$7.95 1

2 MARLO ALEXANDRA BURKS Democracy Now KRZYSZTOF PELC Information Overload 0 2

H SHANNON HENGEN Atwood the Poet MARK LOVEWELL , We Have a Problem C R A M Literary Review of Canada A JOURNAL OF IDEAS How will the next indie book inspire you?

Expand your world. Immerse yourself. Discover new stories crafted by some of Canada’s most provocative and passionate writers. Read up.

Canadian Indie Literary Publishers. AllLitUp.ca/lpg MARCH 2021 ◆ VOLUME 29 ◆ NUMBER 2

A JOURNAL OF IDEAS

FIRST WORD BYGONE DAYS THIS AND THAT A Pronounced Problem The History Books Pack Together, Pack Apart Kyle Wyatt On the Cundill Prize short list Down at the dog park 3 Christopher Moore Dan Dunsky 15 FURTHERMORE 28 Robert A. Stairs, Lawrence Wardroper, At Daggers Drawn HEALTH AND WELLNESS Antanas Sileika, Joel Henderson, Margaret MacMillan soldiers on J. L. Granatstein Fragments Ian Waddell When your mother can’t 17 5 remember your name THE PUBLIC SQUARE Jigging for Answers Katherine Leyton Scratched records of 29 Slouching toward Democracy a Métis family Where have all the wise men gone? Heather Menzies LITERATURE Marlo Alexandra Burks 19 The Prophet 6 OUR NATURAL WORLD Atwood’s poetic voice Royal Descent Shannon Hengen is brought down to earth Thereby Hangs a Tail 31 Mark Lovewell With the ghosts of Madagascar Alexander Sallas On the Rocks 7 Peter Unwin’s new novel 20 RULES AND REGULATIONS Larry Krotz Around the Bend 34 Wait, Wait. . . Don’t Tell Me The many ways rivers run through it The pros and cons of disclosure Robert Girvan Home Sweet Unhomely The latest from André Alexis Krzysztof Pelc 21 8 Spencer Morrison CLIMATE CRISIS 35 POLITICKING Whatever the Cost May Be BACKSTORY Share and Share Alike Preparing for the fight of our life How slices the pie John Baglow Trash Talk Murray Campbell 24 Myra J. Hird 12 36 COMPELLING PEOPLE Wild Rose Diplomacy Negotiating ’s uncertain future The Diarist Bruce Campbell Making tracks in a new land 13 John Lownsbrough 26

POETRY Bardia Sinaee, p. 25 Tyler Haché, p. 27 Michael Lithgow, p. 30 Margo Wheaton, p. 33

OUR CONTRIBUTORS

John Baglow reads and writes in Ottawa. J. L. Granatstein writes on Canadian political John Lownsbrough is a journalist in and military history. and the author of The Best Place to Be: Marlo Alexandra Burks is working on a book Expo 67 and Its Time. on the Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Shannon Hengen reads poetry while trying to stay warm in Regina. Heather Menzies has written ten books, Bruce Campbell is a senior fellow with the including Reclaiming the Commons. Centre for Free Expression, at , Myra J. Hird is a professor in the School of and the former executive director of the Canadian Environmental Studies, at Queen’s University. Christopher Moore is a historian in Toronto. Centre for Policy Alternatives. Larry Krotz wrote Diagnosing the Legacy: Spencer Morrison teaches American literature Murray Campbell is a retired Globe and Mail The Discovery, Research, and Treatment of at the University of Tel Aviv. columnist and reporter. Type 2 Diabetes in Indigenous Youth. Krzysztof Pelc is a professor of political science Dan Dunsky was executive producer of Katherine Leyton is writing on a book about and international relations at McGill University. The Agenda with Steve Paikin, from 2006 to the politics of motherhood. 2015, and is the founder of Dunsky Insight. Alexander Sallas is working on his doctorate. Mark Lovewell has held various senior roles ◆ Robert Girvan is a former Crown prosecutor and at Ryerson University. He is also one of the the author of Who Speaks for the River? magazine’s contributing editors. On the cover: “Out of Office,” by David Parkins.

WITH THANKS TO OUR SUPPORTERS

Made possible with the support of Creates “THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD, REGARDLESS OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT TRUTH.”

— HANNAH ARENDT (1906–1975) “STUNNING.”

— Janice Gross Stein, political scientist and founding director, Munk School of Global Affairs

A groundbreaking biography of Hannah Arendt, whose insights into the power of lies, the corruption of the human spirit, and the “banality of evil” are eerily and urgently relevant half a century later.

ANANSI PUBLISHES VERY GOOD BOOKS HOUSEOFANANSI.COM @HOUSEOFANANSI FIRST WORD

A Pronounced Problem

HE CBC, THE BBC, AND NPR ARE ALL international border — so clearly, in fact, that part of my daily radio diet, but I just about all of us can mimic them perfectly. tend to indulge in more lighthearted At this point, we would find it unforgivable fare early in the mornings, especially for on-air talent, however serious or saccharine, if I’m about to head out for a hard whether in the U.S. or Canada, to mispronounce Trun. Grinding through fast kilometre repeats the first name of the new vice-president. At the is just easier with a pop song stuck in my head very least, one host would try to subtly correct than with the reality of the latest newscast set- the other’s mistake. But butchering a vowel in tling in (that can wait until I’m back at my desk). Rideau Hall, with thousands and thousands of My typical morning soundtrack is a highly early risers listening — that blunder goes uncor- rated Toronto station with three likeable hosts, rected and, I worry, unnoticed by far too many. who mix silly games and celebrity gossip with Rideau Hall may be little more than a sym- quick hits on the usual topics — the traffic, the bol, but it’s our symbol, one that represents weather, the latest COVID-19 numbers, and, of the apogee of our political and civic order. Its course, American politics. Last year, the presiden- pronunciation matters because what goes on tial primaries and general election got plenty of there matters, just as much as what goes on at airtime in between Top 40 hits, just as the MAGA 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or 10 Downing Street marauders of January 6 and the swearing-in of or any other stately address that captivates the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did earlier this year. collective imagination. Its neglect is sympomatic Canadian politics and politicians, meanwhile, of a larger problem, a reminder that we must tend to fly under the radar; who cares about Sean not allow urgent debates about the future of Casey or, for that matter, Justin Trudeau when Canadian content — whether they’re around the you have Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber. CBC’s broadcasting licence, around social media But even my morning radio hosts couldn’t companies compensating news organizations ignore the sudden departure of , on for content, around more publishers wanting to January 21, as Canada’s twenty-ninth governor merge, or around the very survival of our news- general. The DJ who plays the role of the smart paper and magazine industry — to be drowned one briefed listeners on the unfolding drama out by the entertaining circus animal next door. the morning after the former astronaut aborted We all felt the emotional baggage of the presi- her mission: the allegations, the official state- dency just past. We all felt the horror as rioters ments, the high-profile lawyers who had been descended on the U.S. Capitol, as well as the retained, even a cringeworthy refresher on what relief of a successful inauguration two weeks the governor general actually does. And see- later. I suspect we all feel some hope that the next ing as this was palace intrigue at its most vice- four years will be far less exhausting than the past regal, she also mentioned the name of the GG’s four, even those who are upset that Biden has New Edinburgh palace several times. cancelled Keystone XL. But, on the whole, do we What troubled me on my run the morning feel anything so viscerally about the goings-on at of January 22 was not the pace of the workout ? Do we listen with the same rapt or the news of Payette’s resignation, which had attention we give Washington? consumed me the night before. What troubled For the time being, Donald Trump is holed me was how the young broadcaster — fully up in Mar-a-Lago, an address that no Canadian educated in Ontario, according to my sources radio personality would ever mispronounce. at LinkedIn — repeatedly pronounced Rideau For the time being, a sense of decency has Hall as “Rye Dough Hall,” as if we were about to returned to the West Wing. We can’t ignore the make a loaf of bread. It’s a small thing, yes, but elephant — that would be naive and impos- one that speaks to something larger. sible — but maybe we can adjust the dial and One of the things about sleeping next to an spend more time talking about ourselves, about elephant is just how loud pachyderms can be, things like the new governor general and the with their constant rumbling and trumpeting new governor general’s secretary — who those and stomping. In the wild, their sounds can people are, how they are selected, and how their be heard from up to thirteen kilometres away. jobs affect all Canadians, no matter which part In metaphor, they can be heard across a closed of our news ecosystem we turn to.

Kyle Wyatt, Editor-in-Chief

MARCH 2021 3 Literary Review of Canada Massey College 4 Devonshire Place Toronto, ON M5S 2E1 [email protected] EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kyle Wyatt [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR Michael Strizic ASSISTANT EDITOR Rose Hendrie POETRY EDITOR Moira MacDougall COPY EDITOR Barbara Czarnecki ART DIRECTOR Brian Morgan CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Cristina Austin, Marlo Alexandra Burks, Murray Campbell, Bronwyn Drainie, Basil Guinane, Beth Haddon, Mark Lovewell, Cecily Ross, Alexander Sallas, Derek Ungless PUBLISHER Eithne McCredie BOARD OF DIRECTORS John Macfarlane (Chair), Marina Glogovac, Scott Griffin, Neena Gupta, John Honderich, Kelly Jenkins, Joseph Kertes, Amela Marin, Don McCutchan, John Stackhouse, David Staines, Jaime Watt CORPORATE SECRETARY Vali Bennett FOUNDED IN 1991 BY P. A. DUTIL SUBMISSIONS See reviewcanada.ca/submissions for guidelines. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND CIRCULATION In Canada, $56/year plus GST/HST ($68 for libraries and institutions). Outside Canada, $86/year ($98 for libraries and institutions). Literary Review of Canada P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 [email protected] (416) 932-5081 SUPPORT Literary Review of Canada is published ten times a year by Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization (NO. 848431490RR0001). Donate at reviewcanada.ca/donate. ©2021 Literary Review of Canada. All rights, i ncluding translation into other languages, are reserved by the publisher in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and all other countries participating in the Universal Copyright Convention, the International Copyright Convention, and the Pan-American Copyright Convention. Nothing in this publication may be re produced without written permission. ISSN 1188-7494 Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the Canadian Index, and distributed by Disticor and Magazines Canada. Literary Review of Canada may allow carefully selected organizations to contact subscribers with offers that may be of interest. If you do not wish to receive such correspondence, email Subscriber Services at [email protected], call (416) 932-5081, or write P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto, ON M4P 2G1. Furthermore

RE: The Colossus and networks. Libraries transcend boundaries. tion the role of Peter Ittinuar, the first elected by J. L. Granatstein (January/February) Maybe we need to seek a wider international Inuk MP and my fellow NDP caucus member. view as opposed to a shorter-sighted national Angus is correct to point out the oversight, for AS I READ J. L. GRANATSTEIN’S REVIEW OF THE one? Maybe our American partners can now seek which I apologize. (A bit of old age may be Unexpected Louis St-Laurent, I felt great sympa- this option as well? at play, as I’m recalling events that happened thy for the former prime minister, who trav- almost forty years ago. But that’s no excuse.) elled the world on that “slow and noisy RCAF Lawrence Wardroper Angus also mentions a private meeting that aircraft.” I presume it was the military version Coe Hill, Ontario Peter had with Pierre Trudeau at 24 Sussex. I was of the North Star, which I flew from Dorval to not previously aware of that meeting and have in summer 1957. I found myself sit- MICHAEL MCNICHOL CITES THE MEGHAN MURPHY never been inside the prime minister’s official ting next to a lady who, after a few pleasantries, affair when arguing that Canadian libraries residence myself. Back in 1982, I was the NDP’s asked me what I thought of the plane. I told her should not provide platforms for groups whose energy critic, and the Trudeau government had that I thought it ugly, noisy, and uncomfortable. messages “hurt others.” I had to remind myself just introduced the infamous National Energy “I christened it!” she replied, before introducing of the 2019 controversy with the Toronto Public Program: I was a pretty busy guy doing both herself as Mrs. C. D. Howe. Things were a little Library. Although Murphy’s positions may be the energy issues, with Peter Lougheed, Marc cool for the rest of the twelve-hour flight! incorrect — or “problematic,” to use the cur- Lalonde, Ed Clark, and other heavyweights; and rent parlance — McNichol’s dismissal of her is the Constitution issue, with Trudeau and Jean Robert A. Stairs insufficiently demonstrated; his sounds like a Chrétien. So many of my NDP colleagues, includ- Peterborough, Ontario playground admonition (define “hurt”). ing Peter, were very involved themselves. This was I’d like to see McNichol prove his point rather one of the most intense times in Canadian par- RE: For Your Reference than simply point to a Twitter ban as sufficient liamentary history. by Michael McNichol (January/February) reason to silence this person. Later in his letter, Angus wonders if I did not mention Peter because he jumped from the NDP AS A RETIRED LIBRARIAN, I WAS PLEASED TO SEE Antanas Sileika to the Liberals. This is absolutely false. I’m not this piece. While pursuing my master of library Toronto that type of person. Peter Ittinuar has been my and information science degree, I had a general friend since we first met in 1980, and I genuinely introduction to the Canadian library scene, RE: Lives Less Ordinary admire him and his contributions to Canada. where people took pains to distinguish our by J. D. M. Stewart (January/February) Finally, Angus mentions that the constitutional approach from that of the United States, while story involves “more than the white guys who recognizing how we were, essentially, all part of NEVER TRASH A BOOK YOU HAVE NOT READ? OKAY, did it.” I tried to note that very thing — that my larger Anglo-American library traditions. but it sounds like Extraordinary Canadians meets own understanding had come from watching McNichol has raised two important points: my low expectations, with its shallowness, and living with First Nations throughout the First, the different ways we can view freedom of mediocre photos, and dodgy copy editing. How Berger Inquiry, and that Indigenous people were speech. I do not have a solution to the dilemma could something so bland spring forth from the so active and effective on Parliament Hill as we facing librarians. But libraries have dealt with this chromed dome of Peter Mansbridge, who finally repatriated the Constitution. in many ways in the past; the tendency has been gets a chance to have his voice heard, the poor We titled the article “This Is Not the End of to safeguard their independence when making old white boomer? the Story” because, as Angus rightly points out, decisions about collections, services, and pro- But I am looking forward to picking up a copy there are countless other perspectives. I hope grams. Yet I am not sure who or which organiza- of Jocelyn Létourneau’s La condition québécoise, we can continue to hear from many different tion is actually qualified to make some of those which Graham Fraser reviewed in the same issue. people who were and continue to be involved decisions when it extends to inclusivity and My house may be in La Belle Province, yet after in the story of section 35 and other important freedom of expression. I wish I knew the answer! two years I can claim only to be a tax- moments of Canadian history. Second, McNichol raises the issue of “cul- payer (and a confused one at that). More insight tural sovereignty.” This echoes so much of will be appreciated. Ian Waddell what Canadian history reflects back to us: the Finally, I’d like to commend the Literary challenges of being independent in the face of Review of Canada for letters that are actually America’s scale and influence. We are a nation of readable, which cannot always be said of Epistles THE TALE TOUCHES DOWN IN NANAIMO. CLIFFORD compromise, so the trope goes. Unfortunately, to Lord Editors of many other periodicals. Here’s White of Snuneymuxw First Nation and David compromise gets bogged down when tough to all your brilliant readers! Bob of Snaw-Naw-As First Nation argued in decisions need to be made. Canada is part of court their right to hunt deer in closed season America’s larger sphere of influence, and in Joel Henderson under the James Douglas Treaties. And Jim many ways we speak its economic and cultural Gatineau, Quebec Manly, whom Waddell mentions, also worked to language. If that does not change enough (and I ensure Aboriginal rights were included. don’t suggest it should change completely), we RE: This Is Not the End of the Story will never be able to have our own orbit. by Ian Waddell (December 2020) @FrankMurphy49 I commiserate with McNichol, but I would via Twitter love to know if he has any solutions to offer. IN HIS LETTER TO THE EDITOR, IN THE JANUARY/ Maybe we should work with our strength as February issue, Murray Angus writes that my Write to [email protected] or tag our a library community — a strength that rests recent article about section 35 of the Constitution social media channels. We may edit comments and on an intrinsic understanding of standards is incomplete. He points out that I didn’t men- feedback for length, clarity, and accuracy.

MARCH 2021 5 THE PUBLIC SQUARE

Slouching toward Democracy Where have all the wise men gone? Marlo Alexandra Burks

Restoring Democracy democracy witnessed not only in Washington single percentage point. Translation: “The effect in an Age of Populists & Pestilence but throughout the United States, the United of giving tax cuts to the already wealthy is the Jonathan Manthorpe Kingdom, and Canada. A “fast gallop” it is: in reverse of claims made by advocates of trickle- Cormorant Books some 300 pages, Manthorpe covers vast geo- down economics and of the equally fatuous idea 320 pages, softcover and ebook political terrain, beginning with the end of the that ‘a rising tide floats all boats.’ A rising tide Cold War, in 1989, and racing toward today. It does nothing for boats that have holes or that is an extraordinary feat of endurance journal- have already sunk.” N HIS FLIGHT FROM THE FURIES, ism born from years of watching democratic Governments that bailed out the banks dur- Orestes — who has committed a venge- facades crack, and made even more urgent by the ing the 2008–09 global economic crisis only ful matricide — prays to Apollo for ref- threat of COVID-19, which he describes as a new threw fuel on the fire (or water on the flood). uge. His prayer is answered, and he is “ central player” in democracy’s larger story. “The While citizens suffered, a handful of predatory whisked away to Athens, where Athena pandemic is a vivid reminder that a fundamen- sociopaths were rewarded, and the average per- Iasks the “men of Greece” to judge “the first trial tal reason why humans created governments in son was fed a lie. It’s as if government no longer of bloodshed.” At her behest, the best citizens the city states of Mesopotamia seven thousand felt the need to protect and regulate communal of the Attica peninsula come forward and place years ago was for the protection and regulation life; this had become the purview of banks their pebbles into one of two urns. They vote. that are too big to fail. One former investment Aeschylus tells this story in The Eumenides, the banker, Rainer Voss, put it well in Marc Bauder’s third play of his Oresteia trilogy. The Father of documentary Master of the Universe, from 2013: Tragedy grew up in the early period of Athenian “Je größer die Scheiße ist, desto dicker sind die democracy, as it was struggling to establish itself. Corporate- Social- Responsibility- Broschüren” His trilogy begins with Agamemnon, in darkness (The deeper the shit, the thicker the brochures and suffering. But it ends with the light of wis- on corporate social responsibility). dom and the establishment of political order The truly sad thing is that economic suf- and justice — and institutions to protect those focation increases fear and fury. Growing eco- things. It’s a story of the birth of a hero: not nomic disparity threatens communal life and Orestes, but Democracy itself. The Furies and the leads to extremism — particularly of the right- destructive chaos they bring to their victims are wing, scapegoat-s eeking variety — character- banished; wisdom and moderation prevail over ized by precisely those impulses that Athena rage and excess. This is how democracy func- once banished. And here we find another of tions, according to Aeschylus. the great threats to democracy: demagoguery. His is not the only vision or version of dem- Manthorpe describes libertarianism and radical ocracy, of course. Nor is the Rubik’s Cube–like conservatism as “a snare and a delusion,” but S interaction between theatre, the courts, the he’s no more tolerant when it comes to “pure E G A

people, and religion unique to ancient Athens. socialism.” Unfortunately, Manthorpe doesn’t M I

As the British archeologist David Wengrow and exactly define “socialist,” a term that circulates Y T T the late American anthropologist David Graeber with frustrating vagueness. It’s often used as E G

;

pointed out in a recent Lapham’s Quarterly a slur against Joe Biden, who’s anything but a P F A

essay, participatory forms of government were socialist, and most of the policies considered ; 1 and are more common than many previously socialist today would have been bog- standard 2 0 2

believed: Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Ukraine, centrist positions in earlier decades. Nor does , 6

and the Indus Valley have all at some point Manthorpe identify instances of recent left- Y R A

organized their political lives according to wing extremist violence — and we’d be hard U N A

some form of democracy. Closer to home, the Amid darkness and suffering. pressed to actually find any. That’s because the J

,

Haudenosaunee Confederacy, of the Mohawks, bogeyman of the left-wing extremist isn’t the T N Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, has of communal life. Among the essential respon- threat: right-wing extremism is. The violence E M U

long existed as a participatory democracy and sibilities the authorities were expected to fulfil of January 6 will serve as a reminder of that. N O

likely influenced the United States Constitution was maintenance of public health.” (I imagine I’m not the only one with Yeats’s M

E that was ratified in June 1788: “Both models Beyond the virus, what, Manthorpe asks, are the words on my mind: “The best lack all convic- C A E stress the importance of unity and peace and greatest threats to democracy? Increased inequal- tion, while the worst / Are full of passionate P

E provide freedom to seek out one’s success,” the ity, for one: it’s no surprise that Thatcherite cap- intensity.”) H T

, confederacy’s website observes. italism and Reaganomics, like a bad hangover, are As for the political centre, Manthorpe doesn’t S D As rioters and insurrectionists stormed the in large part responsible for the malaise afflicting see it holding: “Democracy’s tragedy over the L O N

U.S. Capitol on January 6, the Christian calen- people in nations around the world; there’s less last thirty years is the erosion of the centre as Y E R dar’s Day of Epiphany, many wondered where and less money to support them. Manthorpe political parties and establishment classes have, - O all the wise men had gone. Would the Furies looks to the International Monetary Fund to to one degree or another, lost touch with large R E L and chaos prevail after all? Enter Jonathan bolster his argument. According to a 2015 study segments of their societies.” This trend tracks the L A B

Manthorpe’s Restoring Democracy in an Age of on the causes and consequences of economic disappearance of the middle class quite well. But A C

Populists & Pestilence, a self-proclaimed “fast gal- inequality, a country’s GDP actually shrinks by the centre is experiencing more than just ero- W E lop over heavy ground.” This is the seasoned 0.08 percent every time the income share of the sion: the entire political discourse has made a R D N journalist’s response to the flagrant threats to rich (defined as the top 20 percent) rises by a rightward shift. In other words, what once was A

6 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA centrist is now leftist; and what once was leftist THE PUBLIC SQUARE is somehow radical. Manthorpe rightly worries about the middle class’s alienation and susceptibility to deceit and disinformation — what he describes as a “running battle” that taps into our human Royal Descent “propensity for blaming unexpected events on unseen forces with dominant powers.” At the heart of Manthorpe’s book is a kind of Hegelian Rideau Hall is brought down to earth notion of freedom: People are free when they can identify with their institutions. That is, they Mark Lovewell can participate and see that those institutions, in some way, reflect their values. This engagement is based on trust and truth. If people are victims of deception, that identification is invalid. Western democracy lives and dies by the integ- O ONE WOULD CALL THE GOV- It’d be more than a stretch to say the present rity of its institutions and of those elected to serve ernor general’s job an easy one. process is perfect. Indeed, there is a basic conflict them. One of Restoring Democracy ’s most inter- Juggling the roles of figure- of interest in having a prime minister choose an esting discussions focuses on Canada, a country head, political arbiter, patron, official who might sit in judgment of his or her so often in the shadow of that shining beacon to and diplomat demands some- own political future (even if formally the PM our south. Drawing on Democracy in Canada, the None adept at ceremony, attuned to political only recommends a candidate to the Queen). recent book by the public administration scholar nuance, and comfortable in the public eye: that’s This flaw is particularly relevant during min- Donald J. Savoie, Manthorpe points to “defects no straightforward combination. Is it any won- ority governments, when a governor general’s that were built into Canada at its creation”: der the pool of potential candidates was kept so decision- making power can play a pivotal role. namely, the adoption of Westminster-s tyle narrow for so long? One of the many recommended improvements, institutions without regard for the geopolitical Since Confederation, Canada has had twenty- bandied about in some other Commonwealth context into which they were imported. Federal- nine governors general. The first seventeen were countries, is to have the governor general voted provincial relations, especially, are a recurring British, all cut from the same aristocratic cloth. in by the general electorate. But it seems unlikely point of judicial contention, so much so that Today, those early representatives of the Crown this suggestion will ever gain much purchase there is a growing perception that the Supreme might look like nothing more than colonial rel- here. Other possibilities include passing the Court of Canada, rather than Parliament, is ics, but that view does them a disservice. Most decision along to Parliament itself, or even the real seat of authority. The shrinking role of were highly diligent, some even carving out last- involving the 1,000-plus members of the Order elected representatives, together with the media’s ing legacies. Lord Lorne, for example, was instru- of Canada. Again, neither of these suggestions celebritization and marketing of political leaders mental in establishing the National Gallery of has gained much support. Not only would the who are judged by their performance on screen Canada, in 1880, while John Buchan, 1st Baron constitutional obstacles associated with such rather than their platforms (if they have any), Tweedsmuir, enthusiastically instituted the options be immense, but each is inherently risky. frustrates people still attempting to exercise their Governor General’s Literary Awards in 1937. Still, In the immortal words of Walter Bagehot, the civic rights. Increasingly, we have to work harder by the time came along in 1952, nineteenth-century observer of the British mon- to see past the smokescreens on our phones, there was widespread relief that the position archy, “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in computers, and televisions. had finally passed into Canadian-born hands. daylight upon magic.” And it is tough to see through all the smoke, Massey himself was the perfect transitional fig- That leaves procedural tweaking, for which to say nothing of the Confederate flags that ure, in many ways indistinguishable from his practical options do exist. The one receiving the recently disgraced Capitol Hill, but Manthorpe predecessors and with all the gravitas the post most attention at the moment is the notion that has managed to spot a glimmer of hope. Oddly requires. His immediate successor, Georges Justin Trudeau should set aside whatever animus enough, it’s a glimmer of hope that the pan- Vanier, evinced a similar dignity; a proud franco- he feels toward Stephen Harper and reinsti- demic has revealed: in these dark times, we have phone, Vanier wore the supremely Anglocentric tute the perfectly sensible arrangements of his a true opportunity to confront ourselves, our title with ease. immediate predecessor. They involve constitut- institutions, and our shared vision of the future. Not all who followed were as scintillating in ing an arm’s-length committee to be in charge of What do we want society to look like? How their talents, and it is probably fair to say that by each vice-regal appointment, at both the federal do we ensure the protection and regulation of the time Roméo LeBlanc stepped down in 1999, and provincial levels, with the task of passing on communal life? Manthorpe recommends a top- citing health reasons, there was a consensus that the names of five fully vetted candidates for the down approach, in the sense that governments it was time to move past battle-hardened polit- prime minister’s consideration. This process has and their institutions must (re-)earn the trust of ical warhorses. The initial trio of a new genera- much to recommend it: it incorporates outside the people. The economic victims of COVID-19 tion — , Michaëlle Jean, and expertise, allows for a modicum of confiden- are “a ready-m ade audience for populists,” yes, — proved highly successful. tiality, and does not break with constitutional but they can also be an audience for a different Each put a unique stamp on the job, not just traditions. Still, its resurrection may not come kind of spectacle: “A good place to start would modernizing its day-to-day features but recap- to pass. The current government might resolve be to revive the status of Parliament and the turing some of the lustre that had faded since instead to selfishly guard its decision-making legislatures as the stages on which issues of the the days of Massey and Vanier. power, giving the prime minister full rein to day are debated and resolved.” There was every indication that Julie Payette meet broader political aims, especially at a time Aeschylus ends his Oresteia trilogy with a would follow suit when she was tapped in 2017. when racial inequity and the push for reconcilia- spectacular transformation. The Furies become A relatively young and highly accomplished tion loom large. the Eumenides, or the Gracious Ones. Vengeance trailblazer, and perfectly bilingual to boot, she So where does this leave us? Alas, probably is superseded by grace, fear by wisdom. And the seemed to embody so many favourable twenty- muddling along as before, with nothing more refrain “Cry, cry for death, but good win out in first-century Canadian attributes, at least as seen in the way of consolation than a few earnest glory in the end” is transfigured into the cele- through the prism of the Liberal government’s promises from the praetorian guard around the bratory “Cry, cry in triumph, carry on the dan- “sunny ways.” Of course, the result did not turn prime minister that important lessons have been cing on and on!” Of course, there’s a catch: The out to be quite so sunny, and for a humdrum learned. We can only hope that those lessons Athenians have voted in equal measure for and reason: when it came to checking whether image really do stick — if for no other reason than to against pardoning Orestes. The struggle between matched reality, no one in the PMO had both- aid our thirtieth governor general. After all, this vengeance and justice is at a stalemate, even in ered to do the essential legwork. So we are left person is the one who will have to contend with democracy. It takes the intercession of divine with today’s inevitable round of recriminations. the shambles Payette left in her wake. Canadians wisdom to bring the trial to its end, and Athena Thankfully, we also have an opportunity to ought to offer a large measure of goodwill as the casts the final ballot. Let’s hope she, or some reflect on how vice-regal appointments are — and next holder of the office sets about this delicate other wise one, does the same for us. could be — made. but vital task.

MARCH 2021 7 RULES AND REGULATIONS

Wait, Wait. . . Don’t Tell Me The pros and cons of disclosure Krzysztof Pelc

Too Much Information: Understanding prices: they actually manage to not absorb the ing labels, and those forty- page disclaimers — it What You Don’t Want to Know information, though on a subliminal level their has also become easier to grasp that we may, in Cass R. Sunstein minds know it’s there. fact, prefer not to know. MIT Press In many cases, such a preference for not know- This leaves governments — often the ones 264 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook ing is actually rational: it is the correct choice deciding whether we ought to be told some- given the effect that learning something would thing — in an unenviably tricky position. For have on us. The process of gathering information, the most part, the design of our political insti- REN’T ALL THE BEST MYTHS REALLY for starters, can be long, costly, and tedious. A few tutions has assumed an Enlightenment model about the price of information? years ago, researchers calculated that it would of the citizen. They cater to our most rational We have Adam and Eve ousted take us seventy-s ix days to read the privacy poli- selves, even when we happen to fall short of from Eden for wanting “the eyes cies we agree to every year. Exposing ourselves to that standard. People claim they have “a right to of them both [to be] opened.” some truths can also make us sad or upset. Or it know”; according to this mantra, they ought to AThere’s poor Prometheus, who gets his liver may worsen our behaviour. On further reflection, be given all the information so they can decide pecked in perpetuity for disclosing the secret of we may prefer not to know what our spouse is for themselves. fire and “all manner of arts” to humans. And up to when we’re away, lest we react less ration- The result has been a steady march among there’s Odysseus, beckoned by the Sirens’ peril- democracies toward ever greater disclosure. In ous revelation of “everything that happens on 2005, Canada became the first country to make the fruitful earth.” In each case, the moral of the the labelling of all trans fats on prepackaged story is the same: you don’t want to know. foods mandatory, to help consumers make It has not stopped us from trying. In the post- better dietary choices. Two years later, Ottawa Enlightenment era, the continuous acquisition mandated that all prepackaged foods list their of knowledge has become our prerogative. It’s full nutritional content. Drug companies, insur- telling that the different versions of the Faustian ance firms, car manufacturers, mortgage lenders, myth — one more story about the price of infor- real estate agents — all are required to provide us mation — fundamentally recast its hero follow- with information that’s meant to help us make ing the Enlightenment. The sixteenth- century better decisions. playwright Christopher Marlowe, for example, There are even government- mandated disclo- condemns Faust’s hubris and rewards his meg- sures about disclosures: online companies must alomania with eternal damnation. By Goethe’s now tell us what they will do with what we tell time, in the early nineteenth century, Faust is them about ourselves. Fewer than 3 percent of us redeemed. His defiant striving toward godlike bother to read those privacy policies, however. knowledge is now bold rather than foolish. He is As a result, most of us draw the wrong inference the original infovore, forever scrolling down and from their existence: 75 percent of people think forever demanding, “More, please.” a privacy policy provides additional protection We accept the premise that rational decisions for their information, whereas it usually repre- ought to be made on the basis of all available sents a relinquishing of it. Similarly, those who information, and that more of it is therefore would gain most from reducing caloric intake better. People of reason prefer to know. They are least likely to read nutritional tables. Given look reality in the eye. They read the full con- our false inferences and selective attention, are tract before signing it. If their spouse has been governments right in requiring firms to provide unfaithful, they’d like to be told, so that they us with all this information? can calmly choose the best course of action. If The answer is all the more unclear given that they have a predisposition to a degenerative ill- Whose head is in the sand now? it can be upsetting to know. When fast-food E U G

ness, they want to find out, even if no treatment customers are told the amount of saturated fat A H

is available. They stay on top of the news, even ally than we’d hope. Knowing how the evening in a meal they nonetheless want to order, they E H T

when it’s bad. In fact, isn’t there something mor- news makes us anxious and distressed, we might may feel they have been robbed of a pleasure. , F ally dubious about preferring not to know? We opt not to watch it. As I recently learned, parents- Smokers who are reminded of the health impact E I H

rarely sing the praises of the ostrich with its head to-be must repeatedly choose how much they of a habit that they refuse to give up are likely to C R A in the sand. want to know — and when. There’s the boy/ girl be aggrieved by the reminder. Should such emo- L A

Yet our high- minded celebration of maximal question but also weightier ones, like deciding tive effects count when deciding what informa- A N information often proves self-d eluded. Despite whether to test for Down’s syndrome and a long tion to provide? Should governments care not O I T our assurances that we can handle the truth, list of other low-p robability conditions, from only about how a disclosure makes us behave A N

; many of our actions suggest that we prefer not sickle- cell anemia to Tay-Sachs disease. For weeks, but also about how it makes us feel? Should 1 5 9 to. We constantly ignore information or attend I felt the full burden of the Enlightenment weigh- they honour our whims, our biases, our foibles? 1

, E

to it selectively. People check their investment ing on me. Reason can get us only so far in such Should they correct for these, like a concerned K S portfolios more often when the stock market cases, which is why the choices of reasonable parent? Or instead accommodate them, like an O N is up than when it is down. They conveniently people about which information to seek vary. understanding friend? . D

. J

overlook the calorie counts on restaurant menus, As it has become easier to know — through These are the questions at the core of Too / O especially if they are prone to indulging. Those the advent of Wikipedia and at-home DNA test- Much Information: Understanding What You Don’t F E N who tend to overspend blind themselves to ing along with nutritional content listings, warn- Want to Know, by the Harvard legal scholar A

8 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA Cass R. Sunstein. According to its main claim, Assessing what “better off” means is the nub tenure- track jobs.” How much should I insist on governments should respect our quirky and dis- of the issue. One way of going about it is to such a disclaimer? torted selves, those revealed through our some- simply ask people what they want to know. But What complicates matters is that while I times incongruous behaviours, rather than the here, too, people’s quirks make this difficult. It believe in my duty to inform students of their Enlightenment ideal of a rational citizen, which turns out, for instance, that most people say they chances, I also think that they might be better we rarely live up to. And, as the book’s title sug- don’t want to see calorie labels in restaurants, off ignoring me. Those who end up succeeding gests, that often means providing people with presumably because they want to enjoy their on the academic market often get there by pay- less, rather than more, information. poutine without being reminded of its effects ing no heed to the odds. This approach might Sunstein may be as well placed as anyone on their hearts. As consumers of cheese curds actually prove strategic. We know from experi- to address the tangle of issues surrounding the and fries well know, “he that increaseth know- ments in social psychology that self-d eception question of which information to provide. He ledge increaseth sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18). Yet of this sort can lead to greater persistence at dif- is the co- author of Nudge: Improving Decisions the same individuals overwhelmingly favour ficult tasks and higher odds of success. For that about Health, Wellness, and Happiness, from 2008, regulation to force restaurants to disclose the matter, people more prone to self-d eception which was an attempt to apply lessons from calorie content of the food they serve. Sunstein appear happier in the present, and they have behavioural science to government policy. That calls this an “evident paradox,” and he generally more positive expectations of their future. How book was co-a uthored with Richard Thaler, wants to place more weight than we currently do much should governments be guided by such a University of Chicago economist who was on how information makes people feel — rather findings? Ultimately, I agree that self- deception awarded the Nobel Prize, in 2017, for his research than merely how it makes them behave. In other can be useful; but I might prefer that it be up in behavioural economics. words, he regrets ruining popcorn. to individuals to deploy it. Which is why for The central idea of Nudge is that govern- In cases like these, Sunstein’s attention to calorie counts, as for the academic job market, I ments can guide people to better outcomes by people’s many irrationalities may lead him to ultimately come down on the side of providing redesigning how choices are presented while underestimate the depth of their reason. If we more, rather than less, information. preserving the freedom to choose. Lives can be want firms to list all their ingredients and their But things get trickier still. We know the pre- saved by changing the default option on organ terms and conditions despite not wanting to cise cardiovascular implications of poutine and donor forms, for example, since most people read any of the details, that might be because the odds of the academic market. But what if the never deviate from the default. Children can we believe that if they were hiding something costs and benefits of a disclosure are unclear? be encouraged to eat healthier food if the vege- untoward, someone would alert us to it. This Since 2012, the United States has required that tables are served at the beginning of the lunch may reflect a faith in markets, another charac- all publicly traded companies list any use of counter rather than at the end. In the world of teristic belief of the Enlightenment: we trust in “conflict minerals” in their products. These Nudge, small, harmless- sounding interventions the market’s singular information-c runching include tin, tungsten, and tantalum — all found can lead to better outcomes. powers, and we similarly trust that someone in a range of tech gadgets, from phones to In 2009, Barack Obama named Sunstein somewhere has a market incentive to flag harm- laptops. These minerals often come from con- his “regulation czar,” which allowed him to ful actions by firms. flict zones, especially around the Great Lakes test out some of his ideas in the real region of Africa, and the concern is world. That appointment was seen in that their mining may help fund vio- some quarters of the United States as “We’ve seen a steady march lent rebel groups, increasing conflict a sinister takeover of government by and suffering. Canadian firms listed on paternalistic regulators who would rob among democracies toward American stock exchanges must follow Americans of their freedoms. Sunstein the disclosure rule, but Canada has yet might have picked the wrong country ever greater disclosure.” to adopt similar legislation, despite to pitch his ideas in. Tellingly, behav- repeated attempts by some members ioural insights have found a more wel- of Parliament. come reception in policy communities outside Or else we may sense that we do not need When the U.S. agency tasked with imple- the United States. The United Kingdom and to pay attention to the information ourselves, menting the law tried to estimate its impact on Canada, in particular, have been leading the because the main effect of the disclosure is on conflict, it found it couldn’t: the causal chain charge. Both the government of Ontario and the companies doing the disclosing. That effect was simply too long. From a consumer’s deci- the Canadian federal government have created is, in fact, supported by evidence: a survey of sion not to buy a product based on its sourcing, “impact and innovation units” that prioritize menus following a mandate to disclose calorie to a company’s decision to change suppliers, to behavioural insights of the kind that Sunstein contents showed that restaurants shifted their the impact that such a change in demand has on has championed. offerings toward healthier options. This too, conflict on the ground — it became impossible That stint in the policy world led Sunstein incidentally, is a product of Enlightenment to calculate what the final effect might be. In to revise some of his own beliefs about the ideas. Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitar- fact, it was suggested that the regulation might right to know and the obligation to inform. ianism, dreamed of a model prison, which he harm the very people it is aimed at protecting by One episode, in particular, seems to have pre- called the panopticon: a design where a single depriving them of a livelihood. Such unintended cipitated a change of heart. In Washington, guard could watch all inmates without their consequences are what government regulators Sunstein successfully pushed for regulation knowledge. The idea was that the mere possibil- lose sleep over at night. But regulators are also mandating that all restaurants and movie the- ity that they were being observed would improve in a better position than consumers to work atres disclose the calorie content of all the food their behaviour. Bentham’s little design has gone through adverse effects. So should the informa- they serve. Learning this, a friend of Sunstein’s down in history as an example of how techno- tion disclosure be required at all? sent him a three-word email: “Cass ruined pop- crats’ dreams can turn into nightmares. We may In this case, Sunstein does not come down corn.” Standing accused of ruining a beloved nonetheless have internalized its insight. We clearly on one side or the other. Sticking with puffed snack has caused Sunstein much grief, don’t need to read the caloric warnings, as long the idea that we should honour how informa- and it has provided the motivation for this as restaurants know that we could. tion affects people’s feelings, he suggests that latest book. ◆ the “warm glow” that some consumers get from Sunstein proposes that information should be WHEN SPENDTHRIFTS IGNORE PRICES OR GLUTTONS choices based on moral convictions — such provided according to a simple rule — namely, ignore calorie counts, it’s easy to take the high- as not buying a product that contains conflict whether it “would significantly improve people’s minded Enlightenment position: responsible minerals —“should be counted” when mak- lives.” To his credit, he offers a disclosure of people ought to know, so let’s make sure that ing policy choices. But then he immediately his own, admitting how that simple-s ounding they do. But what about cases where self- adds that “agencies should do the best they rule is “perhaps deceptively so.” Indeed, what deception might prove useful? can to determine whether disclosure will, in Sunstein proposes turns out to be a tall order: I face this dilemma myself whenever one of fact, counteract a moral wrong.” He goes on, he suggests that regulators should fully take into my students considers pursuing a PhD. A warn- “There is a risk that morally motivated disclo- account the behavioural and emotive effects of ing label might read: “About half of graduate sure requirements will be merely expressive, potential disclosures in deciding whether they students never obtain their doctorate, and only producing a sense that something has been would make people better off. 10 to 25 percent of those who do end up with accomplished without actually helping anyone.”

MARCH 2021 9 This strikes me as trying to have it both ways: makes it more likely that tougher policies like Canada claimed that the measure was dis- governments should at once take into account outright bans, which are explicitly designed to guised American protectionism and more trade the moral vindication that people get from see- limit choice, will be put in place. restrictive than necessary. The World Trade ing their beliefs validated by policy and stick to a Of course, there is nothing intrinsically Organization ruled in Canada’s favour. The policy’s objective effects. Each sounds desirable, wrong in limiting people’s choice. Forsaking legal concept at issue is “country of origin but they will often be incompatible. Either we choice is largely the point of advanced demo- labelling,” which trade lawyers refer to by its value people’s feelings and their moral beliefs, cratic societies. We let health authorities worry acronym, COOL (though it is anything but). or we recognize that those feelings and beliefs about tap- water quality so that we don’t have Think of it as the weaponization of paperwork. are sometimes misguided and that it is the to monitor it ourselves and decide whether When domestic producers have an easier time duty of government to parse the evidence with to boil it every morning. If we had to be fully clearing regulatory hurdles, they often insist greater care. advised of all the safety features on an airplane that those hurdles be made into a requirement The broader point is that information is not before making an informed decision to take for others. The result is excessive paperwork neutral if it is mandated. Citizens draw infer- off, we would never end up boarding. We are and red tape — something that the economist ences from seeing their government require constantly choosing not to choose, knowing Richard Thaler, Sunstein’s Nudge co-a uthor, calls firms to disclose their use of conflict minerals. that we do not know, and trusting that others “sludge.” And while sludge is often portrayed They reasonably conclude that consumption of do. Advanced market societies are based on as the result of bureaucratic overzealousness, such products must aggravate a moral wrong. such delegation of power, which does not take it is just as often the result of clever corporate The warm glow of moral vindication, in other away from the fact that every time we consent manoeuvring. words, is itself premised on governments doing to ignorance, we place a little bit more trust in When people delegate power over informa- their due diligence — rather than being guided policy makers’ benevolence, as well as in their tion to governments, they do so trusting that by said glow. In cases like these, this deference to competence. To opt not to know, then, can be policy makers will steer through these compet- authority may be the best indication that people thought of as the privilege of those lucky cit- ing pressures and appropriately balance people’s expect their public institutions to disregard the izens who believe policy makers’ incentives are well- being with corporate interests. This belief way information makes them feel, in favour of highly aligned with their own. places tremendous weight on one’s faith in gov- an objective assessment of the facts. Consumers Yet the fact is that governments face conflict- ernment, which may explain why countries other can be led by whims, but governments probably ing pressures on information disclosure, some- than the United States have shown the most shouldn’t be — even when the whims in ques- thing that Sunstein also leaves unaddressed. interest in Sunstein’s ideas. International sur- tion are those of their citizens. These pressures arise, first, because disclosures veys suggest that places like South Korea, which ◆ are expensive: meeting the American require- enjoys very high levels of trust in government, are IT IS THIS ISSUE OF TRUST THAT IS THE BIGGEST ment on conflict minerals was estimated to most open to the idea. Countries like Hungary, omission in Too Much Information. I don’t know cost companies $4 billion (U.S.) in the first year where citizens have greater mistrust toward the whether “ignorance is bliss,” as Sunstein main- alone. As a result, industries often lobby against government, are most strongly opposed. tains is often the case, but it surely is a luxury. information disclosures. At least part of the ◆ That’s because one needs to know a IN THE PAST YEAR, THE CONNECTION great deal to know that one doesn’t between information and trust has want to know. To choose whether to “Our desire to be informed gone from an academic question to be told the calorie content of a cheese- an item of dinnertime conversation. burger, we effectively need to know is starting to get in the way of The management of COVID-19 has the calorie content of a cheeseburger. turned in large measure on what infor- In deciding whether to be informed our knowing.” mation — and how much of it — to of the genetically modified content broadcast in the face of rising death of a tomato, it helps to have formed tolls, scientific uncertainty, and vary- an opinion about the health consequences of reason Ottawa has not followed Washington’s ing levels of popular denial and complacency. GMOs. For this reason, choosing not to know example on conflict minerals is the pressure by Early on in the pandemic, some governments often assumes that someone else does. It also the Canadian mining sector, which regularly suppressed information to limit public panic. assumes that this someone else can be trusted to ranks among the most active special interest In some cases, data on questions like the effect- know that we need not be told — either because groups on Parliament Hill. iveness of masks appears to have been mis- it would be ineffective or because it would make More deviously, some corporations actually represented to stave off hoarding, in an effort us sad or upset. love information disclosures, precisely because to retain enough personal protective equipment As a result, it strikes me that Sunstein’s change of the high costs entailed. The biggest food for front-line workers. As a result, the credibility of heart about information disclosures repre- manufacturers have thus been oddly favourable of government-p rovided information has been sents a greater delegation of power to govern- to rules mandating ever more detailed nutri- a key concern. Not coincidentally, those same ments than his prior work on nudges. Indeed, tional label requirements. That’s because it plays countries that feature high levels of confidence the fundamental premise of Nudge is that the to their competitive advantage: they can absorb in government have also proven best at tack- proposed policies preserve choice: I can still the costs of analysis and relabelling, while small ling the virus. The pattern seems to hold even choose whether to be an organ donor; it’s only firms often cannot. Similarly, the largest firms within countries, as the case of Canada suggests. the default that has changed. In this sense, it’s can put out a new product overnight that is free Quebec and Alberta feature this country’s low- the disclosures that are themselves a kind of of trans fats, MSG, or gluten, while mom-and- est levels of trust in government; they have often nudge: I can attend to or ignore the information, pop shops struggle. seen the worst per capita numbers in the most but it is the government’s way of nudging me Neutral-sounding disclosures are not neu- recent wave of the virus. away from a tech product that contains conflict tral if they benefit large firms at the expense of Policy makers have been drawing on behav- minerals. It follows that refraining from that smaller ones. Such competitive effects explain ioural insights at every stage of the pandemic informational nudge may not, in fact, preserve why governments are sometimes so keen not response. Survey experiments have been used choice. If I am not told which products are made only to mandate those disclosures but also to to design public signs about handwashing that using conflict minerals, or whether a tomato impose them on their trading partners. In an yield the optimal behavioural outcome, for contains GMOs, then I cannot choose to be told era of low trade barriers, labelling requirements example. In support of Sunstein’s contention of in order to make an informed decision. can be deployed as a substitute: it’s often easier “too much information,” it seems that if these Another reason that less information may end for a country’s own producers to meet complex signs include too many steps, people retain up limiting choice is that information disclo- national requirements than it is for foreign less rather than more of their content. Nudge sures are often substitutes for hard rules. Rather producers. principles have been used to recruit volunteers than legislating, say, a total ban on trans fats (as In a landmark international dispute that for vaccine trials. And behavioural science may several countries are contemplating), regulators concluded in 2015, Canada challenged a law have the most to offer in getting those parts of can require that consumers be informed and that required that beef sold in the United States the population that remain skeptical of vaccines leave it up to them to make up their minds. a label informing consumers exactly where to nonetheless get inoculated, and to return for A preference for not inundating consumers thus the cattle were born, raised, and slaughtered. that second jab.

10 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA The global vaccine rollout began, of course, do so: they invent desires so that these might be One risk of prodding governments to think just as many countries were seeing record-h igh satiated; they come up with fears so that these like marketers — to encourage them to push our rates of infection. In response, some health might be dispelled. I still don’t exactly know buttons “to significantly improve our lives”— is experts called for governments to dissemin- what bisphenol A is, but, seeing the proliferation that we may develop analogous defence mech- ate even more information, with the explicit of “BPA- free plastic” labels, I know I’d rather anisms against mandated information, even intent of scaring people, along the lines of not have any of it in my newborn daughter’s when it’s information we truly need. public service ads against smoking. This tactic toys. Similarly, the preponderance of scientific In the Soviet-era Poland where my parents too draws on a well-e stablished behavioural evidence indicates that genetically modified grew up, a common joke was that whenever finding: namely, that people are more swayed foods have no adverse effect on human health, the weather forecast called for sunshine, it was by personal stories than by abstract numbers. which is why the Canadian government requires best to pack an umbrella. Announcements of The ubiquitous exponential curve on the front no disclosure of GMO content. Yet this does record economic output left people worry- page of newspapers is one thing; graphic images not stop advertisers from eagerly promoting ing about what bad thing the regime might of patients on ICU ventilators are another. The their foods as GMO- free. It is one more way for be trying to conceal. The one human bias that point of using fear would be to upset people for brands to differentiate themselves. That then Sunstein leaves out of his probing discussion their own good. shapes people’s perception of what’s safe and is a universal and deeply ingrained distaste for ◆ what’s not, which in turn increases the perceived being manipulated — even when it is for our IN ARGUING THE MERITS OF INFORMATION DISCLO- value of those labels. Marketing executives every- own good. The use of behavioural insights by sures, Sunstein draws on the most recent findings where rejoice. policy makers relies on considerable trust, but in behavioural science research. Yet the irony The conclusion the market has drawn is that it also risks eroding that trust if it is deployed is that, cutting-e dge though it may be, behav- affluent consumers want ever more informa- too eagerly. ioural science often finds itself playing catch-up tion, and they are willing to pay dearly for it. ◆ with the market. Advertising departments have And the market has delivered. The result is that I REMAIN HIGHLY SYMPATHETIC TO THE USE OF long been acting on the very insights that social our desire to be informed is starting to get in behavioural insights in policy making — which psychologists and economists are busy demon- the way of our knowing. An average can of tuna, Sunstein’s work has contributed to — and espe- strating through fancy lab experiments. for example, is now adorned with a tapestry of cially the evidence- based methods it relies on, By pushing governments to take into account labels and logos, each assuring consumers of the like randomized control trials. Then again, I’m how information makes people feel, Sunstein utmost virtue of its contents: its performance rather biased. These are the methods I use in my thus finds himself arguing that policy makers on matters of ethics, environmental protection, own research, now suddenly being adopted by ought to think more like marketers. Their object- sustainability, carbon neutrality, organic stan- policy makers. And everyone likes to see their ives may differ, but the approach would be the dards. In Canada, there are over thirty officially work finally get some recognition, don’t they? same: to anticipate people’s irrationality, their recognized eco- labels for canned tuna alone. Still, I remain uneasy about Sunstein’s claim in biased self-image, and their weaknesses, and to There’s a case to be made that as a result, we Too Much Information that regulators should take exploit them — either to move product or “to are now less able to make educated decisions into account how information makes people feel improve people’s lives.” In fact, Sunstein assesses than we were when we had less information in deciding whether to provide it. The simple- whether people actually want to be informed in the supermarket aisle. In fact, in ways that I sounding rule that people ought to be informed of something based on their willingness to pay suspect Sunstein would be sympathetic to, here only if it makes their lives significantly better for it (a criterion that he also duly criticizes, but is a natural role for regulators to play. When the implies a degree of omniscience that may be without providing a better alternative). It thus deluge of information gets in the way of people beyond anyone’s powers. And it leaves out how turns out that people would pay an average making better decisions, regulators may want to people’s behaviour may adapt in turn. It seems of $154 to know the year of their death (while start imposing limits on how much information to me safer to lean toward the Enlightenment others would pay not to know it) and $109 to consumers face when choosing which can of fish model of the citizen — faulty though it may know whether tech products contain conflict to purchase. be — and disregard our feelings altogether. minerals. Of course, this willingness to pay is Consumers have not sat idly by, mind you. By People are indeed prone to quirks, biases, and the very criterion that drives marketers. If people now, we have exquisitely honed defence mech- self-d eception. But perhaps individuals ought want to know, it means someone in the market anisms against the market’s exploitation of our to be the ones wrestling with these as best they has an incentive to tell them. weaknesses. We are terribly savvy consumers: can, rather than being protected from them by Seeing what such incentives have wrought in we know better than to take those labels at face benevolent regulators. the market, however, underscores the limits of value. We instantly picture the focus groups over Information does come at a price. And its Sunstein’s simple-s ounding rule. In their never- at Seafood, Inc. being used to measure our will- disclosure is rarely neutral, especially when gov- ending bid to please consumers, markets are ingness to pay premium for tuna-c an virtue. And ernments are the ones mandating it. Ultimately, constantly creating novel grounds on which to we adjust our behaviour accordingly. popcorn may best be ruined.

     

Flight from Grace A Cultural History of Humans and Birds richard pope Daughters of Aataentsic Mrs Dalgairns’s Kitchen The State of the System  """"!!" Life Stories from Seven Generations Rediscovering “The Practice of Cookery” A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools "! "  "     " kathryn magee labelle edited by mary f. williamson paul w. bennett in collaboration with the Wendat/Wandat With Modern Recipes by Elizabeth Baird !"" "" !! Women’s Advisory Council  """"  !!" mqup.ca @McGillQueensUP  """"!!"""""! " "   "   ""!""  POLITICKING

Share and Share Alike How Ottawa slices the pie Murray Campbell

The Art of Sharing: The Richer versus and far between. Fifteen years ago, as a reporter writes. “It is not flashy.” Yet it’s no stretch to say the Poorer Provinces since Confederation trying to get up to speed on the topic, I con- that this untidy solution has kept this improb- Mary Janigan sulted a Queen’s University professor. At one able country together. McGill-Queen’s University Press point, I stopped his briefing to say I didn’t quite The mix of have and have-not provinces 496 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook follow something. “That’s okay,” he said. “Only has varied over the years as , a few dozen people understand this, and even Newfoundland and Labrador, and Alberta have they don’t always agree with each other.” seen surges of resource revenue (and, truth be F THE PROSPECT OF DISCUSSING CANADA’S But we can agree on this: The Art of Sharing told, politics has come into play). The “night- equalization scheme sends you into is a book we didn’t know we needed. Janigan marish” formula has received a couple of make- narcoleptic despair, consider the bright uses deep scholarly research — her bibliography overs, but there has been one constant: Quebec enthusiasm of Lyndhurst Falkiner is twenty pages long and includes abundant has always been a recipient. In 2020–21, Ottawa Giblin, who, on a warm day in August archival material — to illuminate in a readable will pay out $20.5 billion to the have-nots, I1938, eagerly sauntered into a room on way the decades-l ong grudge match between of which Quebec will receive $13.25 billion. Parliament Hill to talk about the nitty-gritty. the richer and poorer provinces, with a series of Ontario, which was deprived of the benefit in The sixty- five-year-old Australian economist federal governments acting as hesitant referees. 1978 by a last- minute change in the formula, wasn’t put off by the dry-as-dust topic; indeed, In the postwar period, voters wanted better received payments for a decade from 2009, he had sailed across the Atlantic from England social programs, even as most provincial govern- but now it joins four other provinces that will solely to testify before the Royal Commission on ments didn’t have the revenue to provide both wait in vain for money. Alberta hasn’t seen any - Provincial Relations. good roads and improved health services. The since 1963. Giblin arrived wearing a homemade red flan- richer provinces — we have come to call them There are critics of the scheme, of course. This nel tie with his blue shirt, a collarless suit, and the haves — had the money, but their premiers isn’t surprising, considering that equalization workboots smeared with dubbin, but nothing fiercely resisted any transfers to their poor rela- sets up a primal battle over cash. When he was showed his eccentricity as clearly as his eager- tions. The have-not jurisdictions, meanwhile, premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty raised ness to discuss the complexities of federal gov- struggled with limited tax revenues. a protracted fuss about his taxpayers sending ernments. He was in his element that sultry day, Eventually, a full-court press by academics $23 billion more in revenues to federal coffers surrounded by people who were energized by the and bureaucrats persuaded the moneyed pre- each year than they were receiving in services. task of making federations more equit- Reports were commissioned — one able, to allow poor New Brunswick said that equalization had “drifted to operate in the same league as rich “We can agree on this: The Art from its moorings”— and Ottawa Ontario. And the four commissioners fiddled a bit with the formula. And listened with fascination as he outlined of Sharing is a book we didn’t then the fuss died down once Ontario the formula that Australia had come became a have-not province. up with five years earlier, so that all of know we needed.” These days, Jason Kenney is the its citizens had equal access to social dominant naysayer. He is promis- programs, no matter where they lived. ing a referendum this year to allow Some level of equal access had been Ottawa’s miers that provincial inequality threatened to Albertans a chance to vent their anger about a goal for decades, as it tried to balance the poorer destroy the federation and that giving the others scheme that has given them a mere $92 million and richer provinces with a variety of ad hoc a leg up would increase general prosperity. The over sixty- three years (compared with Quebec’s loans and grants to deal with the inequality at difficulty was in figuring out how to do it, espe- $198 billion). Other critics wonder whether the the core of Confederation. Giblin showed what cially as Ottawa had historically been reluctant system has fostered dependency among the have- could be done in a more systematic way, but to decentralize tax collection. nots. Would the Maritime provinces have so officials hooked on the practices of an overbear- The federal government couldn’t butt into many hospitals and universities without the bil- ing central government weren’t ready to follow. areas of provincial jurisdiction, such as health lions they get? Could Quebec afford its compre- It wasn’t until 1957 that Ottawa sent cheques care, so it eventually settled on the rather sim- hensive child care program? Did New Brunswick totalling $139 million to eight qualifying prov- ple idea of giving money to some provinces to reject the tax revenue — and controversy — it inces, so that they could finance the social ensure they could provide relatively equal levels would have got from fracking because it was sim- programs that Canadians were demanding. of services for relatively equal levels of taxa- ply easier to accept money from Ottawa? This bumpy road to equalization is the sub- tion. The feds used the Australian experience to Despite its somewhat Byzantine nature, equal- ject of Mary Janigan’s The Art of Sharing, and it devise what Janigan calls a “rather nightmarish ization is “a principle that should be cherished.” is not damning with faint praise to say that the formula” that tops up revenues according to a But to what extent does it actually work? While book is vastly more interesting than the arcane province’s fiscal capacity. There are no applica- billions of dollars have flowed, there’s never been subject matter at hand. Janigan rightly praises tion forms and no conditions on how the recipi- a comprehensive study of the scheme’s effective- the equalization scheme as “the improbable glue ents use the money. (The three territories have a ness. Does it actually ensure comparable social that holds the nation together,” even as its sticky similar and equally arcane scheme, Territorial programs across Canada? Does it help have- charms are well hidden beneath a mountain of Formula Financing, that in 2020–21 will disburse nots boost their fiscal capacities? Does it foster obfuscating numbers. about $4 billion, unconditionally.) national unity? The questions need answering, Journalists like to call equalization a MEGO Equalization is not a beloved social program if only to cut down on the sporadic outbursts of story — as in “My eyes glaze over.” Polls show like medicare or a lifesaver such as the federal resentfulness among the haves. Perhaps the great- that the scheme in place since 1957 is popular, transfer payments for post- secondary education. est value of The Art of Sharing is to show us that but those who can explain how it works are few “It does not inspire fierce patriotism,” Janigan it would be worth finding those answers.

12 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA POLITICKING

Wild Rose Diplomacy Negotiating Alberta’s uncertain future Bruce Campbell

Moment of Truth: How to Think about Alberta’s Future Edited by Jack M. Mintz, Tom Flanagan, and Ted Morton Sutherland House 320 pages, softcover and ebook

HIS COLLECTION OF THIRTEEN CHAP- ters provides a window into the conservative brain trust that is help- ing Alberta navigate its relationship with the rest of Canada. Two of the Tthree editors, Tom Flanagan and Ted Morton, along with Stephen Harper, were signatories to the five-point “firewall” letter, published in January 2001, that urged Premier Ralph Klein to seek greater autonomy for the province. Twenty years on, the current volume can be read as a fleshed- out version 2.0 of that missive. As these contributors would have it, Alberta’s attempts to reach a better deal within Canada — captured by the phrase “The West wants in”— have failed. The province is worse off now than it was four decades ago, and it is time Tapping into some inconvenient truths. to seek a more independent relationship with the rest of the country; if that is not successful, limited political power must be protected from In “The Future of the Resource Sector,” the Alberta should set in motion the formal seces- the national majority; fiscal transfers to poorer former energy executive Kelly Ogle argues that sion process. Many of these writers are the same regions cause tensions if the richer region feels since Canada accounts for such a tiny portion neo- liberal policy advocates who have shaped exploited; weak central institutions make devo- of global petroleum production, aggressive the agenda of the current government under lution or separation more tenable; the lack of reduction of oil sands activity would have neg- Jason Kenney. Preston Manning, for example, strong economic linkages leads to greater ten- ligible effects on climate change while damag- chaired the Fair Deal Panel, which released its sions; and separation can be peaceful if both ing Alberta’s economy. The political scientist twenty- five recommendations in June 2020, and parties are in agreement. Barry Cooper, perhaps the most extreme voice Jack M. Mintz, a co- editor, chaired the Economic Elsewhere, the economist Robert Mansell in Moment of Truth, argues in “Challenges for Recovery Council, which provided advice for analyzes the fiscal imbalances between Alberta Western Independence” that the deck is stacked: recuperation from the pandemic. and the rest of Canada from 1961 to 2018. The no legal path to an independent Alberta actually Manning’s opening chapter sets the tone “substantial transfers from Alberta” during exists, so aggressive action may be required, per- for those that follow: Alberta is overtaxed and this time — $3,700 per person on average, and haps even U.S. military assistance. “From the oil underrepresented in Ottawa. While it has trans- over $5,000 per person in most years after sands as a strategic North American petroleum ferred huge chunks of money over the past 1980 —“would appear to constitute the largest reserve to the use of the third largest air base in five decades to the rest of Canada, it lacks an interregional transfer in Canadian history.” the world at Cold Lake, Alberta,” he observes, adequate voice in Parliament, the courts, the Later, the economists Herb Emery and Kent “westerners certainly have military bargaining public service, and other decision- making bod- Fellows consider those fiscal transfers and the chips to offer the Americans.” ies. At the same time, it has been denied critical value of interprovincial trade; they conclude The University of Moncton’s Donald J. Savoie infrastructure for distributing its oil and gas. that Canada has much more to lose than Alberta is something of a sympathetic eastern outlier in The so-called Laurentian elite (from Quebec does if the province separates. the collection. While reviewing the historical and Ontario) has consistently thwarted Alberta, In his chapter, “Secession and Constitution domination of Ontario and Quebec, he calls for leaving it three options: stay with Canada but in Alberta,” Richard Albert, who teaches law national institutions — from Parliament and cab- in a new economic relationship that recognizes at the University of Texas, outlines six steps to inet to the public service and the judiciary — to the province’s distinctiveness and the founda- possibly leaving Canada: initiating the process, better represent regional economic interests. An tional role of natural resources; go it alone as an in which the Alberta government outlines its example is Jim Carr’s recent appointment to cab- independent country; or join the United States. plans for a referendum; evaluating the ques- inet as Justin Trudeau’s special representative for Mintz titles his chapter “Why Do Small tion under the federal Clarity Act; voting, while the Prairies. Such accommodation could forestall Regions Secede from a Federation (Sometimes)?” ensuring the process is seen as independent, fair, growing alienation in both the West and the East. He considers several “cases of federal con- and reflective of the will of Albertans; studying Savoie writes, flict,” including Australia/ Western Australia, the outcome, including the size of a majority N A

Y Malaysia/ Singapore, Norway/ Sweden, and and the rate of voter turnout; negotiating terms Change can only come from two sources: R

E Spain/ Catalonia. He draws five “lessons learned” with Ottawa, through what’s known as the 7/50 from central Canadians who are able T E

P from this overview: a wealthier region with procedure; and constitutional amendment. to see that Canada can only develop to

MARCH 2021 13 its full economic potential if national economist Trevor Tombe pointed out in a CBC in 2018 to just over 65 million barrels per day in institutions can better accommodate column that Alberta was on track to become a 2040. High-cost Alberta bitumen would struggle regional economic circumstances, and have-not province for the first time in fifty-fi ve more and more as global demand wanes. from Western and Atlantic Canadians years, thanks to the pandemic and the accom- Numerous global banks and investment joining forces to ensure that the country’s panying economic crisis (this conclusion was funds, including Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and national institutions incorporate strong based on a report he co- authored with Robert BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, are intrastate federalism requirements. Mansell and Mukesh Khanal). Traditionally, stepping away from Alberta’s oil sands. And any high average incomes and a young population comfort Donald Trump’s administration may By and large, the authors here reject the fed- have meant that higher income and consump- have offered the Kenney government has been eral government’s climate change policies, tion taxes flow from Alberta, which Ottawa quashed by Joe Biden, who has rejoined the Paris including emissions targets under the Paris then uses to offset lower revenues associated Agreement and cancelled Keystone XL. Agreement, the carbon tax, Bill C-69 (which they with more elderly populations elsewhere in Moment of Truth might have suggested ways say blocks pipeline construction), and Bill C-48 Canada. But there’s nothing nefarious about the provincial government could assume a (which prohibits tanker traffic off the northern this. “Federations allow us to pool risks,” Tombe leadership role rather than reflexively continuing coast of ). In ways that echo the wrote. “When a province’s economy is strong and down dinosaur row. It might have proposed how aftermath of Pierre Trudeau’s infamous National its incomes are high, it will naturally contribute Canada’s five biggest oil companies — all based Energy Program, these policies have led to the more than other provinces.” in — could harness their know-how and exit of foreign-o wned energy giants from the Second, a major swath of the Alberta elector- adjust to a clean energy world. Instead, it simply oil sands (Total and Shell), while at least fifteen ate — mainly from urban communities — does sets a number of inconvenient truths aside. other companies have shifted their investments not support the direction advocated by these In May 2020, Jason Kenney began slamming outside of Canada since 2014. authors. According to multiple polls, support for the “hypocrisy” of Norway’s sovereign wealth In the final chapter, the three co- fund for pulling investments from editors summarize what’s needed to the oil sands. Even as it continues to undo the damage: a northern corri- “Moment of Truth simply sets develop new oil fields, exclusively for dor for oil and gas pipelines; changes export, Norway is widely regarded to the Supreme Court, including its a number of inconvenient as a leader on domestic emissions composition, size, and how justices reductions and carbon- free innova- are appointed; an elected Senate; and truths aside.” tions. It has the world’s highest per provincial substitutes for many fed- capita ownership of electric vehicles, eral programs, including the Canada for example, which account for more Pension Plan and the RCMP. Edmonton should Kenney’s United Conservative Party has plum- than half of its domestic car market. It ranks also collect provincial income tax directly, exit meted since the May 2019 election. Other surveys eighth out of sixty-o ne countries in the latest federal cost-s haring programs, leave supply have shown lukewarm support for separation, Climate Change Performance Index (Canada is management for dairy and poultry products, for scrapping the CPP, and for replacing the near the bottom, at fifty- eighth). Unlike Alberta, and facilitate private health care. Then, follow- RCMP with a provincial police force. which squandered its mineral wealth on low ing a referendum on equalization that’s slated Most critically, Moment of Truth largely side- taxes and corporate giveaways, Norway is using for this fall, negotiations should be shaped steps the climate crisis, through either old- its fund — valued at over $1 trillion (U.S.) — to by “autonomism,” by which the threat of sep- denialism or what the researcher Seth Klein calls facilitate a meaningful transition. aration could enhance Alberta’s position within the “new climate denialism”: saying one accepts The Kenney government and the Canadian Canada. “The autonomist option could be help- climate scientists’ warnings while avoiding their fossil fuel industry generally dismiss the ful preparation for some version of separatism public policy implications. As a whole, these Norwegian approach. They continue to reject if Alberta is forced to move in that direction,” authors seem willfully blind to the stark reality the climate science and demonize the Trudeau the co- editors write. “In general, the more auto- around the corner, as well as to what’s already government. This position is misguided and nomous Alberta becomes, the easier it will be to occurring before their eyes: the loss of wildlife dangerous. In order to navigate these precarious contemplate full- fledged separation.” and Arctic ice, unprecedented natural disasters, times, Alberta needs to find a way of work- ◆ even shifts in energy consumption. In 2019, the ing with other provincial governments and ON THE WHOLE, CONTRIBUTORS TO MOMENT OF International Energy Agency forecast a future in with Ottawa, instead of entertaining poten- Truth largely ignore or downplay realities that which oil “demand growth is robust to 2025” tial breakup scenarios. This is the actual truth inhibit or contradict their agenda. First, consider but slows to a “crawl” after that. The intergovern- that the authors of Moment of Truth ignore at equalization. Back in July 2020, as the book was mental organization anticipates demand for their — and our — peril. The stakes could not nearing publication, the University of Calgary crude will fall from 97 million barrels per day be higher. CATASTROPHE STORIES AND LESSONS FROM THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION

T. Joseph Scanlon Roger Sarty, editor

Paper Catastrophe weaves together compelling stories and potent 400 pp. lessons learned from the calamitous Halifax explosion—the worst 978-1-77112-371-6 non-natural disaster in North America before 9/11. It delivers an $39.99 inspiring message: the women and men at “ground zero” responded speedily, courageously, and eff ectively, fighting fires, rescuing the injured, and sheltering the homeless.

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS www.wlupress.wlu.ca BYGONE DAYS

The History Books On the Cundill Prize short list Christopher Moore

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Against such prejudices, the Cundill argues when they won, fearful and indecisive when of the East India Company the case that history — big serious history — mat- they lost. He writes a fast-m oving, character- William Dalrymple ters. In a good year, its short lists and winners driven, and violent narrative, driven by the clash Bloomsbury Publishing provide a chart of what deserves attention in of armies and the fate of princes and command- 576 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook current historical practice. For that purpose, ers. But Indian society beyond the palaces of 2020 was a good year. Its finalists — about rajas and nawabs remains something of a mys- Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs Mughal India, Aztec Mexico, and plantation tery. There is a powerful critique of colonialism Camilla Townsend Jamaica — talk to each other about the ways the in The Anarchy, but the best history of the year University Press leading edge of scholarship addresses and even should reach deeper than trumpets and drums. 336 pages, hardcover and ebook reconceptualizes what we might think of as con- ◆ temporary concerns. CAMILLA TOWNSEND’S FIFTH SUN: A NEW HISTORY Tacky’s Revolt: The Story ◆ of the Aztecs is also focused more on the con- of an Atlantic Slave War WILLIAM DALRYMPLE HAS LIVED FOR YEARS IN INDIA, quered than on the conquerors in another Vincent Brown where he writes best- selling books that confront epochal colonization, but Townsend, a histor- Press the realities of colonialism. In The Anarchy, he ian at Rutgers University, barely glances at the 336 pages, hardcover and ebook is at pains to explode the myth that the British battlefield exploits of Moctezuma or Cortés. She Empire was dedicated to bettering India. “One describes her book being born in a quiet library, of the very first Indian words to enter the English “a world of frozen voices,” as she “hears” a T IS NO EASY THING TO RUN A GLOBAL language,” his opening sentence observes, “was Mexica princess facing defiantly taunt book prize from Canada, far from the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.” her captors. And she revels in the strangeness of the great publishing empires and the The “anarchy” of his title is double. At the deep encounters with the distant past. kingmakers of literary fashion, but the start of the eighteenth century, the two- hundred- Townsend is one of a group of scholars, Cundill History Prize works at it. Funded year-old Muslim Mughal empire presided over both in and out of Mexico, who have learned Iby the bequest of a investor and an array of semi-i ndependent Hindu princi- to read Nahua — the language of the Nahuatl, mostly administered through McGill University, palities, and India was probably the wealthiest whom we generally call the Aztecs — to study the Cundill seeks recognition by spending society in the world. But dynastic infighting manuscripts written by Indigenous annalists a lot — $75,000 (U.S.) to each year’s in the century after Cortés’s conquest. winner, plus $10,000 to each of the Using the conquerors’ alphabet and runners-up — and by going global to “Serious history is a tough sell writing tools, they recorded their own a degree rivalled only by the Booker pasts and traditions — rich, brutal, Prize. The Cundill aims to identify the when even critics take their and detailed — from two hundred best histories published in English, years before the conquest to the cen- and mostly it looks abroad to do orientations from fiction.” tury after. that. A prominent Canadian (Jeffrey The Nahuatl annals recreate what Simpson, Charlotte Gray) or near- had once been oral performances. Canadian (David Frum) often joins the jury, and military challenges from resurgent Mysore, Much in them is surely mythologized, and their but the panels are dominated by international Bihar, Bengal, and Avadh brought anarchy to ritual formulas and culture- specific imagery are scholars and critics, while authors from Ivy a formerly quiescent reign. Between 1750 and not easily accessible to modern readers. Still, League schools and their European counterparts 1800, the British East India Company, previously Townsend says, “in the annals, we can hear the are strongly represented on the short lists. In a an import-e xport business with just a handful Aztecs talking.” By listening to them, puzzling dozen years of Cundill finalists, I find only a of employees, seized the opportunity. It built a out what they say, she escapes the depictions single book on a Canadian topic: David Hackett private army larger than Britain’s and exploited of Aztecs left to us by Spanish missionaries and Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream, from 2009. the local rivalries to make itself de facto ruler of conquistadors and presents Nahuatl voices on Seeking wide attention for a prize in history the subcontinent. Then it exported unrivalled Nahuatl history. is a tricky mandate in itself. Of one of the early wealth home to its shareholders, unleashing on Townsend begins with Chimalxochitl, the winners, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s remarkable India a capitalist anarchy of famine, poverty, and defiant young woman, captured and ritually A History of Christianity, the critic and juror dependency. A Walmart with armies, Dalrymple sacrificed in 1299 as the Mexica, then a minor Adam Gopnik wrote, “If any book could truly concludes, is no model for a society. tribe migrating south from modern- day Utah, fulfill the charge of the Cundill Prize — to make Dalrymple is primarily interested in how struggled to find a place in Mexico’s Central first class history more potent to a wide reading India and its rulers — the tragic emperor Shah Valley. Chimalxochitl was immortalized in the public, and above all to remind us that history, Alam, the upstart Tipu Sultan, the kingmaking annals for her prediction of her descendants’ even three thousand years worth, matters — this bankers of the Jagat Seth family — responded to eventual bloody rise to power and wealth. one does.” But a reviewer in the Telegraph was the joint-stock company’s invasion. Emperors Later annals, recording the unexpected reign of unconvinced: “First let me say that I don’t think were blinded, prisoners slaughtered, and prin- Itzcoatl, seemingly a minor figure in the Mexica anyone is going to read this book. It’s 1,161 pages cesses handed out as concubines, while poets dynasty, illuminate how Tenochtitlan became a long, for goodness sake.” The Booker seems able lamented that the arrow of fate cannot be par- great city, dominating all the Nahuatl peoples. to make thick unreadable novels you have never ried by the shield of effort. As he covers scores of In the annal of Quecholcohuatl, for example, heard of go viral, but serious history is a tough battles among multiple combatants in unfamil- Townsend explores the resentment and the sell in a world where even critics often take their iar places, it may be inevitable that Dalrymple deference that subject peoples felt for their historical orientations from fiction. must sketch his generals as brutal and brilliant Mexica rulers.

MARCH 2021 15 In the Spanish invasion, Townsend gives us uprising. The fighting lasted eighteen months. Intricately mapping each of the linked but the perspective of a nameless woman sold by her It wrecked the island’s sugar production and local uprisings across Jamaica and relating them Nahuatl nation to the distant Maya, from whom required Britain to divert ships and regiments to tides in the global struggle, Brown demon- Hernan Cortés acquired her. The conquistador from other fronts of the Seven Years War. Tacky’s strates how the rebels applied strategic concepts named her Marina. Nahua has no letter “r,” so Revolt remains legendary in Jamaica. But for all mastered in wars an ocean away, some moving to them Marina became Malina and then, with its heroism and hope, this slave rising seemed to defensible redoubts in the hills, others urging the honorific “tzin” added, Malintzin, which to follow a familiar pattern. Rebel slaves killed the need to hold an outlet to the sea. He shows was turned back into Spanish as Malinche — the masters and torched isolated plantations, but how they acted on motives and opportunities as name that made her famous in European histor- they could not long withstand the organized global and complex as those of the military offi- ies of the conquest, as Cortés’s translator, coun- firepower that the slave-o wning state sent against cers and planter militias who moved to contain sellor, and spouse. The Nahuatl annals enable them. The rebels became divided among them- and kill them. Townsend to entirely reimagine and reinterpret selves; many were betrayed by fellow slaves or by Brown’s one handicap is that he found no her and the whole complex relationship of con- runaway Maroons, who judged the rising both equivalent, either in Africa or in the Caribbean, quered and conqueror. hopeless and dangerous. The longest stage of of the Mughal poets and historians or the Fifth Sun, an original and disorienting ver- Tacky’s Revolt involved the hunting down and Nahuatl annalists. To reach those whom he sion of Aztec history, does not flinch from the grisly execution of fugitives in the hills. Were seeks to understand, he must tease evidence of deep cultural barriers that Townsend — along slave uprisings just spasms of fury inexorably motivations, alliances, and strategies out of the with her readers — faces. Do we balk at the name followed by brutal suppression? enslavers’ bigoted and biased records. He makes Chimalxochitl (Chi-mal-SHO-cheet)? She warns Brown, a professor at Harvard University, Tacky’s Revolt a tour de force of research, theory, that a simple translation — Shield Flower — might complexifies that image by relentless attention and historical imagination that transforms make the woman romantic, exoticized, and less to the (brilliantly mapped) geography of the anonymous labouring slaves into actors of tragic real to us. The reader will have to work alongside conflict and to every scrap of evidence about the majesty in an intricate conflict. her, she suggests. With some coaching in Nahua rebels’ lives and strategies. Defining slavery as ◆ pronunciation (“x” sounds like “sh,” the “l” in a perpetual state of war among slavers and the TOPICS ON THE SHORT LIST OF TEN BOOKS FOR THE “tl” is almost mute, “hu” sounds like a “w”), she enslaved, he redefines Tacky’s Revolt as a truly 2020 Cundill Prize ranged from Cromwell’s soon has us reading with growing confidence: Atlantic conflict, a struggle that created “com- England to twentieth-c entury Palestine, from Me-SHEE-ka for Mexica, NA-wat for Nahuatl. As plex patterns of alliance and antagonism” that Middle Eastern rivalries to the dispossession much as it is a history of a Mesoamerican people, crossed oceans and empires. of Indigenous Americans. The jury singled out Fifth Sun is a meditation on the difficulties of In Brown’s hands, Africa becomes a group of three finalists that explore colonized and racial- cross- cultural understanding and the value of societies deeply enmeshed in the slave wars, not ized peoples in the clashes of culture that under- attempting it. a blank space from which slave labour simply pinned colonialism around the world. None of ◆ emerged. Warring states survived by export- the authors comes from the societies they write VINCENT BROWN STARTS TACKY’S REVOLT: THE ing slaves to pay for the arms they needed, and about. Dalrymple, from an aristocratic Scots Story of an Atlantic Slave War with a sledgeham- then were drawn into ever more slave sales to family, evokes oppressed India. Townsend, a mer anecdote about the crossing of cultures. fund expanding wars. In the process, a mix of white professor raised in , seeks In the 1740s, in modern-d ay Ghana, a military cultures, languages, and rivalries was transferred the Nahuatl beneath the overpowering narratives leader named Apongo regularly dealt and dined to Jamaica, and would-be rebels shaped new of their conquerors. Brown, an African American with John Cope, a British slave trader becoming alliances across widely scattered plantations. scholar and filmmaker raised in San Diego, rich by exporting war prisoners to the Caribbean Their own histories might have left the slaves as , explores the intricate loyalties of plantations. Some years later, retired with his divided as the Nahuatl facing Cortés or Indian eighteenth-c entury Africans enslaved in the fortune to Jamaica, Cope met Apongo again. princes battling the East India Company. But in Caribbean. In the twenty- first century, when His African counterpart had suffered a military 1760, rebel leaders knew Jamaica’s sugar profits many argue that no one from privilege can or reversal at home and was now himself a slave, were tied to Britain’s fate in the imperial wars. should speak for the colonized and oppressed, renamed Wager. From time to time, the naval French and Spanish colonists, slaveholders some might ask if these are all case studies in captain who owned Wager allowed his neigh- themselves on adjacent coasts, were in a global appropriation. bour Cope to invite his old business partner to struggle with the British and might aid a revolt Townsend gives the best reply. She empha- dinner, and they talked of redeeming him and that could seize and hold ground in the colony. sizes, even embraces, the difficulties of cross- sending him home. But Cope died without act- Tacky’s Revolt drew on the fury always simmering cultural understanding. She suggests, in not ing on his promise. Later Wager applied his mil- in the slave barracks, but it was timed to exploit a quite so many words, that in writing history, itary experience as a leader and strategist to the moment of Britain’s vulnerability amid a global what we call cultural appropriation is unavoid- slave uprising remembered in Jamaica as Tacky’s war. Apongo becomes not some romantic prince able and essential. Even one’s own ancestors of Revolt. He did not live to see its end. tragically enslaved but one of many plantation two hundred years past are almost unfathom- In 1760–61, Tacky’s Revolt engaged more labourers who brought with them experience of ably strange to anyone alive today. If historians than a thousand men and women from plan- war and a deep awareness of how violence could will not make the effort to bridge the chasms, tations across Jamaica in a carefully planned turn masters into slaves and perhaps vice versa. who will? History, Townsend does say, is excit- ing not in spite of these challenges but because of them. The Nahuatl annalists, she declares, wanted posterity to hear them, and they said so clearly in their writings: “Do we ourselves not become both wiser and stronger every time we grasp the perspective of people whom we once dismissed?” The Cundill jurors, with three impressive books about the violence and oppression that mark our world’s origins, may have been per- suaded by that passion. By choosing William Dalrymple, they could have associated the prize with an admired and popular bestseller by a historian who is not a professor. By choosing Vincent Brown, they could have crowned the first person of colour for a prize that remains vulnerable to a # CundillSoWhite hashtag. But it is Fifth Sun, the intersection of a gifted histor- ian and a remarkable source, that they chose in December 2020.

16 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA BYGONE DAYS

At Daggers Drawn Margaret MacMillan soldiers on J. L. Granatstein

War: How Conflict Shaped Us those who lived in the past had their own values, provost of the ’s Trinity Margaret MacMillan principles, and attitudes, and they can be under- College, before becoming warden of St. Antony’s Allen Lane stood only in context. Soldiers were often brutal College at Oxford, in 2007. Other bestsellers fol- 336 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook and licentious, but so too were they lowed, notably Nixon in and The War That lived in. We can be shocked and horrified, but Ended Peace. we should try to understand how and why they Since publishing that first book that so few ANADIANS DON’T LIKE TO THINK acted as they did. This takes work. Today, those would supposedly read, MacMillan has received about war. As the historian Tim wishing to pull down statues are often applying multiple honorary degrees and become an offi- Cook shows in his most recent modern morality to another era. This makes for cer of the , in 2006 (she was book, The Fight for History, this bad, easy history, and it is important for a his- promoted to companion in 2015). And in 2018, country largely forgot about the torian of MacMillan’s stature to stand up for the she became a Companion of Honour, one of CSecond World War for fifty years. It was only way the past should be handled. just three Canadians presently recognized (the in the mid-1990s that Canadians were finally ◆ others being the retired general and diplomat moved by the CBC’s coverage of D-Day and MARGARET MACMILLAN WAS A LITTLE-KNOWN John de Chastelain and ). It V-E Day anniversaries — coverage that showed Ryerson professor when she applied to Canada’s seems that well- written and engaging narrative what our soldiers had done and how they were history isn’t so old- fashioned after all. remembered by those they had liberated. The Certainly War, based on MacMillan’s 2018 veterans’ parades in Holland and the crowds of Reith Lectures, commissioned by the BBC, is cheering Dutch had a substantial impact. So too selling a lot of copies. Organized in thematic did the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown chapters, it is written with style and confidence, Soldier in Ottawa, in 2000, and the watching and it displays her encyclopedic knowledge, crowd’s spontaneous placing of thousands of which covers thousands of years. We learn about poppies on the granite memorial. the reasons for armed conflict, how technology But when Stephen Harper’s government tried is employed, and how warriors are made. War, to commemorate the bicentennial of the War MacMillan tells us, is not an aberration. It is in of 1812, most had a shared reaction of a differ- our bones. The need for security led people to ent kind: people saw it as both an unimport- organize themselves into tribes and eventually ant event and another of the prime minister’s states and nations, which they discovered was attempts to glorify militarism. The government an efficient way to wage battle. And when failed eased back, and the commemorations largely fiz- states fail at war, their civilians suffer the most zled. That there would not have been a Canada (she estimates, for example, that 50 million on if the Americans had won that fight did not seem all sides died during the Second World War from to matter to scholars or the public. And by the bombing, genocide, disease, and starvation). time centenary celebrations of the Great War MacMillan is especially good on the role of stirred other memories a couple of years later, women, noting that female warriors have played there were no veterans left to honour in person. prominent roles over the centuries. In the Soviet Margaret MacMillan knows a great deal about Union’s Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, such ambivalence. She once proposed a “War for instance, they served as front-line fighters and Society” course at Ryerson University, only and as pilots. Of course, as she also notes, the to have a visiting educational consultant advise Red Army took a terrible revenge on German M

A her to change the name to “A History of Peace.” women, raping hundreds of thousands of the D R

E As she points out in her new book, War: How young and old as it moved west. After V-E Day, T S Conflict Shaped Us, the study of war is now It’s in our bones. Fräuleins, trying to survive in a ruined nation, M A largely ignored in most Western universities, had liaisons with Allied servicemen and were M U

E because simply researching or thinking about Social Sciences and Humanities Research scorned: “It took six years to beat the German S

U conflict implies approval to too many. And even Council, in the 1990s, for research funding for soldier,” one bitter joke went, “but it only took M S

K though courses on military history can put bums a book on the Paris Peace Conference. She five minutes to win over a German woman.” J I R

in seats, and even as fewer and fewer students was turned down, SSHRC told her, because Decades later, rape as a weapon of war has ; G choose to major in history, departments are her approach was so old- fashioned. When she remained a potent tactic. In the savage fight- N

I T reluctant to offer them. (When a chair of hist- completed the manuscript of what became ing that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, in H

G I ory at once suggested adding Paris 1919, early in the 2000s, she offered it to the 1990s, “Serb rapists took pleasure in telling F

S

R a few, his colleagues rejected the notion out of Harvard University Press, which said it could Muslim women that they would give birth to

O

I

R hand.) The disconnect is curious, MacMillan not afford to publish books that so few would future Serb warriors,” and the Serbs carried out

R A notes, because we live in a world shaped by war, read. (This was arguably one of the worst deci- “public rape to intimidate and gain information W

O and we need to study its causes, its horrors and sions in the press’s history, and one that says a as well as to encourage non-Serbs to flee.”

W

T

glories, and its past and present effects. We need good deal about academic publishing.) When ◆ , S

U more research on the subject, in other words, her book finally found a home with a trade I WAS IN THE FOR A DECADE, O

M not its removal from curricula. publisher, in London, it caught the public’s beginning in 1956, and as I served only in Y

N MacMillan makes another important point: attention, became an enormous bestseller, Ontario, I never heard a shot fired in anger. O N

A historians and readers must remember that and won a host of prizes. Soon MacMillan was What I remember is the pleasure of being among

MARCH 2021 17 hundreds of Royal Military College cadets in handsome scarlet tunics, accompanied by a military band and pipers and cheering specta- tors, staging splendid parade-s quare ceremon- ials with the colours flying and swords flashing. MacMillan rightly talks about the importance of such time-h onoured training and about the discipline it takes to make a warrior. I also recall one particularly exhausting week- long exercise in the field and thinking that I Thank you, might never get clean again. And I remember my from the board of directors and staff, to all who friends who went to Europe as part of the 5,000- man NATO brigade. They knew they had only supported the magazine in 2020. And special thanks thin-s kinned three-q uarter-ton trucks to take to those who have made multi-year commitments. on the Soviets — not armoured personnel carri- ers — but they fervently believed they were part of the best little army in the world (and certainly $20,000 and Above Trevor Dickie & Kyle Wyatt the best in NATO). They were convinced that Bronwyn Drainie they would beat the Red Army if it came to that. Anonymous (1) Christopher Dummitt The utter weariness that’s inherent in soldiering Scott Griffin Sheila Eskenazi & Joseph Graham and the esprit de corps that can overcome good Northpine Foundation Angela Ferrante sense don’t receive much attention in War but Robert Graham probably should have. Ron Graham Organization is key to the conduct of war. $5,000–$19,999 Tim Griffin Armies plan and prepare for a wide range of John Gross contingencies. Sometimes their leaders get it Michael Adams Tomas Hachard right, sometimes not, but discipline and organ- Margaret Atwood Beth Haddon & Tim Draimin izational skill always remain. MacMillan notes Eric T. Webster Foundation Rose Hendrie the maxim that no plan survives contact with the Roger & Kevin Garland Mary Lue Hinds enemy. France’s fortified Maginot Line is often Bill Graham Kelly Jenkins cited as a classic plan that failed (although Alan Linda Haynes & Martin Connell Donald K. Johnson Allport’s fine new Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of John Honderich Helen & Joe Kertes the Second World War, 1938–1941 convincingly Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Kevin Keystone argues the contrary). You could also point to Gluskin Charitable Foundation Nancy Lockhart just last summer: no soldier had planned for Rosamond Ivey Harry Malcolmson the death trap that long-term-care facilities in Mary Janigan & Tom Kierans David M. Malone Ontario and Quebec became early in the pan- Patrick Martin Marilyn & Charles Baillie demic. But in short order, the well-o rganized John Macfarlane Family Foundation sent some 1,600 men Richard Rooney Myrna Markovich and women into the homes, restored order, and David Staines N. A. Taylor Foundation began cleaning up the mess. It’s no surprise that Andrew Stewart Don McCutchan the federal and Ontario governments went on to Jaime Watt Charles McDonald tap retired generals to manage the rollout of the Barbara McDougall COVID-19 vaccines. Denise Y. Moore I also think of the impact my time in the army Up to $4,999 Josephine Petcher had on me personally. I was a feckless seventeen- Emma Pery year-old when I took the Queen’s shilling, and Anonymous (13) Andy & Valerie Pringle by the time I became a civilian again ten years James & Alix Arnett Miriam & Victor Rabinovitch later, I was a driven organizational whiz. “Get James C. Baillie Donald B. Smith it done right, and get it done on time” had Lisa Balfour Bowen Michael Strizic become my watchword. I planned almost auto- Isabel Bassett David Ticoll matically, did my work efficiently, and accom- Ketri Bennett Peeranut Visetsuth plished a good deal. As an academic, I found Vali Bennett Pat & Norman Webster that I could organize a course or a conference or George & Martha Butterfield Grace Westcott & Peter Grant write an article or book quickly; unlike most aca- Marshall Cohen Heidi Williams demics, I delivered my work on time, and when Donna Dasko asked for 1,000 words, I did not submit 5,000. I made my career out of the skills the military The magazine also thanks those who gave me. (Now I must admit my type A person- have helped with other financial, logistical, and ality didn’t work quite so well when I tried to moral support, and those who have given in kind. give my family a little military efficiency, but I eventually learned to control myself.) Chris Alexander, Cristina Austin, Alan Broadbent, Tim Brodhead, That’s a roundabout way of saying that Kelvin Browne, Marlo Alexandra Burks, Murray Campbell, Jeff Costen, MacMillan is correct: today in the West, we see Nigel Dickson, Kimberley Drapack, John Gardiner, Basil Guinane, peace as the norm, but it’s really not. We rarely Matthew Lombardi, Mark Lovewell, Moira MacDougall, Ross McGregor, think about conflict, when we probably should. Jim O’Reilly, Cecily Ross, Walter Ross, Alexander Sallas, and Derek Ungless Nation-o n-n ation war has declined in the past seventy-f ive years, but there are small wars The Literary Review of Canada, this country’s leading journal of ideas, aplenty and civil wars without number. Indeed, will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary in November 2021. controlling war is practically impossible. “Jaw, We would not be here today without your support. jaw” is better than “war, war,” Winston Churchill famously said. He was right, but the absolutely clear lesson of Margaret MacMillan’s book is that “war, war” will always be with us. There remains much to learn in that.

LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA BYGONE DAYS

Jigging for Answers Scratched records of a Métis family Heather Menzies

Approaching Fire intergenerational traumas, and excerpts from an writes, “Every historian of the multitude, the Michelle Porter oral history going back to the dying days of the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is Breakwater Books buffalo hunt. There are also posters for Goulet’s forced to grapple with the power and authority 200 pages, softcover performances, sometimes with his daughters, of the archive and the limits it sets on what can and various labels from old 78s, including one be known, whose perspective matters, and who of “The Red River Jig,” which he recorded for is endowed with the gravity and authority of his- HREE UNDERLYING FACTS PROPEL Victor in 1928. torical actor.” In that sense, it seems that Porter’s this poetic and often poignant It’s an ambitious mix, made even more so by intent with Approaching Fire is not so much to book: in September 1870, an anti- Porter’s decision to leave so much unexplained. inform as to evoke. By using what the archives Métis militia stoned to death Elzéar Cryptic newspaper clippings about Métis do offer, she draws attention to what’s missing Goulet, an uncle of the author’s scrip — a type of land voucher that Ottawa cre- and suggests that the preserved record misleads Tgreat- grandfather, the fiddler Léon Joseph ated in 1870 — are an example. One, posted by and distorts: “And what is the story / I am mak- Robert Goulet; family photos and records A. Gauvin & Co. of St. Boniface, announces: ing beside his / alongside his music / as if I too were deliberately burned decades later; and a “Half-breed scrip for sale.” In another, “Fred J. am lost?” fear has been passed down from generation to Hosken begs to notify persons desirous of pur- In many clippings, Goulet appears impec- generation. “Be careful,” a respected elder tells cably groomed in suit and tie, with nothing that the author: “you’ll be criticized for / speaking overtly signifies his Métis identity. Similarly, out for / the Métis for / your people / for telling recurring references to “old-time” music and your story.” musicians suggest a culture that’s partially Approaching Fire is an exploration of absence, sequestered in the past: erasure, and the irrepressible yearning to dis- cover what has been suppressed. Ostensibly, it is The flute vanished the poet, journalist, and writer Michelle Porter’s almost as if the final French-Canadian attempt to make sense of her great- grandfather’s connection career as a stage and radio performer in 1930s had walked away hardly ever spoke , before Léon Robert Goulet aban- French anymore doned the spotlight and headed to Mission, and the Michif passed down the line British Columbia. The move was motivated, or was the language played on the fiddles so Porter has been told, by a desire to protect his daughters “from what it meant to be Métis / in Before he was murdered, Porter’s ancestor .” One of those daughters, Porter’s Elzéar Goulet was part of Louis Riel’s provisional beautiful grandmother Estelle, ends up incapa- government and served on the court martial of citated by depression: “Was this beauty a com- Thomas Scott. One of Elzéar’s brothers, Roger, fort to her then? She’s / falling and falling and became a successful land surveyor, making it she can’t get out of bed.” Goulet’s niece Lilian easier for settlers to take up the land; and Robert comes west to help care for Estelle and her seven Goulet’s own father, Maxime, became a minister children. While there, she takes it upon herself of agriculture in the newly formed Manitoba to destroy all the family memorabilia, though government. How does one reconcile the seem- this becomes clear only toward the end of the ing contradictions of one’s family tree? book. But suggestive hints about her setting a Burdened with the accumulating questions, fire out back, where no one can stop her, are Porter begins a series of speculative letters dropped throughout. They stalk the narrative addressed to her great- grandfather (“Dear Pépé”). like a curse. An anguishing and frustrating quest. But after a promising first of these —“With This curse is in keeping with a much larger each word I place on paper, I am looking for story. As Porter says early on, quoting the law- chasing Half-Breed Scrip (which will entitle the you”— the prose becomes disappointingly shal- yer and author Jean Teillet, the boundaries of holder to 160 acres of land in the Province of low. By contrast, Porter’s poetry shines, especially the Métis Nation have always been more social Manitoba)” that he will be selling it. Yet another as she focuses on the often anguished and frus- than geographic, composed of stories that lend reports someone in Montreal exhorting people trated experience of her quest. Some of the best muscle, bone, and memory to that founda- to go west because “now the Half-breed land poems employ metaphors of beadwork — nego- tional word Métis. “This word is a story we are scrips and homesteads are being literally given tiating the needle’s passage, the blood of a telling each other,” Porter writes. But what hap- away.” These references flit through the pages pricked finger, the tension of threads. pens when all you’re left with is scraps — and like ghosts, suggesting how scrip served as a Ultimately, Porter does not answer all of her charred ones at that? Porter learns that her medium more of land dispossession than of pos- questions, but merely posing them and letting great-g randfather left school after grade 3, for session — though not saying so, or daring to say them hang might be enough. It might also help instance. But the reason why “didn’t make it to so, explicitly. mark this book as part of an emergent decol-

Y my mother’s oral histories.” ◆ onizing literature, a kind of shadow companion E R With little to go on, Porter creates something IN WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS, A to Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. Think U A

M of a scrapbook of her hit-and-miss search: speculative non- fiction account of Black of it as an unreading of history: a reckoning with

Y

T a patchwork of poems, semi- scholarly expos- women in early twentieth-c entury America, the all that has been written off, written out, and T A

K itions on the science of controlled burnings and Columbia University professor Saidiya Hartman written over.

MARCH 2021 19 OUR NATURAL WORLD

Thereby Hangs a Tail With the ghosts of Madagascar Alexander Sallas

Chasing Lemurs: My Journey into the Heart of Madagascar Keriann McGoogan Prometheus Books 240 pages, hardcover

N 2006, KERIANN MCGOOGAN, A TWENTY- five-year-old doctoral candidate in bio- logical anthropology at the University of Toronto, led an expedition into the wilds of Madagascar. She undertook Ithe journey to study lemurs, among the world’s most endangered primates, but her trip spir- alled into a maelstrom of disease and political machinations, punctuated by masochistic hikes, traveller’s diarrhea, and one nasty evacuation. These calamities, and more, are retold in her engaging account of the trip, Chasing Lemurs. Readers unfamiliar with lemurs — or those whose knowledge of them derives entirely from the children’s TV show Zoboomafoo — will find a lot to chew on. Owing to its eighty- eight- million-year separa- tion from other land masses, Madagascar houses An island nation’s claim to fame. more endemic species than any other country. These include several hundred unique birds and the perimeter. Many others, including Von der visor, Shawn, a six-foot-five expert in primate reptiles and some 11,000 vascular plants. But Decken’s sifaka and the crowned sifaka, are conservation biogeography; and her supportive lemurs are the island’s claim to fame: it contains “edge avoiders,” who are unable to subsist on but worried fiancé, Travis, whose concerned 111 unique kinds. The indri, for example, is the the forest rim. For them, higher ambient tem- emails pepper the narrative. McGoogan is the largest living lemur and resembles “a two-year- peratures along the edge may prevent “torpor,” only woman on the trip. She relishes this status, old in a panda suit,” as McGoogan puts it. The a state of reduced body temperature and meta- even as it causes her some concern, knowing aye-aye, a nocturnal critter, drills holes in trees bolic rate that lets them survive periods of scant as she does that female travellers must navi- with its ferocious incisors and scoops out tasty food availability. Habitat edging also destroys gate often shifting cultural norms and deflect insects using its long, bony middle finger. Most leaves and insects, which tend to thrive on the unwanted attention. She worries, too, about astonishing of all is the giant lemur, about the perimeter and make up a significant portion of being viewed as “less strong and less capable size of a gorilla, which roamed the forest as the lemurs’ diets. Out-of- control fires, mean- than the rest.” But her grit and determination recently as 500 years ago — and might still be while, lead to “forest fragmentation,” which dispel that worry rather quickly. alive today were it not for human butchery. (Not McGoogan describes as “islands of forest sur- Madagascar, McGoogan notes, is one of the for nothing, perhaps, “lemur” comes from the rounded by ‘seas’ of non- forest.” The conflagra- poorest countries in the world, with 85 percent Latin word for ghost.) tions split pockets of habitat and create even of its population living below the poverty line. McGoogan focuses her research on two sub- more edges — exacerbating the problem. In a gut-w renching passage, she describes two species. One, Von der Decken’s sifaka, is a But lemurs aren’t the only ones in danger. shoeless and malnourished six- or seven-y ear- “medium- sized diurnal lemur, with a beauti- McGoogan notes several threats to the human olds in tattered dresses, their hands outstretched; ful, pure-white coat.” The other, the crowned beings who venture into their habitat. “Don’t one has a limp baby strapped to her back. This sifaka, belongs to the same genus, Propithecus, get bit, don’t get hit, and don’t get lit,” a doctor experience and others like it inspire McGoogan but features a “chocolate-b rown to black head, advises her before she sets out. To that end, she to organize a non- profit, Planet Madagascar, that S

neck, and throat.” Both live deep in Kasijy, a prepares with countless prescriptions and shots. conducts livelihood surveys and runs commun- N O

wildlife reserve of fragmented deciduous forests. But even those don’t protect against everything. ity conservation projects in education and fire M M

McGoogan is the first to collect behavioural data After returning to Canada, she contracts P. vivax management, among other ventures. (In 2016, it O C

for the sifakas from within their natural habitat. malaria — to the astonishment of the staff at received a large grant from Ottawa.) A I D

This is important work; these species and others Toronto General Hospital, where she spends In spending time with playful primates and E M I

are critically endangered. hours on a wooden bench, stomach reeling, head inspiring Malagasy, McGoogan isn’t monkeying K I W

“Habitat edging” is a serious concern in swimming, and waiting for a doctor. around. While existential crises such as climate ; Z lemur land. Since the 1950s, almost half of As good edutainment should, Chasing Lemurs change and poverty may occur on an island, A R R

Madagascar’s forests have been converted to straddles the uneasy gulf between information they’re not occurring in isolation. These are E U G

non-f orest habitat, repurposed for farming or and plot. The colourful cast of supporting char- problems to be tackled worldwide — problems S I

hacked away for charcoal production. Some acters includes McGoogan’s Malagasy research that will require the same bravery, creativity, and O Ç lemur populations are “edge tolerant” and dis- assistants, Andry and Sahoby, the jokester and resolve she displayed in the wild. Madagascar N A R play no preference between the interior and the straight man, respectively; her doctoral super- and its lemurs are just the beginning. F

20 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA OUR NATURAL WORLD

Around the Bend The many ways rivers run through it Robert Girvan

Magdalena: River of Dreams misunderstood Biblical figure Mary Magdalene, trail resonated with a story.” This motif returns Wade Davis is not an obvious choice. Relatively few readers again and again: the importance of grounded Knopf Canada in North America know of the river — beyond knowledge, whether from a traditional perspec- 432 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook references in Gabriel García Márquez novels, tive or from a modern scientific one. perhaps — but many know of Davis and his Beauty and tragedy are tightly woven together Restigouche: The Long Run work. As with a good novel, we come to care in Colombia. Puracé National Park, for example, of the Wild River deeply about the Magdalena and its characters, is home to seven snow-clad volcanoes that soar Philip Lee because our narrator himself cares about them over 4,300 metres and to more than 200 species Goose Lane so much. of orchids; it was also a major conflict zone dur- 272 pages, softcover ◆ ing the fifty-y ear asymmetric war between the TRADITIONALLY, THE MAMOS — THE SPIRITUAL government, far-right paramilitary groups, and leaders of the Arhuaco people — would period- far-left guerrilla organizations, such as the FARC. ADE DAVIS BEGINS HIS BOOK ically assess the Magdalena’s “health and well- The fighting ended in 2016, but not before it Magdalena near the mouth being at every point along its flow.” For them, defined the country for many around the world. of Colombia’s principal rivers are “a direct reflection of the spiritual state Conflict along the Magdalena is hardly a mod- river, in Bocas de Ceniza ern phenomenon, of course. The Spanish arrived on the northern coast, on in 1538, and in a clash of “Andalusian steel Wa jetty that extends many kilometres into the against weapons of wood,” the Muisca people Caribbean Sea. Men and women who work the and many others were decimated. “Within 150 surrounding waters live in shacks that precar- years of Columbus, the original native popula- iously line the breakwater, and on their bleached tion of 70 million in all the Americas would be walls, they’ve painted humble poetry that praises reduced to 3.5 million,” Davis writes. “In the the fishing, the peace, and the sound of the southern Andes of Bolivia, on a mountain of waves. A narrow- gauge railway line runs between silver once sacred to the Inca, an average of 75 the small houses, carrying local tourists looking indigenous men and women were to die every for the sun and perhaps a cone of shaved ice. The day for 350 years.” trains occasionally derail, and if someone has a In Medio Magdalena, the river comes down cassette player with them, a dance might break from the heights, and the valley widens — thirty out. But no one drinks from the toxic waterway, kilometres across in some places. It was here, in which is “contaminated by human and indus- the middle, that commercialization of the river trial waste.” Some will not even eat the fish. They began in the nineteenth century. Steamships remember when bodies once floated down the were a modern marvel that linked the young “graveyard of the nation.” mountainous country in new ways, but they Many of the themes in this heartfelt and were also a catalyst for severe deforestation. sprawling book can be glimpsed on that jetty: Colombians and foreign corporations alike human violence, hubris, and the willful ignor- saw the forests as “a limitless resource that only ance that so often harms the innocent and rup- stood in the way of development.” Felled trees tures ecosystems. Yet there’s also Dionysian joy powered the ships, which passengers used as and optimism to be found in this “compendium “platforms for the hunting of manatees, blue

S of stories.” turtles, ocelots, and jaguars. Men shot her- E G

A In 2014, Davis, the Canadian anthropologist ons from the upper deck for sport. Children M I

and honorary Colombian citizen, proposed a cut open the bellies of iguanas, replaced their Y T

T book, “half in jest,” about “the Mississippi of A lone face of the Magdalena. eggs with manure, and tossed them back into E G

Colombia, the vital artery of commerce and cul- the river.” ; S

C ture.” He then set out to explore the Magdalena of a people, an infallible indicator of the level More recently, Colombia has constructed two I P drainage basin — home to four of every five of consciousness a community possesses.” In major dams that supply nearly a quarter of the W V

; Colombians — by foot, car, and boat. With old other words, Davis explains early in the book, country’s energy needs: “Between La Jagua and E A friends, guides, and people he meets along the rivers are simply “the soul of any land through Garzón, and for another sixty miles to Gigante N

E L way, he made five extended trips in all seasons, which they flow.” This is a truth that many of the and beyond, the Magdalena runs through a A

D

G travelling northbound the length of the coun- Colombians he encounters repeat along the way. narrow gorge, a cleft in the landscape with the

A

M try on or near the 1,500- kilometre river, from Davis begins his journey on foot near the very dimensions, orientation, and geological

X A its source in the south to the sea. In describing river’s source. At 3,400 or so metres, the moun- substrata that cause dam builders to swoon.” R

A

H the river — its waters, its forests, its animals and tainous Alto Magdalena region is a place of From an engineering standpoint, these mas-

C O people and music and dance — Davis hopes to cascading water, mist, and páramos, treeless pla- sive structures are also modern marvels. “The H

P

Y tell “the story of Colombia,” where he has spent teaus that are essential to South America’s larger problem, of course, lies in the details.” Without

C

, time off and on since he was young. In this way, hydrological cycle. Davis sets off with a botan- fish ladders that would “allow migratory spe- A Í

C Magdalena is less of a travelogue and more the ist friend: “William led me along a dirt track cies to stay true to their breeding and spawn- R A

G biography of a nation. that ran through a dry forest of scrub and frail ing regimes,” the dams have contributed to

E

G On the surface, an English-l anguage book acacias before turning back to the banks of the environmental catastrophe: “Fish stocks in the R O

J about the Magdalena, named after the often Suaza. For him, every blade of grass along the Magdalena have collapsed by 50 percent in thirty

MARCH 2021 21 TALONBOOKS 2021 SPRING colours years,” while the river’s drainage basin has lost ies and veins in the human body, a network of nearly 80 percent of its canopy. “Erosion darkens waterways reaches across the ancient delta to its flow, with some 250 million tons of silt and connect the snowfields of the Sierra Nevada, debris each year. Few rivers in the world have the most sacred destination of the pilgrims, been so adversely affected by sediments.” Then with the river that made possible the life of the there are the 32 million people who flush their Colombian nation.” toilets directly into the Magdalena each day. In Toward the end of Davis’s journey, an ele- the management and mismanagement of the gant retiree recounts the story of Simón Bolívar, watershed, we see a country “forfeiting the future whom the Enlightenment polymath and for the essential needs of today.” Magdalena explorer Alexander von Humboldt The great García Márquez, who made the river first dubbed El Libertador. “It was here that 2211 C · 2030 C · 419 C “not a setting but a character in his novels,” everything came together,” the retired man tells once proclaimed his beloved Magdalena “dead.” Davis. The story of a continent, of a country, Many others might proclaim it “ignored.” While of a precious ecosystem whose biodiversity is A History of the Theories of Rain the river is “the lifeblood of their land, the spirit- unmatched anywhere in the world — they’re all Stephen Collis ual fiber of their being,” Davis describes a people linked. “Colombia’s very freedom,” Davis writes, who have long looked the other way. “We have “won in battle two hundred years ago, grew in Approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe always turned our backs on the Magdalena,” says good measure out of Bolívar’s transcendent conceptually through its dissolution of the one man, who has studied it for decades. “We faith in the messages of the wild, the threads of categories of “man-made” and “natural” have done so forever.” Others make the same loyalty that bind a people to their mountains, disasters, A History of the Theories of Rain point. “We turned our backs on the river that forests, rivers, and wetlands.” ◆ explores the strange effect our current sense of gave us life,” a stranger who quickly becomes a friend explains. “But to deny the Río Magdalena IN APRIL 2018, SOME 4,000 KILOMETRES NORTH- impending doom has on our relation to time. is to betray all that we are as Colombians.” east of where the Magdalena finally meets Forthcoming March 10, 2020; 978-1-77201-288-0 It’s easier to finally face the river now that the Caribbean, the journalist and St. Thomas the decades-l ong conflict has come to an end. University professor Philip Lee drove from The stories of those who suffered during the Fredericton to a village called Tide Head, four war — partially funded by cocaine, which most hours away, to visit with the biologist Alan Colombians “have never used or seen”— are Madden, “a man who knows the Restigouche as haunting. Over 200,000 innocent people died intimately as anyone on Earth.” There they first and millions more suffered. Even at the most discussed what would become a worthy com- dangerous moments, though, some stood for panion to Davis’s book, Lee’s Restigouche: The human dignity. One woman, in response to Long Run of a Wild River. a dream, visited her mother’s killer in jail, lis- The Restigouche, though diminished from its tened to his apology, and forgave him. A young former glory when the salmon runs were “prodi- 7484 C · 1788 C · 2011 C man — who came to be known as “the dude of gious,” remains a great salmon- fishing river. And the dead”— repeatedly risked his life to pick up Lee knows it well. He’s camped beside it, canoed bodies that no one would dare to touch. One upon it, and fished it since he was a child. He One Good Thing town collected, buried, and left memorials to has also witnessed the quickening pace of eco- A Living Memoir the unnamed dead, pulled from what many logical damage: M.A.C. Farrant began to call the River of Death. When Davis visits Medellín, he traces the In each new season I watched assaults on A delightful hybrid of creative non-fiction career of Pablo Escobar, who once controlled natural systems spread through the val- and memoir, written in sixty-four epistolary drug revenues that exceeded $20 billion a year. ley. Some I have seen with my own eyes: sections all addressed to gardening columnist “His net worth was $55 billion, making him the the logging trucks rumbling down from richest criminal in history. And the bloodiest.” the hills twenty-f our hours a day; the cuts extraordinaire Helen Chesnut of the Victoria At one point, Davis compares Escobar with Al growing larger and creeping ever closer to Times Colonist. Capone, the Chicago mobster who person- the river; feeder brooks that once flowed Forthcoming Feb 15, 2020; 978-1-77201-284-2 ally killed thirty-t hree. “In the decade of terror through the summer now dry and choked unleashed by Escobar, in Medellín alone, more with sediment washed down from nearby than forty-s ix thousand would die.” logging and more distant industrial enter- But times have changed. Escobar died in prises. The hills have been sprayed from 1993, and young architects and designers have the air with pesticides and herbicides, and fundamentally remade the city he once terri- the old mixed forests transformed into fied — focusing as much on reimagining the new monoculture tree plantations. poor and distant barrios as on improvements to the centre — through a movement known Even as he has watched the degradation in real as urbanismo social. “On a mission to save their time, he has wondered, How did this happen? city, they embraced and remained loyal to three Over the years, study after study has predicted 7622 C · 427 C · 2116 C articles of faith: Pessimism is an indulgence, “the numbers of direct and indirect jobs that orthodoxy the enemy of invention, despair an will be created and tax revenues that may be insult to the imagination.” As Davis shows, it’s a collected” through resource extraction in New Painting Time lesson that can also apply to the river: trees can Brunswick, but Lee has rarely seen the living Maylis de Kerangal be replanted, habitat can be rehabilitated, a new place he knows reflected in the technical reports Translated by Jessica Moore flourishing is possible — often faster and cheaper about the Restigouche. So he asked himself a than expected. “Stories of rebirth and redemp- question not unlike the one Davis asked over This exquisite and highly aesthetic coming-of- tion have become commonplace as people and over in Colombia: “Could a truer measure age novel by the author of Birth of a Bridge throughout the world have embraced their rivers of what’s worth saving be found in the story of and Mend the Living uses a succession of as symbols of patrimony and pride,” he writes. the life of one wild river?” trompe-l’oeil techniques to explore a young Think of the Seine, the Hudson, the Cuyahoga, As it flows for 200 kilometres, northeast from woman’s art apprenticeship. the Thames. the Appalachian Mountains to Chaleur Bay, In the Bajo Magdalena, some 240 kilometres on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the Restigouche Forthcoming March 21, 2020; 978-1-77201-283-5 from the Caribbean, the river actually falls below marks the border between Quebec and New sea level and stops flowing. Mountain runoff Brunswick. Lee organizes the river’s story around helps push it the rest of the way: “Like the arter- three extended canoe trips, where he was joined See our forthcoming titles at talonbooks.com/c atalogues/ LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA Talonbooks by family members and friends who know the Restigouche, where colonial officials introduced an imposed temporal standardization: “We all waterway intimately. These trips were joyous, “the common law tradition of private fishing now live according to the practical and predict- meditative, and occasionally rain soaked. “The rights and a history of regulation that gave pri- able rhythms of the same clock that is regulated inevitable difficulties and hardships we encoun- ority to angling over harvesting for food with by the artificial lines we have drawn across our ter on trips such as these,” he writes, “and in the nets or spears.” Angling was a “refinement of a maps,” Lee writes. “But the river still keeps its passages of our lives, are necessary obstacles to civilized people,” and eventually New Brunswick own time.” To acknowledge this, Lee main- overcome. Sometimes we have no choice but began leasing exclusive fishing rights along the tains, is to acknowledge the flux of creation, a to pull our canoe over a shallow gravel bar or river to those who were, purportedly, the most Mi’gmaq concept and way of being based on shoulder it across a portage. In my life, I’ve done refined. In June 1880, Chester Arthur (soon to an understanding that people “are all part of a my share of both.” become the twenty-fi rst U.S. president), Charles divine process in an ever- changing world.” With Lee offers plain, concrete descriptions of the Lewis Tiffany (the jeweller), William Kissam more river leases coming up for auction in 2023, life that flows around him, which he comple- Vanderbilt (the railroad tycoon), and others of he sees that understanding as key to the wise ments with engaging chapters on the com- New York’s super elite bought roughly 650 hec- stewardship of the Restigouche going forward. plex, multi- layered history of the region, using tares and formed the Restigouche Salmon Club. Lee knows the value of science, but he suggests excerpts from original documents wherever That was just the beginning. that we can mistake abstraction for life and often possible. Of course, human violence, hubris, Soon it wasn’t only the Mi’gmaq who could forget that we too are part of nature. and willful ignorance have played out in New no longer fish their river; most citizens of New ◆ Brunswick too. So as we learn of great fishing Brunswick were kept away by leases that were ONE DAY, WHILE WATCHING AN EAGLE RIDE THE pools and iconoclastic river guides, we also sold to the highest bidder. A century after the updrafts, Lee thought of the writer and senator learn of a billionaire family that controls an Restigouche Salmon Club was founded, in , who has spoken of the “industrial forest” that covers 200,000 hectares what came to be known as the Battle of Larry’s “spiritual readjustment” one can draw from a and of a mid- century hydroelectric scheme Gulch, local residents protested the lack of river. “We have too much, we fret too much, we billed as the “economic salvation of our prov- public fishing access before being dispersed by hoard away too much for ourselves,” Richards ince.” Constructed in the 1960s, the Mactaquac the RCMP. From fishing rights to the manage- has written. Spending time on the water, how- dam, upstream from Fredericton and capable of ment of Crown forests, Lee describes how rich ever, can remind us that “human kindness mat- generating 20 percent of the province’s power, families and corporations have long wielded ters, and companionship, and our love of and was “designed to transform this great river into too much influence over the Restigouche. “It’s protection for those who are far away from us at an asset.” But it has ravaged salmon stocks on a situation in which there really is a deficit in that moment, but not much else.” its way to becoming “a liability for an already terms of democratic decision- making about our A newspaper editor once told Lee more or highly leveraged power utility.” natural resources,” he quotes the historian Bill less the same thing: “A true story well told Lee also integrates the long- ignored history Parenteau as saying. becomes a parable.” Indeed, the well-told story and deep culture of the Mi’gmaq, who have lived Corporate influence has even affected concep- of the Restigouche, like the well-told story of intimately with the river for generations. Signed tions of time in the region. In 1876, the Scottish- the Magdalena, has much to teach us. Though in the mid- eighteenth century, the Peace and born Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming degraded and though different in many ways, Friendship Treaties “confirmed their right to fish “opened the river valley to the world” with a both rivers are what Davis describes as open and hunt in their traditional territory,” but the railway bridge downriver from Matapédia. With books —“with countless pages and chapters yet British did not honour those guarantees on the the rail lines came economic development and to be written.” CLIMATE CRISIS

Whatever the Cost May Be Preparing for the fight of our life John Baglow

A Good War: Mobilizing Canada Klein, the former director of the British 2020, due to COVID-19 shutdowns, is anything for the Climate Emergency Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for but temporary relief. (And as the International Seth Klein Policy Alternatives, cites a particularly ripe Energy Agency reported in January, emissions ECW Press example of that stifling. Paul Hambleton, the from inefficient yet increasingly popular sport 464 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook CBC’s director of journalistic standards, has utility vehicles continued to rise, even with the argued that journalists should use “climate pandemic.) emergency” and “climate crisis” with extreme Half-hearted, equivocal measures won’t cut it, T THIS POINT, ONE SHOULD NOT caution. The phrases, he explained in June 2019, and the pun is intended. have to set the scene for a review “have a whiff of advocacy to them. They sort That’s why Klein proposes a profoundly dif- of Seth Klein’s A Good War, yet of imply, you know, something more serious, ferent approach: to put Canada on a war foot- the notion of a “climate emer- where climate change and global warming are ing, while mobilizing all levels of government gency” still has an empty rhetor- more neutral terms.” and the Canadian population as a whole to Aical flavour for far too many. The reality: Massive If there’s a problem within the national media, fight. For him, this is much more than a facile wildfires in Australia, the Amazon, and North it’s even more acute in the political sphere. As military metaphor — it’s the real thing. America. Increasingly powerful hurricanes, so Klein observes, the Liberal government intro- To develop his argument, Klein recounts in numerous that meteorologists run out of names. duced and passed a climate emergency motion detail how Canada mobilized for the Second The rapid melting of Arctic ice. A measurable in mid-2019 — before reapproving the Trans World War, an impressive story in itself. After rise in sea levels. Road-m elting summer highs. Mountain expansion project the very next day, the so-called Phony War period, from September Accelerating extinctions, including what’s been having already bought and paid for the exist- 1939 to April 1940, a time when much was said dubbed the insect apocalypse. These and other ing pipeline. Justin Trudeau has repeatedly but little actually happened, the country finally sobering developments are all now defining fea- reaffirmed his support for Keystone XL (though, came to grips with the Nazi threat when it tures of our planetscape. But no signal of crisis on his first day in office, the new U.S. president became apparent that Germany would win has been enough, so far, to make our govern- blocked further construction on that contro- the war. And once it had actually confronted ment (and most others) shake off the political versial pipeline, in which Alberta has invested the emergency, Canada punched well above lethargy that’s preventing the forceful action $1.5 billion). And the Liberals’ “net-zero by 2050” its weight. Out of a population of 11.5 mil- required to reverse course. climate legislation, introduced in November lion, 1.1 million men enlisted, nearly half of As those who have been paying whom served overseas. Some 44,000 attention know, we have dangerously died. Wartime production was prodi- little time. A near-p erfect consensus of “No signal of crisis has been gious, helmed by C. D. Howe, a man climate scientists tells us that we have of extraordinary capacity who eventu- about a decade to act before we slip enough, so far, to shake off ally became known as the minister of into catastrophe, as the United Nations everything. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate the political lethargy.” Private enterprise and an expanded Change made abundantly clear in its public service, including numerous 2018 special report. Simply to hold cur- Crown corporations, ramped up pro- rent atmospheric warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius 2020, is merely aspirational, lacking any penal- duction almost ex nihilo. It was a period of above pre-i ndustrial levels, we must halve global ties for non- compliance. major innovation and job creation, as well carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve At the provincial level, Rachel Notley imposed as unprecedented productivity: our matériel net-zero emissions by 2050. And even with that a carbon tax when she was the NDP premier of output was fourth among the Allies, after the rise, the IPCC report states, “climate-r elated risks Alberta, even as she pushed for more pipelines United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. to health, livelihoods, food security, water sup- and oversaw a 40 percent increase in greenhouse And, thanks to sound transition measures, the ply, human security, and economic growth are gas emissions from the development of the oil postwar decades were years of prosperity. projected to increase.” sands. Her successor, the United Conservative The media played its part as well: it didn’t The difficulties in actually doing something Party premier Jason Kenney, launched a circulate crude war propaganda, but it did keep more than continually repeating the above sta- McCarthy- style inquiry into “anti- Alberta energy citizens informed — while never pretending to tistics are overwhelming. The problems to be campaigns.” In Victoria, John Horgan’s NDP be neutral in its coverage. Nazi sympathizers got solved are complex, multi-f aceted, and full of government came up with a “Clean BC” climate no airtime to present “the other side.” traps. They will require fundamental changes plan, in late 2018, even as the premier promoted A vital element of Canada’s all-in commit- in our thinking, our political culture, and our fracking and the natural gas industry. ment was the real sense that everyone was work- economy. That’s a steep hill to climb but, as While governments of all stripes palaver and ing together. There were enforced wage and Klein argues, not an insurmountable one. The obstruct rather than confronting the deadly real- price controls and a tax on excess profits. Social worst obstacle is what he calls the “new climate ity of the crisis, Canada is the tenth- highest GHG solidarity was built with the introduction of denialism.” Unlike the classic version — pushed emitter in the world and, per capita, the second- unemployment insurance and the family allow- by assorted ideological cranks and fossil fuel worst emitter of all the G20 countries: nineteen ance. As Klein notes, inequality is “toxic” to the industry shills facing off against bona fide cli- tonnes per person per year, more than two and kinds of efforts that are once again required. mate scientists — the new denialists concede a half times the group’s average. Our emissions The overall point that Klein is making is that, that anthropogenic global warming is an actual remain about as high as they were in 2005. in the face of a real emergency like the Second thing. But their “unspoken defeatism infects Meanwhile, world GHG emissions continue to World War, Canadians can throw themselves and shuts down the real debate we so urgently rise. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that the into the struggle, make the sacrifices that are need to have.” 7 percent decrease in energy-related emissions in needed, and work together for a common

24 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA Flyover

People are in the news It’s hard to justify for licking ice cream in the store and putting it back. a harsh sentence for the ice cream lickers One is facing twenty years. The plane dips given the unmitigated contamination

like a warm spoon into the clouds of the future as a whole, toward gridded subdivisions. In-ground pools the hollowing out of so-called flyover country. like marble slabs. Pedestrians I should’ve taken the train.

cross a wooden walkway I would’ve been a musician suspended over a large pit filled with construction beams. if I had more talent and less good sense. My ears pop. As ever, Each month I put a little bit away.

much of the populace The commentariat is divided is employed in actual trades. over the fascist movement: a looming threat Then there are the “analysts” or a stone in society’s shoe?

manipulating symbols. I’m not sure where I stand, Lawyers and coders. I could sell a think piece but I’m looking at the situation from a distance. linking polyamory to housing costs. I’m making a list.

Bardia Sinaee

Bardia Sinaee is a former assistant editor of the Literary Review of Canada. His debut collection is Intruder.

purpose. Instead of practising austerity, the gov- money, but somehow that money always seems clude more democratic forms of participation, ernment of the day can spend as required — and to be found in times of crisis (as, for example, including protest as necessary; nor does it mean the economy will grow. In the same way, Klein during the COVID-19 pandemic). repeating the human rights violations that argues, we can confront the climate emergency Klein’s proposals are entirely sensible once marred our achievements during the Second and do well at it. the premise of an emergency situation is World War. Klein insists, for example, that ◆ accepted — and, at this point, it must be — but Indigenous peoples, rightly wary of the state, INDEED, THERE IS INCREASING POPULAR AWARENESS he concedes that a new transitional economy must have a seat at the planning table, control that the emergency is upon us. Even in Alberta, will not be successful with only empty promises over their own lands, and the right to develop where 40 percent of our national GHG emis- of green “jobs, jobs, jobs.” A transition plan their own environmental solutions — as many sions are generated, 56 percent of the population must include clear individual paths to specific, First Nations are already doing. is favourable toward a Green New Deal, when high- quality jobs, with training and relocation A Good War, as Klein points out at the begin- it’s defined as a comprehensive set of measures costs thrown in. And we won’t be flying blind: ning, is not a book about climate science. It’s a to tackle both climate change and inequality. other countries, like Norway, Sweden, New readable set of suggestions — solidly rooted in What is needed — and there are few signs of it Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, and the our own history in Canada — for how to put out at present — is resolute, imaginative political United Kingdom, are already far ahead of us. We the fire that is rapidly consuming our house. As leadership so that we can achieve and sustain, can build upon their best practices. such, it is yet another solid contribution by yet as the IPCC puts it, “rapid, far-r eaching and Unlike his sister, Naomi, whose suspicion of another person who smells the smoke and sees unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” top-down state leadership in this fight is clear the flames. But, as he would agree, the point is Moreover, doing too little will cost us much in her recent books, Seth Klein clearly believes not to talk about the emergency in various ways more in the not-all-that-long run. Klein cites that a state-led mobilization is essential to but to end it. We have less than ten years to Joseph Stiglitz, the economist and Nobel laure- meet the crisis. But his proposal does not pre- do so. ate, who has pointed out that, in the United States, 2 percent of GDP has already been lost to weather- related disasters and that direct costs to health have been in the tens of billions. “It makes sense,” Stiglitz wrote in , in 2018, “to spend money now to reduce emissions rather than wait until later to pay a lot more for the consequences.” Klein sets out in considerable detail how Canada should spend that money: massive investments in public transportation and green infrastructure, a rapid transition to green energy, major retrofitting programs, and extensive car- bon capture projects. Tied to this environmental agenda would be measures to sharply reduce social and economic inequality. To be successful, these major changes would have to be supported by a whole-of-g overnment approach at all levels, with legally enforceable target timelines. This program will all cost considerable amounts of

MARCH 2021 25 COMPELLING PEOPLE

The Diarist Making tracks in a new land John Lownsbrough

The Diary of Dukesang Wong: A Voice from Gold Mountain Edited by David McIlwraith; translated by Wanda Joy Hoe Talonbooks 144 pages, softcover

N AN ENTRY DATED “SPRING 1880,” Dukesang Wong recorded in his diary, “I have decided to venture to that coun- try they call ‘the Land of the Golden Mountains.’ The next ship that departs Ifor those shores is the one which I shall be on. Because I cannot build upon my own land in this country, it is right that I should attempt to seek land over the ocean.” In a subsequent entry, marked “Late Summer 1880,” he confessed trepidation about his “wild and uncivilized” destination, where “people kill each other daily” and “all the business and the laws are controlled by white people, while we are not permitted to rule over our own actions.” He wondered if there were less “barbaric” areas: “My life doesn’t yet have the signs of impending death, and my Digging into the archives of a transformative period. family has not yet carried on its name. With no wife and children, my life has still to be lived, covered her grandfather’s diary in an archive and over several hours, his blackened fingernails and I am curious what this new land will bring.” translated portions for her paper. (Hoe went on indicating arsenic poisoning — was com- These words were written when Wong was in to have a career with UNESCO.) pounded by the social ostracism that derailed his mid- thirties. For more than a decade — the Years later, the author and filmmaker David his own hope of finding employment within diary begins with entries from 1867 — he had McIlwraith came upon the thesis and realized the imperial court. been preoccupied with his family’s honour and its importance. With Hoe’s participation, and For years, while earning a living as a tutor a tragedy that had blighted their name. Then he adding an introduction by Judy Fong Bates, instead, he attempted in vain to clear his family realized that, according to the straitened rules he nurtured it along to publication, providing name of scandal. At one point, he fell in love and regulations of the elite society into which context and commentary to help fill in the gaps. with one of his pupils, but he resisted the temp- he had been born, opportunities at home were Some narrative gaps proved insurmountable. tation to act on his feelings, on the grounds of scarce. Instead he pursued a belief that became The archive in which Hoe found her grandfather’s social propriety. “As the tutor grew more and a theme of many immigrant stories: that oppor- writings was located in a Wong Association more attracted to his young student,” McIlwraith tunities were brighter over the far horizon — in branch that was later destroyed by fire (other writes, “his concern and anxiety about the the Golden Mountains of the Pacific Northwest. branches still exist throughout North America). attraction also grew. Like most of the young Wong’s introduction to “this new land” would All that remains of the diary’s original seven women of the period in China, Sai Ling had be Portland, Oregon, but he eventually moved notebooks is those portions that Hoe originally been betrothed in an arranged marriage.” This on to British Columbia. transcribed with the aid of two uncles. We are is a diary that reveals a thoughtful man, whose All the while he kept a record of his observa- thus left with the fragments of a life — a com- occasional doubt and dismay were nonetheless tions, a chronicle of events and self-r eflection, ment offered not as a complaint but with regret superseded by strong self- discipline and a sense on a journey that led him to work on the and also gratitude. Even with these fragments, of duty. Canadian Pacific Railway. It is a tale of terrible we catch glimpses of a much broader canvas. We Eventually, in 1879, Wong committed himself Y R

hardship and deprivation, compounded by the discover insights and intimations of an experi- to a “little bride” named Lin, an infant thirty-fi ve A R B racism that Chinese workers experienced and ence too long ignored by mainstream histories years his junior, following a tradition common I L

C

the chillingly utilitarian attitude with which this of a transformative period. to the patriarchal structure of imperial China. I L new and barbaric land regarded them. The extant diary starts with the upheaval And that promise — of a wife and progeny to B U P ◆ that ultimately led to Dukesang Wong’s deci- carry on the family name, bringing it honour and R E

THE DIARY OF DUKESANG WONG IS PRESENTED AS sion to emigrate. His father, a magistrate north distinction — nudged his thinking toward a new V U

“the only known first-p erson account by a of Beijing, had weighed in on a land dispute life on distant shores. “Lin has been promised to O C N

Chinese worker on the construction of the CPR.” that pitted two families against each other. His me as my second wife,” Wong wrote. “Ironic that A V

;

As such, its appearance is a welcome and signal position on the matter prompted his shocking I do not have a first, unless those brief moments E

C event, one whose origins can be traced back to murder — at a banquet hosted by the family with Su-Lin were first.” He offered no further N I

V an undergraduate thesis submitted four decades he favoured. And this crime brought shame explanation, though Hoe told McIlwraith “that O R

P ago by Wanda Joy Hoe, Wong’s granddaughter. on the victim’s family. The trauma of the he was known to have had a first marriage, or E

H As a sociology student at Simon Fraser, she dis- murder — Wong recalled his father’s agony cohabitation, in China, and that the relationship T

26 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA produced a son.” (Neither the first wife nor her his father, a restoration possible only when he son followed Wong to Canada.) finally married Lin and started a family. Plastic Bag With his mandarin background and educa- “It is hard, this labouring,” Wong wrote of his tion, Wong came into contact with Christian time on the railroad, “but my body seems to be Had I not seen missionaries in China, likely Jesuits. He enjoyed strong enough. The people working with me are multiple discussions with one in particular: “The good, strong men. There are many of us work- the white plastic bag Englishman cannot have any classical know- ing here, but the laying of the railroad progresses taking flight ledge whatsoever, but he does seem to be well very slowly. It seems we move two stones a day! versed in his philosophy.” Later, Wong corrected And they want this railway built across these himself: the man was, in fact, from France, “but high mountains, some two thousand miles!” from the neighbour’s lawn, in any case, also a barbaric land.” While aspects Later, he decided to become a tailor and set up a silent medusa of Christianity baffled Wong —“It is an interest- a business in : “There is not in the gelatin sky — ing concept: my soul to be saved — but from enough ready- made clothing from China, and what?”— he relished these conversations, even there are no tailors to cut the cloth in our man- as he kept reminding himself to hold fast to ner. I will be able to earn some money, enough had I not seen it Confucian principles. He saw Christian teach- to bring Lin over to this land.” She arrived, with flying by with ings as “just another point of view toward this her guardians in tow, toward the end of the life in which we all must exist, and it is certain, 1880s. They married several years later, she a the night’s clothing I think, that these lessons are about a good life young teenager and he nearly fifty. of giving and helping other people.” When If one can praise Dukesang Wong for his only going home Wong sailed to North America in 1880, he did dedication to what he considered his duty, so aboard a missionary ship. one can certainly praise Lin for her equally to more plastic, In Canada, Wong emerged as a spokesman hard-won adherence to it. Disease, a miscarri- passing by for, and teacher to, his fellow countrymen. It dis- age — these were some of the early challenges heartened him to learn that great social upheav- that confronted her in British Columbia. But als in his native China had sparked anti-W estern the couple had seven sons together and, finally, adulterous pigeons xenophobia. This enmity was juxtaposed with a girl, whom Wong declared “a great joy for all eating from the realities of anti-C hinese sentiments in North this house” in the diary’s final entry, dated 1918: our trite decay. America, including low wages and a head tax. “She has come in my old age, a joyous sign, and Even the Japanese were treated better, he com- she will be able to bring me pride, I know! It plained. (However, as McIlwraith points out, is good. Her brothers are men now, so she will Had I not seen had Wong not died in 1931, at the age of eighty- be assured a good life. She will look after Lin the white plastic bag six, he might have witnessed the shameful when I leave these lands for the final journey internment of Japanese Canadians during the homeward.” The baby girl, whose anglicized swooping Second World War.) name was Elsie, was the future mother of Wanda ◆ Joy Hoe. She lived until 1992 and was buried in something warm IN AN ENTRY DATED “SUMMER 1886,” WONG Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery, sharing remarked how the “fresh new land” he had long a tombstone with her mother. from the frigid air of dawn, pondered “is a land already full of sadness. The Hoe concluded her transcription of her grand- I would’ve told people are beginning to pursue a search for gold. father’s diary on an upbeat passage, which is per- They say it glitters everywhere, and men die for haps understandable. But in an entry from 1901, it. It is a peculiar set of values, strange to my Wong once again lamented the strife occurring your little secret. humble limited experience, where men fight one in his homeland and his sense of alienation in another for it.” Canada: “I have ceased to desire to return to my What is remarkable about the man who emer- village, for I am now of this house, but I am also ges in these entries is the equipoise he somehow greatly saddened, for now I can only hope to be Tyler Haché managed to maintain even in the face of priva- buried in a nameless land.” One likes to imagine tion and the tumult of his surroundings. For all that somewhere in the diary’s missing pages, he Tyler Haché is a poet from New Brunswick. He is working on his master’s degree in English and his doubts, he displayed a steadiness born of looked back on his life, gazing at his children creative writing at the University of Toronto. fidelity to philosophical principles, to the “order and knowing he helped give them a name, in this of life,” and to restoring honour to the house of “nameless land,” that they can be proud of.

MICHAEL TREGEBOV ‘ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!’ RTheenter – GUY MADDIN

/ iÃi˜Ìˆ“i˜Ì>>˜`w˜>˜Vˆ>i`ÕV>̈œ˜œv>ޜ՘} i܈à 7ˆ˜˜ˆ«i}}iÀˆ˜>˜`>ÀœÕ˜`£™Èn]The Renter ˆÃ/Ài}iLœÛ½ÃvœÕÀÌ i˜ÌÀÞˆ˜ ˆÃcomédie humaine.

f£nN£ÇÈ«« - \™Çn‡£‡xx{Ó䇣È·£ Ƃ6ƂƂ   Óx

AVAILABLE FROM UTP DISTRIBUTION NEWSTARBOOKS.COM NEW STAR BOOKS THIS AND THAT

Pack Together, Pack Apart Down at the dog park Dan Dunsky

URING THE LAST FEW MONTHS about our pets, of course, but also about our deep to stay patient, as a damn virus turned her of her long life, we’d still kids. About school. About work, music, movies, routine completely inside out. take Scout to the park, where and Netflix. It’s about neighbourhood events, Of course, it didn’t take long for the common she’d meet up with her apartment vacancies, and home renovations. COVID exchange to begin with “How are you friends — Molly, Archie, King, It’s health advice and book recommendations holding up?” or “How are you guys doing?” It DCooper, Pepper, Auden, Moose, and the rest of and helpful suggestions about aging parents. It’s was as if we were all trying to cope with reality by the canine crew. By this time, as the old lady water- cooler talk without the water cooler, where hearing how others were coping. Some version of the dog run, she was given a lot of space, people drift in and out, depending on whether of “A day at a time” was a common answer. “This whether out of respect or, more likely, lack of they’re picking up after their dog, stopping Duke isn’t forever” was another. A third was the recog- interest, since she only occasionally made a half- from humping Maddie, or intervening in the nition that many of us have it better than others. hearted attempt to play. rare fight that goes from zero to a hundred faster Based on my unscientific dog-park observations, She died in October at sixteen and a half (as than the greyhounds Claire and Florence (some young couples and younger families were espe- with young kids, when you get very old, the dogs’ names have been changed to protect their cially interested in this style of exchange. quarter and half years matter). A husky- shepherd owners’ privacy). For others, the pandemic was a kind of mix, she had come to us from Moose Factory, But as the foul pandemic outlasted the spring, thermostat, cranking up existing emotions. Ontario, as a five-month-old pup who had been then the summer, then the fall of 2020, I noticed Teddy’s owner started to linger at the park, even found in a chicken coop. She was house-t rained, that the dog park became more and more as the weather grew cold and the days grew so there had been at least some care, some sense important for many of us dog owners. Whereas short. She’s an older woman who lives alone. It’s that she was a pet to someone. Thanks to the our chats used to be mostly informal and light, hard not to imagine that this has been a lonely tireless work of rescue organizations, she made there now seemed to be a real urgency to inter- and difficult time for her, and that the park is the long trek south, like so many other northern act. Owners stayed longer at the park, often one of the few places she gets regular contact dogs. Lucky for her and for us. joining other groups of people when their with others. And I often think about Jack’s When we adopted her, our boys were eight initial socially distanced bubble dispersed. owner, whose spouse has advanced cancer. What and five. Now they are both grown and gone Conversations also became more personal. must he think, listening to people complain from home. So many of the memories I have of Mimi’s owner — with whom I had previously about having to wear a mask and keep a safe dis- them over the past two decades include her, in spoken only once or twice — confessed to being tance from one another? Even at the dog park, my mind’s eye: at baseball and hockey games, overwhelmed by working at home, or “living our narcissism can sometimes be breathtaking. birthdays, the cottage. Even skiing, where she at the office,” as she put it. She would describe COVID-19 didn’t create these connections once ran up the snow-c overed hill to find us. the impossible routine of her day, with a young and associations. It didn’t encourage extroverts She was the best girl ever, and that’s not just my daughter to care for, and wonder how she’d deal to be even more outgoing or invite introverts to opinion; it’s objectively true. with the demands being placed on her. People exercise muscles they prefer to keep idle. But, Scout had a terrific life here in the city, in part have regularly felt comfortable opening up to paradoxically, given the way the virus spreads, because Toronto is such a great place for dogs. me — a willingness to listen has been part of it encouraged us to find ways of being more I’m not sure why that is; maybe it’s a corrective my job as a journalist. But this kind of personal social, to share our concerns and check up on to the Anglo chill that burrowed into this place sharing, coming from someone I barely knew one another more than we previously had. As for decades. Regardless, our four-legged friend (I still have no idea if Mimi’s owner is single we were forced to consider our own well- being, was treated well pretty much everywhere she or in a relationship), opened my eyes to some we became more aware of the needs of others. went. Shops welcomed her and gave her treats. deep need to be heard as we all strained against ◆ They left water bowls outside to cool her down a terrible year. I HAVEN’T BEEN TO THE PARK SINCE SCOUT DIED, on hot days. The corner store around the block In early October, in one of my last trips to so I wonder, now that the vaccines are rolling had her picture on the wall, and she was featured the park before Scout died, Happy’s owner, a out and our collective patience is wearing thin, a couple of times in our local hardware store’s veteran high school teacher who usually keeps whether this intimacy has remained. Given the Instagram feed (@dogs_of_hardware). People the conversation light, told me that he already light at the end of the tunnel, has dog-park talk would frequently stop to pat her — especially felt as tired as he normally does in May. He said reverted to its more optimistic and lighthearted young kids who thought she might be a wolf. he didn’t know how he was going to get through tone? Or have the changes I noticed last year And there was the park, where she went most the year trying to figure out the government’s remained, perhaps more important than ever? days, usually twice a day, for nearly two decades. constantly changing rules for schools or the mix After all, we’re still a long way from normal. Dog parks are a unique microcosm of urban of online and in-p erson “modalities.” I’ll find out soon enough. We just got a new life. They’re local hubs where pet ownership Blaze’s owner, meanwhile, wondered aloud rescue, whom we’ve named Bear. We hadn’t provides the bond that leads to conversation and if he wanted to even keep his job at all: while planned to welcome another pet into our home acquaintance. As in the ’80s sitcom Cheers, these working from home and being around for his so quickly, but truckloads of northern dogs con- public settings aren’t primarily about friendship kids, he was reassessing his entire career. He tinue to come south. We saw a picture of a face (although some develop); they are more about didn’t want “to spend more time on a treadmill” we liked, went to meet him, and couldn’t say social connection. New owners show up, and if he could help it. I haven’t seen him for a while, no. He’s about a year old, eighty pounds, and they become part of the pack, so to speak, while so I don’t know what he decided. big-hearted. So, if all goes well and he takes to others move on, drift away, don’t really stay in Diego’s owner, whom I’ve known for years, his training, it won’t be long before I’m back to touch beyond a wave on the street or a brief opened up to discuss the challenges she was the outdoor water cooler, grateful for the science hello and scratch on the neck. having with her daughter, and Rebel’s owner that allows us to overcome this plague and for Conversation at the dog park is pretty much confessed to “losing it” over a simple thing, her the connections these loving animals bring to what you’d expect. It’s about everyday stuff. It’s nerves finally frayed from months of digging our lives.

28 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA HEALTH AND WELLNESS

Fragments When your mother can’t remember your name Katherine Leyton

An Alphabet for Joanna: ORIGINALLY FROM THE DETROIT SUBURBS, JOANNA She didn’t know anyone else in Long Beach. A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments followed her high school boyfriend to Long Rogers’s father said that she could stay with him. Damian Rogers Beach, California, where they were quickly So she did. Knopf Canada married by a mail-o rder minister. She painted This was not Joanna’s happy ending. The two 344 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook a rosy picture of her wedding —“blue jeans, fought; there were unresolved issues with her wildflowers, love beads, sunset”— but there first husband — to whom she was still legally were problems. This period in Joanna’s life married — and there were more secrets. Rogers’s OTHERS CAN BE AT ONCE held a number of mysteries. There remain gaps father eventually sent Joanna back to her par- entirely familiar and com- and opposing narratives that leave the reader, ents’ house in Detroit. Joanna then informed plete mysteries to their along with the author, maddeningly unsatisfied. him, at a rather late stage, that she was pregnant. children. The women who “Whatever it was, it was bad,” Rogers says. “My He moved to Michigan and they tried the rela- name us and hold an almost mother hinted throughout my childhood that tionship again, but to no avail. Joanna returned Munbearable power in shaping our identities are she had lost herself in some way, and that she to her parents and Rogers’s father left. Damian elusive. Certain facets of their selves and chap- didn’t really understand what had happened didn’t see him for several years, and neither was ters of their histories are closed off. to her during this time. Doctors she saw after- he a significant presence in her life growing up; As she opens her memoir, the poet Damian they reconnected years later, though. His role Rogers recalls the time her mother escaped from within this narrative is to help fill in details her nursing home in Buffalo, New York. Joanna about Joanna, who can no longer remember has frontal-t emporal-l obe dementia, and when who he is. the police brought her back, she was unable to After trying to piece together her early life, say where she’d been. Rogers was asleep in her Rogers writes about her childhood in her grand- Toronto home; she didn’t find out about the parents’ home, her memories of the first apart- episode until the next morning. Where did her ment she and her mother shared, and how they mother go? What did she do with those hours? would sing together and listen to the Beatles. Rogers can only speculate: “I am able to imagine Rogers delves into her own life too: a gig at a my mother, and in my imagination I fill the fashion magazine in New York; falling in love holes in the stories of what happened to her. with the musician who became her husband; There are so many holes in the stories, and I am moving to Toronto; publishing two poetry always filling those holes.” books; and her struggles to conceive her son, The incident serves as a broader allegory Levi. She writes about her relationship with her for their relationship. Even before the disease, mother as a young adult, interwoven with scenes Rogers was aware that she didn’t entirely know from after her mother’s diagnosis: transitions her mother. “I used to feel that I knew the con- between various assisted-l iving facilities; pass- tents of her mind almost as well as the contents ing time in a nursing home by drawing together; of my own,” she writes. “In some ways, that long, emotional embraces at each parting; and was an illusion, of course; she kept secrets.” As bringing her young son to visit. Whether she a young, single mother, Joanna was a fun and was a moody adolescent or an adult reassuring loving parent, but she hid parts of herself and her declining mother that the shapes she was her past. As her brain deteriorated, her memories colouring were superb, Rogers captures these and her words were taken from her, a process scenes of intimacy with a seductive ease. “You’re Rogers describes evocatively as “a large dark field my beautiful baby,” Joanna tells her on one M

A filled with a flickering network of rapidly dim- visit, to which Rogers responds with a kiss on D

R ming lights.” Moments that leave the reader wondering. her mother’s cheek. E T

S Of course, An Alphabet for Joanna is also ◆ M A Rogers’s story. “I make my life with my mother ward, she told me, suggested she had sustained AS PARENTS AGE, THERE IS AN INEVITABLE ROLE M

U into a story,” she writes, “and the story makes a closed head injury, an injury she couldn’t reversal when the caregiver becomes the cared E S

U me.” This self-c onsciousness is one of the most remember or name.” for. But it is the transformation of Joanna’s per- M S striking elements of this memoir. As the book The man Joanna was married to is not Damian sonality that is especially heartbreaking. When K J I

R jumps back and forth in time, from 2019 back to Rogers’s father. Joanna met that man, as the story her brain started to change, so did her percep-

;

0 Joanna’s life before her daughter’s birth, Rogers goes, when she showed up at his door hawking tion of her only daughter. At one point, Joanna 2 9 1

pieces together memories, photos, letters, her Avon products. In his words (and Rogers is care- was convinced that Rogers was stealing money ,

T

H mother’s zippered notebooks, a conversation ful to emphasize that this is his version), she was from her, so she made frantic calculations on the

C A with her father (of which she provides a sort “fragile, emaciated, hollow- eyed.” She looked back of a photocopy of a photo of her daugh- N

N

A of transcript), and emails from acquaintances. like she needed help. When she returned to his ter. The picture was creased and folded; in it,

A

M

While she periodically highlights the flaws of house to deliver the Snoopy cologne decanter Rogers was beaming. When her mother made , G

A her sources, Rogers is explicit about her need to he’d ordered, he invited her in. She opened up this accusation, Rogers was heavily pregnant. A

R tell this tale. She states early on that she writes to him, telling him that her husband was putting She visited Joanna’s bank and discovered that G

E as much to force herself to stay present during aluminum foil on the windows, that he thought her mother had been telling the staff that there D

E

I her mother’s decline as to retrieve the fragments the radio was bugged, and that he believed she was no baby, and that her daughter was trying L U

J of Joanna’s past. was controlling his heartbeat with her breath. to poison her. This paranoia recalls a moment

MARCH 2021 29 abuse, as Rogers tries to gain insight into how Artist Statement for Found Sounds at the Lake it shaped her mother. Over the years, Joanna dropped hints about her brother before she I am surrounded by sounds of insects flapping at screens revealed what had happened (she waited until Rogers was thirty). “Everything that’s wrong with trying to reach the porch where I sit and listen me is because of Allan,” Joanna said. Later in the to this fuss of wings in the bright light of a flush moon. conversation, she added, “Promise me you won’t Across the lake a chorus of frogs improvise, and every so often write about this.” That the author includes her mother’s request reads as an admission that memoir can be a self- a loon wails a strange, abrupt cry — not the usual arousing melancholy, serving form, even a betrayal. But the revelation but broken and crude. Sometimes seagulls join the shrill. also clarifies something for Rogers about her childhood — and speaks to her own sense of A whippoorwill whips persistently into the night, and a weird hum broken trust. Allan, who has since passed away, of some unknown animal living low to the ground used to make her feel uncomfortable. He once told her that she looked like a young Brooke Shields. When she discovered the full truth undulates along the waterline. This acoustic paroxysm churns about his character, she was angry that she’d the warm air to a frenzied pitch, then slackens; even insects been allowed to spend time in her uncle’s home ease their winged blunders into the veranda’s canopy. as an adolescent without her mother present. But Joanna insisted Damian was never in danger. “In In this brief lull I hear “snaps” in nearby scrub, more evidence a way this seems delusional, tied to the family’s deep denial, but it did feel as if there was a force of a restless crowd out in the dark. And then it begins again, field separating me from my uncle, a force field he could not cross.” The book skirts the role that a slow swell of cries as if by magnitude the moon could be coaxed women’s silence and passivity plays in genera- to burn more brightly, or maybe it’s the shine that draws this tional trauma. It’s another moment that leaves textured wall of animal calls from the bush. All of this has to do the reader wondering, alongside Rogers, what Joanna was thinking. ◆ with “god” I’m certain — the word, I mean. Out there lumbering ROGERS’S ATTEMPTS TO UNDERSTAND HER in shadows among roots and beasts is a word I know little about. mother are ultimately, and perhaps predict- ably, unsuccessful. There comes a point when And yet this flux of belling and wood-note draws me Joanna cannot even remember her daugh- and everything else ineluctably toward the thing it names. ter’s name. Rogers is left with more questions, including whether she will develop the disease Michael Lithgow herself — whether she will be undone in this Michael Lithgow is an associate professor of communications and media studies at way, and what it will mean for the people who Athabasca University. His new collection is Who We Thought We Were As We Fell. love her. Near the end of the book, she describes a visit to her mother’s extended family in Montana, when she went through old family photos and earlier in the pregnancy when Rogers told her a mystery, to Rogers’s father, who left when came across a picture of her great-great-great- mother that she was having a boy. “That’s good,” Damian was just shy of one (which prompted grandmother. The photo once belonged to her Joanna replied. “Girls can be rivals for Daddy’s her to stop talking for a time), to one of Joanna’s great- grandmother Ivy, who had written on the attention.” Rogers can’t imagine her mother boyfriends, who tried to seduce Rogers when back “my mother’s mother.” Rogers would like making such a statement before her illness, but she was just thirteen, men leave behind them a to know the woman’s name, but none of her she wonders if she might have thought it. wake of trauma. The darkest episode concerns relatives could tell her. She speculates that Ivy The toxic actions of men are at the centre Joanna’s older brother, Allan, who repeatedly hadn’t known either. “This woman was a ghost of Rogers’s reading of her mother’s life. From molested her as a child and eventually raped to Ivy, just as Ivy is a ghost to me,” Rogers says. Joanna’s first husband, whose offences remain her. The book continually circles back to this “Ghosts all the way back.”

A Love Letter to Africville By Amanda Carvery-Taylor

“Delightfully capturing the joy of family, friendship and community like a warm hug. A Love Letter to Africville gives us a small glimpse of what is truly important about the people of Africville.” — Juanita Peters, Africville Museum

GLVFRXQWZKHQ\RXRUGHUIURPRXUZHEVLWH FRGH/5&)3 IHUQZRRGSXEOLVKLQJFDURVHZD\ LITERATURE

The Prophet Atwood’s poetic voice Shannon Hengen

E CHATTED AT A CONFERENCE we toured Nickel City, ate Timbits, explored northern bush. Is that how we young women several decades ago. As we the couple’s preferred tastes in Scotch, swapped should learn to change the story? had tea on a patio after her stories. Once, over lunch, she relayed how, when Skip ahead to the hugely successful The poetry reading, I made bold visiting her late friend Chief Harry St. Denis, Handmaid’s Tale, from 1985, whose Offred and to ask if she would be pub- at Wolf Lake First Nation near Témiscaming, friends failed to see the signs of encroaching Wlishing a new collection sometime soon. In her Quebec, she brought about hilarity with her tyranny around them in their supposedly liber- distinctively pointed voice, without hesitation, imitation of the Queen. ated lives before the fundamentalist coup. Again, she replied with a grin: “No. I’ve read the late She met with undergraduate students on each Offred is frighteningly and obviously one of us. Tennyson.” Yet a couple of volumes of poems visit. Any rumour or misapprehension we might But a slight shift happens here: by the end of this have appeared since then, and now Dearly has have had of a sharp tongue was displaced by speculative work, the central character shows a come out, quickly reaching the bestseller lists. the patience and encouragement she showed glimmer of courage. Being forced by the savage Like her immediately recognizable speaking them unfailingly. And now when I read this power of the regime, she overcomes her passiv- voice, the persona of Margaret Atwood’s poems new volume of poems, I hear that patient and ity and acts in solidarity with other resisters to is unique. But unlike her speaking voice, it’s a encouraging Atwood alongside the octogenarian survive. (I was once with a group of critics who persona that shifts over time. The latest work seer who refuses to look away from the real: her joined Atwood on a tour of French universities, predicts and admonishes, though subtly. This decline, ours, the planet’s. where she addressed large lecture halls full of is somehow a wiser voice than before — still ◆ students preparing for their national exams, bracing but winsome. Put down your Tennyson ATWOOD’S FICTION FORCES US TO LOOK CLOSELY which included The Handmaid’s Tale that year. and pick up Dearly. at where we’re going, and for that we hold her We could all feel their deep regard for her and In the opening sections, we sense we’re sitting in awe. To properly describe the range of voices her prescient voice.) with her in the twilight. It’s fall. We’re sipping in her many novels is a mighty task indeed. But Solidarity with others is important. In Laphroaig. We hear the new persona first when even a selective glance at those seventeen books, The Robber Bride, from 1993, the villain Zenia she recites the introspective opening piece, “Late not to mention eight collections of short fiction, certainly reads signs and acts to survive but at Poems,” and then laugh out loud at “Everyone helps us approach the poetry. great cost to the three more familiar Atwoodian Else’s Sex Life.” The shifts in tone from omin- I bought her first novel, The Edible Woman, characters. Zenia dies and the others form a ous to playful remind me of my later meetings at the wonderfully named Canada Book and friendship that has a hint of solidarity. with her. The trio of speculative novels pub- ◆ lished in this century started with IN 1999, CLARE COULTER MOUNTED AN “This is somehow a wiser Oryx and Crake in 2003. The main adaptation of Atwood’s Good Bones at character, numb and passive, is now the Tarragon Theatre, in Toronto. I was voice than before — still a man, which does not feel like prog- teaching my “Atwood’s Short Fiction” ress. Beyond those three books comes course at the time, at Laurentian bracing but winsome.” The Heart Goes Last, in 2015, with male University in Sudbury, and decided to and female characters equally, and take my small class to the show. I let chillingly, clueless. They don’t figure the author know where we were having lunch Drug in Regina, not long after it was published things out. They don’t join with others to resist. before the performance, and she agreed to join in 1969, starting decades of reading and writing They end badly. us. It was around the time of her birthday, and about an author who seemed to want to teach Most recently, the sequel to The Handmaid’s my students decided to bake her a cake, which me something urgently. While I have loved and Tale has the ruthless, brilliant Aunt Lydia as its we carted down Highway 69 in the back of our appreciated countless writers over the years, I protagonist. In The Testaments, co- winner of the van. As I introduced her to the group, she imi- have never sensed any of them except Atwood to in 2019, Atwood changes the story- tated how, as she got out of her taxi, the driver be speaking directly to me. That is madness, of line dramatically. But at what cost? Aunt Lydia had said of our chosen café, “That’s not a great course. But considering the astounding popular- acts alone. Is there solidarity anywhere in this place to go into alone, ma’am.” Perhaps he ity of her fiction, that madness must be shared novel? Is it effective? Is anybody happy? could sense she was about to get chocolate frost- around the world. ◆ ing all over her hands. Marian MacAlpin, of that debut novel, ignores MARGARET ATWOOD IS NOT AND HAS NEVER BEEN A decade later, in 2008, Atwood came to her distrust of her fiancé and boredom with her the poet of happiness. Prophets rarely are. Sudbury to celebrate her November birth- work and her co-w orkers to the extent that she But she has been a wise voice throughout her day with a fundraising dinner hosted by the becomes anorexic, then cannibalistic, making twelve volumes of poetry. Unlike her voice in Laurentian English Department. I recall the a cake in the shape of a woman for her bewil- prose — devoted as it is to plot lines and to spontaneous ovation in an overcrowded room dered partner. Atwood the novelist seemed to whether they are inexorable — her poetic voice is as she walked in and the endless string of fans be shouting at the docile young women of my sensual. No less the teacher as a poet than she is who queued up after dinner to have a book generation to alter the script — to rewrite it, in as a writer of prose, she nevertheless morphs into signed — to each of whom she spoke attentively. fact. But how? And why? a lyricist, appealing to us through our senses. She celebrated her birthday with us for the next The unnamed narrator of her 1972 novel, A comparison: if Atwood’s prose is like a recipe six years, and the funds from those hugely popu- Surfacing, no less numb and passive than Marian for, say, bread, then her poetry is the aroma of lar gatherings went to social causes she supports: MacAlpin and having ignored an abortion, simi- it baking. ecology, Indigenous learning. larly enacts her own near-death, in this case by Atwood invokes stories from fairy tale, myth, Her partner, the convivial Graeme Gibson, drowning. Then she ditches her companions and history, ordinary life, the natural world — any accompanied her on three of the trips. Together eats hallucinogenic plants alone in the remote text with the power to offer guidance — and tells

MARCH 2021 31 them through the experience of one discerning frightened men / battering their way to some voice. Her skill with the various meanings and huge purpose / they can’t now exactly remem- sounds of words has not diminished over time: ber.” Does her image lead the speaker into Dearly certainly attests to that. Her voice remains “despair” and “helplessness” or “into the heart Transforming strong. It’s the persona that has changed. of prayer”? Yes, Atwood the poet occasion- From 1966 to 1986 — twenty years — Atwood ally cites prayer, again asking what its power Transgender History published nine books of poems. The last three might be. books have come out over a quarter of a century. Dearly brings us into absence most skillfully. Why, having been put off by the late Tennyson, Her partner of many years has died, leaving does she continue to write poetry at all? To wit- “the shape of an absence / in your place at the ness and document that inescapable change? table.” She asks of all the dear ones, “Where At twenty- seven, she published The Circle are they? / Where? Where? After a while / You Game, where the voice senses menace every- sound like a bird. / You stop, but the sorrow goes where. Vulnerable, she is also herself dangerous, on calling.” In “Songs for Murdered Sisters,” unlike in the latest poems published at eighty- a seven- poem cycle, she mourns women lost one, where her vulnerability has no defence. In to stories they have not had the power to a sequence of seven short pieces in The Circle shape — not unlike her early fictive characters. Game, she says: “Leave my evasions / alone / stay And she mourns her own powerlessness: “I was in the borders / I’ve drawn.” It ends with “what too late, / Too late to save you.” you destroyed / with your transient hands // you The “Plasticene Suite” of nine poems cata- did so gently / I didn’t notice at the time.” logues our alarming waste and brings together At forty-t wo, Atwood published True Stories, Atwood’s wry and wise voices in a kind of lyric a remarkable volume: “The true story is chorus. I imagine her reading these poems vicious / and multiple and untrue.” Brutal scenes aloud, demonstrating that her skill with the of human depravity mix with the act of teaching sound of words is as exceptional as in the earli- a child to spell —“how to make spells.” What is est poems. About a baby bird in the Midway the power of words against the power of hatred Islands, lying dead from eating plastic, she and brute force? observes “this glittering mess, / this festering Seasons figure in her every poetry book, nestwork.” In the next poem, “Editorial Notes,” less often summer than fall or winter. Attend she quotes an editor of her work who suggests to the passage of time, this persona admon- that she “pull back somewhat / from exhortation ishes. Attend to memory, especially its decline. and despair,” about which she subtly concludes, Reflections on presence and absence recur “There is some danger in this.” increasingly throughout the body of work, The seventh poem in the suite evokes a recent OTHERS OF MY KIND: absence being especially poignant in the news item about a whale carrying her dead Transatlantic Transgender latest. Only a lyricist as skilled and practised calf —“So big and sad”— for three days. The as Atwood can write movingly about absence, whale mourns her baby, the victim of “toxic Histories which is — to cite one apt metaphor — as elusive plastic.” Repeating “so big and sad,” the speaker Alex Bakker, Rainer Herrn, as the wind. declares “something must be done” and asks, If the seer’s voice in her novels tells us repeat- “Will we decide to, finally?” As we do nothing, Michael Thomas Taylor, edly to read the signs and to act, its poetic our use of plastic makes us increasingly absurd, and Annette F. Timm counterpart speaks eloquently to the subtler with our “(beloved twistable / pea-green always value of being present. She witnesses the decline dependable / ice-cube tray . . . ).” $49.99 CAD / $49.99 USD (S) and deaths of parents, often repeating the insight The menace around the speaker of Atwood’s first shared in True Stories: “Witness is what you earliest poems is now much more obviously and 298 pages, 186 illustrations must bear.” strikingly the speaker herself. Like her, we are 8.5 x 11 inches At fifty- six, Atwood published Morning in the “the lobotomized,” who “drink martinis and 978-1-77385-121-1 PB Burned House, with a complete section devoted go on cruises” while “the world fries.” The plan- to the death of her father — her memories and gent voice is reflecting on loss — the title poem This is the story of a group of transgender dreams of him, her helplessness. Here she an elegy on “an old word.” She tells us, “I miss speaks of the wind as “nothingness / in motion, you all dearly.” people on both sides of the Atlantic who like time. The power of what is not there.” This Reading Margaret Atwood’s poetry has sharp- changed the course of history. Through persona is present for her dying father, and at ened my perceptions for fifty years, helping me letters and photographs they created his death she feels his absence keenly. Against conjure that space between despair and wonder, networks of affirmation and trust. By any of the forces over which we have little con- the chill of betrayal and the warmth of love. advocating for themselves within the trol, especially time and decline, words offer As I age — as we all age — we need her to con- medical system, they influenced doctors no defence. She chronicles that truth by being tinue to sit with us in the twilight. We need the and authorities like Magnus Hirschfeld, present, bearing witness. late Atwood. When she published The Door, in 2007, Harry Benjamin, and Alfred Kinsey. Richly Atwood was sixty-s even. In this volume, the Inspirations illustrated in full colour, featuring many speaker is present for her mother’s death and never-before-seen photographs, this is an asks, “What can I possibly tell her? / I’m here. / I’m The Circle Game exciting reconsideration of trans history. It here.” Is that enough? Poems about poetry and Contact Press, 1966 is essential reading for anyone who feels the about the power of words to touch what is vital powerful and complicated pull of the past. appear in The Door, as they do throughout her True Stories poetic oeuvre. She describes poets as having “the Oxford, 1981 irritating look / of those who know more than we do.” But “if you try for a simple answer” to Morning in the Burned House what they know, “they pretend to be crazy, / or McClelland & Stewart, 1995 else drunk.” She also considers, as she does throughout her career, the study of sexual and The Door other politics. McClelland & Stewart, 2007 In two war photo poems, she describes one @ UCalgaryPress “dead beautiful woman” among “other dead Dearly people scattered around / . . . left in the wake of McClelland & Stewart, 2020

press.ucalgary.ca LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA Returning

The wind on this hill overlooking A few minutes the city is carrying the longing from now, you’ll be back you’ve tried to forget, on the path,

aching to give it back to you. your name left buried deep in the ground, the sound In the distance, amber light of it reaching through roots and stones is filling the blind windows of houses. Soon, you’ll be the only traveller as you return to the neighbourhood in this place without a home. you’ve abandoned, the family that doesn’t know Even the birds will have gone to sleep, sewn into the thick you’re each of these shadows skin of branches; you’ll leave to embrace them;

the crickets awake the darkest places within their green walls. where you’ve been lost.

Margo Wheaton

Margo Wheaton is the author of The Unlit Path behind the House. Her latest collection is Wild Green Light, co-authored with David Adams Richards.

Fresh Titles for Spring 2021

DID YOU SEE US? • 978-0-88755-907-5 • $24.95 THE POLITICS OF THE CANOE • 978-0-88755-909-9 • $27.95 AUTHORIZED HERITAGE • 978-0-88755-927-6 • $27.95 BEING GERMAN CANADIAN • 978-088755-847-4 • $31.95 LITERATURE

On the Rocks Peter Unwin’s new novel Larry Krotz

Written in Stone on Lake Superior, are from the seventeenth they dreamed.” At one point, Paul asks him to Peter Unwin and eighteenth centuries. Yet, as writers such look at three rust- coloured lines stacked hori- Cormorant Books as Louise Erdrich have pointed out, “there is zontally. “That first line,” Joe says. “You know 256 pages, softcover no completely accurate way to date rock paint- what that is, right?” Paul admits that, no, he ings.” Her non-fi ction work Books and Islands doesn’t, and “neither do you.” Joe tells him it’s in Ojibwe Country — which could serve as an the Canadian National Railway. The second line ETER UNWIN’S WRITTEN IN STONE alternative title for Written in Stone — tours is the Canadian Pacific Railway. And the third? begins at the end. Linda Richardson the land of her ancestors and provides a sensi- “The Trans- Canada Highway,” Paul answers is driving an aging Westfalia van tive, intelligent means of experiencing images confidently. “The Highway of Hope.” Joe shakes on one last journey from Toronto that remain shrouded in mystery. For Erdrich, his head and grins. “The third one is the end of to Northern Ontario to scatter her understanding, especially through a Western, the world.” Phusband’s ashes. Years before, when she first codifying gaze, isn’t necessarily something that ◆ met Paul Prescot, he was “a sullen older man can or should be obtained: “The rock paintings WRITTEN IN STONE IS A MULTI- LAYERED BOOK THAT who cast an atmosphere of sullen disapproval.” are alive. This is more important than anything bears rereading. It’s also a book that has to be He approached her at a party and asked if else that I can say about them.” Similarly, Paul grappled with. Unwin does not dispute that she was any good in a canoe — along the way, European settlers can relate to the land, nor does he explained the etymology of the word and he ignore the endemic difficulties. He brings quoted T. S. Eliot (he even inquired if she got the up Franklin’s ill- fated expedition and the Jesuit reference). Despite the shaky start, she agreed to missionaries who went mad from starvation. go with him. Is this a story of identity? Or is it A dystopian mood pervades the novel, his ninth: a send-up of pretensions? Either way, Linda and starlings fly into windowpanes and die; churches Paul come together as a pair of restless souls catch fire and burn down. Modern urban life is paddling along the Grand River. noisy and banal, while the wilderness carries an Their marriage has its difficulties. There are edge of magic that is more a marker of uncer- fights and infidelities, but also tenderness, and tainty than it is a happy escape. a sense of the two of them against the world. From Kenora to Parry Sound, Northern Linda is younger, thoroughly urban, and has Ontario is rendered evocatively. Along the north a master’s degree in English (so, yes, she did shore of Lake Huron, there are rocks, trees, and get the Eliot reference). After slipping into animals, but also the grim debris of settlement: “a bohemian half-world of theatre, ritual, and “rusted air compressors and miles and miles of drinking too much,” she ends up undervalued frost fencing, the crushed packages of takeout and dissatisfied as a proofreader for gardening joints, empty cigarette packs that skidded the catalogues. Paul has a binary view of humans: pebbled shoulders of the highway.” The book’s you are either an indoor or an outdoor person. cover blurb prepares readers for a narrative that He despises the modern world and immerses “goes beyond the surface acknowledgments of himself in his semi-a cademic career research- settler impacts, and exists on the border of two ing Indigenous rock paintings. He writes sev- solitudes, where the known and unknown can- eral titles on the subject, including Pictographs, not be separated, where mythology and real- Petroglyphs and Paradigms of the Apocalypse, and is, ity are one, and where an old and inaccessible in his own words, “the world’s leading authority knowledge holds the means to a possible recon- on aboriginal rock art, east of the Rockies.” ciliation.” It is this, but not entirely. Bored with work, Linda fixates on the The possibility of parody always lurks in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography: “Everything The paintings are living things. background of this novel. It’s difficult to know real happened in those books. Only there.” She how to accept it. Paul could be the type of per- plans to read every volume before she dies. The sees the pictographs he visits as “living things, son — one many of us know — who embraces volumes were gifts from her late father, perhaps like books. Living books”— even as he seeks to a different culture and then expounds on it to “give her a spine. Many spines.” But within discern their knowledge. He interprets them at tediously. But Unwin plays him straight — that them, she sees only stories of men and death, one point as “giving the finger to Cartesian dual- is, until Paul’s rather farcical end, in which he as she obsessively searches out the most misan- ity.” But it is Linda who wonders if this wisdom perishes in a remote cove, on the equivalent of a thropic accounts. could be hers: “It was out of reach, but close.” vision quest, from an infected tooth. The narra- Together, Linda and Paul set up competing She doesn’t try to possess it; instead, she regards tive does not presume to take a theoretical bent stories of Canada as they try to relate to the land it as a pull, a questioning: “Beneath her hand she beyond its protagonists’ existential searches. and its complex past, as well as to each other. felt the rock still warming. Was it hers? Could However, the author does ask implicitly about R

“History. You can’t live without it,” Linda’s it possibly be hers, a wisdom that seemed sud- world view. Does yours (like your religion) help K C I father used to say. Of course, living holds the denly everywhere? What had she been given to you live? Are you at peace? Does it trouble you? L F

; true meaning. know and to keep and to hold?” Will it overwhelm and destroy you? These are L L E

Pictographs are the crux around which the The Indigenous view within the novel is the urgent questions that the book raises. And N N story turns. Unlike the cave art in France or more cut and dried. Paul’s guide on his research throughout, the enigmatic rock paintings pro- E F

Spain, which dates back tens of thousands of trips, a laconic character named Joe Animal, vide a motif, unsettled and unsettling. Close, but D A H years, the paintings at places like Agawa Rock, observes simply, “What they drawed is what just out of reach. C

34 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA LITERATURE

Home Sweet Unhomely The latest from André Alexis Spencer Morrison

The Night Piece honing for decades. This volume collects stories narratives, “The Third Terrace,” unfolds a noir- André Alexis from across his career, spanning his 1994 debut, ish revenge drama that takes place in a world McClelland & Stewart Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, 2010’s Beauty identical to ours, save that hand porn and hand 384 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook and Sadness, and the 2013 novella A, along with prostitution — in which customers watch espe- several new ones. At its best, Alexis’s writing cially shapely hands rub oils across various fab- channels the high-minded otherworldliness, rics — are booming industries. T FIRST, GEOFFREY MOREHOUSE, not to mention the unnerving strangeness, of In an afterword to the volume, Madeleine a federal clerk in the 1980s, resists Poe, Calvino, and Borges. These propulsive tales Thien evocatively likens reading Alexis’s writ- the occult contagion that has unfold events in the manner of fables, elaborat- ing to the sensation of walking on ice. We feel overtaken his cubicle-hived floor ing weighty themes — the nature of our minds, ourselves supported only “by a surface about at Transport Canada. His fellow the existence of divine powers — upon the to give way.” The image is apt. These stories Abureaucrats have been voraciously reading a thread of fantasy. often plunge us — drastically, suddenly, with a mysterious red book, with troubling results. We see this fabular quality in “Cocteau,” crack — into new, darker worlds, with all the ter- They have begun speaking in fragments, omit- named for the French author. (A few story ror and chill of falling beneath the ice. Yet easily ting the words “I,” “eye,” and “aye,” and stick- titles are names of writers from whom, pre- overlooked amid the otherworldly horrors are ing out their tongues. The pressure to conform sumably, Alexis draws inspiration.) Here, a the recognizable horrors of deceased parents mounts. Everyone else has read the book — why mediocre poet takes the job of caretaker of an and fractured marriages, as Alexis weighs fantasy not Geoffrey? Is being lizard-like really so bad? abandoned — and, we learn, haunted — tower against reality, one sorrow against another. This strange scenario crystallizes many of the in a small Ontario town. A ghostly presence A clue to the wellspring of loss that perme- strengths of André Alexis’s collection The Night visits him overnight, operating as a muse whose ates The Night Piece lies in the surname of the Piece. For one, there’s the sheer imaginative poetry the caretaker transcribes and publishes aforementioned bureaucrat: Geoffrey Morehouse. gymnastics required to conceive this premise under his own name. As the poet’s fame grows, Throughout, characters seem deprived of, and and the narrative twists and turns that unspool admirers swarm the town, desiring a clearer in need of, a fortified sense of home, of homeli- from it. There’s the deft mining of voice for com- understanding of the verses. From a tale of ness. They lose homes, inherit empty and deso- edy: Geoffrey’s deadpan account, its tone timid demonic possession, knotty aesthetic questions late ones, and rent them out to strangers. But and pedantic, jars ironically with his unnerving gradually materialize. What, if any, power does the experience of being unhoused takes more plight. There’s likewise the gentle sat- expansive, figurative forms too. Alexis, ire of bureaucratic Ottawa, a motif that who moved to Canada from Trinidad binds several of these stories. “The gentle satire of with his parents as a child, has writ- Especially striking, though, is ten that he doesn’t “like to be thought Alexis’s use of a plot derived from the bureaucratic Ottawa binds of as a ‘black writer,’ largely because I ostensibly low-culture genres of hor- refuse to accept that my race provides ror and fantasy as a substrate for high- several of these stories.” a royal road to understanding the fic- culture philosophical rumination. tion I write.” Nevertheless, the unhous- Geoffrey eventually resolves to pre- ing that characterizes the diasporic tend he’s read the mysterious tome. He imitates a text draw from its author’s life? What relation- experience recurs within the collection. In the his co-workers’ speech and mannerisms and ship exists between celebrity and craft? (Similar title story, for instance, the protagonist listens to takes a copy of the book home, opening it ten- questions animate A, a satire of Toronto literary a fellow guest at a Caribbean Canadian wedding tatively. Even this scant exposure sparks recur- culture involving Atwood and Ondaatje, as well in Ottawa recount his haunting by a soucouyant, rent nightmares featuring an eerie figure whose as a skewering of David Gilmour.) a blood-sucking ghoul of Caribbean folklore. nationality echoes the two words —“Norwegian Another of the collection’s standouts, “Horse,” Like Coleridge’s wedding guest in “The Rime roads”— that Geoffrey reads. In what ways has probes the relationship of mind to body through of the Ancient Mariner,” Alexis’s character is the text infiltrated his mind? Is the Norwegian a horror story involving a mad scientist. The transformed by the tale he hears. The soucouyant a spectre of the author or something else? scientist rents the upper floors of the narrator’s later appears in the young Ottawan’s dreams, Geoffrey eventually concludes that “the red home and eventually recruits him as a guinea upending his understanding of community by book is not a book at all. It is another mind. pig for an experiment in which the scientist investing it with new mythologies. It is not another mind in the benevolent sense. assumes diabolical control of the man’s move- In this story and others, Alexis refutes Earle It is another mind like a virus. What I mean ments. Watching from afar as his body treks Birney’s claim, in his 1960s poem “Can. Lit.,” is: if I were foolish enough to read the red book, around Ottawa, the narrator experiences a gulf that our country lacks a sense of historicity: I would become the mind within it.” From the between his consciousness and his flesh: “I have “It’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted.” sedateness of cubicle life and the surrealness of a tendency to speak of my (so-called) mind as Alexis’s ghosts of memory and reverie reanimate nightmares we are catapulted into the loftiness ‘I,’ but that’s not exactly what I felt. My body contemporary Canadian experience. Their haunt- of the seminar room, there to debate the rela- was ‘I’ as well. The constant unfolding of images, ings invest that experience with tales from distant tionship of author to reader and text to mind. words, and desires that I take to be conscious- places and cultures, unsettling it. (The collec- ◆ ness was, for the first few days, bifurcate.” tion’s interlocutors include Maupassant, Fuentes, TO THE NIGHT PIECE’S CREDIT, THE PHILOSOPHIZ- Not every story traffics in the fantastic, gothic, and James, too.) Brainy, horrifying, and inter- ing arises from the plot organically and unobtru- and grotesque. “Kuala Lumpur” poignantly nationalist in scope, The Night Piece exemplifies sively, enriching rather than overwhelming it. It’s relates a bereaved son’s struggles during his the Canadian unhomely in the best of ways. a literary skill that Alexis, best known for Fifteen father’s wake as it descends into pandemon- Domesticating the foreign, it renders newly for- Dogs, winner of the 2015 , has been ium. One of The Night Piece’s most memorable eign the domestic.

MARCH 2021 35 BACKSTORY

Trash Talk

HEN I WAS YOUNG AND STILL my generation once focused our anxieties on living at home, I would holes in the ozone layer, deforestation, and sometimes walk with my nuclear fallout, we now talk about global warm- mother around our sub- ing, biodiversity loss, carbon emissions, oceans urban neighbourhood near filled with more plastics than fish, and the WOttawa. During the week, she timed her walks to millions who must eke out a living by pick- start after the letter carrier had already made his ing through the colossal garbage dumps of the rounds. As she went, my mother would pick up world’s privileged. More and more people are the dozens of elastic bands that he often casually aware of our environmental problems; reusing discarded on the road. When we returned home, is not just for eccentric mothers anymore. Most she would sit at the kitchen table and cut these municipalities across Canada have recycling pro- thick loops of rubber lengthwise — in order to grams, and studies show that about 30 percent double their number — and then put them in of Canadians regularly use the blue bin. Yet our a kitchen drawer, beside boxes that contained waste problems are only getting worse. twist-ties, bread clips, pens and pencils, as well I wanted to write a book that would help as small pieces of paper, saved from used envel- lift the veil on Canada’s staggering — indeed, opes, that she repurposed for making lists. When world- leading — waste generation, and what I asked her why she did all this, she would reply we can do about it. Canada produces nearly simply: “Waste not, want not.” 1.3 billion tonnes of solid waste annually, which This was in the 1980s, a decade of hyper- includes everything from mine tailings and live- consumerism, bigger is better, and seemingly stock manure to 777 kilograms of garbage per limitless supplies of energy. My father made a person (compared with the OECD average of stable wage, and my mother’s behaviour, I am 610 k ilograms). With only 9 percent of our plas- ashamed to say, embarrassed me. Why couldn’t tics actually being recycled, most of our refuse she be like other moms, who bought new ends up in domestic landfills or is sent abroad clothes rather than shopping at Value Village, to be openly dumped, landfilled, or incinerated. who drove far more comfortable luxury cars, As I researched and studied the problem — in who filled their kids’ lunch boxes with dispos- Alberta and British Columbia, in Ontario, Nova able drink containers, ready- made sandwiches, Scotia, and Nunavut — I often thought back to and Del Monte pudding cups that my friends my mother’s frugality, her fine-tuned skills of tossed in the garbage? These were women who making do with what she had. And I would wish went to the salon instead of cutting their own that I had paid more attention back then. hair and who generally lived what appeared to Today, I am trying to catch up with what my be a carefree, illimitable lifestyle. mother knew decades ago, to teach my own chil- My parents were older than my friends’ par- dren how to repair and fix, scrounge and save, ents and had grown up in Britain during the and be happy with less. My two teenagers, far Second World War. Both came from impover- more politically and ecologically conscious than ished families and had experienced relentless I was at their age, wonder how my generation, in and debilitating food insecurity. It wasn’t until I particular, allowed the earth to become a dump- was considerably older — and had learned more ing ground. My shame and my determination about the war, the decade of postwar rationing, to take responsibility and to leave them with a and the trauma of sustained precarious liv- livable planet press upon me. So, yes, they too ing — that I began to appreciate my mother’s know about elastic bands. In our kitchen, we idiosyncrasies as something far more valuable. have large balls of them, recovered on walks Some forty years later, I see things very differ- they take with me after our letter carrier makes ently than I did as a self-c entred teen. Whereas her rounds.

Myra J. Hird is the author of Canada’s Waste Flows.

36 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA Spring Reads

Canada’s Fluid Borders Borders, Culture, and Canada’s Storytellers Canada’s Best Trade, Invesment, Travel, Migration Globalization The GG Literary Award Laureates An Anthology Edited by: Geoffrey Hale, Greg A Canadian Perspective Edited by Andrew David Irvine Edited by Andrew David Irvine Anderson Victor Konrad, Melissa Kelly Hardback ISBN | 9780776628035 Hardback ISBN | 9780776627830 Print ISBN | 9780776629360 Print ISBN | 9780776636733

Thomas Mackay Cultural Policy The Laird of Rideau Hall and the Founding Origins, Evolution, and Implementation in of Ottawa Canada’s Provinces and Territories

Alastair Sweeny Edited by Diane Saint-Pierre and Print ISBN | 9780776636788 Monica Gattinger Print ISBN | 9780776628950 Discover the first, long overdue biography of Thomas Mackay, a major How do Canadian provincial and promoter of Ottawa as the capital of territorial governments intervene in Canada. Born and raised in Perth, the cultural and artistic lives of their Scotland, Mackay emigrated with citizens? What changes and influences his family to Montreal in 1817. Years shaped the origin of these policies later, he would end up being one of and their implementation? On what the greatest builder of his time, builing foundations were policies based, and on the Ottawa and Hartwell Locks of the what foundations are they based today? Rideau Canal, founding New Edinburgh This book answers these fundamental and the Rideau Falls mill complex, questions and many others, by building Rideau Hall, and financing the offering a comprehensive history Ottawa and Prescott Railway. of subnational cultural policies, including the institutionalization and instrumentalization of culture by provincial and territorial governments.

1968 in Canada Audio Books A Year and Its Legacies Edited by Michael Hawes, Andrew C. Holman, and Christopher Kirley Print ISBN | 9780776636597

Chairing Successful Meetings Lespérance Code Michel Lespérance Print ISBN | 9780776636832 Audio ISBN | Audio ISBN | 9780776628691 9780776628684

www.Press.uOttawa.ca Facebook.com/uOttawaPress Twitter.com/uOttawaPress