejorative kunlun. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese take great exception from the western aid rulebook, insofar as the money All of which emphasizes the point that China in to the term colonialism when it is applied to their was only valid for the purchase of Chinese technical Africa—the current overriding obsession of the African adventures. Since the Chinese Communist expertise and equipment.) China coughed up more continent’s western observers—is by no means a Party came to power in 1949—coinciding, than $2.5 billion to 25 African states from 1954 to new phenomenon. incidentally, with a rise in pitch of various 1977. Between 1967 and 1976, China transferred Zhang He’s vast fleet notwithstanding, it is the African liberation movements—the Chinese have more than $143 million of arms to 15 African states. scale of recent Chinese engagement in Africa that taken pains to link themselves historically and The construction of the Tanzania-Zambia railway is so noteworthy. Across the continent, since the ideologically to the anti-colonial project. One in the 1970s, which cost the People’s Republic beginning of the century, the People’s Republic of their great historical wounds, picked at when upward of $405 million, remains China’s largest has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on strategy demands, is the razing of Shanghai’s Old international infrastructure project. infrastructure, and reaped hundreds of billions Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, by a French In the late 1970s, China’s domestic policies— worth of commodities in return. It is estimated that contingent during the Second Opium War in 1860. in particular, the upheaval of the Cultural there are almost a million Chinese people across This catastrophe has come to serve as China’s Revolution—and a rapprochement with the United almost all of Africa’s countries. Roads and stadiums shorthand for colonial aggression; Beijing thus States, slowed down involvement in Africa. But and airports have been built by Chinese state- understood Africa’s pain. As CCP leader Liu Shaoqi when Deng Xiaoping reset the economic agenda owned enterprises; Africans have access to phones told the World Federation of Trade Leaders in 1949, in 1979, establishing four special economic zones, and clothing and electronics at cut-rate prices. And “in the Chinese people [Africans] see their own and looked toward growth as the country’s driving yet, peering through the murk, observers have asked tomorrow, and the Chinese see in them their force, the continent emerged as the go-to spot for own yesterday.” natural resources. Richard Poplak is a South African–born journalist “We must tell [Africans], in order to help them,” Premier Zhao Ziyang made an eleven-country and author. His latest book, Continental Shift: exhorted a Work Bulletin of the Chinese People’s tour between 1982 and 1983, and, although he A Journey into Africa’s Changing Fortunes, Liberation Army, 1961, “about the significance of did not quite abandon the Five Principles, he read co-authored with Kevin Bloom (Portobello Books, the Taiping uprising, the Boxer uprising, Dr. Sun from a more pragmatic, develop-now-and-ask- 2016), traces the 21st-century transformation of Yut-Sen, and the revolutionary experience of the questions-later lyric sheet. This resulted in China Africa. Communists of this generation.” taking a tack that differed significantly from the

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 7 western approach to development aid. Gradually, rural areas to the cities, combined with a very real their fins. If growth is not tethered to an increase in over the course of the past two decades, aid has consumer-culture revolution, means that African skills and education, then Africa is left with nothing become a dirty word, and strings-free investment policy makers can expect continued interest from when the boom ends. Should China continue to a mantra. Since the recent global financial crash, the Chinese for at least two decades. And this is turn the other cheek when dealing with rampant African governments for the most part have ignored to say nothing of Indian investment, which runs corruption, and African countries do not foster a the entreaties of free market fundamentalist at roughly half of Chinese input, and the genuine measure of transparency when tendering contracts, institutions like the International Monetary Fund. and robust competition that China-in-Africa the notion of competition and fair play is further The robust state, with a managed economy, is in stimulates—the Japanese have taken note, as have denuded, and rot becomes the status quo. What is vogue. All eyes East. the Americans. Natural resources are certainly a more, the emergence of a China model (and China In 2009, China surpassed the United States to large part of the picture, but it is not inconceivable watchers in Africa swear there is no such thing)— become the continent’s largest trading partner. that by mid century, the world will be referring to the notion of a highly managed, highly statist, Size and prominence have invited one-party system that subjugates criticism. In countries such as It is not inconceivable that by mid human rights at the altar of endless Namibia, Zambia and Mozambique, development and a tinctured form of the rapaciousness of Chinese century the world will be referring to capitalism—is enormously attractive business interests coincided neatly to many African leaders, who see with homegrown corruption, and has Chad or Somaliland as the factories democracy as a costly inconvenience. led to front-page scandals and a Even under Xi Jinping, China is growing frisson of xenophobic of the world, while rural China not as monolithically united and distaste with Chinese-led initiatives. focused as many imagine it to be. The ice-cold pragmatism involved invents aerospace technology. Africa, too, is a region of almost in dealing with China—a country unimaginable ethnic and nationalist renowned for its human rights abuses—causes Chad or Somaliland as the factories of the world, diversity. The future of both entities rests, however, hand-wringing among the old guard of the while rural China invents aerospace technology. on developing coherent local and regional policies liberation movements, especially in South Africa, This shift is already evident in Ethiopia, which has that work in concert. The variables are staggering. a country constitutionally ballasted by some of the aggressively been courting Chinese manufacturing That said, the stakes for Africa are so high—more most glorious human rights rhetoric penned since as it moves off the mainland. than one billion people, massive tracts of wealth, John Locke. None of this comes without a price. Bereft of an engine for global growth well into the next But there is a growing feeling, continent- proper management, Africa’s forests, fisheries and century—that blowing this opportunity has wide, that the 21st-century Chinese represent a mines face utter devastation. The building of a ramifications for every last person on the planet. once-in-an-epoch opportunity. No one imagined road along the Samburu plain in Kenya has meant For those on the continent thinking long term, and that China’s year-on-year growth would be that the region’s elephants are being poached into they are legion, this is an opportunity that must sustainable—it has not been—but current policies near extinction; Mozambique’s shark population is be grasped and managed. The alternatives are too of moving more than 300 million people from under massive pressure because of the market for bleak to be considered.

We thank the LRC for broadening Canada’s landscape of politics, art and ideas through the Spur Festival.

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8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada 2016 speakers and events include:

Hon. Lena Daniel MacIvor El Jones Alexander MacLeod Metlege Diab

Can the Liberal Arts Books That Spur Post-Truth Politics Save Society? Nta’tugwaqanminen Saturday, October 29, 4pm Our Story: Evolution of the O’Regan Hall, Halifax Central Library Friday, October 28, 7pm Gespege’wa’gi Mi’gmaq King’s College Prince Hall, 6350 Coburg Rd. Fact-based politicking is dead. Donald Sunday, October 30, 9:30am Trump’s presidential bid has all but ce- As the cost of living soars and our arts Pavia, Halifax Central Library and culture sector continues to stagnate, mented this fact. Relying on dubious facts more and more young people choose their The Mi’gmaq of the Gaspé Peninsula have and emotional button pushing, his cam- further education based on its perceived occupied this land since time immemo- paign has evolved from an unsettling joke usefulness, driving them from the “imprac- rial. Prior to Canada’s settlement, they to a strong candidacy. Similarly distressing tical” liberal arts even though studies con- were its sole inhabitants. This book by patterns are emerging here. Spur asks: Why tinue to show minimal ﬁ nancial gain from Gespe’gewa’gi Mi’gmawei Mawiomi, with are we so angry? When did experts become eschewing them. Spur asks: What is the val- a foreword by Satsan (Herb George), pro- untrustworthy? And what is the future for ue of a liberal arts education? Do the liberal vides evidence for their ancient inhabitancy political and civic participation in Canada? arts and the sciences interact meaningfully, through both historical research and the and does their separation negatively a ect narrative history passed on for generations either ﬁ eld? by Mi’gmaq elders.

FESTIVAL PARTNER NATIONAL SUPPORTERS SPUR HALIFAX SUPPORTERS PERFORMANCE SUPPORTERS

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September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 9 Lost in Syria Deborah Campbell’s search for her one-time fixer, and friend. Juliet O’Neill

cast repeatedly on the American networks. Among homes and half of them—2.5 million—had fled the A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of some war correspondents, the lessons were to take country. About 1.5 million took refuge in neigh- Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War care in who you work with and that even a highly bouring Syria. Deborah Campbell experienced journalist can face the worst danger Ahlam was a fixer for many foreign journalists, Knopf Canada of all—death. international non-governmental organizations 352 pages, hardcover The New York–based Committee to Protect and humanitarian workers in the Syrian capital, isbn 9780345809292 Journalists has chronicled the murders and other Damascus. She was also establishing a school deaths of more than 1,200 journalists in the course for displaced Iraqi girls in her modest apartment of their work since 1992. The CPJ says the stats and served as a go-to person for fellow refugees arly morning, August 19, 1991, the include dozens of “media workers”—local drivers, in Sayeda Zainab, a Damascene neighbourhood phone rang in my hotel room in Vilnius. As travel guides and fixers, many of whom are well- known as Little Baghdad since it had become the Ethe Moscow correspondent for Southam respected local journalists. largest community of Iraqi refugees in the world. By News, I was in the Lithuanian capital to report on In such high-risk environments, you may won- 2007, the influx of refugees had reached a crisis point allegations that Soviet special forces were respon- der, what is in it for the fixer? Max was in it for fun and Syria’s open-door policy was nearing an end. sible for the execution of seven Lithuanian border and adventure and for the money; an American Campbell writes that she needed a trustworthy guards. dollar provided access to medicine and oranges guide, a go-between who could traverse the bar- “There’s been a coup in Moscow.” It was my and other items unavailable for rubles. The fixer in riers of culture and language, and help her gain editor quoting a bulletin from the Russian news Stavropol wanted the outside world to know that the trust of Iraqis who would be unwilling to talk to agency Tass. I quickly called my fixer, Max, and as life was not as rosy as widely portrayed in the West. outsiders. She could not live in Iraq to chronicle the I rushed to get a flight back to Moscow, he promised My fixer in Latvia was a newspaper reporter; her exodus but would get the stories of why and how to gather as much information as possible and meet income from helping foreign journalists allowed from those who had made it to Damascus. me later at my office near the Russian parliament. her to continue her low-paid local journalism. The A Syrian journalist introduced Campbell to Max was a resourceful young translator who had motivations—and virtues—of individual fixers are Ahlam. Well educated, confident, fluent in English, helped me get my bearings when I took the posting. as varied as the people they work for. experienced in work in Iraq with U.S. forces and I had fixers in other cities, too, in the former USSR. Public knowledge about the use of fixers has journalists, Ahlam was a natural aide. “She would Often, but not always, fixers are local reporters, and grown since the Iraq war, when it became extremely give me a new way of thinking about war, about journalists frequently hire them to explain the lie dangerous for foreign reporters, especially highly what war does, and what it takes to survive” writes of the land, navigate access to officialdom, conduct visible TV crews, to travel outside protected areas. Campbell. “She would become my friend.” research, sometimes interpret or translate, line up Journalists quarrelled publicly over the ethics of Both women were aware of dangers and took transportation, even shelter and food. fixer hiring, with some accusing others of cowering precautions. Journalists and those who helped It is safe to say that every journalist who has in their hotels while fixers on the outside did the them risked being branded as spies by the Syrian reported abroad for a news organization or as a dirty work with little or no recognition. intelligence service, so Campbell posed as a tourist freelancer has a memorable fixer in their life— Few fixers would make for as compelling a nar- and professor to all but those with a need to know. someone with whom they shared harrowing or rative as a brave Iraqi woman named Ahlam, who Street vendors called her “doktora.” With Ahlam’s humorous experiences in pursuit of a story. One features in freelance writer Deborah Campbell’s assistance she succeeded in her goal of putting a time I lined up a fixer in Stavropol, President second book, A Disappearance in Damascus: A human face on the consequences of the war in Iraq Gorbachev’s hometown, and I was greeted at the Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of and her Harper’s article won an award. airport by two KGB officers who intimated they War. Normally, she would then move on. Not this were keeping tabs on me. My fixer was a democracy Campbell, winner of three National Magazine time. activist, and his phone line had been tapped, so we Awards, teaches narrative non-fiction writing Ahlam had stopped communicating with took pains afterward to make our arrangements at the University of British Columbia. She has Campbell, who now was back in Vancouver. The over more clandestine channels: he managed to get reported from Iran, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, friendly emails ceased, and her phone calls went a message to me at my hotel and we eventually met the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Israel, Palestine, unanswered. Mutual colleagues did not know at his home. On the few occasions I was in a conflict Cuba, Mexico and Russia. She has been pub- what was up. Campbell could not get Ahlam off zone, I was grateful to have a fixer who was better lished in Harper’s, The Economist, Foreign Policy, her mind, and her next project gave her a chance than I was at distinguishing between gunfire and a the Guardian, New Scientist, Walrus and other to return to Damascus to see if Ahlam was okay. truck backfiring. publications. Unbeknownst to Campbell, Ahlam had been pres- In some locations, the risks fixers and journalists Campbell describes herself as an “immersive sured by a Syrian intelligence officer to report on face can escalate quickly from threats to violence. journalist”—not the kind who creates virtual real- other refugees, NGO staff and foreign reporters. The execution in 1979 of ABC TV correspondent ities with 3D digital technology, but a feature writer Instead of betraying or endangering anyone, she Bill Stewart and his Nicaraguan interpreter, Juan who immerses herself for weeks or months among quit her work as a fixer and stopped returning Francisco Espinosa, was a cautionary tale when the people she is covering. reporters’ phone calls. I was a cub reporter. The killings by the U.S.-backed In 2007, Campbell needed to penetrate the The narrative of this memoir, paced like a good Somoza dictatorship’s national guard were broad- community of displaced Iraqis in the Syrian capital novel, quickens soon after Campbell witnesses Damascus to research a Harper’s magazine piece Ahlam being taken from her home by secret police. Juliet O’Neill was a foreign correspondent for on the largest exodus in the Middle East since the In the panicky aftermath of Ahlam’s abduction, Canadian Press in Washington and for Southam Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948. Campbell lies alone in her Damascene apartment, News in Moscow and London. After retiring from Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the annoyed by the “drip, drip, drip” of the faulty air daily journalism she worked for two years as media ensuing purges and sectarian violence, a fifth of conditioner, and wavering between denial and then officer for Oxfam Canada. Iraq’s population had been displaced from their dread. When the journalist who introduced her to

10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Ahlam tells her to get out of Little Baghdad immediately, Campbell is stricken by paranoia. Unsure if her presence in Damascus had tipped the secret police, strangers’ gazes turned ominous; phone lines and public places no longer seemed safe. But Campbell’s guilt pushes her to seek Ahlam’s whereabouts, and hopefully her release. When she sets to work to find Ahlam, she wonders whether her journalistic instincts and investigative skills will be enough. She goes underground, discovering from a surprising source that Ahlam has been detained in Douma Prison, only a short distance from the headquarters of the United Nations High Give monthly. Commission for Refugees. Campbell comes to see institutions such as Support the LRC with a monthly donation and help us sustain the UNHCR through a new lens, questioning their cooperation and motives. UNHCR officials reject all our publishing and programming activities. her offer to expose the case in an article on the grounds it would backfire, exposing Ahlam and Provide ongoing, reliable, regular sources of funding for the other prisoners to more danger. Yet she badgers them despite her worry that she is indeed making LRC with automatic withdrawals. It’s an easy and convenient Ahlam’s situation worse. She has no way of knowing. way to give. And you can change your mind at any time. Campbell is plagued by the question of whether she is to blame for Ahlam’s disappearance. While Every gift—at every level—makes a significant impact. rebuking herself, she also tells herself that it could just as well be the fault of Al Jazeera, BBC or Amnesty International, with which Ahlam had Visit reviewcanada.ca/donate recently worked. “And even if this was not my fault, even if her arrest had nothing do with me … I was still responsible for her,” Campbell decides. “We had been a team … Our friendship had been forged through the work and it was the work she did—on behalf of me, and all of us—that had put her in danger.” It is this realization of responsibility that gives A Disappearance in Damascus so much heart. Campbell leaves no stone unturned in her search to find and free her friend, going from organization to organization—from UNHCR to the International Committee of the Red Cross, from Reporters Without Borders to Amnesty International—many of which Ahlam had, after Subscribe! all, worked for. Campbell stayed in Damascus for weeks and when she reached a dead end, travelled 1 year (10 issues) *Rates including GST/HST by province to Beirut for help from her contacts there. She Individuals Libraries and Individuals Libraries sought out friends of friends. Institutions ($56 + tax) ($68 + tax) While bringing the reader into her own turmoil, Canadian addresses* $56 + tax $68 + tax ON, NB, NL (13%) $63.28 $76.84 Campbell tells Ahlam’s side of the story with clar- PE (14%) $63.84 $77.52 ity, compassion and suspense. Who turned her in? Outside Canada $86 $98 NS (15%) $64.40 $78.20 Who had she been asked to spy on? Was Campbell Prices include shipping and postage. Rest of Canada (5%) $58.80 $71.40 responsible? What happened behind the prison gates? A Disappearance in Damascus is vivid, provoca- Name Suite/Apt. tive and timely. High-profile kidnappings, arrests and deaths of journalists and their assistants in Street City conflict zones in the last few years have increased Province or State Country public awareness of the role that fixers play and the perils they face—sometimes greater than the jour- Postal/Zip Code E-mail nalists who hire them. Just last year a coalition of major news organiza- Telephone Fax tions began to codify some obligations to freelan- NH1609 cers and fixers: safety and security, credit for story Please bill me! My cheque (payable to the Literary Review of Canada) is enclosed. content, prompt payment and a commitment to Charge my Visa or MasterCard. have the same concern about their welfare as their Card number Expiry own staff. Eighty organizations have signed on. Another notable development is the establish- Signature ment of worldfixer.com by two journalists in the United Kingdom in 2015, a database to match news Fax or mail completed form to Literary Review of Canada, PO Box 8, Station K and other organizations with fixers and freelancers Toronto on m4p 2g1 • fax: 1-800-635-5255 • tel: 416-932-5081 in 150 countries. Undercover fixers are included. email: [email protected] While institutional efforts may improve protec- To subscribe online, visit www.reviewcanada.ca/sub2016. tion for fixers, A Disappearance in Damascus illus- If you do not wish to receive correspondence from the LRC or other organizations trates how individual conscience and courage may unless it pertains directly to your subscription, please check here also be necessary to confront the dangers of bringing news from hot spots around the world.

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 11 IN A WORLD GONE MAD

Otto & Daria: A Wartime Journey Through No Man’s Land by Eric Koch, Winner of the Yad Vashem Prize for Holocaust Writing Born as “Otto” into a wealthy Frankfurt family, Eric Koch fled Nazi Germany for England as a Jewish refugee, only to be interned as an enemy alien. Later sent to Canada, he was once again imprisoned.

“…the past is painted with the brush of a novel, but made all the more convincing by its truth.” The Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson

12LRC Otto & Daria ad U of R Press.indd 1 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review2016-08-10 of Canada 11:21 AM The Orient Express Alexandre Trudeau’s whirlwind, and sometimes cliché-rich, tour of China. Patrick Brown

Despite what he describes as an early “resolve to Chinese would dare to suggest they have a better Barbarian Lost: Travels in the New China devote myself to understanding China,” Trudeau’s grasp of the Cultural Revolution, or any other topic, Alexandre Trudeau long preparation for this “mission to track glimpses, than, say, Jonathan Spence or Frank Dikötter, who HarperCollins chosen moments that might reveal the grand affairs bring a lifetime of scholarship to bear on the original 304 pages, hardcover that lie beneath” did not include learning Chinese. oral and written sources they use for their books. ISBN 9781443441407 Unable to speak to anyone, take a taxi or order a On learning that I lived in China for many years, meal without help, he engaged a young woman, new acquaintances frequently feel the need to Vivien, as an interpreter, fixer and guide. share their own experience on business trips or he story begins as so many stories It is not unusual for a journalist to work with vacations. “Our guide was amazing!” they exclaim have begun since our ancestors first told an interpreter. As a rule, though, journalists do so often that it has become a standing joke. “She Tthem in the flickering firelight of caves: not publish books, or even articles, which depend took us to this village in an area where tourists long before his quest unfolds, the young hero learns so heavily on an epic string of interviews with an never go. We were the first white people/foreigners/ that he is the Chosen One. employee. westerners they had ever seen!” When he was very young, Alexandre Trudeau Cast in the role of the author’s sidekick on the This compelling desire to have others believe that recalls, his father left on a long voyage to a strange road, Vivien is the book’s main character, aside you have been the first foreigner a Chinese person and perilous land on the edge of the world. “When from Trudeau himself. She is quoted directly, on has ever seen is known as Marco Polo syndrome. he returned, he was changed. He looked and innumerable subjects, on more than a hundred of “There were practically no other foreigners to be smelled slightly different. He had a beard and a tan the book’s pages, and mentioned by name on 50 seen there,” Trudeau writes of his trip to China with and a strange energy about him. He radiated a kind more. A gifted writer with a true ear for dialogue his father in 1990. And of the 2006 trip—the subject of power, seemed more aggressive and alive than can work the alchemy of transforming the words on of the book—he writes while describing a neigh- usual … this was a new father, not the patient and the page into a voice in the reader’s head. But, as bourhood of Guangzhou, a major city with a large adoring father of before, but the free spirit who I plodded wearily through the pages of Barbarian foreign population, “foreigners might occasionally had wandered the world. The lone traveller. The Lost, Viv’s voice started to emerge and it sounded enter during the day, and perhaps it’s not unheard observer of things. The holder of secret knowledge.” oddly familiar. It took a while for me to realize of that a white is seen walking the streets at night.” Alexandre also learns that shortly before he where I had heard it before: It was Siri, the digital A common side effect of Marco Polo syndrome was born, his mother had also journeyed to this assistant in my iPhone. is disdain for other foreigners in China, like the mysterious land in the Orient. His destiny was Viv has some interesting, if unexceptional ideas, men Trudeau spots in a Shanghai bar. “The newly clear. He, too, would travel to that enigmatic land, but the dialogues quoted throughout the book have arrived foreigners mix with those long marooned and unravel its strange secrets: “We’re filled with the ponderous didactic quality of a conversation in Shanghai, the club’s regulars never numerous desires—needs even—to go somewhere because with my digital companion, or the lines spoken by but always present. They come searching perhaps untravelled places are dark holes in the mind that characters in films explaining things the script writer for the company of fellow foreigners of any sort. draws us toward them. So China lay out there like feels need exposition before the plot moves on. They’re men with tanned and grim faces, old boys a gateway. The shapes of my childhood awareness Viv is clearly bright, articulate and resourceful, with airs of repressed desperation, with a need to of it, of my father’s book, my womb-bound journey but the dialogues reported by Trudeau are pep- remember—or forget.” there left more mysteries than understanding.” pered with clunky observations that simply do not This kind of overblown writing makes much of On the cover of Barbarian Lost: Travels in the ring true. the book heavy going. Describing a group of guys New China we are promised “an insightful and witty During a discussion about the controversial having a beer as if they were grizzled veterans of the account of the dynamic changes going on right now Three Gorges dam project, Viv remarks, “The proj- French Foreign Legion in a Saharan foxhole does in China.” In the opening chapter, “China Calling,” ect had seemed unavoidable for decades. Then it not make them any more interesting. Alexandre Trudeau promises more: after years of was finally commenced under Li Peng, the most A book about “dynamic changes taking place in focusing on “war zones and uncharted hinterlands,” stodgy and repressive of our recent leaders.” China right now” would be valuable. A book about he tells us, he was finally ready for the quest: “China Of a Hong Kong newspaper, she says “The South how Alexandre Trudeau felt during a short trip a was still distant, wrapped in mystery and doubt, China Morning Post is not, perhaps, what it used to decade ago is less so. It is the print equivalent of a immense, troubled, stiff and austere. Still it called.” be, but it is still a seminal liberal institution in the fading selfie. In eager anticipation of hair-raising adven- Far East.” During a boat ride on the Yangtze, Trudeau tures coupled with enlightenment and revelations I have no particular difficulty with the thoughts became depressed. about “China right now,” I plunged into Barbarian expressed. My problem is in believing that a human Lost only to find that the bulk of the book—243 of being actually uttered those words in the course of The outside world grows distant and the jour- 289 pages—is an extensive account of a rather dull normal conversation. ney stands in for life itself. As we move mon- and uneventful trip the author took for just one In between these stilted chats, Trudeau offers otonously forward, the metaphor becomes month in 2006—ten years ago. set-piece essays that bring a disconcerting change real and the passage takes on the feeling of The inclusion of a sidekick has been an orna- of tone, as the author switches from asking ques- philosophical inevitability. Because I am no ment to much great literature. As a literary device tions about China to giving a China 101 lecture on captain of the ship and play no part in piloting it worked pretty well for Cervantes, Conan Doyle, Daoism, Mao Zedong, the silk industry, the Tang us down the river, because I am but a pas- Twain and Tolkien. In this case, it is excruciating. dynasty or the history of Hong Kong. Offering his sive subject of the passage, a slight existential own interpretation of complex and difficult issues, panic sets in: that life’s not just fleeting, but Patrick Brown was a foreign correspondent for the Trudeau can be dismissive of the work of others. empty. That I’m wasting away, steadily pro- CBC for more than 30 years, often in Asia, includ- On the Cultural Revolution, for example, he makes ceeding toward death. ing Bangkok, Delhi and, most recently, Beijing. He the astonishing assertion that “foreign historians now splits his time between Canada and China as mostly characterize it as something sinister, gro- Reading this on page 117, contemplating gloom- an independent documentary film maker. Follow tesque, infantile and bizarre.” ily the 172 more pages still to read, I knew exactly him on Twitter @truthfromfacts Few writers on China who cannot speak or read how he felt.

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 13 MEMOIR Last Words Editing, at its highest level, is a creative act. Ellen Seligman’s was a kind of alchemy, to the very end. Steven Price

n the last year of her life, before her sud- candle is held low and close to the body, would Everything blurs together. Momentous changes den passing in March 2016, Ellen Seligman the light catch a figure’s eyes? Or psychological were happening in my life. My wife gave birth to our Iedited two novels: Michael Helm’s excellent complexity: would a man like Adam Foole speak second child at the beginning of that year, and he After James, and my second novel, By Gaslight. openly in front of his ward, Molly, or seek to protect had a difficult first year on Earth; my wife and I were By Gaslight is set in Victorian London, and tells her from the horrors of the city and so allow her a neither of us sleeping; deadlines for By Gaslight the story of the real-life detective William Pinkerton, kind of childhood? Sometimes I would make note rolled past at an alarming rate. Ellen insisted the some six months after his father’s death, as he seeks of a particular problem, of a scene too freighted novel would take as long as it took. The editing to trace a criminal his father never managed to with exposition, or dialogue that did not coalesce, went on. catch. Ellen and I worked together on the editing and return to it later that night, after the kids were Ellen’s devotion to her books was unyield- for 13 months, from February 2015 to March 2016. asleep. More often, Ellen would fall silent and wait ing, passionate. I learned later how, as with all of Our first serious email exchange explored in detail on the end of the line while I wrote and rewrote a her books, Ellen debated and weighed font sizes, some of the ideas and elements paper stock, cover layout and page in the novel, and ways to tease Ellen would fall silent and wait on the design for By Gaslight, making them out—themes of fathers and sure the very tiniest details were sons, grief, loss, fate and the ways end of the line while I wrote and rewrote considered. And the final physical our lives are determined by where book is indeed beautiful. I like to we come from. Our last exchange a sentence, the only sound between us think now that, although Ellen on the novel—also by email, never did see the finished book, changing the Reckitt woman’s the typing of the keyboard. all this must have helped her to name to Charlotte, for clarity—was envision it, to close her eyes and conducted seven days before her death. sentence, the only sound between us the typing of feel its weight in her hands. Editing, at its highest level, is surely a creative the keyboard. Ellen Seligman was a dynamo, a wonder. She act. I do not know that Ellen would have used There was no second draft, third draft, fourth was one of the great secret creators of Canadian such language; she told me once that her task was draft. Rather, there followed an endless amount of literature. She believed the nature of words mat- simply to read attentively, to bring the full weight rewriting. The novel cut 35,000 words during that tered because a work of literature, to her, was folded of her concentration to bear on a book. But Ellen’s year; it added some 70,000 words of new material, seamlessly out of the language itself. One needed concentration was a kind of genius, a sensitivity to the length of a short novel. Two significant charac- to get it right and the only true obstacle to that a work and what it wanted to become. Her editing ters were removed entirely; the ending was wholly was giving up, giving in, too soon. She had a low, method was somewhat legendary: Ellen would rewritten. We were both satisfied with By Gaslight’s dry, sardonic voice that somehow carried an equal examine every sentence, word by word, question- horizontal movement but a vertical element was measure of detached amusement and particular ing if what was being achieved was in the book’s added, to deepen and complicate the characters. warmth. She spoke slowly, was never hurried, and interest, or the author’s interest, or neither. Ellen Our intention always was to keep an eye fixed on had an impossible grasp on the minutiae in a text. liked to work in conversation with her authors— the characters, rather than the plot; neither of us Her ear for dialogue was extraordinary. Characters literally. We spoke on the phone almost daily for wanted an “entertainment,” but rather a novel were psychologically complex beings and she months, sometimes five days a week, usually for exploring its characters and how to live in the would question and argue and debate and worry roughly five or six hours at a time. world. It was to be a novel about a detective, rather away at why any of them did what they did. And It was a powerfully intimate process, frustrating, than a detective novel; we wanted the detective’s she argued with herself as much as with the novel; yes, but also illuminating, and intensely gratifying. art to become a metaphor for the mystery of grief I believe a great part of her gift lay in an endlessly Beginning at the opening of the novel, Ellen would and loss. elastic ability to adapt and re-examine how a novel edit 50 or 60 pages (line by line) and then post In order to make this happen, we worked moved and came to life. It was a kind of alchemy, a them to my house, on the West Coast; I would read linearly through the manuscript, beginning the fluid gesture. through them, make my own notes and then we second section only when the first was satisfactory. Some two weeks after Ellen had passed away, my would speak. I would raise questions, Ellen would But because any change to a later section neces- wife was going through our old answering machine raise questions, and the purpose of both was always sitated reworking what had come before, we were messages, deleting them. She stopped when she to seek greater clarity, fluidity, resonance and integ- endlessly returning to completed sections. Ellen’s heard Ellen’s voice. It was a message from several rity. These could be matters of diction: “dinner” or faith in the novel never wavered, no matter my own months earlier. “Steven. It’s Ellen. I guess you’re not “tea”? “hansom” or “brougham”? Or logic: if the anxiety or despair. Still, she was not pleased with there. It’s Friday at … No, wait. It’s Saturday. [pause] everything. Often a revision would create a whole Are you there? [pause] Okay. You’re not there. I’ll Steven Price is the author of two award-winning host of unexpected problems. In a 750-page novel, call you Monday.” poetry books, Anatomy of Keys (Brick Books, 2006), this meant an almost dizzying number of scattered It was so absolutely typical of Ellen, Ellen at her winner of the Gerald Lampert Award, and Omens new “hot spots” throughout the manuscript. But most concentrated, her immersion in the work so in the Year of the Ox (Brick Books, 2012), winner of when a scene at last began to work, Ellen was vol- total that the weekdays had poured into the week- the ReLit Award. His first novel, Into That Darkness, uble and fiery in her praise. Somehow it all seemed end unnoticed. was published by Thomas Allen in 2011. His novel worth it, at such moments. My wife and I stood together in the gathering By Gaslight was published by McClelland and I think now of that year with Ellen and it is dif- dusk, listening, playing her voice over and over, Stewart last month. He lives in Victoria. ficult to pick apart what happened when, and how. stricken.

14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada GALA October 13, 2016 5:30 pm One King Street West Toronto Help us celebrate this monumental anniversary Single tickets available at reviewcanada.ca/gala

We invite you to join us to celebrate this milestone anniversary. Like the magazine itself, the evening will feature a lively debate on an issue important to the country’s future.

The evening will start with an exclusive, on-stage conversation between David Frum and the Honourable Gary Doer, who will discuss the implications of the 2016 U.S. election for Canada.

David Frum Hon. Gary Doer

You’ll then move onto cocktails, where guests will rub shoulders with some of Canada’s best writers and thinkers, a decadent dinner and the unveiling of the LRC 25—our list of the 25 most inﬂ uential Canadian books published since 1991, the year the LRC was founded.

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September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 15 Literary Soirée

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world. —Russell Baker

You’re standing in C’s kitchen, drinking wine when A tries to explain the New Poetry, how it drives on both sides of the road, collides with itself, glass and metal flying Small Boat: i into the next century. Elliptical, elusive, non- linear, definitely complex, the New Poetry It’s the wind I’ve come to fear. chain smokes two packs a day but never coughs. Remember those childhood days Purrs inscrutably on top of the baby grand. when it made your pinwheel spin Avoids trap doors, doesn’t count the tree’s rings. so fast the colours melted, disappeared? Compelling, nonetheless, self-sufficient, gutsy, Now it’s whitecaps and no fun at all. beyond beautiful or profound. In its imageless He calls them “mare’s tails” to make it sound better grey suit it struts across the page indifferent but you know what’s up. to the postcard lying in the gutter — Oh, my love, oh, oh … It’s the open gullet of ocean. You think of the Old Poetry, that heavy It’s got a date to take you in mud hut of desire, the years of collecting bits and it’s not waiting much longer. of coloured glass, how you mosaic-ed Come on, wind says, brushing your cheek the beams, oven-ed the pigment, massed a little fresh. the thermal, vegetabled the art. Sadness Take a spin. I dare you. takes hold of your bones. Muscular verbs, A’s telling you, anything that sounds crunchy. Kate Braid You get the idea: no assonance, dissonance, symbol, rhyme, no repetition, simile or metaphor. Definitely no mothers or fathers, no afterbirths or meltdowns, no rivers of tears. Having shed all its devices, the New Poetry’s empty as a blackboard on Sunday afternoon, a woman kneeling in a radiated field, begging her turnips to thrive, goddamnit, thrive.

Patricia Young

Kate Braid has written, edited and co-edited twelve books Patricia Young recently placed first and second in Prairie Fire and of poetry and non-fiction. A second edition of In Fine ’s fiction contests. Her twelfth collection of poetry will be Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry, published by Biblioasis in the fall of 2016. She has recently read co-edited with Sandy Shreve, will be published fall 2016 by Detachment: An Adoption Memoir by Maurice Mierau and The Caitlin Press. In 2015 she received the Mayor of Vancouver’s Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Storie” by Joy Williams. Award for service to the literary community. She is currently reading Patrick Friesen and Per Brask’s translation of Ulrikka S. Gernes’s Frayed Opus for Strings and Wind Instruments, The Cathedral Builders of the Middle Ages by Alain Erlande-Brandenburg and Neil Turok’s The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos.

16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada jungle dreaming i.m. Ramona Lehr, 1953–2015 Night’s Work Eyes closed, green mesh around me, roof of leaves over my head. Bats are rustling in their high beds, soft-winged, Inis Mór, County Galway, Ireland taking short flights in their dreaming. I’m inside the dream The wind that rocked the roof all night woke me: where the body is awake and clear, sister of a woman opening gates, gusting behind the shed, strewing bric-à-brac of pebbles, bones. Cow voices, who’s touched forty thousand heads, emptied the bone pockets, low as thorns, scraping the window. This is sleep, scattered their debris. Outside, night lowers its ladder, probed awake. Sunflowers shaking their fists, their waterdance patterning walls. Poppies aglow lays it lengthwise across the dropped leaves in the afterdawn. Storm is night’s work; rest, the sun that darken from the weight — shadows appear, constellations, filling the sky’s bowl. The waves work less and less. Small leaves the rain had battened down, unfold. a grasshopper clinging to the mesh. The sky drifts downriver, lap of water, ratios of light. From their green chrysalides *Note: “The waves work less and less” is borrowed blue morphos emerge, river dwellers fishing from the shoreline from “Alas! so all things now do hold their peace!” wait for the sky to blue. When you gather by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. the molecules of the hand and hold them to the candle’s flame, Kelly Norah Drukker the cicadas of the mind will sing.

Genevieve Lehr

Genevieve Lehr was born in Newfoundland and lives in Halifax. Her poetry Kelly Norah Drukker is the author of Small Fires, a collec- has been published in a number of literary journals in Canada and abroad. tion of poems published by the Hugh MacLennan Poetry She is the editor of Come and I Will Sing You: A Newfoundland Songbook Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press (2016). Born in (University of Toronto Press, 1985, reprinted 2003) and author of The Design Montreal, she grew up in the Laurentian region of Quebec, of Wings (Running the Goat Press, 2004) and The Sorrowing House(Brick and has worked and taught English in the United Kingdom, Books, 2004). Her latest poetry collection, Stomata, is forthcoming from Brick Ireland, Switzerland and France. Her poetry and creative Books in October 2016. Her poem “the latter half of the third quarter of the non-fiction have appeared in numerous Canadian and waning moon” was co-winner of the Malahat Review’s 2015 Long Poem Prize. international journals. Kelly’s poetry has received a CBC She is currently reading Du Fu: A Life in Poetry translated by David Young, Literary Award (2006) and a Norma Epstein Prize in Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey through the Realm of Vanishing Creative Writing (2013), and has been longlisted for the Cultures by Wade Davis and Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Montreal International Poetry Prize (2011). She holds a mas- Narratives by Joan Halifax. ter’s degree in English and creative writing from Concordia University, and is pursuing a doctorate in humanities at Concordia. Kelly is currently reading A Lovely Gutting by Robin Durnford, Bear Dreams by Ian Ferrier, and The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante.

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 17 What George Did Zoe Whittall on rape culture as seen from the inner circle of the accused. Adèle Barclay

dodge the media circus and swirling questions about She felt simultaneously grateful that these The Best Kind of People her complicity in George’s alleged crimes. As she other women existed and totally judgmental Zoe Whittall considers the possibility that her loving husband is of them. … She hated the women in the group House of Anansi Press an abuser and a liar, the beautiful lakeside mansion when they talked slowly, or mispronounced 400 pages, softcover where she lives suddenly looms large and lonely. words, or cried, or expressed shame for ISBN 9781770899421 As for the once-popular Sadie, she is caught in staying with their husbands. She hated them the crossfire between the students who believe her because she could relate to them, and that father and those who believe the girls. She ques- meant she didn’t know who she was becom- oe Whittall’s third novel, The Best Kind tions her mother’s and brother’s deeply rooted ing, who she had been, who she was sup- of People, demarcates a pivot point for the denial. And the Men’s Rights Activists who make a posed to be. ZCanadian novelist, screenwriter and poet cause of liberating her father present a particularly known for her realist novels that depict queer and bristly challenge. Sadie’s clarity seems almost far- In the midst of all the drama, a local novelist trans characters’ lives in Toronto and Montreal. The fetched at times, but she also exists at that precar- exploits the family’s story for his own Jonathan book follows the disintegration of an affluent all- ious moment where her feminist ideals—taught to Franzen-esque aspirations. His inclusion is a American family in the wake of patriarch George her, ironically, by her father—are being tested in the self-aware gesture that calls attention to the liter- Woodbury’s arrest for attempted rape and sexual real world. Her arrival at an MRA meeting gets at ary tradition of the Great American Novel, which misconduct with minors. A group of 14-year-old her conflicted position: deploys feminine experiences while seldom includ- girls at the elite private school in New England ing those voices in its canon. Whittall slyly announ- where George, a local hero and respected teacher, She nodded at them. They were people her ces her own take on the form. Queer, femme and works come forward with the allegations after a ski father would call delusional nutbars. But Canadian, she is surely an outlier of the American trip. Opening with George’s arrest, the story surveys some weird part of her wanted to believe literary establishment. But she initiates a dialogue the reverberations of the shocking news in the lives them. Because if what they were saying was with it by veering away from George’s perspective of those caught in its ripple effect. true, she could defend her father, she could and centering the experiences of the women, girls As with her previous novels Bottle Rocket Hearts take all the confusion she felt and turn it into and queer folks. Even though Andrew, Sadie and and Holding Still for As Long As Possible, Whittall’s something concrete. It was an answer. Joan are tasked with supporting George, and have interest here is in how we forge intimate relation- only positive memories of him, Whittall shows the ships while at the mercy of forces—politics, chance, To call Whittall’s The Best Kind of People timely varying degrees to which people on either side of a tragedy—beyond our control. The allegations is an understatement. Rape culture is not new, but scandal can be enmeshed in rape culture, confront- against George tear apart the reality of his wife, we are at a moment when mainstream discourse on ing it or constantly abiding it. Joan, their teenaged daughter, Sadie, and their sexual assault is starting to take shape. Recent high- The Best Kind of People does not merely speak son, Andrew, a lawyer living in New York City, profile sexual assault cases such as Bill Cosby’s and to its time: it grapples with some of the issues sur- who returns to his rural Connecticut hometown, Jian Ghomeshi’s have provoked discussion and an rounding rape culture at their most intimate and a reluctant prodigal son, in order to defend his elucidation of issues of abuse, power and consent. urgent. This is not a story of triumph over trauma; father’s case. There Andrew, who is gay, is forced to As the Stanford University rape case demonstrated it is about how we live with trauma daily. Whittall reckon with his high-school sweetheart—a closeted with its institutional victim shaming and the sur- knows that these are familiar stories that are just gym teacher whom he dated while still a student. vivor’s powerful personal statement, we are simul- beginning to be told. Meanwhile, young Sadie takes a rebellious turn taneously stumbling toward understanding and a As they come out, it becomes possible for more from model student to stoner, fluctuating between regressive pushback when it comes to rape. The Best survivors to come forward. But the revelations destructive behaviour and small moments of clarity Kind of People explores the pervasiveness of rape summon complex and deeply conflicted responses. where she observes how this rupture in her family culture, but from the even more deeply complex We have been trained to think of abusers as one- and town plays out socially. Many figures, includ- vantage point of the alleged abuser’s inner circle. dimensional monsters, and to sweep abuse under ing the mayor, support her father, and she begins to George’s own perspective remains largely the rug. Clearly, these approaches are failing us. perceive the class and racial dynamics that inform unknown throughout the narrative as he awaits trial Abusers are not always obviously shady villains— her pocket of upper-class Connecticut. in prison, glimpsed only briefly through occasional sometimes they are charismatic people we love As the family unravels, Whittall locates this potent visits. He is a blank screen upon which characters and respect. While I was reading The Best Kind moment to illuminate how power, misogyny, vio- hurl feelings and agendas. The black hole of his of People for this review, someone I once dated lence and class are enmeshed in thorny, subtle ways. character is a moral choice on Whittall’s part—like was accused of assaulting dozens of women and Joan, a hyper competent matriarch, retreats inward, his family, we will never know if he is guilty. underage girls, of using his status as a lead singer even having her groceries delivered, so she can The Best Kind of People’s fully fleshed-out in a famous hardcore band, and the cloak of his characters, intuitively detailed environments and progressive politics, to prey on fans. As our culture Adèle Barclay is a writer and critic whose work has patiently wrought domestic portraits are in keep- begins to broach actual conversations about rape, appeared in The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, ing with Whittall’s lauded style. As explosive as its we are going to have our beliefs challenged not only The Pinch, Matrix and elsewhere. She is the winner starting point is, the novel dwells in the minutiae of in the abstract, but in very real ways. This is why of the 2016 Lit POP Poetry Award. Her debut poetry the everyday and its unseen emotional valences— The Best Kind of People is Whittall’s bravest, finest collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, grocery lists, laundry, morning rituals. Some of its hour: she articulates all of this grief and the grey was shortlisted for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award most poignant yet fraught moments come when aura it radiates. The novel may not resolve the grief for Innovative Poetry and will be published by Joan attends a support group for women with part- of trauma, but it is one of the few narratives I have Nightwood Editions in October. She is the inter- ners in prison. Whittall captures her complicated encountered that truly holds it. views editor for The Rusty Toque. perspective:

18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Lives of the Poet The reclusive Elizabeth Bishop reveals herself in her work. Bardia Sinaee

writes, “These peninsulas take the water between ingly designed to differentiate this from other aca- Elizabeth Bishop at Work thumb and finger / like women feeling for the demic studies. The second chapter is interspersed Eleanor Cook smoothness of yard-goods.” “The Map” was written with tedious writing prompts for would-be poets Harvard University Press soon after Bishop’s mother died in a Dartmouth (“Exercise: Write a short poem mostly in ordinary 300 pages, hardcover sanatorium in 1934, and Cook points out that diction that also includes a word or two that may be ISBN 9780674660175 Bishop associated her mother with yard goods; she hard to define precisely”) that never ppeara again. considers the sewing metaphor in light of Bishop’s Whereas Cook’s writing is most engaging when 1953 short story, “In the Village,” which opens with she freely explores her own impressions of Bishop’s hen a reporter at the American a woman unmistakably based on her mother being poetry, her attempts to dictate how her findings embassy in Brazil called Elizabeth fitted for a dress. should be interpreted come off as pedantic. Take, WBishop in 1956 and told her she had Cook’s chronological examination of Bishop’s for instance, Cook’s analysis of Bishop’s oak leaf won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Bishop left her books, and the far-reaching connections she metaphor in the poem “Quai d’Orléans”: mountaintop home near Rio, entered a neighbour’s makes, facilitate more nuanced readings of Bishop’s kitchen and ate two Oreo cookies, which she hated. later work; when the poet describes “the silken The entire poem works with the old topos “I thought I should do something to celebrate,” she water” as “weaving and weaving” in the 1949 poem of leaves, not so much Milton’s leaves of later explained to the Paris Review. “Cape Breton,” Cook’s shrewd observation about Vallombrosa that descend into Shelley’s Through quaint anecdotes like this one, the Bishop’s fabric metaphors makes one wonder if revolutionary leaves blown by the wild west notoriously fastidious poet cultivated, over the the shoreline’s ghostly presence, “the mist [that] wind—leaves that go back to Homer’s meta- years, a reserved if somewhat idiosyncratic per- incorporates the pulse, / rapid but unurgent, of a phor for souls of the dead. “Leaves” make sona. Bishop was less candid about her difficult motorboat,” is Bishop’s mother. such a potent figure for a poet that no compe- childhood (she was only a baby when her father’s Cook’s prose is decidedly more functional than tent poet [emphasis added] will use this word sudden death precipitated her mother’s mental stylish, but more importantly her expertise and and possible topos without thought. breakdown) and her sexuality (in the same Paris breadth of approach are as expansive as Bishop’s Review interview, she casually alluded to Lota de poetry is allusive. By reading Bishop’s first book It is unlikely that Cook’s presumed audience of Macedo Soares, her partner of over 15 years, who as a quasi-pastiche of Wordsworth’s Prelude, aspiring poets would appreciate being censured died of a tranquillizer overdose soon after Bishop Cook shows how the arrangement of poems in the for lacking fluency in the topos of leaves in western left Brazil, as “a friend”). On the rare occasion that seemingly miscellaneous collection actually cor- literature. And Cook’s tone here risks alienating romantic relationships or childhood turbulence responds to Bishop’s travels after her time at Vassar lay readers who may be drawn to a critical study of appear in her poetry and short fiction, she writes College and to her interior voyage—“the growth of Bishop (as opposed to, say, Wallace Stevens or Ezra about them abstractly or in the third person. a poet’s mind.” Also remarkable is the richness Pound) precisely because Bishop’s allusiveness is Therefore one cannot help but wonder how of Cook’s secondary sources, such as a French- rarely prohibitive; while it enriches one’s under- Bishop, who published fewer than a hundred Canadian World War One recruitment poster fea- standing of the trope, Homer’s metaphor for lost poems in her lifetime, would have felt about how turing France’s Gallic rooster fighting the German souls is not essential to appreciating how a barge’s much of her formerly private work has been issued eagle, which Cook uses to contextualize how the wake resembles an oak leaf.” since her death in 1979. In addition to selections geopolitical allegory at the heart of Bishop’s poem More than any superficial writing advice, how- of her letters and paintings published in the mid “Roosters” would have been more unambiguous to ever, this study’s value is its demonstration of how 1990s, the publication of Edgar Allan Poe and the a mid-20th century reader. to read poetry. When Bishop, in a love poem con- Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments, At times, a seeming conviction that Bishop’s cerned with shelter and nests, employs a “nested” in 2006, was followed two years later by Words mastery is self-evident causes lapses in Cook’s dis- (i.e., symmetrical) rhyme scheme (in this case abc- in Air, a fascinating, nearly thousand-page col- cipline. She occasionally describes Bishop’s choices cba), Cook identifies how this elaborate conversion lection of Bishop’s correspondence with the poet as “just right” or “a stroke of genius” without much of “scheme into trope” allows Bishop to evoke an Robert Lowell. In the midst of this ephemera, and elaboration. Part of Cook’s appraisal of “Roosters,” entire world in two short stanzas. That readers as the many critical studies and anthologies that a poem of 44 three-line stanzas all rhymed aaa, is attentive as Cook exist at all should compel poets treat Bishop’s poems like discrete texts, University that it “reads easily; the rhymes are mostly unob- to pay more attention to craft when experimenting of Toronto professor Eleanor Cook’s new study, trusive.” However, one could not only find many with poetic conceits. Elizabeth Bishop at Work, notably emphasizes the awkward, lurching passages in “Roosters” (“Christ In a poem from her new collection, Let the examination of Bishop’s poems in the context and stands amazed, / Peter, two fingers raised / to Empire Down, Hamilton, Ontario–based poet order of their original collections. surprised lips, both as if dazed”), but could also Alexandra Oliver uses sonnet-length stanzas with Although she is primarily considered an make the case that the poem’s defiant unreadability nested rhymes (abcdefggfedcba) to describe an American poet, the three childhood years Bishop underscores its message of protest, which is why encounter with a young manicurist. As the girl says spent living in Great Village, Nova Scotia, were Bishop’s friend and mentor Marianne Moore had that a nail salon is not where she expected to end formative to her visual and metaphorical palette. the good sense to dislike it. To be fair, this is in part up after a childhood spent excelling in the sciences, Describing a map of the North Atlantic in the open- a matter of divergent tastes, but Cook transcends the poem’s scheme switches to near rhymes (as in ing poem (“The Map”) of her first collection, Bishop such divergences when she is more steadfast in hand/friend, burble/marble, watch/catch), enact- undertaking the burden of proof. ing her sense of falling short. Poetry survives in part Bardia Sinaee’s poems have appeared in pub- Another shortcoming of Elizabeth Bishop at through the symbiosis between writers like Oliver lications throughout Canada, including Arc, Work is its distracting and incongruous attempts to and readers like Cook, and those scouring Elizabeth Maisonneuve, Walrus and Best Canadian Poetry orient itself toward a specific readership. The first Bishop’s unfinished drafts would do well to apply 2015 (Tightrope Books). He lives in Toronto and is half in particular suffers from unpredictable tonal Cook’s methodology to finding Bishop at work in an editorial assistant at the LRC. shifts (from playful to anecdotal to didactic) seem- the output of contemporary poets.

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 19 Blue Notes In true tone deafness, an answer to why we sing. Emma Hooper

Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music Tim Falconer House of Anansi 304 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781770894457

here is a battle being waged about music, about why we like it so much and Twhy we have it at all. On one side, we have cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker, cham- pioning the “auditory cheesecake” team, those who believe music to be a non-evolutionarily crucial, although pleasant, side effect of our development of language. On the other, we have professor of psychology and behaviour neuroscience Daniel J. Levitin, who champions the pro-evolutionary stance first put forward by Charles Darwin, that, in the English biologist’s words, “musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male and female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.” Both sides are well argued, rigorous and contemporary, leaving us with a rather thrilling answer to the question why do we make music: no one really knows. This certainly has not stopped academics and practitioners across myriad fields from delving further into the complicated relationship we have with this particular art form. There is one point in Tim Falconer’s Bad Singer: The Surprising Science culture; as Falconer points out, “traditionally, left relatively story-less through a bit of waffling of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music when a whenever people gathered they would sing.” This on-and-off-again music lessons up until the final researcher lays out her goal: “to better understand is why it rings true when he admits flat out, “I’m a chapter and concert. Perhaps the idea is that by the mechanics behind pitch perception and music bad singer. And deep down, it matters.” Historically, this point we should be hooked far enough into the processing at the behaviour level, at the cognitive we have always sung; we should all still be able to. more informative content to maintain momentum or theoretical level, at the computation level, at Bad Singer is really two books in one: the per- without the impetus of the narrative plot; however, the brain level, and at the genetic level.” Falconer’s sonal narrative of Falconer as he confronts and Falconer does too good a job of building story ten- book, which also incorporates sociology, pop cul- attempts to understand and overcome his own sion in the first half for it not to be missed when it ture analysis and a personal journey, attempts to failings as a musician and vocalist, and the broad, dries up. achieve no less. Bad Singer strives toward some if not always in-depth, exploration of humankind’s Falconer’s naive layperson narrator func- sense of truth through whatever disciplines and relationship with music along various scientific and tions especially well as a bridge; we do not feel routes possible, seeking solid ground in the often sociological avenues. intimidated by the scope and depth of the various shaky science of music. It is a formula that works; Falconer, a journal- academic fields he dives into, as Falconer himself Although the earliest instruments as yet discov- ist by trade, knows the value of a good story, and takes the plunge and asks the questions, silly or ered are 35,000-year-old bone and ivory flutes, it is his personal story gives context and relevance to otherwise, for us. Questions such as: why do people fairly universally assumed that we made and played what could otherwise be a dry compilation. We like sung music so very much, with the vast major- drums long before that, and that, before any formal are interested and invested as he discloses his ity of popular music across all genres, from folk to instrumentation—flute, drum or otherwise—the life-long struggles with intonation and the idea of hip-hop, featuring the voice as lead instrument? earliest form of human music making came from performance, the frustration and embarrassment The answer to this is laid out by a small team of our own bodies, clapping, stomping and, of course, of not knowing when he is out of tune, leading to experts, and involves everything from empathy to singing. The voice is an instrument shared by every the unlikely climax of his true amusic diagnosis. intermediality and ethnomusicology. (One exception to the pace is an early paragraph Another of Falconer’s inquiries is, what, exactly, Emma Hooper is an author, musician and aca- entirely given over to listing academics within the is meant by that ubiquitous term, musical timbre? demic. Her next book, A Long Sound, A Low Sound, book’s field; no more than a series of names, it is One recent study of more than 6,000 sounds nar- will be published by Penguin Canada in 2018. She of little interest to anyone except other academ- rowed timbre down to around ten parameters, teaches pop-music sociology at Bath Spa University. ics, for whom this book, with its gentle entry-level “attributes such as brightness, attack time, effective Although Emma lives in the United Kingdom, she approach to the topic, is not written.) The pacing duration and noisiness,” while another aims not to comes home to Alberta to cross-country ski as often falters a little in the second half of Bad Singer, break it down at all, but instead, recognize musi- as she can. www.emmahooper.ca after we have learned his official diagnosis and are cal timbre as one “complex spectromorphology,

20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada an electroacoustic term for the sonic footprint of a singing off-pitch is not always condemned. In fact, sound spectrum as it changes over time.” there are a number of musicians who have made Most relevant to Falconer’s plight, perhaps, is a a career of it, such as Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Coming up study that recently proved that timbre is a musical Singing slightly out of tune can lend an air of attribute that tone-deaf people can and do respond authenticity valuable in musical genres such as folk in the LRC to, despite an inability to distinguish pitch, lead- (as well as punk, rock and others). Note New Yorker ing us to a third, inevitable, question: what does it editor David Remnick’s description of Dylan’s actually mean to be tone deaf? drawl, “He has a true voice.” The two threads of the book twine especially And so, frustratingly for our narrator, who is Memory and nostalgia neatly in this quest to concretely define tone deaf- paradoxically told in singing lessons, “worrying ness and bad singing. The popular and easiest about your singing while you’re singing means Donna Nurse definition of a bad singer tends to be someone who you’re doing it wrong,” searching for a quick route is not in tune. This is what the scientific, lab-test- to having a “good” voice or being a “good singer” is Reggae appropriation able definition of tone not as easy as just being deafness, or amusia, Timbre is a musical in tune. Or breathing Dalton Higgins is based on. We follow well. Or having strong as Falconer undergoes attribute that tone- abdominal muscles. As several guinea pig ses- with the question of the Queer and urbane sions in various labs deaf people can and do origin of human music, Amy Lavender Harris for his own diagnosis. there is no one, firm, sci- (There is a less rigor- respond to. entifically proven answer ous version of the test to what makes a good History’s resurrection for those who would like to analyze themselves at singer. But this, perhaps, can be as liberating as it is Ana Siljak home, called the BRAMS online test.) While I will frustrating. We are currently governed by a “cultural refrain from revealing the results of Falconer’s hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and evaluations here, it is notable that far fewer people encourages consumption rather than creation,” Jane Jacobs, immortal are actually tone deaf, or amusics, than think Falconer argues, and it is easy, but also distracting, Lev Bratishenko they are. While around 20 percent of the population to get caught up in a drive for scientific measures are good enough to know when they are bad—they of one’s own talent. Instead, when Falconer states can hear that they are not hitting the notes they early on, “singing is something we should all be Harper’s legacy want to be, and are therefore not considered true able to do,” we should not interpret it to mean amusics—only 2.5 percent are actually, properly, technically, but, instead, read it more generously: Paul Wells tone deaf, that is to say, unable to hear the differ- singing, music making, is something innate and ences between close pitches. important to us all. We might not know exactly why John Le Carré’s genius Those are satisfyingly tidy numbers. However, or exactly how, but that should not stop us from, they still do not really bring us much closer to a alone, with friends, or on stage, opening out and Paul Wilson sturdy definition of “good” or “bad” singing, as letting loose our own version of a joyful noise.

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, Where We Live John Reibetanz poetry is just the ash.” Paperback Our relationships with the Leonard Cohen places we inhabit and that inhabit us.

The Unlit Path Behind the House Small Fires Margo Wheaton Kelly Norah Drukker Paperback Paperback

“Wheaton’s work is suffused Trio Poems that illustrate with a remarkable compas- Sarah Tolmie the stories that lie sion: subtle, hard won, and Paperback buried in landscapes mature. It refuses to compete and in human lives. with literary fashion; it simply One woman. Two lovers. Knots transcends it. This is a stun- It’s a complicated dance. Edward Carson ning debut – a work of tech- Paperback nical sophistication and great hook Finalist for the Pat nancy viva davis halifax emotional integrity.” Lowther Award, 2016 Sculpted from the persua- Jan Zwicky Paperback sive mind, erratic heart, and enigmatic art of love’s Witnessed and lived experi- most devious puzzles. ence that bridge literary McGI L L - Q U E E N’S U N I V E R S I TY PR E S S mqup.ca and activist worlds. Follow us on Facebook.com/McGillQueens and Twitter @Scholarmqup

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 21 ESSAY Reasonable Doubts The gap between religious rights and the rights of the rest. Suanne Kelman

ccommodation has such a cosy sound. rush of adrenaline at the sight of a burqa or niqab. Yet tion with a list of non-negotiable demands aimed Even when it is applied to government how can anyone argue that their rights are violated at correcting its existing “premises of imperialism, Apolicies, it carries a hint of rest after a by a woman wearing what amounts to a tent with white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cis- tiring journey. But there is nothing cosy or com- eye slits, assuming that it is her own choice? Surely a sexist heteropatriarchy.” Now that is an abyss in forting about the accommodation issues that democratic society has to allow people to wear what approaches that is going to be hard to bridge. Canadians face today. they want, whether it is a burqa or the clothing of an But we have our own problems, on the evidence Take the issue of the burqa, the all-concealing 18th-century Polish nobleman, the preferred look of the headlines of our newspapers. If you enjoy garment that has become the focus of frighten- for some of Canada’s Hasidic Jews. feeling outrage, they provide plenty of fodder for all ingly intense emotion in the West. In France this Some of my female friends justify their reac- political persuasions: summer, a Mediterranean resort sought to ban the tion as a feminist response. They see the niqab as so-called burkini, an outfit that covers only mar- an affront to the battle for equal rights to women. • An eleven-year-old First Nations girl died ginally more than a standard female of cancer after a court granted her Victorian bathing costume. The coun- We need to develop principles to deal parents the right to decline further try’s Council of State overturned the chemotherapy and to seek traditional proposed ban, but not before social with the issues where we cannot trust treatment. The parents opted for a media hummed with photographs of Florida clinic licensed as a massage gendarmes forcing women in Muslim our emotions. establishment—not the only case of dress to leave, pay fines or even par- this kind in recent years. tially disrobe on the beaches. Not to mention a Maybe—but I remember a time when some non- • Last year a Montreal judge refused to hear a popular Facebook posting by the imam of Florence, Catholics reacted with the same exaggerated revul- case (involving a seized car) until the plain- showing—without comment—fully clad nuns sion to nuns’ habits. There is something about the tiff removed her hijab. Two years earlier, the cavorting in the water. total otherness of a woman in a niqab or burqa, Quebec Soccer Federation had tried to ban The term niqab is more familiar than burqa that feeling of an earlier world intruding into the turbans for its players, a move that was over- in Canada, where the face-covering veil surfaced present, that gives a lot of Canadians the creeps. turned after a directive from the Canadian as an issue in our most recent federal election. I think that unreasonable sensation is precisely Soccer Association and advice from FIFA. Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to ban it the reason why we need civil discussions and • In 2014, York University stood by its deci- for citizenship ceremonies—a pledge that would debates that will lead to policies on accommoda- sion to allow a male student to avoid classes have affected only a minuscule number of women, tion now. That revulsion is one of the danger signals where he might have to interact with women. whose identities could have been established easily that unite our issues on accommodation—we need • This year, a potential student with dyslexia before the ceremony began. It is one of the symbols to develop principles to deal with the issues where accused the University of Ottawa, a bilingual that the Parti Québécois’s proposed Quebec Charter we cannot trust our emotions. institution, of discriminating against him by of Values would have banned for public servants. That is as true for accommodating disabilities as forcing him to learn French. Coincidentally, But why is it such a flashpoint? The issue of it is for issues of faith. Few Canadians would admit the same university cancelled (briefly) a free the burqa and niqab somehow resists rational to negative feelings when they confront disabilities. yoga class run for its Centre for Students discourse. On one hand, these wholly concealing It is impossible to imagine a Canadian politician with Disabilities after accusations of cultural garments cannot actually be defended on religious following the lead of Donald Trump in his mocking appropriation. grounds. You will not find any mention of them in imitation of a journalist with a chronic joint condi- • In 2013, during a provincial election, a PQ the Koran, which prescribes modest dress for both tion. Nonetheless, disabilities—physical, emotional candidate suggested that Montreal’s Jewish women and men. Even the term hijab refers not to a and intellectual—create unease in a lot of us, so General Hospital should drop the word head covering, but to the idea of separation, which we would rather just pretend they do not exist. “Jewish” from its title and cease offering is commanded only for the wives of the Prophet. Moreover, accommodating all disabilities fully circumcisions. Her own party rejected the The niqab derives from specific Middle Eastern would be prohibitively expensive. We need to start proposal. cultures, not Islam. formulating policy on what constitutes reasonable • In June, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled On the other hand, the burqa and niqab are accommodation. that the Law Society of Upper Canada is certainly not unique in the history of fashion. They You can see why any sane politician would want entitled to deny accreditation to the law do not cover much more than the outside garment to leave these problems alone. Canadians pride school of Trinity Western University, whose of an affluent matron in ancient Rome, whose veil themselves on seeming nice—so polite that we “community covenant” enjoins students proclaimed her social and marital status. apologize when other people step on our feet. And to refrain from sex outside of heterosexual Yet they arouse inappropriately strong emotional there is no nice way to resolve the conflicts that marriage. Ezra Levant commented on the responses in many Canadians. I have met lifelong reasonable accommodation is meant to address. decision in The Rebel, under the headline: NDP voters (the NDP strongly opposed Harper’s To be fair, Canada’s challenge is nowhere near “Update On Trinity-Western University’s proposal) who nonetheless experience a painful as extreme as our neighbour’s to the south, where Fight Against Anti-Christian Bigotry.” several fundamentalist ministers applauded Omar Suanne Kelman is a journalist, author and former Mateen’s massacre at an Orlando gay nightclub. We do have a framework for dealing with these director of the School of Journalism at Ryerson And that was only six months after students at conflicts, but it is vague. Our Charter of Rights University in Toronto. Oberlin College presented the school’s administra- and Freedoms guarantees Canadians freedom

22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada of conscience and religion; freedom of thought, cies. We face an inescapable conflict: on one hand, Of course, France is not the only country where belief, opinion and expression; freedom of peaceful a segment of the Canadian population trumpets its policy produces undesirable and possibly unantici- assembly; and freedom of association. right to practise its religion freely—not just to wor- pated consequences. Ontario last year introduced So far, so good. But then you hit Section 15.1, ship as it chooses, but to restrict its membership, to a long overdue, more inclusive sex education cur- which proclaims that we are all “equal before and control the education of its children and to avoid riculum in its public schools. That sparked angry under the law … without discrimination based on activities and people it condemns. For another seg- and surprisingly large protests in some areas, often race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, ment, to which I belong, the rights of the religious based on false information about what was being age or mental or physical disability.” should not be allowed to infringe on the rights of taught. The province held its ground, with the Put those two sections together and you run into equality and security guaranteed in the Charter. For result that some parents, particularly in Toronto’s trouble. The two sets of rights—religious freedom us, LBGTQ rights trump the rights of the religious. Thorncliffe area, are now homeschooling their and the equality of all Canadians—are not always Moreover, we expect and demand other rights children. compatible. As for some of those other points, the granted to us by the legal system, including the right That is their right, of course. They blame the Bible itself discriminates against people with dis- to control our own reproductive and sexual lives government for trying to force-feed their children abilities. It bars from the Temple “a blind man, or a and now the right to die, in strictly defined condi- homosexual propaganda. I blame them for their lame man, or he who has a disfigured face, or any tions, if life becomes too physically painful. bigotry and authoritarianism. That is yet another deformed limb” (Leviticus 21:18), adding for good The right to die is, at this point, a game changer, reason to start gathering information and formulat- measure hunchbacks, dwarves and anyone with forcing us to confront a conflict we have been ducking policy, instead of playing politics: this is an issue eczema or scabs or crushed testicles (Leviticus ing for years on abortion. Just ask the women of where everyone is biased. 21:20). Prince Edward Island, who heard in July that they And, in spite of my biases and pace the Parti Fortunately, the Third Temple is unlikely to be might finally be able to obtain abortions in their Québécois, we cannot actually base these policies built in our Dominion, so no one will have to take own province. Up until then, no doctor in PEI was on the simple premise that Canada is a secular its priests to court. We have more pressing issues. willing to perform the procedure. Many doctors and state. That position is the starting point of Quebec’s In the area of accommodating religion, it is easy other healthcare workers—out of religious belief or sane and balanced 2008 report on the issue of reli- to identify the key conflicts: sexual orientation and simply respect for the Hippocratic Oath—would gious accommodation, Building the Future: A Time conduct, reproductive rights and the right to die. If have to violate their own consciences to assist in for Reconciliation, by Gérard Bouchard and Charles we were really courageous, we would add the issue ending a life. Taylor. The authors wrote: of religion and education. We need better guidelines for all of the areas The clash between LBGTQ rights and the more where government and religion already intersect, Liberal democracies, including Québec, all conservative branches of religion is the one that and there are a surprising number of them. For adhere to the principle of secularism, which grabs the most attention. I suspect can nonetheless be embodied that for most readers of this journal, in different systems. Any secular it seems blindingly obvious that There are going to be a lot of system achieves some form of bal- equal treatment regardless of gender ance between the following four or sexual orientation outweighs the unhappy people once we start principles: 1. the moral equality of scruples or distaste of the faithful. spelling out our limits on tolerance. persons; 2. freedom of conscience That is part of the problem: we all see and religion; 3. the separation of our own reactions as common sense. Church and State; and 4. State neu- We are accustomed to addressing conflict with instance, although an Ontario Muslim group has trality in respect of religious and deep-seated logic, so it is tempting to apply rational argument abandoned its efforts to establish sharia courts for secular convictions. to the issue of some fundamentalist religions’ aver- some civil cases, Ontario does permit the use of sion to sexual freedom. Advocates often try. In June, both the Jewish Beth Din and Catholic canon-law This sounds convincing, although state neutral- Britain’s The Independent argued that Islam does courts. ity in respect of religious and deep-seated secular not explicitly condemn homosexuality, noting that In April, the Canada Food Inspection Agency convictions is often impossible. But Quebec is, as the Ottoman caliphate decriminalized gay sex in began enforcing labelling regulations for halal food, we are so often reminded, a distinct society. You 1858, long before any western country. as it already does for kosher certification. cannot actually prove that Canada as a whole is You cannot make that claim for Judaism or Above all, we surely have to address the issue of a secular state. The preamble to the Charter of Christianity, since Leviticus (20:13) denounces religion and education. Publicly funded religious Rights and Freedoms begins: “Whereas Canada homosexuality as a capital offence. Moreover, education has disappeared in Newfoundland, is founded upon principles that recognize the Deuteronomy (22:5) blasts dressing in drag as where all public schools were faith based not supremacy of God and the rule of law.” “an abomination before the Lord your God.” so long ago. But the governments of Alberta, Until comparatively recently, Canada identified But critics of fundamentalism point out that the Saskatchewan and Ontario still pay for Catholic itself as a Christian country and some of its citizens Old Testament identifies a whole panoply of education. Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta, still cling to that belief. abominations, ranging from idolatry, false scales Manitoba and Saskatchewan offer partial funding Canadians are demonstrably more relaxed and “the hire of a harlot or the wages of a dog” for any private school that meets specific criteria set about religion than Americans—we do not demand (Deuteronomy 23:18) to pork, shellfish and insects, by each province. that our prime ministers attend church regularly vultures, a lying tongue and “the proud in heart” Defenders of these systems point to the unique or play golf with evangelical leaders. But religion is (Proverbs 16.5). If you choose to embrace the Old historical status of the Catholic church in Canada, subtly interwoven into our government. Our lead- Testament’s punitive attitude to sex, this argument an argument with some validity. But those Catholic ers call on God as their witness when they swear runs, shouldn’t you also have to let your fields lie school boards were initially established in places their allegiance to the Queen. fallow every seventh year, to stop rounding off the and at a time when public schools were avowedly Is it time to follow France’s lead and proclaim side-growth of your heads and harming the edges Protestant. Given that today public education our country a secular society? Probably not: of your beard (Leviticus 19:27) and to avoid mixing is secular, and that many of the children in our according the 2011 census, almost a quarter of wool and linen? schools belong to the Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Canadians identify themselves as religiously unaf- That argument was popularized in rather more other faiths, this privileged status for one church filiated—although that is up from a mere four dismissive terms by a letter attacking the homopho- seems manifestly unjust. percent in 1971. Meanwhile, by 2010, 27 percent bia of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, an American radio I see no reason for the public purse to pay for attended a church or equivalent at least once a host. (My favourite passage in the letter runs religious education, but then I am a secular person. month. That is a lot lower than the 46 percent who “Lev.25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, I would like to see as many children as possible in were regular churchgoers in the United States, but both male and female, provided they are purchased public schools, precisely to ensure that they are still a substantial minority. from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims exposed to a wide range of ideas and beliefs. For So I do not think that Canada is ready to join that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. me, the French decision to ban girls in hijab or boys France as a self-proclaimed secular society. But Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?”) in kippot from public schools is counterproduc- that does not mean that we cannot have an essen- But rational argument, whether accurate or not, tive. I do not think that the cause of secularization tially secular government, one that protects the is not all that useful in this context. Homophobia is is advanced by denying public education to the legitimate rights of religions without allowing them immune to facts. That is exactly why we need poli- religious. to violate the rights of others and that does not

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 23 favour any one religion over the rest. gram. In many other areas, politics and the squeaky reasoning of the Learning Disabilities Association We cannot achieve this solely through the wheel dictate policy, rather than medical evidence of Ontario seems unimpeachable when it deduces traditional Canadian virtues of compromise and or need. that “about 6.87% of students in Ontario publicly courtesy. There is no nice way to make these deci- In a sense, we are now suffering from the effects funded schools in 2013–14 would have learning dis- sions. There are going to be a lot of unhappy people of scientific success. For many diseases and disabilities,” but that does not tell us how much help once we start spelling out our limits on tolerance of abilities, we enjoy greatly improved diagnostic tools those students would need, or even if we could religion, dictating the limits of personal conscience and better treatment. No sane person could want help all of them. in our health care and removing religious faith from to return to the ignorant and punitive treatment When it comes to physical disabilities—involv- publicly funded schools. endured by children with learning disabilities when ing vision, hearing, mobility—advocates have But our cuddly self-image will suffer much I was at school. produced sheaves of studies showing that they cost more if we face the truly tough decisions involved From my own experience, I can look back over employers very little. You can find dozens of them in addressing all the problems associated with dis- a history of triumph for students who overcame with a simple Google search. I do not trust those fig- ability. It is an area where Canadians and their gov- depression, eating disorders and other mental ures either. I think they benefit from those very elas- ernments talk a good game. All our jurisdictions are illnesses, or graduated in spite of staggering chal- tic definitions of disability that I just mentioned. passing new laws to make our buildings and institu- lenges created by serious mobility limitations, Of course a worker with some hearing loss is no tions more accessible. Advertising campaigns urge other chronic medical conditions and, in one case, problem at all in many professions. But if someone us to remove the stigma from mental illness, to complete blindness. A disability should not auto- requires a signer or attendant at all times, the cost learn to deal intelligently and compassionately with matically bar someone from an education or a job. can be prohibitive, for a business or, eventually, a it. Under the law, a disability is no disqualification But that is not the whole story. I can also, again government. for education or employment. from my own experience, recall students whose And the truth is that we are not going to pay But we do not talk much about how to pay for mental illness made their own academic success to accommodate fully every disability for every that accommodation. I do not need to cite facts and impossible, and whose presence in the classroom Canadian. So we need to decide how much we are figures here: the flaws in our system are self-evident drained resources and attention that should have willing to pay to live up to our image of ourselves even at the level of theory. There are sharp limits gone to their colleagues. Almost anyone who and to behave justly and compassionately. on government assistance for the myriad forms of teaches university in Canada has a collection of It will be a grisly exercise, but we cannot put it off assistance required to accommodate the full range grievances on this issue. any longer. The baby boomers, that demographic of disabilities. We are ducking a huge wave of neglected tasks. tsunami, are hitting the years when dementia is As a result, to my mind, we have developed To start, we need to sharpen our often overly elastic going to become an epidemic. They are not going to a system that runs on hypocrisy. This spring, for definitions of disability. recognize their own growing deficits immediately. instance, Ontario backed away from a change that In the fields of learning disabilities and mental They will want to stay in their homes, even if that is would have saved it a great deal of money: it had illness, the problem is particularly acute. We are no longer safe. They will want to continue driving. proposed ending its funding of intensive therapy lucky in Canada to host many highly effective treat- So you can see why we need to start hammering for children with autism after the age of five. Other ment and lobbying agencies, often combined in a out some policies now, even if those policies can- programs are theoretically available after that, but single institution. That is good news if you suffer not possibly satisfy everyone. The late psychiatrist they are already oversubscribed. In the face of from a mental or physical illness. But I think it also Bruno Bettelheim titled one of his books Love Is Not intense protests from parents, the province ponied means that we must approach the facts and figures Enough. For Canada, niceness is no longer enough up an additional $200 million to extend the pro- supplied by these agencies with a fistful of salt. The either.

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The Forgotten Songs of the Voice and Versification Translocated Modernisms Double-Voicing the Canadian Newfoundland Outports in Translating Poems Paris and Other Lost Generations Short Story As Taken from Kenneth Peacock’s By James W. Underhill Edited by Emily Ballantyne, Marta By Laurie Kruk Newfoundland Field Collection, 1951–1961 Dvořák, and Dean Irvine By Anna Kearney Guigné Robert Frost, the modern American The short story occupies a prominent place poet, claimed “poetry” was what is Translocated Modernisms focuses on the in Canadian literature and never more so This book and accompanying music files lost in translation. This refreshing yet other lost generations of expatriates than since Alice Munro’s 2013 Nobel Prize brings to light the best of the remaining rigorous and extensive examination of from modernism’s global peripheries for Literature. Kruk’s work is a singularly unpublished material in Peacock’s 1951- the art and science of versification and —principally but not exclusively from original exploration of the layered “double- 1961 field collection. It addresses the lacuna translation focuses on the poem while Canada—who travelled to and through voicing” in the short fiction of eight between Peacock’s massive field collection offering a broad overview of the technical Paris in the early to mid-20th century. acclaimed Canadian writers. and what he eventually published in terminology involved. Outports. www.Press.uOttawa.ca Facebook.com/uOttawaPress Twitter.com/uOttawaPress

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Adventures of a political gun-for-hire Canada’s David Axelrod tells tales from his 50-odd campaigns. Robin V. Sears

the powerful insider analysis of a David Axelrod in his suit jacket conspiratorially and saying things Campaign Confessions: his brilliant Believer: My Forty Years in Politics or like, “I have in my pocket here some numbers that Tales from the War Rooms of Politics the keen observation of the human cost of politics would blow your mind if I could show them to you! John Laschinger with Geoffrey Stevens by Richard Cramer, whose epic What It Takes: The But I’m sorry, I can’t. Have to share them with the Dundurn Way to the White House leaves the reader breath- leader first—he’ll be smiling, believe you me.” 184 pages, softcover less at the sacrifice made by candidates and their Great campaign managers always have great ISBN 9781459736535 families in the tightly fought 1988 U.S. presidential intuition. Laschinger describes how his gut and campaign. his read of the mid-campaign numbers told him We are instead overwhelmed by hagiographic that the Harper campaign team had made a fatal he slow cheerful growl comes down bios, tick-tock narratives spun by winners to gul- mistake with their taunting anti-Trudeau ads. It was the phone line and then pauses: “Lash … lible authors, and too many self-promotional lead- clear to him that in lowering performance expecta- Tsin … jher.” It is the signature greeting that ers’ memoirs. It caused a small scandal in Ottawa’s tions about Justin Trudeau in their ads and endless hundreds of Canadians in all streams of political political village that John Ibbitson’s Harper apolo- trash talking was a trap. When the untested leader life have heard on the other end of the line for more gia won the prize as the best political book of the exceeded them, in the opening debate, in Lasch’s than four decades. In the early years it was usually year, as one recent example of the difference in view the die was cast. a call to fellow Progressive Conservatives. In the quality. While he pioneered many of the tools now past two decades, though, John Laschinger’s client Laschinger’s chronicles are that much more pre- conventional in Canadian campaigns—direct mail, Rolodex has included Canadians of every political cious as he is also perhaps the last icon of a fading phone banking and its social media equivalents, stripe—and a collection, implausibly, of Kyrgyz era. In 1974, the year we met—he had just become rolling overnight polling, targeting—he remains politicians. the Progressive Conservatives’ national director, very traditional in his view about what wins: the If John Laschinger were American, he would be and I was in the same chair at the NDP—the idea candidate, he says over and over. All the money our James Cargill, or David Axelrod or Bob Scrum of a barbaric practices tip line would not have been and organization in the world cannot save a weak or Karl Rove. In Canada the idea of a campaign acceptable as a private joke in a Laschinger cam- or error-prone leader, especially one up against manager as an independent businessman, a gun paign. Sure, graveyards were often very loyal voters, a confident competitor with a compelling vision. for hire, is virtually unknown. Most who run big but calling live voters to scare them away from the Laschinger hammers his view that candidate char- Canadian campaigns do so as party employees or polls? Never. Leaking Jack Layton’s embarrassment acter is always key, citing his research from British government political staff on loan, or in the old days in a massage parlour decades before would have Columbia to Kyrgyzstan, about voters’ ability to as corporate or trade union bosses “volunteering.” got you fired from just about any party’s campaign. spot it. And candidates with simple strong mes- In this marvellous collection of campaign war Lasch was part of that standard setting: always saging overwhelm competitors with much larger stories, Lasch—as he is universally known—tells civil, he loves the game and hates losing. Like war chests and better organization. In three of the tales from the more than 50 campaigns he has led the late Keith Davey, the Liberal Party’s famous last four Toronto mayoral campaigns the biggest or co-managed. He has helped run campaigns in rainmaker and master of Pierre Trudeau’s greatest spender lost—and Laschinger won two of them. seven provinces, several mayoralties, the United victories, he could reach across tribal boundaries to For those who want an irreverent, insightful Kingdom and, yes, Kyrgyzstan—three times! comfort a competitor in personal difficulty. Lasch potted history of the most interesting campaigns David Miller, Brian Topp and Olivia Chow, all reveals Davey showed him great respect at a dif- over the last generation, Campaign Confessions is New Democrats, have benefitted from the Lasch ficult personal moment. a perfect introduction. Geoffrey Stevens, a veteran treatment. Laschinger finds the hobnailed boots of the of The Globe and Mail, has avoided heavy use of his In Leaders and Lesser Mortals: Backroom Politics youngsters of the political tribes today hard to bear. editor’s pencil on Laschinger’s rambling storytell- in Canada, his first collection of war stories, pub- Campaign managers then knew that excessive ing style, while deftly shaping the book’s narrative lished in 1992, Laschinger was more purely Tory, campaign savagery risked violent escalation that arc. As for professionals looking for tips on how to but he could still tell hilarious tales about his own would only discredit everyone. The book ends with develop their skills in the dark arts, this is required gang. Bill Davis briefly contemplated running to his winning percentage compared with the Toronto reading. Laschinger’s lists of dos and don’ts should succeed Joe Clark as federal party leader. His boys Blue Jays. No prizes for guessing who did better. be lifted by every party for their campaign manage- were quietly assembled for an evening of con- Philosophically, Lasch remains a Davis/ ment schools. spiracy when no one was around. The whisky was Stanfield Tory, although he made his peace with If Laschinger ever comes across as a little too old poured, the cigars were lit and the plotters set to Mike Harris’s harder edge. On a polygraph, he school, it is in his skeptical treatment of the impact work. Unfortunately, Laschinger reveals, no one would have a hard time proving his loyalty to of social media. Most Canadian campaigners are told them that the air conditioning was turned off Harperism. Like Norm Atkins, Hugh Segal or Harry at least five years behind the leading American at night, and their cigars set off the fire alarms. The Near, he was of a generation of “one Canada” campaign technology pioneers, but the 2016 U.S. conspiracy came to an abrupt end when “twenty progressive Tories. The slice-and-dice approach presidential campaign is clear proof those tools are firemen in full equipment suddenly burst in … to segmenting your target audience into the base the future: social media launched, helped grow and Davis thought better of being a candidate.” and the enemy would have been anathema. For a then fund both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. This year’s volume is far more about permanent campaign manager to propose deliberately insult- The Clinton team has a team of a hundred doing truths, across the spectrum of politics, at every ing one group of Canadians to wedge them against digital content, spending more than $100 million. level of power, and even internationally. It is clearly another, for partisan advantage, would have been Perhaps the saddest tales are those from his Lasch’s effort at a legacy and lessons for a new career ending. decade of attempting to help Kyrgyz democratic generation. As a strategic analyst of research data, Lasch has leaders cement their liberation from the Soviet There are few useful Canadian books on the only two or three Canadian peers. This memoir is empire. Laschinger helped them win elections, but practice of political campaigns. We do not often get scattered with lessons about the use and misuse of in the end—as in so many other former Soviet satel- numbers by campaigns—and a delightfully poign- lites—oligarchs recaptured power. Robin V. Sears was national director of the NDP ant photo of his delivering devastating numbers to Laschinger has provided a rich behind-the- for seven years and managed three national cam- Ontario Conservative leader John Tory on election scenes look at political campaigns as they are paigns. He is a principal of the Earnscliffe Strategy eve. Nor was he above trickery and sleight of hand. actually fought. His respect for the craft and all its Group and a fellow of the Broadbent Institute. He would taunt and enrage reporters by patting players makes this an even rarer treat.

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 25 A Defence of Dying A secularist takes comfort in mortality. André Forget

The Consolations of Mortality: Making Sense of Death Andrew Stark Yale University Press 275 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780300219258

n Book IX of The Iliad, Achilles tells Ajax and Odysseus that his mother, the goddess IThetis, has revealed to him a choice of fates: if he stays in Ilium and continues the siege of Troy, his life will be cut short but his fame will live forever; if he returns home, he will live a long life but his name will die with him. The choice Achilles makes—to go out in a blaze of glory—is emblematic of one of the ways humans try to make peace with death. After all, failing the existence of a spiritual afterlife, having one’s name live on is about the closest thing to immortality we can hope for. And yet, even if, like Achilles, we could secure some guarantee that posterity will remember us, how much consolation does this really offer in the dark existential hours of night? If our bodies do not house an immortal soul that will survive us, how can any thought of death not be, at the very least, deeply sad? In The Consolations of Mortality: Making Sense argues that there are three common approaches intimates immortality, and the goods of immortal- of Death, a wild romp through epistemology, meta- to this understanding of death: Epicurean, exis- ity are already available to our mortal selves. After physics, ontology and philosophy of mind, Andrew tentialist and Buddhist. The Epicurean approach, considering various possible ways of preserving Stark, a professor of strategic management and pol- following the insights of the fourth-century Greek elements of ourselves after death, from putting itical science at the University of Toronto, explores philosopher, posits that because life is not present one’s name on a building to keeping an electronic the possibility that death is not an inevitable evil, when death is and vice versa, by the time death life-log like that of Microsoft engineer Gordon Bell, but a kind of blessing. He argues that the wisdom arrives, we are no longer there to worry about it, which records everything he sees, hears, reads, of the ages has handed down four basic ways of rendering fear of death a kind of category mistake. thinks, does and dreams, Stark concludes that no taking consolation in the thought of our own ends: The existentialists, on the other hand, suggest matter how robust (or slim) an account we leave that death is actually a benign or good thing, that that without death, we would never appreciate to the world, it will always be missing something through mortal life we can acquire an intimation of life. The Buddhists question whether the self that essential: us. immortality, that immortality would be malignant dies can really be said to exist in the first place. Then there is the idea that immortality would be and that life gives us all the bad things death does. Stark dedicates a lot of time to chasing down the malignant. Stark argues that if we stayed the same In short and readable chapters that anchor various permutations, elisions and implications as eternity rolled on, we would either be crippled by philosophical questions of time, the self, memory of these approaches, but in the final analysis he a terminal boredom in a static world, or left heart- and identity with anecdotes from literature, popu- remains unconvinced: any consolation that relies sick with nostalgia in a rapidly changing one. If we lar music, art, sport and cultural bric-à-brac like on clever logic and intellectual gymnastics will not, changed, and our memories eventually fell away to memorial plaques and bucket lists, Stark evaluates he believes, ever prove psychologically comforting. be replaced by new ones, wouldn’t that be a kind of these strategies for neutralizing death’s sting. For Stark, this is very much the point. He tells us mortality in itself? In any of these accounts, living He begins with and spends most of the book at the outset that he aims to approach his subject forever would eventually lead to something much exploring the question obliquely posed by the first not from the perspective of a philosopher or literary worse than death. consolation: despite our natural anxieties, is death, critic, but of an “everyday bundle of ego and anxiet- The final consolation, that with all its losses, life in and of itself, really all that bad? If we examine ies who loves life and is looking to console himself itself is nothing but an intimation of death, Stark it in the right light, can’t it seem harmless? Stark about death.” For a consolation to be effective, it finds less convincing. While he acknowledges that has to be emotionally satisfying as well as rationally in a metaphorical sense the losses we experience in André Forget is assistant essays editor at The convincing. life seem to presage the final losses of death, he Puritan and a staff writer for the Anglican Journal. That bundle of ego and anxieties is similarly not argues that there is a categorical different between He lives in Toronto. calmed by the second consolation: that mortality watching husbands and wives walk out or friends

26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada drift away and contemplating the annihilating loss impulses and appetites, or if the self also includes of individual consciousness. However painful we the compendium of ideas, attitudes and behav- find the vicissitudes of life, at least we are there to iour we present to the world through our inter- experience them. actions with others. At various points, he seems to Clearly, this is a lot of ground to cover, and Stark entertain each of these definitions; the problem is nothing if not ambitious; to his credit, for a book is that depending on which of these definitions that bites off so much, Consolations is fairly easy one assumes, death will mean something slightly to digest. Whether or not it contains much that is different. convincing is another question. For example, while a person suffering from As Stark explains in the introduction, his over- advanced dementia clearly retains consciousness, riding interest is personal: he does not want to we often talk about that person as though “no longer provide a comprehensive overview of how each there,” precisely because the memories, impulses of these consolations has been presented and and appetites that constituted his or her identity understood over the course of history; he wants to are gone. There is a real sense in which the person know if they can really make us feel better about we knew is dead. If, on the other hand, self includes death. The problem, of course, is that whether one the public façade as well as the private experience, finds a particular consolation useful is likely to be it is entirely reasonable to speak of a person’s after- highly idiosyncratic, and, in presenting his own life, as Stark acknowledges when he talks about arguments for why cer- the sense he has gained tain consolations work of “knowing” Winston while others do not, he It is not consolation Churchill through biog- is forced to resort to a enough for Stark that his raphies, film clips and kind of rhetorical arm anecdotes. twisting to keep his ideas, work and insight This is not simply readers on side. an issue of semantics. For example, after are of value to those For Achilles, what car- his whirlwind analy- ries on after death—the sis of Epicurianism, who come after him; he fame of his deeds—is existentialism and more precious than the Buddhism, Stark con- needs to believe dying is decades of happiness cludes that “any con- he could have spent solations that rely on actually better—for him. back home in Phthia Fuelling Canadian letters Canadian Fuelling equating our selves to because his identity is letters Canadian Fuelling statues of chains, or the moments of our lives to profoundly social; for Achilles, existence is a matter

trophies or tools, ultimately won’t grab us. They of being seen by others and remembered by them. 25 for 25 implausibly deny our reality.” Certainly, there are Such appeals to posthumous glory ring hollow for those who might agree. But others are likely to find Stark precisely because his understanding of self his summary rejection of 2,500 years of human is profoundly individualistic. It is not consolation thought after 86 pages of often convoluted syllo- enough that his ideas, work and insight are of value gisms and thought experiments to be, at the very to those who come after him, or even, for that mat- least, presumptuous. ter, that his children carry on his genetic material; Part of the problem lies in the tension between he needs to believe dying is actually better—for Stark’s goals and his style. Although his subject him. matter forces him to engage in sophisticated The problem, ultimately, is that in building his philosophical questions about the nature of time, argument for or against different consolations of identity and language, he rarely avails himself of the mortality, Stark makes a lot of assumptions about Join a group of visionary kind of vocabulary philosophers have developed how his readers view themselves, and what they to simplify and navigate them. Instead of explor- value about life in the first place. The deeply indi- donors and help us ing historical or cultural context to understand vidualistic conception of self that emerges over the reach our goal of $250,000 why certain consolations have gained traction course of the book, is, even among non-religious by our anniversary, assuring in certain places at certain times (How can one thinkers of the 21st century, highly tendentious. talk about existentialism without talking about For those who share it, Consolations may well be a the LRC’s place in Canadian the Second World War? How can one talk about helpful book; for those who do not, it leaves many letters for another quarter Buddhist thoughts on death without also discuss- unanswered questions. ing the Buddhist understandings of passion and For all these faults, Consolations is unflaggingly century ego?), the tool he most frequently reaches for is the interesting. In his intellectual grand tour of possible thought experiment, which leads him, and us, into consolations, Stark deftly folds dozens of different page after page of abstractions only tangentially thinkers and traditions into a compact, many- related to the question of consolation. (A few exam- faceted book. He is at his strongest when simply For details on how to give, ples: if a person changes completely over time, are paying attention to the quirks and inconsistencies please visit they still the same person? Can we imagine human in the metaphors we commonly use when talking life not as a journey, but as a statue that stretches about life and death. reviewcanada.ca/ out in time instead of space? If someone teleports In the end, Stark concludes that death is a boon. 25-for-25 to another planet by way of a machine that annihi- But he acknowledges that believing this is not lates and then reassembles that person, can that enough. “We can accept that we got the best deal individual be said to have died?) imaginable and still ache at the thought that one Consolations is also guilty of another serious day we will drink an espresso for the last time, or Or contact: lapse. To pose questions about death is, ipso facto, see a sunset for the last time, or make love for the Helen Walsh, President to pose questions about what it means to be alive, last time.” and for humans that means understanding what Love of life and fear of death, it would seem, are Literary Review of Canada the self is. Behind Stark’s own whimsical defin- too deep within the bones of our species for even [email protected] ition (“bundle of ego and anxieties”) lurks a host the most tightly reasoned consolation to reach. If 416-944-1101 sxt. 227 of ambiguities. Stark never quite says whether he that is not exactly a comforting thought, perhaps it thinks the self is coterminous with consciousness, is one that frees us to focus, as Achilles did, on how whether the self is consciousness plus memories, best to spend the lives we have.

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 27 28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Welcome to the Machine The surprising political and cultural legacy of the photocopier. Alison Lang

Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century Kate Eichhorn MIT Press 216 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780262033961

here are few things more dishearten- ing for a young do-it-yourself enthusiast Tthan to have her posters unceremoniously torn down. I experienced this mini-war of attrition several years ago in Halifax. My friend and I had launched an all-female DJ night and I ran excit- edly through the streets late one night, plastering our bright photocopied posters over street lamp poles and on cable boxes, taping and stapling with impunity—or so I thought. A few days later I strolled through the city’s north end with a friend to point out my handiwork—and to my shock only scraps and tattered corners remained. Someone had methodically torn down our handiwork, one photocopied sheet at a time. I was aghast. And so I was introduced—however unwill- ingly—to the politics of photocopied media. As long as DIY promoters, artists, writers and creators have embraced the cheap freedoms of photocopied print media, cities and residents have fought to remove 1874) to the first xerography copy, produced by the became obsessed with the concept of multiple what they perceive as cheap, dirty blights on their American physicist and inventor Chester Carlson copies in order to preserve important documents. city’s landscape. And while cultural critics have in a makeshift laboratory in his New York apart- But while xerography quickly assumed its place in bled page after page of words about the erasure ment in 1938. Originally called electrophotography, the industrial queue of the office assembly line, of various other forms of street art—like, say, graf- Carlson’s process involved a series of steps: creating Eichhorn points out its far more interesting genesis fiti’s erasure in 1990s-era New York City—there has an image on a slide with India ink, rubbing sulphur into a tool of independent DIY creation and, effect- been very little written or said about the function on it to create an electrostatic charge and placing ively, subversion. of photocopiers and photocopied media and the the surface under a lamp. The process was refined In part, this is due to xerography’s democratiz- changes to this media over time. Adjusted Margin: by the Haloid Company—later known as the Xerox ing accessibility, highlighted by Marshall McLuhan Xerography, Art and Activism in the Late Twentieth Corporation—and xerography began to take off in as creating an “extreme decentralizing” that would Century, the exhaustive and brilliant history of the American offices. lead to revolution. McLuhan was talking about photocopier by academic and poet Kate Eichhorn, In outlining this history, Eichhorn establishes authors self-publishing their works outside of examines the photocopier as an essential tool of the machine’s “intended” purpose as a copier the aegis of publishers, but his words apply to community building, activism and social change. for businesses and the roots of its later persona many of the movements that flourished with the In presenting us with this invigorating and inspir- through some fascinating tidbits—for example, assistance of cheap and accessible photocopying. ing depiction, she gives heft and permanency to Carlson eventually used profits from his patent Eichhorn highlights many of these movements in a machine that might otherwise be considered a to fund research in psychic phenomena, and was the ensuing chapters, beginning with photocopy hoary artifact of a bygone era. a supporter of desegregation and pacifist causes. art. It is perhaps hard to imagine today, but in the Eichhorn opens the book with an overview of Eichhorn’s point about Carlson’s politics is fascin- 1960s the photocopy craze was so prevalent in art xerography in its earliest incarnations, starting ating—that even in the early days of xerography, circles that the University of Chicago introduced with the stencil-based Papyrograph (invented in the radical (for the times) politics of the inventor of a master’s degree that had copy art as its main the early photocopier seemed to unintentionally set focus. The intriguingly named Generative Systems Alison Lang is the editor of Broken Pencil maga- the groundwork for his invention’s more grassroots Department, led by instructor and artist Sonia zine, She has written for the Toronto Star, Rue political functions. Landy Sheridan, explored the artistic potential Morgue, Aux, THIS Magazine, Quill & Quire, and The cost effectiveness of photocopying had cre- of works produced by a range of mimeographic Weird Canada. She recently contributed to the ated a boom in the practice by the late 1960s—as technologies, while also acknowledging the limits Spectacular Optical anthology Satanic Panic: Pop Eichhorn writes, much in the way we obsessively of these machines. “Indeed, copy machines’ built- Culture Paranoia in the 1980s. back up our data today, photocopy users slowly in restrictions—the fact that they were engineered

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 29 rather than to create—was part of their attraction paigns from grassroots queer activists like early borrowing and reproducing artwork, etc.) and, as and challenge,” Eichhorn writes. 1990s group Fierce Pussy, as well as handwritten with all grassroots activities, there can be very real Meanwhile, groups such as Fluxus began and type-written zines that can fly via pen pal mail consequences for certain users and proprietors. employing copying to quickly disseminate their from New York City to rural towns all over North For a book that deals with a piece of technology own works, pamphlets and manifestos, while other America and the world. now considered largely outmoded (and replaced by artists used photocopying technology to bring out- Of course, copy shops are not just sites of fun digital scanners), Adjusted Margin ends on a won- of-print and marginalized literature back into the and openness and freewheeling artistic commun- derfully thoughtful and optimistic note. Eichhorn hands of readers. I am reminded here of the wave of ities. They are also sites of illegal activity; after all, discusses a visit she made to the Deutsches ASCII text art and poetry that sprouted in the early what student has not exceeded their copy privileges Technikmuseum in Berlin to what she thought days of the internet, which sought to make experi- and copied entire versions of course texts as a cost- would be a copy-machine museum. She was led to mental writing and word art accessible to anyone saving measure? Eichhorn posits that the same a storage space of “somewhat neglected” machines, who possessed a dial-up modem. Photocopy qualities that make xerography a boon to individ- including a delightfully impractical wood-panelled culture unwittingly set the groundwork for experi- ualism and public creation also create suspicion 1960s copier manufactured by Fotoclark. In some mental and independent art practices merging with and undermine modes of print capitalism. Among ways, the dusty corners of this collection act as a new technologies. other examples, she cites the disturbing period metaphor for the photocopy machine’s place in cul- A major part of Adjusted Margin deals with xer- following the 9/11 attacks in which one copy shop ture today—unlike typewriters and record players, ography’s influence on social movements, with a in particular—Toronto’s Best Copy near Ryerson copy machines do not serve any fashionable retro particular focus on New York’s Lower East Side, University—was raided by the RCMP at midnight aesthetic functions that would appeal to today’s with its explosion of punk show and art postering in in September 2002. The RCMP later revealed that consumers of hip artifacts. the late 1970s (and eventual crackdown by Rudolph they had targeted the nephew of the copy shop Rather, Eichhorn argues, the legacy of the copy Giuliani in the 1990s) and zine and riot grrl culture owner, who had previously been detained and machine will forever exist in its function. She cites and queer activism—particularly in relation to the held by police for several months, and whose con- the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, with fight against AIDS misinformation—in the 1980s. nection to the copy shop cemented his profile as posters, flyers and zines accompanying the obliga- Much of this can be tied to the concept of “publics” a suspected terrorist. No one was charged with tory signal boosts on social media and email, and (spaces defined by their relationship with and to terrorism, although the shop ultimately closed due notes that this is a possible sign of the way the a larger public) and “counterpublics” (opinion- to the resulting bad publicity. Eichhorn writes that photocopier has perpetually altered the way we ated spaces defined by critical relationships to many university copy shops are run by people from view public space and the way we take up space power and authority), which are introduced by marginalized cultures, and often these shops— within cities with ideas, art and information. It is Eichhorn through the ideas of the social theorist already sites of illegal activity—are located on the also a lasting signifier of the power of print media Michael Warner. Eichhorn argues that the nature literal margins of a university campus, separating and the way certain blotchy, ink-stained DIY mis- of xerography allows it a unique ability to straddle the institution from the city. They are, as she writes, sives will forever contain their own fundamental both publics and counterpublics, and effectively “First World ghettos inhabited by Third World and enduring communicative power. And for those redefine these spaces, particularly within cities. In professionals … vigorously policed.” Even as copy of us who still live and die by our paper crafts, our this framework, xerography yields highly visible, shops dwindle in cities, it is valuable to remember handwriting, our stapling and pasting, the photo- glossy and well-funded AIDS action material by that many users of the copy machine were privil- copier is a treasured item, and one that should 1980s artist collective Gran Fury, but it can also eged in their clandestine practices (using the office forever be regarded with nostalgia and endless produce DIY handmade wheat-pasted poster cam- copier for non-office purposes, copying illegally, gratitude.

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30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada PEN Canada presents the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award at the International Festival of Authors

The RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award celebrates unpublished work from writers 18 to 30.

The award is part of a global initiative to develop young talent. The winning Canadian entry is submitted to PEN International to be judged against promising writers from around the world.

Congratulations to Laura Legge, winner of the 2016 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award

The PEN Canada bene t at the International Festival of Authors: By Word and Deed: Resistance in Times of Turmoil Saturday, October 22, 2016, 7:30 pm

Writer and lmmaker David Bezmozgis in conversation with Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, To End All Wars, and, most recently, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, about the lessons we learn from writers and activists battling fascism, racism, and other forms of injustice.

Fleck Dance Theatre, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto Tickets: $50 available at www.pencanada.ca/wordanddeed or 416 703 8448 ext. 25 All proceeds support PEN Canada’s advocacy for imprisoned and exiled writers.

September 2016 reviewcanada.ca 31 Letters and Responses

Re: “Fire and Ice in the Academy,” Re: “Political Cola Wars,” by Clive by Sverker Sörlin and Graeme Wynn Veroni (June 2016) (July/August, 2016) n his letter responding to my review of Brand t is a legitimate question, how best to approach ICommand: Canadian Politics and Democracy in Ithe current state of our living together. You know the Age of Message Control, Alex Marland correctly what I mean: political economies that produce notes that I “forgot to complain about its length obscene inequality and runaway toxicity; states … 496 pages, which includes a glossary of over and cults that traffic in rape and murder; all our 60 political communications concepts as well as brutalizing racism. Our maths and sciences can five appendices.” surely help us to describe these things and thereby There’s an explanation for this oversight. In to know them in part, but they will not suffice for an uncharacteristic moment of restraint, I chose understanding them, for thinking about them to delete the following passage from my review or knowing how they feel. For that, we will need before submitting it for publication: a poem or two, a few beautiful images, a rap, a “It appears that Marland has rooted out every prayer, some marginal history and several para- single government memo and directive on brand- graphs of theory whose density tries our patience. ing, from every department, and regurgitated it And we will need hermeneutics and critique to here. Imagine slogging through a 400-page govern-

Because the Public Matters. the Public Because expose and assimilate the truths of all of them. ment manual and you will have a sense of what it Humanities scholars have always known this. is like to work your way through Brand Command. It is just that now—as Sverker Sörlin and Graeme It is endless information devoid of insight. This Wynn show in their article—they are working with exhaustive review leaves the reader feeling simul- an urgency and conviction that matches their taneously sated and unsatisfied. It is akin to circumstances. What makes the work Sörlin and reading a detailed explanation of the mechanics of Wynn describe so vital and so necessary is that it making a sausage, without ever getting to find out Th e Graphite Club e Graphite Th is not a response to the “crisis in the humanities” what a sausage actually tastes like. but a refusal of it and, instead, a direct engage- “Here is a typical passage: ‘Departments retain ment with the very real crises of the world. Work some independence to reflect their target audi- such as the After Oil project (in which, I must ences’ needs, such as Immigration, Refugees disclose, I am a collaborator) takes for granted that and Citizenship Canada, which transcribes its the artifacts and practices of human creativity and online videos into Arabic, Mandarin, Punjabi, Join the Graphite Club, human/non-human confederacy hold the key to Spanish and Tagalog. And in 2013 the Standard on devoted to the long-term our possibilities. And, so, we study that stuff and, Optimizing Websites and Applications for Mobile thereby, study our worlds, constructing their pasts Devices was introduced. It stipulates that a con- sustainability of the LRC and futures one word, frame and note at a time. If sistent navigation bar must be used, composed and its elemental place in this is what “integrative humanities” means, then of the Canada wordmark and home, back, menu, it is really just humanities with a serviceable but search and settings buttons. Websites must adhere Canadian life. unnecessary adjective. to specific dimensions, alignments and colours so This is nothing at all like renovating human- that online content is accessible from small touch- ities training and practice to make it resonate screens.’ Now, multiply that by a few hundred with prevailing market fashions and technocratic pages. discourses. It is, instead, demonstrating that “This meticulous catalogue is complemented by Membership bene ts all those years spent in the library, archive and a sweeping survey of numerous academic theor- and details available at museum in isolated study were the very opposite ies about public sector branding. And judging of withdrawal from the world. They were prepara- by the sheer number of references and citations, reviewcanada.ca/ tion for the world, for engaging with it through there seems to be a significant academic industry graphite comprehensive and a deep study of human art- built upon the shocked surprise that governments fulness. And they were worth it. Affirming the deploy the methods of modern marketing and “usefulness of our endeavours” in times like these branding to shape public opinion. Needless to say, requires humanities scholars who are trained and this will come as a surprise to absolutely no one To join the Graphite Club, employed as such, not trained or posing as some- who lives outside the cloistered world of academe.” thing else. If integrative humanities means the I apologize for the omission and am pleased to please contact: latter—if it means more TED talks and fewer dis- correct the record now. Helen Walsh, President sertations, if it means apologizing for the complex- Clive Veroni Literary Review of Canada ity of our language instead of speaking it—then it is Toronto, Ontario [email protected] the name for forgetting, rather than asserting, the role of the humanities in finding ways out of the The LRC welcomes letters — and more are available 416-944-1101 ext. 227 messes we make. on our website at www.reviewcanada.ca. We reserve Darin Barney the right to edit them for length, clarity and accur- Montreal, Quebec acy. E-mail [email protected].

32 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada POLITICAL PHENOMENA

Trudeaumania Paul Litt This is the definitive account of Trudeaumania: when the fabled spirit of the sixties – human rights, ban-the-bomb, psychedelia, the counterculture – met the excitement generated by the Centennial and Expo 67 and the anxieties around Quebec separatism and Americanization. The result? A desire for renewal, nationalist ambition, and media hype propelled Pierre Trudeau to power. Trudeaumania was about more than a man, it was a passionate quest for a new Canada.

October 2016 978-0-7748-3404-9 hardcover

Paul Litt artfully combines thorough research with a penetrating media analysis “to create the most definitive account of that extraordinary phenomenon of Trudeaumania ever published.

Paul Rutherford author of When Television Was Young: Primetime Canada 1952–1967

Brand Command The Call of the World Canadian Politics and Democracy A Political Memoir in the Age of Message Control Bill Graham Alex Marland In this fiercely intelligent memoir, An eye-opening look at how Bill Graham – Canada’s minister political parties and the of foreign affairs and minister of government use branding defence during the tumultuous strategies, and the implications years following 9/11 – takes us that this has for Canadian on a personal journey through a democracy. period of upheaval in global and domestic politics, arguing that March 2016 global institutions based on inter- 978-0-7748-3203-8 hardcover national law offer the best hope for a safer, more prosperous, and just world.

April 2016 978-0-7748-9000-7 hardcover

www.ubcpress.ca stay connected thought that counts Finding Franklin The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search RUSSELL A. POTTER Fall Cloth, eBook – 280pp “This seamless blend of research and captivating storytelling showcases the curiosity, frailty, and endurance of the human spirit.” Arrives –Publishers Weekly from Strangers in Arms MQUP Combat Motivation in the Canadian Army, 1943–1945 ROBERT ENGEN Cloth, eBook – 332pp

“This is an important contribution to scholarship, one that will shake up several ﬁelds and have important consequence internationally.” –J. Marc Milner, University of New Brunswick

Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City SARAH BASSNETT Cloth – 228pp

“… offers a visually compelling look at the history of Toronto in its quest for modernity, and offers a glimpse into how a new form of technology could be a transformative force in a rapidly evolving city.” –Spacing

Discovering the End of Time Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell DONALD HARMAN AKENSON Cloth, eBook – 548pp

A masterful study of the origins of apocalyptic millennialism, which lies at the heart of evangelical Christianity. “… impeccably researched and beautifully written.” –David M. Hempton, Harvard Divinity School

Distributing Status God’s Province The Evolution of State Honours Evangelical Christianity, Political Thought, in Western Europe and Conservatism in Alberta Samuel Clark CLARK BANACK Cloth, eBook – 296pp Cloth, eBook – 520pp

“… full of insights about status as a fundamental “… provides a balanced and convincing argument about form of social power in modern western society.” the complex, sometimes subtle, yet often signiﬁcant –Cecilia Ridgeway, Stanford University ways in which religion has inﬂuenced Alberta’s political leaders and shaped the province’s political character and trajectory.” –Steve Patten, University of Alberta

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