‘Tiny anarchic guerrillas’ PAGE 11

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pasha malla That’s Not Funny! CanLit’s humour deficit

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and introducing Columnist Andy Lamey on sex, power, and #MeToo

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Editor In Chief 3 A Little Sincerity 20 Delirious in the Pink House Sarmishta Subramanian Letter from the editor A poem [email protected] Sarmishta Subramanian John Wall Barger Assistant Editor Bardia Sinaee 4 The Art of Unsettling 21 Sisterhood of the Secret Pantaloons Associate editor Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in Suffragists and their descendants Beth Haddon ­conversation with Dionne Brand One Hundred Years of Struggle by Joan Sangster Poetry Editor and Just Watch Us by Christabelle Sethna and Moira MacDougall 6 Ecclesiasticus XXII Steve Hewitt copy editor A poem Susan Whitney Patricia Treble George Elliott Clarke Contributing EditorS 23 The Americanization of Oscar Mohamed Huque, Andy Lamey, Molly 8 The Other Side of ‘Irish Eyes’ The early days of a modern celebrity Peacock, Robin Roger, Judy Stoffman Brian Mulroney abroad and at home Making Oscar Wilde by Michèle Mendelssohn ProofReaders Master of Persuasion by Fen Osler Hampson Gregory Mackie Suzanne Mantha, Heather Schultz, and En première ligne by Luc Lavoie Tyler Willis Martin Patriquin 25 Scenes from a Marriage art director Rachel Tennenhouse One woman’s life in Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia 9 Oriental Orientations (1): Yijing The Wife’s Tale by Aida Edemariam ADVERTISING/SALES A poem Michael Wile Donna Bailey Nurse [email protected] Yuan Changming business manager 28 The Oil Stays in the Picture Paul McCuaig 11 ‘Tiny Anarchic Guerrillas’ The tar sands, and a war of images The child as organizational colleague and Board of Directors Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life Tom Kierans, O.C., Don McCutchan, funhouse mirror by Matt Hern and Am Johal and The Beast Trina McQueen, O.C., Jaime Watt Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a by Hugh Goldring and Nicole Marie Burton corporate secretary New Social Contract by Darren O’Donnell and Brian Jacobson Vali Bennett The Design of Childhood by Alexandra Lange Advisory Council Ian Garrick Mason 30 Letters Michael Adams, Alan Broadbent, C.M., Simona Chiose, Emmett Macfarlane, Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald 14 Pardon My Parka, or Ira Wells, Rev. Robert Cooke, Michael Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Grant Reuber, Humorous Canadian Initiatives Kehler, Lori Turnbull O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard Schiff CanLit’s comedy problem Poetry Submissions Pasha Malla 32 Sex versus Power For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. Is the male libido really to blame for #MeToo? LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK 17 The Mother as Spider A column Founded in 1991 by P.A. Dutil Being a woman and an artist in the world Andy Lamey The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Kudos by Rachel Cusk Review of Canada Charitable Organization. Kate Taylor annual subscription rates Individuals in Canada $56/year plus GST/HST. (Libraries and institutions in Canada $68/year plus 19 An Iconoclast Protests GST/HST.) Outside Canada, please pay $86/year for A parable of modern scapegoating individuals, or $98 for libraries and institutions. Mary Cyr by David Adams Richards Subscriptions and Circulation Mark Fried Literary Review of Canada P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto ON M4P 2G1 [email protected] 416-932-5081 • reviewcanada.ca ©2018 The Literary Review of Canada. All rights, Poems in this issue are inspired by the theme of ‘East.’ including translation into other languages, are reserved by the publisher in Canada, the United States, Great Britain 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 repro- Illustrations by Meaghan Way. Meaghan Way is an illustrator based in Toronto. She loves architecture, duced without the written permission of the publisher. sculpture, set design, bold colours, and layered textures. Her work has been recognized by the Society of ISSN 1188-7494 Illustrators, 3×3, and Applied Arts; her clients include Vice, Samsung, Frank + Oak, Canon, and Droga5. The Literary Review of Canada is indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the Canadian Index and is distributed by Disticor and Magazines Canada. From time to time, the LRC may allow carefully selected organizations to send mail to subscribers, offering products or services that may be of interest. If you do not wish to receive such correspondence, please contact our Subscriber Service department at [email protected], or call 416-932-5081, or mail P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto ON M4P 2G1.

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2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada A Little Sincerity

mong my more vivid memories of my editor here, and for a few glorious months before as vice chair, and backing up the board is a commit- nerdish preteen years in the city then the LRC was sold to Carleton University Press, ted and accomplished team of volunteer advisors. Acalled Madras is of reading Oscar Wilde he and fellow editor Jeet Heer (now at The New A search for a new publisher is in full swing, and we plays aloud with my mother. We read under Republic) worked with the editor in chief, Patrice will approach the next phase with a vision to grow fluorescent tube light in a house surrounded on Dutil, also the LRC’s founder. the LRC, and the expertise to achieve it. three sides by sand and the Bay of Bengal, from a The magazine couldn’t afford an office, so they On the editorial side, tumult has not kept us hardbound volume that now sits on her bookcase met at a coffee shop, and Lamey edited at his from charging ahead with a reinvigoration of the in Toronto. I knew nothing of Wilde’s tribulations mother’s apartment on an ancient Mac that used magazine. Articles published in the LRC won a gold then, or even that he was gay. I had only words on floppy disks. He recalls one memorable experi- and an honourable mention (Stephen Marche’s a page, mordantly funny and sharp. We chortled ence where he cut all the footnotes out of a long “Northern Shadows” and Ira Wells’s “The Age of our way through The Importance of Being Earnest, article that was actually about footnotes and how Offence”) for Best Essay at the National Magazine then Lady Windermere’s Fan, then A Woman of extremely important they are (to the author’s great Awards last month. A new focus on the visual No Importance, each playing a fleet of droll, witty displeasure). In the intervening years he worked at side in 2018 culminates in the appointment this characters. The New Republic and the National Post; published month of Rachel Tennenhouse as art director—the Life bobs along on unseen currents, and many a prescient book on the global refugee crisis (2011’s magazine’s first. A staff and freelance designer for years later, when I made a documentary for CBC Frontier Justice); and settled into a job as a professor Toronto Life, The Walrus, Chatelaine, Maclean’s, Radio’s The Sunday Edition about my mother’s of philosophy at the University of California at San the National Music Centre in Calgary, et al., Rachel mother—in brief: married at ten, a mother at fif- Diego. But he did not forget his early intellectual brings a wealth of talent and experience, and with teen (and then again, five more times), she issued preoccupations any more than I apparently did degrees in architecture and digital arts, an enthusi- a “declaration of independence” from her husband mine, and he returns to the LRC, bringing his char- asm for ideas that makes her a wonderful partner at forty, got her master’s degree at seventy-seven, acteristic wit and perspicacity to a broad range of in this enterprise. She joins our assistant editor, and become a celebrated author at seventy-nine— political and cultural subjects each month. Bardia Sinaee, an accomplished poet and writer, I called it “A Woman of No Consequence.” I was Penury is another motif we could mention here, and our copy editor, the formidable Patricia Treble, quoting my grandmother’s eye-rolling, faux-­ and while the magazine’s fortunes have shifted formerly head of research at Maclean’s (and, in her humble description of herself, with a nod to Wilde. since Lamey’s early days, the path of progress other life, an in-demand authority on the mon- While editing this issue of the LRC I found is seldom linear. In the not so distant past the archy), on a small but ferocious editorial team. And myself musing about strange, unobserved motifs— LRC’s future was, again, more than a little tenu- there is the aforementioned columnist—who, I had let’s call them life’s little Easter eggs, after those ous: we saw a financial crisis last fall that left us better break it to you, now claims the back page of unexpected features that programmers slip into in dire straits, and the departure of our publisher, the magazine. The Letters page moves to page 30. DVDs and video games. This magazine contains designer, copy editor, and managing editor—two- Maps are available on request. Gregory Mackie’s delightful review of a new Oscar thirds of the staff. It was a difficult time with a few Speaking of finding things, one last word on Wilde biography by a Canadian scholar at Oxford, bright moments: a fundraising party graciously those Easter eggs. We spot them in the magazine as well as a review by the brilliant Donna Bailey hosted by the political columnist Paul Wells and often, small echoes and resonances that come out Nurse of The Wife’s Tale—a story told by a grand- lobbyist Lisa Samson in their Ottawa home; a lively of nowhere—the word harridan, which appeared, daughter, the journalist Aida Edemariam, of a event in Toronto featuring the historian Margaret implausibly, in two stories in the April issue; or grandmother who, it turns out, was married at eight MacMillan, hosted by our board chair, Jaime Hannah Arendt, who elbowed her way into a string and became a mother at fourteen (and then many Watt. (Stay tuned for details on this year’s event of pieces over a couple of issues. We’ve decided to times over), and who likewise issued a declaration in November, featuring a literary super-luminary.) celebrate rather than scratch our heads over these of sorts to her husband. Nine months later, the LRC has emerged the literary stowaways. Write to us or email editor@ Another recurring motif, one that bears further stronger for all the change, and that is thanks in reviewcanada.ca with a list of the motifs you explanation: This issue marks the debut of a new large part to you, our engaged and loyal commun- spot in this issue—the more obscure the better—­ column by longtime LRC contributor Andy Lamey. ity of readers and supporters. Longtime donors and include your postal address. We’ll mail the Readers of recent issues will remember Lamey’s have come to our aid along with a host of new respondent who can uncover the most Easter eggs a masterful appraisal of David Frum, or his enter- supporters, including many writers, who humbled small prize. And we’ll take a cue from Wilde, as well taining and erudite critical profile of John Metcalf us by giving financially on top of already contribut- as from this month’s cover story by Pasha Malla, last year. But Lamey’s history with the magazine ing their excellent work. New funders, such as the when judging: Humour as much as close reading goes much further back. He contributed his first Donner Canadian Foundation, joined our long- will be rewarded! article, on multiculturalism, in December 1995— standing grantors, who’ve worked patiently with us indeed the first freelance piece he ever published, through the transitions. We owe them all, and you, for a fee that certainly did not overinflate his bank a debt of gratitude. We are paying it through action. Sarmishta Subramanian account (zilch). In 1996 he became managing The redoubtable Tom Kierans has joined our board Editor in chief

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 3 interview The Art of Unsettling Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in conversation with Dionne Brand

ecolonization, and the role of art and the imagin- D ation in this liberatory enterprise, is at the heart of As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press), a book published late last year by the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, artist, and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. That idea is also at the centre of this conversation between Simpson and the celebrated poet, novelist, and critic Dionne Brand, whose writings explore the politics of race and resistance. Simpson, a member of Alderville First Nation, is the author of the short-story collections Islands of Decolonial Love and This Accident of Being Lost, a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2017. Brand’s works include Ossuaries, Artistic practice as resistance and world building. Land to Light On, What We All Long Still from animated film by Amanda Strong, Flood (2017), From the CBC Arts series Keep Calm and Decolonize. courtesy CBC. For, and the non-fiction work A Map to the Door of No Return. Anti-colonial organizing and struggle has always that was not edited or massaged to make it palat- Simpson and Brand spoke in Toronto last month. been a part of my adult life, and I always learn able to white people in order to sell more books. Their conversation was moderated by Idil Abdillahi, so much from the act of refusing and then build- I’ve been lucky to find independent publishers assistant professor in Ryerson University’s school ing something different. That’s a rich, generative, that support that vision. Of course this has set my of social work, and a longtime activist. This is an theoretical and artistic space for me. In Nishnaabeg career on a very particular trajectory that I didn’t edited transcript. thought, there is a sort of unfolding that is import- realize at the time. When I meet new publishers ant. Our intellectual practices are embodied and they will often say, “We know, we read that you Dionne Brand: Your book As We Have Always are animated through our relationships with the write for an Nishnaabeg audience, but would you Done seems to me a kind of manifesto. When I got to commune of life. I wanted that unfolding to be part be willing to write for a white audience? We could the end, and you talked about Idle No More, which of the book, and for me to be in conversations with reach a wider audience.” you were a great part of, I realized these are some that commune of life and with others who are doing Brand: What would that possibly look like? of the things you had learned or thought through, this work. I wanted the book to be a conversation Simpson: I’ve never even thought about it, or come to know as a result of being engaged with more than an authority. I wanted people to come because…white people are welcome to read my Idle No More. So I read the book as a kind of call out of the book with different perspectives than work. My work asks that they would have to read my to arms, in a sense, and a manifesto for unsettling, they went into the book with and to be able to find work from a position of not being centered in it, and or keeping unsettling going. It is also an analysis of meaning in the context of their own trajectory, but I think that is really, really, important. struggle, I thought: of anti-colonial organizing, and to have sort of a collectivity to it as well. Brand: Seriously, and that would look like…? your role in it, and what you learned. You also do a Brand: You say in the work, “I write for my Simpson: “Wider audience” is code for white comprehensive analysis of the various institutions people.” And I just wanted you to expand on that. audience, which is code for less angry, less political, that are involved in past and ongoing colonization, Your audience. more palatable. It means paying attention to the such as the church, and other pedagogical systems, Simpson: I do. I write for my people, as an act experience of a white person reading my work with like colonial literature. Am I right? of love and resistance and because until relatively very little knowledge of the Indigenous. It means Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: Yes. Indigenous recently, very few people were able to do so. I privileging the experience of a white person read- Peoples have been in engaged in anti-colonial grew up a disappointed reader because I never ing my work over Indigenous readers. Making sure organizing long before Idle No More. The com- saw myself in the books I was reading—none of that I’m making my point without offence. Paying munities you and I come from have been resisting the books were written for me. I made a decision attention to tone. Having a glossary so “everyone” and mobilizing for as long as we have been facing early on in my career to speak first to a Nishnaabeg can understand the Nishnaabeg words. Removing domination. I was a young adult during the so- audience, as a way of not centering whiteness. I am insider knowledge and layered meanings. Being called “Oka crisis,” and watching the mobilization not writing to educate white folks. That’s not what concerned with such things produces different at Kahnawà:ke and Kanehsatà:ke was in many motivates me. I want to interact with my audience work. It limits the stories you can tell and the way ways the beginning of my political awakening. on my own terms. In a way that was truthful and you tell them. It limits the worlds you can build.

4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada I’ve always been drawn to writers that reject this obscure what has been lived. America—that body was first captured for labour premise. I like reading books where Indigenous Simpson: Liberation. That’s what I’m writing in the colonial project and now is beaten, dragged, lives and worlds are affirmed. Where we are not towards. The monster has arrived, and the monster shot, or imprisoned as a sign of its non-nation victims or feeding victim narratives. Where we open was always here. I believe I have a responsibility status—of the impossibility of its ever being folded up worlds, not close them down. to this most honest, naked truth, and to as you so into nation and a sign of its continual possession. Brand: I think the book speaks to how to remain beautifully say reject “liberal democratic language So I find that interesting. constantly vigilant to the ways in which colonialism to obscure what has been lived.” Simpson: The liberation of Black people’s bod- is an active organizing system. It’s alive all the time, Brand: Certainly we have to be alert to the threat ies and Indigenous People’s bodies is, as Robyn continually making and remaking itself through or the enactment of violence. Maynard says, “an interlocking justice project” its apparatus of governance. In a sense, it is at Simpson: Yes, because we know it will play out because of this, although our experiences and per- work daily through the most mundane exchanges. on those of us with the least resources to survive spectives are different. This erasure, disappearing, People say or hear “colonialism,” and they think it. In times like this, we need to also build and outright killing is a continual, relentless process that was in a certain period of a certain system, but maintain scaffoldings of care for our communities. and it plays out differently in each community. they don’t see it as an ongoing act. Colonial violence is always asymmetric. I think it is It is important for me to continually and critic- Simpson: For Indigenous Peoples, colonialism important then to build mechanisms into our anti- ally think through visibility in this context. There is a system, a process, an ongoing act that is very colonial organizing to make sure we are taking care is a gendered asymmetry to the disappearance of much alive in 2018. It is the defining relationship of our communities, acting in solidarity with other Indigenous bodies, and there are a large number of between Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian communities of resistance, and not just refusing ways that being Nishnaabeg is not okay, and makes state. It controls all aspects of Indigenous life. It is the violence of the colonial world, but relentlessly one a target. There are benefits to performing a cer- a system of laws and policies that are designed to building liberation out of whatever we have. tain kind of Indigeneity particularly in the shadow maintain the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples Brand: The clarity in your text is stunning of state reconciliation. There are certain kinds from our homelands, from our cultures, lan- when you talk about how Indigenous bodies of Indigeneity that are acceptable in the context of guages, knowledge, and even our own bodies. In are observed, and the role that the Indigenous liberal multiculturalism. the Trudeau era of reconciliation, there have been body plays in the colonial project, where it is Brand: Right, having to perform a certain kind superficial signals and promises of a different rela- located, how it is seen, and what its uses are. You of Indigeneity. tionship in the form of inclusion and recognition— write and I quote, “…it is these bodies that must Simpson: And so what happens when you write land acknowledgements, smudging, and traditional be eradicated—disappeared and erased into books that I think are perhaps opaque, but then dancers participating in government functions, and Canadian society, outright murdered, or damaged they are getting recognized for book awards? That minor changes in insignificant policy. We must to the point where we can no longer reproduce makes me think that maybe I’ve made a mistake…. remain vigilant, though, because the structural Indigeneity.” Can you reiterate that? Brand: That’s the paradox… changes are not happening. The system of colonial- Simpson: Well, I was thinking a lot about bodies Simpson: …and so for me there is a continual ism is becoming even more embedded and obfus- and land and space and time. I wanted there to be negotiation and a continual refusal and a continual cated. The majority of the book was written in this no way you could come out of this book thinking that reinsertion of me into this. Whiteness erases it, and moment of time of Harper leaving office, Trudeau when I say the word “nation,” or “Indigenous nation,” we reinsert it. Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson and coming in, where I think we wanted to feel hope- that I mean “nation-state.” I was trying to think this Dene scholar Glen Coulthard’s work on recognition ful. It didn’t occur to me when I was writing that, through within Nishnaabeg ethics and philosophy and refusal was so influential in the formation of by the time the book was published, Trump would and I was thinking that if I am living in a deeply As We Have Always Done. be president. relational way, my body is a hub of networks cycling Brand: Yes. There is a certain dexterity, I’ve cer- Brand: Yes. The morning when we realized that through time and space and a very living, organic tainly learned, about living Black. About producing Trump was elected I thought, So the real monster mechanism that extends beyond my physicality. creative work that gets co-opted and that must be has arrived. The one we’ve been staving off and Land is very important to Indigenous Peoples, reconstituted all the time. I mean, you think about making concessions to. I thought of all the move- but we think of land quite differently from the col- Black music in particular, which is constantly being ments backward and forward, even just the last onizers. For us, land is not an enclosure that is pro- reconstituted, mainstreamed, and then of course thirty years—periods where people got satisfied tected by a border. Land is not a natural resource when the living conditions that art evinces haven’t with institutional recognitions, with the middle to exploit. Land is not a commodity. It is a particu- changed, one must always make more imaginaries classing of everything, with liberal democracy’s lar space full of relationality to which we form very for one to live in. Art is often reproduced as belong- piecemeal agreements to give you this right and deep attachments over very long periods of time. ing somehow to the national, to the nation-state, that right. I talk about it in my forthcoming book Nation-states need to remove Indigenous bodies if you will. But artists such as you and I have to The Blue Clerk: you are given a right to one hand from land in order to commodify land and exploit constantly undo that. You are living the undoing of and one foot but the whole body’s integrity is dis- natural resources. This process of expansive dis- it and constantly have to produce against it. So it is allowed. Some of those compromises were people possession has a very long history in Canada. Two a real paradox, what becomes of one’s work. You are trying to save themselves—I’m going to be gener- Spirit and Queer people’s bodies were targeted a multi-genre artist, and a beautiful artist at that, ous and compassionate around that. So all of our and disappeared first. And then women who did I should say. And so I am interested to know how efforts in the last thirty years or so were to hold not conform to Victorian principles of woman- and why you work your art and your poetry and the monster back, in full recognition of what the hood—because women are sites of world build- your music in the ways that you do. monster could do, which was to kill us all com- ing and we replicate Indigeneity. This expansive Simpson: I got interested in performance pletely. We constantly make concessions to white dispossession is evidenced today by the thousands because I like the work of embodied practice and supremacy by yes, accepting remediation instead of MMIWG2S. If you have a world where relation- because I like making things. I’m drawn to the of liberation. Concessions to, and characterizations ships and process are paramount, land and bod- world building and visioning capabilities of artistic by the state instead of the demand for our full lives. ies become so very connected in relation to both practice. Historically Indigenous and Black artists You write in your book that the characteriza- space and time. have been visionaries in our struggles and move- tion of the effects of colonialism as “social ills” is a Brand: You also talk about colonialism having to ments. They have also affirmed our presence—­ failure to see that “the politics of land and body dis- make Indigenous bodies disappear, either in a kind created temporary spaces of joy and freedom, and possession serves only to reinforce settler colonial- of mist of history, or in assimilation, because that enabled me to go on. In the academy I think about ism, because it doesn’t stop the system that causes body has to disappear in order for the Canadian things, and lecture about things, but in perform- the harm in the first place while also creating the state to possess the land. There has to be nobody ance I can set up space together with an audience opportunity for neoliberalism to benevolently pro- living there in order for the land to be legitimately to share something different. I really liked creating vide just enough ill-conceived programming and claimed. But of course, Indigenous Peoples are these islands of freedom, little glimpses of freedom ‘funding’ to keep us in a constant state of crisis, alive. And continue to be alive. Yet the colonial where we stand together and we get to feel, just for which inevitably they market as our fault.” And mythmaking is in constant operation of disap- a second maybe, what freedom might be like, and to so many have yielded to these characterizations pearing those bodies—Indigenous bodies and also get that feeling into our bones. These spaces open in the false or misguided hopes that somehow Black bodies. And it makes symbolic these sets of up different possibilities. These spaces are not just this monster will back up, and yet a most honest, bodies for its possession of these Americas, if you spaces of refusal, they are also generative. They are utterly naked manifestation of the monstrous has will. In the case of Black bodies we see the spectre, also spaces of joy and possibility. I love how Ashon appeared. No more liberal democratic language to the emergency of police shootings all across North Crawley writes about the importance of joy.

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 5 Brand: So you are saying that these various ­practices open up different spaces for a kind of com- munal understanding or different angles to under- Ecclesiasticus XXII standing. When you think of this academic work, As We Have Always Done, whom does it speak to? 1. Lassitude = wallowing in shit. Simpson: I think my intention was to “think You stink, and all flee from your disgusting estate— through with,” not “speak to.” My ancestors worked just as finches flee a falcon. and worked and worked and worked. They got up every day and made things. They made their pol- 2. Gossip is as uncouth as a wedding march itical system and their healthcare system and their at a funeral. education system, their transportation networks, their clothes and their food. They were constantly

engaged in creating, and through those individual 3. As quickly as they are overheard, and apprehended, and collective embodied processes, generated backbiters’ asses must be whipped raw. thought, ethics, theory. I’m interested in living in a different world. I’m interested in building a dif- 4. Why not? ferent world. They are cancerous kooks, hazardous cranks; Brand: For me it is about the commitment to a rictus—a frozen grin—severs each face. art as liberation and the miracle of shapes to com- municate. I am not this singular writer distinct from 5. Mourn the dead, but not fools: community. I have obligations to a “freedom to Everyone must die, but fools choose Idiocy. come,” as Rinaldo Walcott calls it. I think of writing as an obligation to that. A pleasure, certainly, but a 6. Mourn the dead for seven days: Yes. willing obligation to a future world, or to imagining a future world, so I will use all the tools at my dis- But fools should mourn their birthdays— posal, at least all the ones I love. every day that they breathe. Simpson: Yes, that is a beautiful, brilliant way that Rinaldo Walcott frames it. For me, that respon- 7. They weep so they can sup on their tears. sibility to “freedom to come” means that we have to build alternatives in the present because it is 8. Fools think Wisdom a frill, our actions now that give birth to that future. The mere wit, and as esoteric, not essential. present, our presence, is interesting to me because each moment is a collapsing of the past and the 9. Picket fences can’t hold back a flood; future. The present, our presence, is our power. In nor can a fool stand against Trouble. my territory, I also have a responsibility to support “freedom to come” for the Black community. I have 10. Fools are like turrets torn down, a responsibility to act in solidarity, to share land and space, and to respect the sovereignty and self- towers tumbled after. determination of this community as well.

Brand: Talk about the Radical Resurgence 11. Or like dummies—Zombies—become dominoes, project.­ zilch, a posse of zeroes. Simpson: Well, it used to be just the resur- gence project, a political idea that the way out of 12. Pillows can’t stand in for pillars, eh? colonialism would be for us to, individually and then collectively, think within our own ethics and 13. Earthquakes don’t crumble well-built homes; processes and do that world building without Crises don’t unbalance the wise. seeking the recognition of the colonizer. That was always very attractive and appealing to me. There 14. The tongues of the wise are sword blades. are important things, though, to think through. It Their tongues are like glittering steel is crucial to me to place women and Two Spirit and Queer Indigenous People at the centre of emerging from gold-studded sheathes. our movements as a mechanism for reclaiming consent, body sovereignty, a spectrum of genders 15. Spurn a friend? and sexual orientations, individual and collective That’s as nasty as throwing stones at birds. self-determination, and empathy. It is critical we think through solidarity and materially contribute 16. To critique a friend is Etiquette; to abolition and the undoing of anti-Blackness. It is to slander a friend is Treachery. important that we do not allow resurgence to be co- opted and deradicalized. It is okay to be radical. We [Woodstock (New Brunswick) 2 mai mmxvii] need to be radical. It is the only ethical response. Brand: You’re suggesting a constant thinking and rethinking since colonialism is, in effect, corporate- ism and capitalism now—it morphs very quickly. It absorbs radical concerns by taking the edge off. But it is moving on in that same shape; it simply has George Elliott Clarke integrated some of your claims into its shape with- out fundamental change. And we, I’m using “we” here broadly to speak of all people who are affected George Elliott Clarke, OC, ONS, FRCGS, PhD, LLD, etc., hails from Nova Scotia, is Africadian, by it, have to be as agile. Because it keeps moving, Afro-Métis, and is currently at work on an epic trilogy, of which Canticles I (Guernica), in holding our bodies in the same situation. 2 volumes, is the first instance. Once the poet laureate of Toronto (2012-2015) and then So it is a tricky, tricky thing. But talk some more parliamentary poet laureate (2016-2017), Clarke is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian about the difference between cultural resurgence Literature at the University of Toronto. and political resurgence, because that is interest- ing to me. In Black communities there are cultural nationalists, capitalist nationalists, left radicals,

6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada LGBT and feminist revolutionaries, so many and to recognize their self-determination and in my body, to re-inhabit my own sovereignty. To get strands of politics, and these categories are not nationhood and our responsibilities to them. Doug comfortable in my own bones and own skins and to always discrete, all attendant on opposing racism Williams, an Elder from Curve Lake First Nation, speak my truth in a clear and strong hearted way. but with differing strategies. taught me how to do this. It is not meant to be empty Brand: I saw her do a piece at Nuit Blanche in Simpson: Some forms of resurgence—let’s say words. It is an ethical and political intention meant 2009, Gone Indian it was called, so powerful. Just language learning, or learning a cultural practice for continual follow-up. It is a very particular way of amazing.­ (both crucial forms of resurgence) are more palat- living. When I am in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), I think Simpson: I feel free in ceremony, and I feel free able to whiteness and the state than returning land, of the 450 years of resistance from Kanehsatà:ke watching her performances. This is where I first felt or building an economic system that rejects capital- and Kahnawà:ke. I think of my nation’s relation- like someone had my back. Alexis Pauline Gumbs ism. I’m not particularly interested in reclamation ship to Kanien’kehaka (Mohawks). I think of Ellen and her work M Archive is another work that or Indigenizing things. Resurgence for me is an Gabriel. I think of writers and academics like Audra influences me right now. The way that she “thinks undoing of the settler state. When I start to hear Simpson and the Kanien’kehaka whose attachment through together,” the way that she thinks with presidents of universities and mayors use the term to that place is so deep. A few weeks ago, Robyn ancestors, the way that she is detonating all the dif- “resurgence,” then I know that we’re not talking Maynard had a public conversation in Montreal. ferent kinds of genres in her work. It broadens me about the same thing anymore. We both started with an acknowledgement—I did and makes me see other possibilities. I have a lot Brand: Absolutely not. Then you have to change mine according to my political practices and in of admiration for Lido Pimienta. We were on tour the word entirely. my language. At the beginning of Robyn’s talk, she together for New Constellations. She is amazing on Simpson: Yes. called into the room a series of Black people who stage, but what really spoke to my heart was the way Brand: I am disturbed sometimes by the glib had been killed through anti-Black violence in the she interacted with Indigenous youth in workshop language of land acknowledgement at public city of Montreal. settings. We were on a reserve and she was in a events. The acknowledgement must be spoken, of So yes. The language should be more radical. songwriting workshop with a small group of young course. But there is a packaging of it, if you will, in It should lead to action. It should lead to a further Indigenous women. She brought them on stage to the language of “sharing” as if the audience is being unsettling and decolonizing. It should not be an perform with her that night. Seeing how important forgiven instead of notified. It resembles a consum- obligatory ritual designed to exonerate those in the it was to them, and to their community was just an able item for the audience, and a consumable item room from colonialism. incredible thing to witness. I have a lot of admira- for history. It is not sufficient, the language of it Brand: Tell me of other artists, painters, writers, tion for my sisters and my kids. And of course, as a should be much more radical, actually, it should musicians, that are doing work that you admire. writer, Dionne Brand. lead to action not mere obligatory ritual. Simpson: Rebecca Belmore is someone that has Brand: Really? Are you kidding me? Please talk about truth and reconciliation. You a pretty big influence on me. She comes into space Simpson: No, I am not kidding. Of course. Your talk about it here…well, you talk about it every- with her head held high, grounded, unapologetic. gorgeous body of work and your practice has where. Maybe I should frame it like this: what are She commands the space around her. always been a beacon. You are doing things dif- the pitfalls of that? Brand: Fierce. ferently, unapologetically, politically, in a bunch Simpson: Part of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Simpson: Fierce. Her work has been so influential of different genres, and that gave me the idea that political practices is to acknowledge the peoples and generative for me. Her work forced me back into it was even possible. You are brilliant. I am (after whose homeland we are visiting, as a mechanism my body. As a writer and an academic it is easy to Christina Sharpe’s work) so very lucky to be writing of affirmation, diplomacy, relationship building just live in your head. Belmore challenged me to be in your wake.

Tolstaya’s story takes us from her childhood through the Tolstoy and Tolstaya’s legacy is still regarded as one of early years of her marriage, the writing of War and Peace the greatest contributions to Russian history and world and Anna Karenina and into the first year of the twentieth literature, while their day-to-day life has been recorded century. She paints an intimate and honest portrait of through their correspondence. This volume presents Tolstoy’s character, his qualities and failings as a husband the last 239 letters plus 11 hitherto unpublished letters and a father, and forms a picture of the quintessential between the spouses, painting a remarkable portrait of Tolstoyan character which underlies his fiction. their life and times. Cloth · 978-0-7766-3042-7 · 1250 pages · $89.95 Cloth · 978-0-7766-2471-6 · 510 pages · $54.95 www.Press.uOttawa.cawww.Press.uOttawa.ca Facebook.com/uOttawaPress Facebook.com/uOttawaPress Twitter.com/uOttawaPress Twitter.com/uOttawaPress

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June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 7 The Other Side of ‘Irish Eyes’ Brian Mulroney abroad and at home Martin Patriquin

Master of Persuasion: Brian Mulroney’s Global Legacy Fen Osler Hampson Signal 288 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780771039072

En première ligne: Le parcours atypique d’un communicateur Luc Lavoie Les Éditions de l’Homme 328 pages, softcover ISBN 9782761949699

here are several types of political biographies. One serves to shower praise T and burnish legacies once the politician in question has been put to pasture. Jean Chrétien has been the subject of more than one of these There have been many books on Mulroney, but few examining his foreign-policy record. tomes, Bob Plamondon’s The Shawinigan Fox being Photograph taken at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, by U.S. Department of Defense (Lynch, 1984) only the most recent. As Lawrence Martin did in his Courtesy Wikimedia Commons mostly flattering take of Jean Chrétien’s life, Iron Man, Plamondon in his book revels in how the U.S. ­president facilitated the collapse of the Western Canada’s political and journalistic establishment screw-faced little man from the Quebecois sticks world’s economy. in the 1980s. Weaned on the anti-American ten- fought expectations (not to mention separatists, Master of Persuasion, a look at the foreign policy dencies of Pierre Trudeau, this establishment saw Paul Martin, and Liberal party stalwarts) to become of former prime minister Brian Mulroney, betrays Canadian prime ministers as Asterix and Obelix prime minister. its type and intent in its first two sentences. At a tidy figures, feisty, indomitable men who stood as bul- Another type, usually written while the polit- 288 pages, the book, written by Fen Osler Hampson, warks against America’s hefty economic, cultural, ician is still active, exists to take stock and either a professor at Carleton University with a fine and military incursions. Mulroney’s chumminess quiet or amplify the noise made during his or her ­pedigree—his talents were honed at Harvard and with Ronald Reagan weakened this fortress; free tenure. Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, very much in the London School of Economics—nonetheless has trade with America destroyed it altogether. So the the latter category, presents Donald Trump exactly lofty aspirations. Not only does it set out to make establishment demonized Mulroney during his as you’d expect: monstrously insecure, easily the case that prime minister Mulroney’s foreign decade in office and all but ignored him afterwards. swayed, allergic to all truths—a beta man masquer- policy was the most ambitious and successful since It’s a simplistic argument, and one made with ading as an alpha male president. Lester Pearson’s—perhaps even more so, Hampson the blinkered enthusiasm of a diehard Mulroney In contrast, Paul Wells’s The Longer I’m Prime intones—it argues that Mulroney the diplomat is as partisan. But Hampson has a point. Mulroney’s Minister, published in what turned out to be crucial a figure today in this shambolic Trump era legacy has produced many scathing literary works, Stephen Harper’s last years in office, brought as he was during the good old days of the Gulf War almost all focusing on his Airbus-related overindul- nuance to our twenty-second prime minister’s and acid rain. gences. Some are worthy, like Stevie Cameron’s On tenure. Yes, Stephen Harper is a bit of a jerk. No, he “This book was written to fill a void: there is no the Take and Peter C. Newman’s The Secret Mulroney isn’t the hard-right religious and economic ideo- single-authored book on the global legacy of Brian Tapes. Others, like Marci McDonald’s Yankee Doodle logue presented to us by his opposition and a fair Mulroney,” Hampson writes in the preface. “This Dandy, marinate in useless anti-American hysteria. chunk of the Ottawa press corps. is more than an oversight given the many tomes Mulroney’s transgressions effectively blinded jour- A third type is written as reappreciation of a that have been written about the foreign policy nalists and historians to his foreign policy record; despised political figure. With Duplessis, Conrad achievements of Canada’s other post-war prime by focusing entirely on it in this downright friendly Black took a very respectable stab at the demon- ministers, especially Lester B. Pearson and Pierre work, Hampson seeks to re-imagine the much- ized Maurice Duplessis, making the case that Elliott Trudeau.” maligned eighteenth prime minister. Quebec actually flourished economically under He doesn’t come right out and say it, but Hampson has it easy. Mulroney’s foreign policy the (admittedly very large) thumb of the late pre- Hampson clearly believes that the oversight is is not a difficult record to defend or promote. His mier. In Hoover, Ken Whyte did much the same intentional and exists because of the ideological successes are many and undeniable—combatting for Herbert Hoover, punting aside the narrative, persuasions of most journalists and historians. acid rain, the push for an end to famine in Ethiopia, echoed by mainstream historical record, that the Conservative, conspicuously self-assured, and free trade with the U.S., and liberalized trade with (worst of all) fervently pro-American, Brian Asia—though tempered by Mulroney’s own human Martin Patriquin is a Montreal writer. Mulroney was a walking caricature to much of rights concerns in China following the Tiananmen

8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Square massacre. His loud anti-apartheid voice on the world stage helped put an end to the egregious South African regime. In most cases, Mulroney achieved all these Oriental Orientations (1): Yijing without the benefit of public opinion. As a point of comparison, Justin Trudeau rose to the top politic- could mean the book of change ally when it was safe, even necessary, to be pro- ‘runoff sperms,’ ‘already,’ or ‘as environment and smugly progressive. Mulroney soon as’ in Mandarin sounds, but railed against apartheid when other politicians were here it refers to creative conception paying lip service to its horrors (as Pierre Trudeau artistic landscape, or literally did) or wholeheartedly in favour of its continued meaning scenery, as suggested existence (see Margaret Thatcher), and the country’s in a traditional Chinese painting or business community was heavily invested in the a realm of ink, brushpen and ricepaper, where South African economy. He took on acid rain when it was a problem obsessing only environmentalists, and in the face of yawning indifference from the a white horse is charging swiftly Reagan administration. Mulroney brought Canadian across the point of two meeting hills resources to bear in Ethiopia, saving tens of thou- or a whole mountain range sands of lives in the process at a time when most highlighting itself beside a pine tree Canadians couldn’t place the country on a map. reaching out as if to welcome The gulf between Trudeau père’s words and visitors, or level against the whole world Mulroney’s actions doesn’t escape Hampson’s as in one of Wang Wei’s poems, Su Dongpo’s attention—though he sets his targets more, and ci, Mao Zedong’s handwritings justifiably, on Justin Trudeau’s rhetoric, which is even more lofty than his father’s. “Canada must lead with tangible deeds—put its own skin into the game instead of making empty pious rhetorical Yuan Changming pronouncements,” Hampson writes. Free trade was Mulroney’s potential foreign- affairs Waterloo, if only because so much of the Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan and hosts Happy Yangsheng in country’s establishment was so vociferously Vancouver; credits include ten Pushcart nominations, The Best of the Best Canadian against it. For many, removing protective tariffs Poetry (tenth anniversary edition), BestNewPoemsOnline, Literary Review of Canada, from American products was akin to treason, and and Threepenny Review. it sparked all measure of rhetoric from Mulroney’s Liberal opposition. One Liberal attack ad from the 1988 election campaign showed two businessmen straight out of central casting erasing the Canadian Mulroney could easily hide his excesses on the an old friend from his Université Laval days, to be border. “[Free trade] turns Canada into a colony of world stage. The mechanics of gaining power in the ambassador to France. Bouchard would become the United States,” thundered the Liberal platform. first place are a touch more messy—particularly a key minister in Mulroney’s cabinet before leav- This was a ripe time for Mulroney’s many satir- when the would-be diplomat must make his bones ing its fold in 1990, allegedly over the incapacity ists, who pilloried his penchant for extravagance in the caustic political culture of his native Quebec. of the Mulroney government to pass the Meech and often-breathless love for America. Perhaps For a convincing (albeit brief) look into how Lake accord. the most enduring spectacle of Mulroney’s foreign Mulroney did this we turn to Luc Lavoie. A journalist- This was bad enough, but then Bouchard made policy wasn’t curbing acid rain or tackling famine in turned-political-advisor-turned-executive, Lavoie is it sting. He went on to form the separatist Bloc Ethiopia. It was when he and Reagan took the dais perhaps best known to politicians and hacks alike Québécois, the federal party that existed only to aid at a 1985 meeting in Quebec City to belt out a war- for his long-running tenure at the dearly departed Quebec’s departure from Canada. He then served bly version of “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.” The Café Henri Burger and the bar at Hy’s Steakhouse. as official Opposition leader before leading Quebec event had it all: tacky spectacle, conspicuous power, Slitty and gravelly-voiced, Lavoie loved to kibitz to the brink of separation in 1995. Lavoie, a devoted and a far-too-close appreciation for America’s John with the very people who either opposed or covered federalist and even more devoted Mulroney confi- Wayne president. his boss. Appropriately, his memoir, En première dant, added diplomat to the list. To this day he plays “The first prime minister of our country to have ligne, is written in this folksy, mildly boozy style of envoy between Mulroney and Bouchard, passing emerged from the working class, Mulroney courted Lavoie in the flesh. Like Mulroney, he came from along messages and massaging still-bruised egos. the rich, luxuriating on their parvenu Florida a small Quebec town on the St. Lawrence. Like And their breakup is nothing if not an endur- estates, and dressed as if he hoped to be invited Mulroney, he knew instinctively the importance of ing sore point in both men’s lives. Lavoie served as to pose for a GQ fashion spread,” wrote Mordecai learning the “other” language—English in his case, intermediary of sorts at Maurice Richard’s funeral, Richler in 1993. Funny as they were, Richler’s words French in Mulroney’s. in 2000, to ensure the two men didn’t cross paths. were just that: words. And considering the profile Lavoie first met his eventual boss in 1981, “I had to negotiate with those in charge to make of our current prime minister—born into wealth, when Mulroney was but a wealthy and telegenic sure they weren’t placed close together,” Lavoie courted by the ultra-rich, splashed onto the pages mining executive. His singular pursuit of the writes. “[Mulroney] called me when he was of Vogue—they haven’t aged well. And at about Progressive Conservative leadership was some- two streets away from the church to make sure the same time as Richler was writing them, Liberal thing to behold. In Master of Persuasion, Hampson Bouchard had gone in before he would show up.” prime minister Jean Chrétien happily implemented writes of Mulroney’s great regard for Joe Clark, by Thirteen years later, nearly a quarter century the North American Free Trade Agreement— then foreign minister in Mulroney’s cabinet. In En after their falling out, Mulroney again did much the an expansion of 1988’s free trade agreement that première ligne, Mulroney is a shark who, in 1982, same little dance to avoid Bouchard at the funeral Mulroney negotiated before he left office in 1993. publicly supported Clark’s leadership while secretly of a mutual friend. It’s an abiding lesson from the In polite society, we’d call Chrétien a hypocrite. In ensuring its collapse. “No doubt Joe thought, with Mulroney era. Treachery’s fine, as long as you’re not politics, it’s called expediency. It was also the best a naiveté of which I know he is capable, that he on the receiving end of it. compliment to Mulroney’s foreign policy legacy; had control of his party,” Lavoie writes. Instead, In concentrating on Mulroney’s foreign policy, even his enemies eventually came around. Lavoie watched as Mulroney sank a dagger between Master of Persuasion is like a P.K. Subban highlight Clark’s shoulder blades. Lavoie went to work for reel—all the seemingly effortless master strokes here are certain advantages to focusing on Mulroney as an advisor within the year. without the many self-inflicted mistakes. The TMulroney’s foreign policy for the biographer Karma’s a bitch, in the words of a Riverdale-era Mulroney in En première ligne is scrappy, mean, determined to rehabilitate his subject. Diplomacy is Veronica Lodge. Mulroney suffered monumental precious, and occasionally petty. Taken together, a charm offensive in which the diplomat necessar- treachery some eight years later at the hand of they give us a very decent portrait of a man who ily accentuates the good at the expense of the bad. Lucien Bouchard. Mulroney plucked Bouchard, worked to be appreciated despite himself.

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 9 THE

Africa has experienced dozens of conflicts over a variety of issues during the past two decades. Responding to these conflicts requires concerted action to manage the crises —

the violence, political discord and humanitarian consequences of prolonged fighting. It is FABRIC O also necessary to address the long-term social and economic impacts of conflict, to rebuild ’ communities, societies and states that have been torn apart. To accomplish this requires the Look Whos involvement of institutions and groups rarely considered in formal official African conflict management activities: schools, universities, religious institutions, media, commercial enterprises, legal institutions, civil society groups, youth, women and migrants. These groups and organizations have an important role to play in building a sense of identity, fairness,

Watching Looking beyond the State shared norms and cohesion between state and society — all critical components of the fabric F PE ACE IN Surveillance_Treachery_and Trust_Online of peace and security in Africa.

This volume brings together leading experts from Africa, Europe and North America to examine these critical social institutions and groups, and consider how they can either improve or impede peaceful conflict resolution. The overarching questions that are explored by the authors are: What constitutes social cohesion and resilience in the face of conflict? What are the threats to cohesion and resilience? And how can the positive elements be fostered and by whom? THE FABRIC OF PEACE IN AFRICA AFRICA The second of two volumes on African conflict management capacity by the editors, The Fabric of Peace in Africa: Looking beyond the State opens new doors of understanding Looking beyond the State for students, scholars and practitioners focused on strengthening peace in Africa; the first volume, Minding the Gap: African Conflict Management in a Time of Change, focused on the role of mediation and peacekeeping in managing violence and political crises. Pamela Aall and Chester A. Crocker, Editors Foreword by Kofi Annan

Pamela Aall is a senior fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation’s (CIGI’s) Global Security & Politics Program, leading the African Regional Conflict Management project with Chester A. Crocker. She is also senior adviser for conflict prevention and management at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), and on the board of Women in International Security. Now in Paperback Aall | Crocker Chester A. Crocker is a distinguished fellow at CIGI. He is the James R. Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and serves on the board of its Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. A former assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 1981 to 1989, he served as chairman of the board of USIP and is a founding member of the Global Leadership Foundation.

ISBN 978-1-928096-35-1

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Look Who’s Watching Tug of War The Fabric of Peace in Africa Surveillance, Treachery and Trust Online Negotiating Security in Eurasia Looking beyond the State Fen Osler Hampson and Eric Jardine Fen Osler Hampson and Mikhail Troitskiy, Editors Pamela Aall and Chester A. Crocker, Editors 978-1-928096-58-0 | paper 978-1-928096-35-1 | paper 978-1-928096-30-6 | paper 978-1-928096-60-3 | ebook 978-1-928096-41-2 | ebook 978-1-928096-20-7 | ebook

Complexity’s Embrace ReflectionsOn Canada’s Past, Present and Future in International Law The International Law Implications of Brexit Réflexionssur le passé, le présent et l’avenir du Oonagh E. Fitzgerald and Eva Lein, Editors Canada en matière de droit international 978-1-928096-63-4 | paper 978-1-928096-64-1 | ebook Oonagh E. Fitzgerald, Valerie Hughes and Mark Jewett, Editors 978-1-928096-67-2 | cloth 978-1-928096-68-9| ebook Advancing Policy Ideas and Debate

CIGI Press books are distributed by McGill-Queen’s University Press (mqup.ca) and can be found in better bookstores and through online book retailers.

10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ‘Tiny Anarchic Guerrillas’ The child as organizational colleague and funhouse mirror Ian Garrick Mason

Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract Darren O’Donnell Coach House Books 250 pages, softcover ISBN 9781552453377

The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids Alexandra Lange Bloomsbury 416 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781632866370

A is for AMY who fell down the stairs B is for BASIL assaulted by bears C is for CLARA who wasted away D is for DESMOND thrown out of a sleigh…

nd so this alphabet continues, a twenty-six-page litany of horrible A ends. Written and illustrated by the utterly original talent Edward Gorey in the 1960s, The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a short and darkly funny romp through a Victorian-esque catalogue of arbi- trary, sometimes implausible deaths that might befall a child—“U is for UNA who slipped down a drain”—each lethal incident brought about by heedlessness, external malevolence, or simple bad luck. The humour of the work arises from Gorey’s way of combining de-familiarization (the children are roughly sketched and dressed in late nine- teenth-century clothing) and slightly exaggerated period-appropriate language (Hector is “done in by a thug”) with our own fears and guilts as adults. The process by which children transform from vulnerable and wholly dependent infants into con- fident and self-reliant men and women is confusing iillustration by meaghan way for everyone involved. And given the stakes, the physical and social structures we create to protect ­nostalgia and guilt it spawns, we’ve honed the art or ­“hard-charging” or “ladylike” or “ruggedly and shepherd children through this transforma- of being simultaneously uncertain and righteous independent” to that list you’d likely find yourself tion are often both contentious and surrounded about the ways we raise our kids—and about how in an argument. by minefields of intense emotion. Whether it’s we tell other people to raise theirs. On the other hand, on a daily basis we make post-war living-room arguments over Dr. Benjamin The questions that children seem to gener- choices about children that may or may not align Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child ate out of thin air as they make their way in the well with our more considered, long-term views. Care, 1980s-era litigation against “unsafe” play- world, after all, must be answered not only by A child asks to be allowed to go the mall for the first ground equipment and toys, progressive education parents in regard to their own offspring, but also time with her friends, and her parents must make versus the three Rs debates, or the current embrace by society at large. The answers are not easy. On judgments while she stands with arms folded, wait- of both helicopter parenting and the mixed the one hand, they force us to ask ourselves what ing for an answer: about the friends they have met, kind of adults we’d like those children to grow up the “friends” they haven’t met and may not even be Ian Garrick Mason is an essayist, documentary to be: “self-confident,” “resilient,” “curious,” and aware of, the types of people who might be at the filmmaker, and photographer, and is a contributing “creative” are attributes that seem to command mall, the hazards that may or may not lie en route, editor at Barcelona-based urbanNext. His writing general societal agreement at the moment, but the and the girl’s age and track record of making good and visual work are found on iangarrickmason.com. consensus is a limited one. If you offered “pious” judgments for herself (an analysis that parenthood

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 11 inevitably distorts one way or the other). Though which good design must respond: It’s one thing for own open-plan schooling experience had mixed they usually are granted more time to think, a government to write a rule saying that cars must results—“I realized, as I approached college, that schools and policy makers, too, must develop stop at crosswalks when pedestrians are waiting to I was years behind the standard in calculus and their rules and regulations in a state of dynamic cross, but whether drivers end up obeying that rule French (albeit years ahead in creative writing and tension among enlightened aspirations, a host of in practice is quite another matter. In many areas feminist theory and exposure to the brilliance of unknowns, and immediate pressures, whether today—my own included, unfortunately—stop- Zora Neale Hurston)”—she sees the open-plan political, budgetary, or legal. To a cash-strapped ping at a crosswalk actually surprises other drivers philosophy as best-suited to preparing children school system, a general long-term principle about (a safety risk in itself, ironically) because it’s so for an economy of the future that will require the good life—even one we all agree with, such as uncommon to do so. Rather than advocating for “research, discussion, exploration, and tinkering, “encouraging resilience is better than over-protect- the imposition of a new rule, likely to be ignored, skills children can only learn by doing.” iveness”—often has little practical power in the face urban designers may seek instead to minimize the of a single successful lawsuit about a hazard that number of crossings that pedestrians have to make hile Lange’s educational philosophy focuses could have been avoided here and now. in their journeys. If children can reach their school Won preparing children for eventual work as While parents and schools and governments and a good park without crossing any major streets, adults, Darren O’Donnell shifts the spotlight onto argue and make (and later reverse) decisions, changing driver behaviour at crosswalks becomes the question of what children can do now, as chil- working patiently in the background is the physical less of a priority. dren. O’Donnell is the long-time artistic director of environment that surrounds our children—a “third Risk and parenting is a central theme of Lange’s Toronto-based performance company Mammalian teacher,” in the words of Italian preschool pion- book, and it helps her to move from the physical Diving Reflex, and the second half of his book eer and education philosopher Loris Malaguzzi. structures that her design eye naturally focuses on Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New This is the starting point for New York City-based to the people—and people structures—that objects Social Contract is a fascinating reflection on his architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange, and buildings support and influence. As part of experiences—and the lessons and principles he whose book, The Design of Childhood: How the her advocacy for “redesigning cities for children,” drew from them—in incorporating children into his Material World Shapes Independent Kids, presents for example, she sympathetically discusses the company’s artistic program, not only as performers a critical history of the objects with which and the “free-range parenting” movement that calls for a but also as administrators and leaders. The com- environments within which children have grown relaxation of the white-knuckled grip that modern pany’s projects are interventionist in nature, seek- up over the past one hundred years or so. Given parents place on their children’s ability to roam, ing to test new configurations of human interaction her professional focus, it’s no surprise that she is a a movement led, in part, by Lenore Skenazy, who (for example, by having children give haircuts to firm believer in the potential of design for shaping found herself condemned as the “world’s worst admirably up-for-it adults in a real barbershop) culture and influencing behaviour, and for develop- mom” for allowing her nine-year-old to ride the under the non-threatening cover of “art.” “We ­create ing children in a better way. Lange declares right subway without adult supervision. Lange empha- a new and unusual social reality by performing that up front that our built environment “is making kids sizes a striking statistic that captures “the change social reality,” he explains. less healthy, less independent, and In treating children as artistic less imaginative. What those hungry collaborators and organizational brains require is freedom.” With that Destroying ‘bureaucratic colleagues, however, O’Donnell is ringing call, she proceeds to make her in fact hoping to inspire a peaceful, case for securing children’s mental totalitarianism’ may disrupt the rules slow-burning social revolution—the liberty—and physical liberty, too— manifesto for which he lays out in from the scale of building blocks all that produce profits for investors the book’s first half. He is rightly the way to the scale of cities. (or whatever aspect of capitalism he convinced that children are capable Her recommendations follow a not only of great creativity, but also consistent logic. Homes that pro- opposes), but would also destroy the of doing much of the work required vide both shared family spaces and to plan and deliver creative projects. spaces where kids can make guilt-free control systems that maintain trust. Further, because they lack verbal fil- messes, and leave them while work- ters, have not yet learned to repress ing on multi-day personal projects, their feelings, enjoy only the most are better ones to grow up in—a principle that in territory granted to an eight-year-old in 1926 (six limited tolerance for boredom, and generally bring should resonate with adults who routinely leave miles from home) and that of his great-grandson in energy to everything they touch, he believes that more than ten applications open on their com- 2007 (three hundred yards from home, the end of children should be included in a much wider range puters. Toys that are modular, open-ended, and his quiet suburban street).” The result, she argues, of adult world endeavours than just the arts. While robust—Lincoln Logs, Minecraft, even cardboard “has been a rise in childhood obesity, damaging he does admit, wisely, that in certain areas like fire- boxes—are to be preferred over toys with too much effects on mental health resulting from limiting fighting or heart surgery the integration of children “explicitness of purpose” (yes, she’s looking at you, self-directed experience and peer interactions, and as colleagues might be “more difficult,” O’Donnell Heartlake City Lego). Well-designed children’s even physical apprehension of geography.” sees children as the future shock troops—“let’s rooms should have minimal clutter and decoration Her point is a strong one: Basil’s parents should parachute the little kids in everywhere, like tiny to leave space for the work of young imaginations, stop fearing he’ll be assaulted by bears if he goes anarchic guerrillas,” he declares—in a gently sub- an approach that while it may seem perfectly tuned outside on his own, and keeping Basil on a short versive battle against both “bureaucratic totalitar- to the mimimalism of the current moment, in fact leash will merely turn him into a fragile, risk-averse ianism” and capitalism itself. evolved, as Lange explains, in close alignment with grown-up. I wholeheartedly agree, in principle— It is clear that both Lange and O’Donnell have the early twentieth century’s “hygiene aesthetic”, though my enthusiasm is immediately tempered by deeply optimistic views of human nature, and which sought to reduce child mortality and illness the fact that coyotes have moved into my sprawling within their own domains the implications that flow through the use of easy-to-clean surfaces and the suburban neighbourhood over the past few years, from these views are coherent and likely to pro- elimination of places where dust could collect. prompting warnings from the municipal govern- duce improved outcomes for all concerned: chil- Widening her field of view beyond the home, ment to keep children away from woods and parks dren, their parents, and adults at large. Expanded she makes the case for reintroducing a calibrated at twilight. The Little Red Riding Hood metaphor, physical freedom, better designed environments, level of risk into playgrounds, so that children can historically used to conjure fears of random street and the connection of emotions like joy and curi- learn to face fears, recover from failure, and chal- crime, is unexpectedly less metaphorical now. osity with learning and work are all things to be lenge themselves to get better. Her ambition for It’s not only the liberty of after-school explora- welcomed and encouraged. cities seeks to reduce more serious levels of risk, tions that she encourages us to expand, but also Their views, however, have blind spots, which meanwhile, arguing that neighbourhoods with that of in-school learning. Lange praises the become larger and more serious as we widen the thoughtfully designed streets and long, contiguous now century-long shift from dimly lit, fixed desk, scope of analysis. First, Lange and O’Donnell— areas of safe exploration are far better for children rote learning schools to those with open plans, both accomplished, creative people—write as if than those with high-speed thoroughfares and flexible furniture, and a discovery-driven teach- almost all important things issue from creative crosswalks that drivers ignore. ing curriculum. She dismisses the educational processes, and as if properly designed societies and As obvious a point as the latter may appear, standards movement of the 1980s as a conserva- their activities should unfold in entirely organic, it stands as an instance of the human dilemmas to tive ­“backlash,” and though she admits that her natural, self-motivated ways without orders being

12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada barked or performance being measured, presum- equipment, and both of these risks can indeed be ­villages—trust grows on its own. Large-scale soci- ing an embrace of risk, in effect, as a principle mitigated with better design. But modern parents ety, by contrast, needs to be far more deliberate of social organization. For Lange, openness and restrict the geographic range of their children’s about the matter. An institution that has lost public blank canvases, imagination and collaboration, independence not solely from fear of cars but also trust has to prove itself all over again, not simply are key ingredients in the development of young from fear of violence, kidnapping, and harassment. by acting better day to day, but also by instituting adults ready for a new world of work. O’Donnell Tentatively circling this idea, she quotes cultural rules, training, and enforcement and reporting has a similar vision, arguing that the incorporation anthropologist Dwayne Dixon, who explains that mechanisms that demonstrate to all skeptics that of children into adult working environments “will Japanese kids are allowed a greater range of move- improved behaviour is now built into the system become easier and easier as the economy con- ment because they and their parents believe that itself. This only makes sense, because it was the tinues the transition into one in which people slide “ideally, any member of the community can be system—not a few bad apples—that was assigned from project to project, the lines between working, called on to serve or help others,” and she wistfully the burden of blame for the offending acts. volunteering, supporting, building one’s resumé, looks back at the wide territory explored by the When O’Donnell seeks to destroy “bureaucratic and contributing to the community becoming young characters in Maud Hart Lovelace’s 1942 totalitarianism” through anarchic subversion by increasingly porous…” children’s book Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill. high-energy children, he may have in his mind the To an extent, of course, this is true. New ventures Yet, while Lange clearly understands that a founda- unbending discipline and rules that produce reli- are often highly creative—at first—and place chal- tion of social trust is required before parents will let able profits for rapacious investors (or whichever lenging yet ambiguous demands on their founders their kids wander off for hours, she doesn’t explore aspect of capitalism he opposes), but to the extent (“just go figure it out” is a standard response to where that trust went. his revolution turned out to be successful he’d also employee questions in such firms). Large compan- If she did, she might find an irony to ponder. The be destroying the control systems that all organ- ies today often spawn innovation labs and assign civilization-wide movement toward greater per- izations must use to create and maintain trust. their bright talents to them in hopes they’ll create sonal liberty that began to crest in the 1960s—and “Accepting feelings is to accept that discomfort is transformative new products. And the so-called gig that promoted the open schools and creative learn- okay and to understand that any workplace without economy has put a premium on the self-manage- ing that Lange champions, as well as the emotional feelings is a workplace in the service of a deeply ment skills of many people faced with winning and expressivity and freedom from rules that O’Donnell conservative, factory-like mentality,” he declares. delivering projects on their own. loves—didn’t restrict itself to making the positive “I don’t know where [this proposal] will end up, These are some of the best-known incarnations assertion that each individual should be free to I just know that when a child loves or hates some- of our “future” economy—yet they’re not nearly as choose their own destiny and lifestyle. Because one, they simply state it.” creative and open as we imagine them. Successful the movement faced resistance from traditional In fact we can make an educated guess about start-ups have to impose bureaucratic rules on institutions, it also made the negative assertion where this will end up, because there are quite a themselves to avoid running out of money and to that those institutions had no legitimate authority number of workplaces that were, until recently, ensure they ship products on time; innovation labs to constrain anyone’s behaviour: that they were proud to have cultures where people could express start with Post-it notes and brain- and act on their feelings whenever storming sessions but must manage they felt like it—and these are the their project pipelines with stage- We already had workplaces with same workplaces that today are the gating, business cases, and probabil- subject of sexual harassment-related ity assessments; the gig economy is cultures where people could act on lawsuits, angry social media cam- partly made up of creative roles and paigns, and devastatingly negative partly made up of hourly jobs like their feelings whenever they felt like press coverage. As O’Donnell himself waiting tables and driving for Uber. it—these workplaces today are the discovered when his core team of This applies even to an organiza- teenaged artists opposed his wish to tion as central to the new economy’s subject of sexual harassment-related broaden participation within their conception of itself as Apple. For neighbourhood—“although it was many, Apple’s mantra “it just works” lawsuits and more. about creating a unique and safe seems to sum up the central role of environment for creative expression,” creativity in the modern economy, he reflects, “there was also an ele- generating visions of the late Steve Jobs elegantly corrupt, mendacious, immoral. As a self-described ment of elitism for elitism’s sake that was absolutely cutting to the heart of a user interface problem with revolution, the movement placed critical focus on crucial to the youth”—human emotions can run in a leap of inspired thinking. Yet Apple’s vast profit- the illegitimacy of systems, not on the flaws of indi- both inclusive and exclusive directions, even in the ability as a company is equally dependent—and vidual people. context of an enlightened artistic program like his. from a work effort and resource allocation point of So as deplorable acts have come to light in the Similarly, in one of her only comments relating to view, vastly more dependent—on analytical think- course of time, the cultural conclusion in each the darker (or, more charitably, less social) side of ing, deliberative strategy, number crunching, rigor- case has been sweeping rather than particular. The children, Lange remembers how at a playground ous supply chain maintenance, and manufacturing Pentagon Papers proved that governments are liars. with large, interconnectable building blocks— processes managed down to the nanometre. The sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church though not enough of them—“teams and raiding Critically, most of this work, most of the time, proved that priests (and by extension religion) are parties developed, undoing the work of my eight- is not fun. The vast majority of jobs, now and in not to be trusted. The #MeToo exposures are prov- year-old and his temporary friends as fast as they the future, involve rules, routine, bosses, and hard, ing that all men—“feminist” men included—are could build.” Her son retreated in tears. sometimes unpleasant effort. While risk is indeed a danger to women. In the face of this apparently One of the awkward but inescapable challenges a foundational part of economic activity, firms do endless series of systemic betrayals, is it any won- of human life is that we have to hew to a number their best to take risks deliberately and with fore- der that the average person has tightened their of different values simultaneously if we are to be thought, and to reduce all other risks—financial, circle of trust down to the number of people they able both to live well and to live together. We must reputational, or physical—to as close to zero as can count on one hand? Without social trust, our raise our children to find creativity and joy in work they can make them with proven tools like meas- perception of risk goes sky-high. We pull our chil- when they can—but when they can’t, to have the urement and process. We therefore do our children dren closer in fear. grit required to work anyway. Using transparency a disservice if we prepare them for the art but not As doom-laden as that might sound, there are and rules we must re-build our trust in the systems for the grind, for the inspiration but not for the countervailing winds. Pushing us in the opposite and society around us, so that we can confidently implementation. They need to be capable of doing direction is our pressing practical need to earn allow our children to take more risks. And while we either, and often both. money, to be able to leave our children in the care must understand and respect our own emotions Second, while both Lange and O’Donnell seem of others while we do so, and even, as adults, to as human beings—not just our right to have them, perplexed by the aversion to those human-scale be able to work with each other cooperatively. We but their power over us, for good and ill—we’ll also risks perceived by parents and schools and other can’t simply give up on trust and carry on regard- have to get much better at conditioning the social organizations, neither seem eager to ask why less, our hands warily resting on our pistols. But we expression of our emotions through self-restraint that aversion exists. The risks that Lange writes can’t just wish it back into being, either. and more thoughtful speech. the most about, for example, are accidents that In small-scale social configurations with fre- Once upon a time, after all, that was the defin- might happen on streets or on unsafe playground quent interactions among members—families, ition of growing up.

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 13 Pardon My Parka, or Humorous Canadian Initiatives CanLit’s comedy problem Pasha Malla

erek McCormack did not win the 2016 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and Dits accompanying $15,000 cash prize. Susan Juby did, for Republic of Dirt, a sequel to The Woefield Poultry Collective, which introduced readers to Prudence, a Brooklynite fish-out-of- water who chances into running a derelict farm in interior British Columbia. The novel’s cast of characters includes a septuagenarian named Earl who plays the banjo and cracks wise (refusing Prudence’s hot sauce: “I just got over my heartburn from our trip to Ron’s Pizza Parlor”), and its scenes rollick along with the joke-per-minute efficiency of a network sitcom. While the comedy in Republic of Dirt may be a matter of taste, the Leacock medal, as Canada’s only major award for literary humour, canonizes its victors alongside Important Writers such as Mordecai Richler (the 1998 winner), Farley Mowat (1970), and Robertson Davies (1955). But before we accept the Leacock medallists as a comprehensive representation of our comic elite, consider this: Since 1947 the prize that claims to acknowledge “the best in Canadian literary humour” has never been awarded to a person of colour. By contrast, eight writers of Asian and Afro-Caribbean origin have been awarded the Giller Prize since 1994; M.G. Vassanji has taken it twice, and whether Joseph Boyden’s 2008 win jukes those stats depends on how generous you feel about his Indigeneity. This is not an attempt to instigate a hashtag cam- paign or lambaste the jurors at Stephen Leacock Associates. The National Magazine Awards didn’t illustration by meaghan way fare much better in their humour category before it was suspended in 2016: the last decade of final- and memory of Stephen Leacock” by continuing This is not to say that Sketches isn’t enjoy- ists included only two non-white writers, Scaachi “to initiate and support activities which widen able or elegantly written. While the citizens of Koul (honourable mention in 2015), and yours truly interest in Leacock and his writings [and] in the Mariposa tend to be caricatures, they’re vividly (a bunch of times—toot-toot!). The Leacock medal Leacock legend.” So it seems predictable that, crafted: the inscrutable hotelier Mr. Smith simply provides an entry point for a larger conver- as a corollary to those activities, the medal honours “makes the Mona Lisa seem an open book and sation about what constitutes comedic writing in books that emulate the qualities of its namesake— the ordinary human countenance as superficial this country, what role it serves and how it’s cele- or at least his fiction. as a puddle in the sunlight;” more generally, the brated. And while the apparent racial bias of the Assuming that Leacock’s various chauvinisms— men of the town are judged per their equanim- award is, let’s say, curious, I’m more interested in it his contempt for women and Indigenous people, ity: “ ‘Level-headed’ I think was the term; indeed as a symptom of exclusivity, insularity, and a poor in particular, has been well documented—are not in the speech of Mariposa, the highest form of understanding of how humour operates in certain the legacy conscientiously perpetuated by Stephen endowment was to have the head set on hori- overlooked corners of our national literature. Leacock Associates, one might take his most zontally as with a theodolite.” Zena Pepperleigh, Despite its pretence of scope, the Leacock medal famous book, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, the book’s token, summarily humanized woman, has traditionally been awarded for humour written as the medal’s exemplary title. The tone is breezy, sits on her porch imagining rescue by knights in the mode of Stephen Leacock. Perhaps this is anecdotal, and archly ironic. The struggle between in shining armour before capitulating to a more to be expected. After all, the prize’s host organiza- success and failure (financial, political, romantic) humble, local romance in an artful conflation tion is expressly mandated to “preserve the literary is a consistent theme, and its characterizations of fantasy and reality: “Already, you see, there ­legacy” and “to honour and perpetuate the name traffic in idiosyncrasies and quirky irreverence. was a sort of dim parallel between the passing of If there’s satire or parody at work, it’s a particularly [Mr. Pupkin’s] bicycle and the last ride of Tancred Pasha Malla is the author of six books, most gentle and forgiving breed; Leacock’s characters the Inconsolable along the banks of the Danube.” recently Fugue States, a novel. He lives in Hamilton, are parochial, sure, but that’s the source of their Tellingly, Leacock addresses a generic second Ontario. charm—and their integrity! person with a baseline of familiarity that affords

14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada innate access to any reference. “I don’t know curiously­ zoological Wives, Children & Other Wild being Canadian, is invited to recognize part of him- whether you know Mariposa,” the book begins. Life. There is wordplay, of course (Fear of Frying self and his background in the sketches.” Forgiving “If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know and Other Fax of Life; also True Confections), Atwood some assumptions (and realities) that Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted and eponymous memoirs (Richard J. Needham’s have shifted in the past half-century—what “being with a dozen towns just like it.” Ingratiating phrases Needham’s Inferno and Max Ferguson’s And now… Canadian” entails, exactly, as well as how many such as “you will easily understand” punctuate the Here’s Max); Arthur Black conflates these tech- of us might recognize exactly nothing of ourselves book, implicating the reader as a presumptive ally of niques with his trifecta of winners, Black Tie and in Sunshine Sketches—the diagnosis is still useful: similar experience and social station. (Touchstones Tales, Black in the Saddle Again and Pitch Black (his A Leacock-championed book inspires self-recog- include the caprices of the Liberal party, the sink- Fifty Shades of Black was a finalist in 2014, but lost nition in readers whose heritage and experiences ing of RMS Lusitania, and the inadequacy of Greek to Bill Conall). qualify as Quintessentially Canadian—should one, translation.) The first-person narrator also proxies There have been a few aesthetic anomalies that is, consider the quintessence of our nationhood as an observational “I” slightly peripheral to the among Leacock winners, most recently Gary to be most acutely expressed in the eccentricities of action on the page, rendering the reader both “you” Barwin’s Yiddish for Pirates (2017), and The Sisters small-town mayoral elections and “whirligigs.” and “I” simultaneously—unless “we” don’t intrin- Brothers by Patrick deWitt (2012). These two novels The Stephen Leacock medal has succeeded less sically identify with either, of course. stray from the Leacock formula in some respects— at celebrating the breadth of our nation’s comedic To be fair, most authors of Leacock’s era and Barwin’s postmodern adventure story is narrated writing than in substantiating a set of culturally pedigree might well assume a kindred readership; by a Jewish parrot; deWitt’s postmodern Western exclusive tropes by lionizing books mostly written it’s not a project of exclusion so much as oblivious- suggests a Coen brothers/Cormac McCarthy col- by a subset of our population to mollify people just ness. And while it can be futile to condemn the laboration—but, like Sunshine Sketches, both are like them. That said, rather than calling for Stephen past with updated morality, it’s worth examining situated in worlds so predominantly male that the Leacock Associates to apologetically garland some how we deal with history that is politicized in homosociality borders on parodic. The novels do, in random writer of colour, which would only achieve retrospect. As such, the Leacock medal feels a bit fact, muck with genre and gender conventions, but a condescending, concessional diversity, let’s steer like a Confederate statue that sits, dutifully tended, they still exemplify Leacock’s tendency to central- away from Mariposa entirely. This country is home in the town square of Canadian literature. But ize masculine nostalgia, here for the swashbuckling to some very funny writers working outside the rather than tearing it down, we’d do well to heed and gun-slinging of boyhood fantasies. (Of seventy- artistic and ideological scope of what’s traditionally Guy Vanderhaeghe’s advice in the 1986 anthology, one Leacock medalists, only seven, including Susan celebrated as “Canadian literary humour,” writers Stephen Leacock: A Reappraisal: “We might learn Juby, have been women.) whose books challenge readers’ comfort and resist something by taking a walk around the monument As Northrop Frye once noted, “[Whenever] dominant narratives in both form and content. which Stephen Leacock has become and taking some people get to the point of emotional confu- In the interest of scholarship I asked a few a look at him from a slightly different angle too.” sion at which the feeling ‘things are not as good as dozen literary folks for recommendations of funny Perhaps the most Leacockian of medalists in the they ought to be’ turns into ‘things are not as good Indigenous and Canadian writers of colour. The past couple decades is Stuart McLean, response was effusive. The names that a winner for three separate Vinyl recurred most frequently included Cafe collections (2007, 2001, 1999). André Alexis, Dany Laferrière, Thomas As with Leacock’s Sketches, McLean’s This is comedy for audiences who King, Maria Qamar, Eden Robinson, stories boast a folksy, family-friendly recognize themselves in a middle-class Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and appeal and feature “ordinary” people Drew Hayden Taylor. Suzette Mayr engaged in commensurate affairs. family getting by, with all the hijinks also got a couple of mentions for her This is comedy for audiences who terrific novel Monoceros, and by far the recognize themselves in the mem- of toilet training a cat or celebrating most common reply to my survey was bers of a middle-class, nuclear family Scaachi Koul, whose first book was in doing their best to get by, with all the Christmas with Muslims. fact a finalist, perversely enough, for hijinks and teachable moments that this year’s Stephen Leacock medal. come with, say, toilet training a cat or However, even if she had claimed the celebrating Christmas with Muslims. As a standard- as they used to be,’ back comes this fictional image $15,000 jackpot, a single win for a woman of South bearer for the Leacock legacy, McLean might be of…the real values of democracy that we have lost Asian heritage doesn’t solve the larger problem, and outdone only by Trevor Cole’s Practical Jean, which and must recapture.” The Leacock medal partici- risks being just as tokenistic as cataloguing authors’ won the prize in 2011 and takes place in the small, pates yearly in this brand of wistful revisionism, names in a defiant roll call of BIPOC hilarity. fictional town of Kotemee, or perhaps Dan Needles, resurrecting the mythos of ostensible “traditional But let’s not abandon that list entirely. Of the who won in 2003 for With Axe and Flask: A History values” embodied by Sunshine Sketches and emu- above-mentioned writers, many have enjoyed of Persephone Township, which centres around the lated by subsequent winners. These books are mainstream success far beyond a Leacock com- small, fictional town of Larkspur. Also operating notable, too, for not only their dramatic content mendation—Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs was a multiple- soundly in the Leacock mode is Terry Fallis, who but their comedic sensibility—more Horatian than award winner and runaway bestseller; Robinson has seen five of his six books shortlisted for the Juvenalian, certainly, and perhaps best described won the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award in prize; three have won. His first novel, The Best Laid as safe. 2016 for her body of work—but few, if they’re taken Plans, a mild-mannered send-up of federal politics, This may be one reason for the unanimous seriously as literary authors, are also lauded for was declared by the Winnipeg Free Press upon its whiteness of the medalists. Voices from the mar- their comedic sensibilities. Contrast this with Will publication in 2008 to be “the most irreverent, gins tend to deploy humour to question, provoke, Ferguson, for example, who post-419 is still recog- sophisticated, and engaging [satire] CanLit has seen and disrupt rather than to uphold the status quo. nized, and often defined, as a three-time Leacock since Stephen Leacock,” and was also deemed “the In Sunshine Sketches Leacock claims that, when it medal-winning humourist alongside his Giller essential Canadian novel of the decade” upon win- comes to comedy, “what the public wanted was not Prize accreditation. Some people get to be both; ning the CBC’s Canada Reads competition in 2011. anything instructive but something light and amus- others do not. The titles of some other winning books include: ing,” that “people loved to laugh [and] if you get a A final note about my email query: The most Pardon My Parka, Mice in the Beer, Saturday Night lot of people all together and get them laughing you instructive response wasn’t reading suggestions, at the Bagel Factory, Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw, can do anything you like with them,” and, finally, but a thoughtful missive from the Haudenosaunee Gophers Don’t Pay Taxes, Never Shoot a Stampede “Once they start to laugh they are lost.” But the writer Alicia Elliott: “To be honest, I feel like ‘liter- Queen, and The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car. intended reader of Stephen Leacock’s stories isn’t ary humour’ and its attendant whiteness have to do There are regional books, such as The Promised led afield so much as innocuously distracted; that with the ways that white people seem to think there Land: A Novel of Cape Breton, and Ian Ferguson’s the prize perpetuates this mode of humour blinds needs to be a separation between being serious and Village of the Small Houses (i.e., Fort Vermilion, it to any comedic work invested in challenging the being funny. Indigenous people (and I think black Alberta), and a few through the 1970s and 1980s modes of power that Leacock and his acolytes tend people and other people of colour, as well) have to that, alongside legions of wide-lapelled nightclub to reify. constantly undergo trauma in a way that makes it comics, mined hilarity from the battle of the sexes, As Margaret Atwood pointed out forty-four years impossible for them to have that separation. So to e.g. Take My Family… Please! and No Sex Please… ago, Leacock’s stories are based in “the laughter get through really serious, awful shit, we rely on We’re Married, as well as the less ­imploring, of recognition and identity,” such that “the reader, humour almost constantly.” This resonates with

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 15 any community that opposes hegemonic power; What used to be encouraging about Ondaatje dry shampoo are amusing enough, I’m hoping that consider the absurdism and bold satire practiced and Mistry, too, was that their humour challenged Baroness Von Sketch pushes more boundaries in its by the literary avant-garde who challenged Soviet notions of how New Canadians were meant to third season.) totalitarianism in the 1920s and 1930s—many of depict their engagement with the dominant culture. Which brings me, somewhat contrivedly, back whom were jailed for their efforts. Should the powers-that-be at Stephen Leacock to Derek McCormack. Despite being one of the This false distinction between literary and Associates suddenly about-face and start rewarding most hilarious, original, brilliant writers in this humour, or that separate, faintly patronizing more culturally or aesthetically diverse work, little country—as well as a white man!—McCormack category of “literary humour,” creates a dynamic will be achieved if the books merely adhere to and has never been nominated for the Stephen in which acclaim is only afforded to writers— replicate certain tropes of acceptability. Television Leacock medal. (In fact I’m not sure that any of his and here I mostly mean writers of colour—who offers a fine illustration of how this sort of inclusion seven works of fiction has been listed for a major forgo their propensity for play in order to be taken tends to operate: diverse voices are welcome, pro- Canadian book prize.) His most recent novel, The seriously. This is especially true when we look at a vided they either speak the same way as everyone Well-Dressed Wound—“weird, inventive [and] few Canadian authors who have achieved global else or operate with the ridiculousness of carica- wonderful,” according to the Village Voice, “fantas- recognition. Of our writers with a major foothold ture. We may applaud the cosmetic inclusivity of tically demented” (Globe and Mail), and “radically on the world stage, perhaps none is more gravely, Kim’s Convenience and Little Mosque on the Prairie, alive” (Art Forum)—is part theatrical performance, beardedly serious than Michael Ondaatje. Yet but the formula of the typical network ­sitcom part fashion show and part séance. The novel’s he used to be pretty funny—or at least playful. bulldozes any real idiosyncrasy or difference: the plot, such as it is, details Abraham and Mary Todd Ondaatje’s “Application for a Driving License,” characterizations are simplistic, the storytelling Lincoln’s attempts to summon the spirit of their from his 1979 collection There’s a Trick with rote, and each episode relies on the same arcs and dead son. (If that sounds familiar, The Well-Dressed a Knife I’m Learning to Do, reads not just like narrative beats of most mainstream entertainment. Wound came out a year before George Saunders’ a parody of lyric poetry, but a parody of the self- Kim’s Convenience, in particular, operates under the Lincoln in the Bardo.) As with all of McCormack’s aggrandizing, egregiously sombre poet as well. benevolent but ultimately flimsy banner of toler- work, things go spectacularly off the rails in a rau- It’s also structured like a classic joke, culminating ance, as if merely showcasing the interactions of cous, raunchy pageantry of Beckettian farce, haute with a deadpan punch-line: people of colour, no matter how banal, is somehow couture, and scatological obscenity—often at the innately progressive. same time. Two birds loved The best counterexample to this brand of well- Writing for Vice, Blake Butler described his in a flurry of red feathers behaved comedy is the Kids in the Hall, which, over response to the book: “You’re laughing and then like a burst cottonball, its six seasons on CBC, might have failed to include the laughing hurts and then you aren’t laughing continuing while I drove over them. much racial diversity, but certainly broke the anymore, which as an experience delivered on mold for what was allowed on TV. From sketches paper couldn’t feel more immediate.” Of course I am a good driver, nothing shocks me. like “Running Faggot” to the creepy surrealism any novel that simultaneously evokes and troubles of Bruce McCulloch’s short films, The Kids in the laughter fails, per Margaret Atwood’s analysis of Rohinton Mistry is known for his doorstop social Hall refused to placate the average CBC viewer Canadian humour, to comfort readers with fam- realist novels, but his first collection of stories, Tales with the broad, facile humour of contemporar- iliarity. So perhaps it’s understandable that Derek From Firozsha Baag, exhibits a wit and whimsy ies like the Royal Canadian Air Farce, Smith and McCormack’s work hasn’t earned mainstream that the author has abandoned in his more recent Smith’s Comedy Mill and CODCO. Even now, the renown—or a Leacock medal. (Well, that and The work. “Swimming Lessons,” the book’s final story, is “Gay Discount” episode that opens the inaugural Well-Dressed Wound features, among other things, about an Indian immigrant to Toronto who decides series of Kim’s Convenience, a mostly superficial a cloven-hoofed, horny devil who declares, “Ladies to learn to swim at the local Y, where he becomes survey of stereotypes and assumptions, pales and gentlemen…I give you the future of fashion— obsessed with the pubic hair sprouting luxuriantly when compared to the scathing satire of Scott AIDS!” and the word “faggot” appears more than from a classmate’s bathing suit; “Squatter” features Thompson’s monologues as Buddy Cole. As John three hundred times over the novel’s seventy-two a similar character whose assimilation is foiled by Semley wrote in This is a Book about The Kids in pages.) But it’s a shame that work this smart, this an inability to sit on a Western-style toilet. The book the Hall, Buddy was “a challenge to any narrow- unconventional, this thought-provoking—and, offers one of Canadian literature’s most hilarious minded viewer who flipped past the CBC to see a mainly, this funny—isn’t widely celebrated. Beyond and honest depictions of the so-called “immigrant glittering gay caricature waving his rubbery wrists the cosmetics of racial representation, we need more experience” (always singular; apparently there’s around,” and the character embodied the show at writers like Derek McCormack, whose bizarre, wild only one), yet one finds little humour in Mistry’s its best: confrontational, grotesque, discomfiting, novel achieves the same effect as any good joke: it mega-selling downer, A Fine Balance, and certainly weird—and still the funniest thing on Canadian disrupts and surprises us, and colours our worlds a Oprah never championed him as a comedian. TV by a considerable margin. (While the perils of little differently.

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16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Mother as Spider Being a woman and an artist in the world Kate Taylor

Kudos Rachel Cusk HarperCollins Canada 240 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781443447157

owards the end of Rachel Cusk’s new novel Kudos, the narrator, a novelist, is Tinterviewed by three journalists in a plush hotel in an old European city. The narrator has previously appeared in both Outline and Transit, the first two titles in this provocative and innovative literary trilogy, and she will be known to the eagle- eyed reader only as Faye. (I spotted her name once in Kudos’s 240 pages.) In this last instalment, Faye is attending a literary conference in an unidentified country that sounds a lot like Portugal, and appar- ently her fame as an English author is such that the local media is paying attention. The first journalist begins his interview with a lengthy wind-up that addresses the issue of hon- esty in literature—Cusk relates this second hand in her inimitable form of reported dialogue—but he is never allowed to hear the answer to his extenuated question; he takes so long that his allotted time runs out and he is ushered away before the author ever has a chance to answer. Our narrator is then whisked into a makeshift studio where a television host delivers a detailed explanation of her own difficulties establishing a career in a sexist environ- ment and her thoughts on the themes that female artists chose for their work. Meanwhile, her crew fiddles with cables. They never do solve their sound problem so the interview is abandoned. The third journalist is more lucky; he’s a print The latest book in Cusk’s trilogy plumbs the themes of art and motherhood. reporter who does actually manage to ask Faye Detail from Soft Touch (2006), by Monica Bock. Cast iron, cast porcelain, painted wood. Image via the artist. a question. But, like some politician coached about getting on message as fast as possible, Faye shifts Gatsby tells us little about himself. Another Nick, also make elliptical references to another source the answer away from herself within a few sen- Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell’s multi-volume of instability, that of Brexit: one writer who the tences and begins talking about her teenage son. A Dance to the Music of Time series, takes self- narrator meets suggests it’s a bit like the turkeys By this stage, the reader can only feel that Cusk is effacement to still further extremes, offering the voting for Christmas. And, in the midst of all this, having a quiet but prolonged joke at both the nar- most cursory information about his own circum- the characters also consider how they are shaping rator’s and the reader’s expense: Faye will never talk stances as he observes a parade of colourful charac- their own stories as they tell them: in short, they about Faye. ters in British high society in the twentieth century. reflect on what it is to make art. That television With this trilogy, Cusk has turned her denial What is novel about Cusk’s work, however, is that host with the technical problems refers specific- of the autobiographical imperative in first-person the device is so thoroughly woven into what are, to ally to the art of Louise Bourgeois, a successful narration into an exquisite if occasionally frustrat- judge from what we know of Cusk’s own biography, (and real) visual artist who depicts the mother ing art form. She is using a literary device, some- distinctly autobiographical themes. as spider rather than Madonna. Kudos is a novel times known as the peripheral narrator, that does Cusk is herself a divorced parent and success- about what it means to be woman, mother, and have its precedents. Nick Carraway in The Great ful novelist, as is her narrator who repeatedly artist in a shaky world. encounters other working mothers—and a few In the trilogy’s first novel, Outline, the recently Kate Taylor writes about film and culture for the fathers—who discuss the sometimes troubling, divorced Faye travels to Greece where she teaches Globe and Mail. Her most recent novel, Serial sometimes poignant reactions of their children creative writing and listens to lengthy monologues Monogamy, is now available in paperback. to their various separations. These Europeans from each person she meets. Here, Cusk’s method

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 17 was a revelation: meaning floated out of a series of fied by the aloof literary star, Luís, whom she is critics and should not, therefore, be subjected to deftly interwoven encounters that hinted at con- anxiously courting—but many seem like little more sharp rebuttals of criticisms of the author’s previ- nections but never tied them off. In the second than satirical digs at the literary establishment. ous work. Nor, one hopes for Cusk’s sake, is every novel, Transit, that process bore heavy emotional The reader can’t but help wonder: Who is that reader acquainted with the drubbing she took from fruit as Faye’s interlocutors increasingly reflected self-satisfied Irish writer who has sold his soul to the British media over her confessions about her on the way adults treat children, in particular the the bestseller list? Or the earnest American author divorce in her 2012 memoir entitled Aftermath. For children of divorce. By the time we reach Kudos, Linda, so hurtfully puzzled by the demands of the all that Kudos may be the story of the oddly privil- however, the style is threatening to become literary life? She provides a satirical account of a eged life of a highly successful novelist, there is a mere manner. writers’ retreat run by an Italian countess in her powerful undercurrent of bitter retort in the book, As Faye attends a literary festival somewhere castle, but the effect of the humour is distancing: both to journalists and to ex-husbands—the novel in Germany before proceeding to the conference one is as amused by poor Linda’s incomprehension is filled with stories told by the female characters in what we guess is Portugal, she meets dozens of as by the pretentions of the place described. about the appalling behaviour of their exes and, in people. The novel is no longer a series of intercon- Similarly, when yet another interviewer tells particular, the men’s attempts to turn the children nected encounters with distinctive against their mothers. characters but rather a survey of If Kudos rises above all this self-ref- the literary crowd: most of the erential cleverness, it is because occa- characters are other writers, jour- If Kudos rises above all this self- sionally one gets a flash of what Cusk nalists, publishers, and the like. is actually risking here. A divorced Only once is the indirect dialogue referential cleverness, it is because mother and well-rewarded novelist used to create a unique voice, that herself, the Toronto-born writer, who of the almost pathologically voluble occasionally one gets a flash of what lives in London and has made her teenage Hermann, who acts as tour Cusk is actually risking here. career in the U.K., is a two-time Giller guide during the first festival, an Prize nominee for Outline and Transit, event organized by his mother. His has won the Whitbread First Novel monologue conjures up one of the Award in 1993, and has been short- novel’s most poignant figures as Cusk briefly aban- Faye he has had a revelation—if he could only listed for all the major British prizes. But prizes dons her characteristic distance to let voice and ask her one perfectly simple question perhaps he only applaud courage after the fact; the writer has character merge for emotional effect. Hermann is could achieve one of the mellifluous interchanges to be brave alone in an empty room. In Kudos, an only child whose father died before his birth and in which her novels specialize—you sense a joke Cusk is a writer openly remaking the novel’s form whose mother remains single, and he confesses to at the expense of Cusk’s critics, who have noted in a quest for honesty in storytelling, and a novelist Faye his youthful but highly sensitive considera- that nobody actually talks the way her characters wrestling with two themes: the role of the female tions of their intense mother-son relationship. do. The journalist asks his banal question—what artist and the role of the divorced parent. It is not Others certainly emerge as distinctive and did Faye see on her way to the interview?—and because Cusk is deft, clever and—rather like her sometimes sympathetic characters—there is the inevitably her answer is never recorded. Unless we narrator—widely recognized and largely rewarded accommodating translator, Sophia, resigned to decide that all of Kudos is her answer. for previous work that Kudos is impressive. It is her role as handmaiden to writerly egos, personi- Still, most readers of a novel are not persnickety because the novelist is struggling.

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18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada An Iconoclast Protests David Adams Richards’s grand parable of modern scapegoating Mark Fried

Mary Cyr David Adams Richards Doubleday Canada 432 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780385682480

avid Adams Richards has long been a wizard at Dconjuring tragic scenarios that address topical social problems in all their gory complexity. He is unafraid of challenging the reader’s prejudices or slicing through any delusions we might have about what makes us tick. In Principles to Live By (2016), for example, he pairs the brutal vicissitudes of a foster care system run by self-righteous and self-interested bureaucrats with the immense tragedy of genocide in Rwanda. Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (2011) takes off from the death of a young Mi’kmaq man to explore racism and politics on a New Brunswick reserve. A fatal cave-in at a mine is only the beginning of things. His new novel, published only two from The Graphic (1871) via Litteraturen genom tiderna, by Hugo Rydén, Gunnar Stenhag, and Dick Widing (1984) years after his last, features a page- turning plot, the full life of a memorable character, thirteen-year-old son of one of them has an audio and go on living. In Crimes Against My Brother and a provocative exploration of a fundamental tape that proves it. (2014), for example, mean-spirited gossip following concern in today’s media-driven world: our rush After the body of that adolescent is discovered accidental deaths drives three cousins to betray the to judgement and our urge to scapegoat. Sadly, in Mary’s hotel room, she is jailed. An astute New people they most love. Yet an unshakable integrity it’s marred by an intrusive narrator, occasional Brunswick policeman (John Delano, the protag- and a return to religion make reconciliation pos- sloppy writing, and the sizable chip on the author’s onist of Principles to Live By), sent by the family, sible for two of them. In Principles John Delano ­shoulder. If only Richards trusted the power of his uncovers evidence of her innocence, but the makes enemies of all around him after not saving stories and the imaginative abilities of his readers. authorities are unmoved. Mary has been framed to a Canadian family in Rwanda, then finds spiritual The eponymous heroine of Mary Cyr, plucked divert attention from those who are truly criminal. succor in the search for the surviving son of that from a brief passage in Incidents in the Life of Richards then ingeniously spins what might family and his own lost son. Markus Paul, is the free-wheeling scion of a family have been the tale of a trusting Canadian, caught in Mary Cyr’s journey is similar, no matter that she that owns large swaths of New Brunswick. Like a web of Mexican corruption, into a grand parable is a multi-millionaire heiress. A headstrong woman, Incidents, the plot of Mary Cyr turns on a murder. of contemporary scapegoating. While Mary sits in unwilling to toe the genteel family line, she is as But this time the murder is no mystery. a dank jail cell, the gossipy globalized press whips much of a misfit in her world as the poor cousins in Mary has travelled to Mexico hoping to atone up a whirlwind against her. Her “crime” is spread Crimes or the dock worker wrongly accused of mur- for a fatal cave-in at a coal mine partly owned by across the world’s front pages; she is pilloried by der in Incidents. In fact, wealth only fattens her up her family. When the book opens, the Cyrs’ venal commentators on the CBC and BBC, every last for scapegoating, since the rich are considered fair Mexican partners have called off the search for detail of her behaviour over decades trotted out and game for our knee-jerk urge to dish dirt. Richards survivors, since further investigation might reveal twisted to paint her as uncaring and unhinged. As skillfully pokes holes in such prejudice, showing the that those same partners pocketed the millions the narrator puts it, “People…only need an excuse Cyrs to be much like everybody else, doing the best sent by the Cyrs for safety improvements. Thirteen to be outraged; they need it to satisfy the famine in they can with the hands they’ve been dealt. trapped miners are still alive, however, and the their lives.” Religion comforts Mary as she faces the dem- In much of Richards’s fiction the victims of onstrators and cameras that gather daily outside Mark Fried is a writer and translator in Ottawa. tragedies wreak further devastation before finding her barred window. Generous and kind to her His translation of Élmer Mendoza’s Name of the some solace in faith and forgiveness. The heroism cellmates, she forgives her immediate tormentors, Dog, the third in a Mexican detective series, will of his protagonists lies not in their deeds, but in the but offers no pardon to the many who did her be published in July. spiritual resources they muster to face their failures wrong in the past: the relatives who ostracized

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 19 for their faith or their poverty. Mary sometimes car- ries this torch: “I bet you if they ever had a truly great writer there,” she says, “they would scorn him, and Delirious in the Pink House ridicule his greatest books. And lie about him.” But it’s the omniscient narrator who voices the author’s derision in Mary Cyr. He elbows Mary I am the big fat Canadian writer, A mother weeps aside to repeatedly castigate progressive intellec- the one in the over- beside her burning son. tuals as self-righteous fools. And that’s when the sized Pink House I dance around them novel falters. “They went on…being outraged at the in a village in the Himalayas. twirling. How can I help it? world that held people like them back,” he writes That’s me on the roof They are so pretty of young Mary’s Toronto friends. “They were part in my green kurta in their bright purple turbans. of the central casting of a new stratagem of unease. They were forever adopting the correct posture. dancing in the afternoon! I want, I tell the living They in the end never freed anyone, simply them- I stand stalwart on the terrace & the dead, to be free, selves from any deep obligation.” as if it were the free as this woman And after Mary is jailed: “The men, of course— crow’s nest of a ship. with eyes like stones those who believed in equality, and gender parity— I peek out the barred windows who carries a pan of all those things they were always taught to agree like a villain in gravel on her head to and accept…did not think that their glee at her a Russian silent film. under these picturesque hills! demise was anything more than appropriate. For all After writing a poem O how my money of them most of their lives existed to do what they I stand up with great pleasure, chains me! And when the had been taught, to create and destroy scapegoats.” I howl my happiness! trash in the streams His skewering of lefties hits the mark, but is so Local men beside a brushfire & the babies in rags oft-repeated it grows tiresome. The narrator’s pen- stop their conversation, sadden me, I just chant for spelling out every intention also stifles the reader’s imagination, paradoxically, leaving staring. Old women glower climb back aboard us to argue with his interpretation, if not his pol- stooped over their brooms. the Pink House itical opinions. The unnamed narrator becomes, Families walking by as it drifts on the dusk in effect, a character whose omniscience is hard give the Pink House like a tide. to trust. a wide berth. What do I care? His treatment of the setting will pose additional I run out into the road difficulties for some readers. Richards depicts the high-fiving beggars, corrupt exercise of power with unerring accuracy tousling the hair of children. and conveys a Catholic (though not specifically They draw away slightly Mexican) worldview with compassion. Yet he gives but my poetry is a magic wand: some people names no Mexican would recognize I call out, You (cow) (“Erappo” or “Gidgit”), and no one eats anything rhyme with that (plough)! John Wall Barger resembling Mexican food. The coal mine somehow appears in a town inhabited by Maya and sur- That (kite) is a metaphor rounded by jungle, though that puts it three thou- for you (little girl)! John Wall Barger’s third book of poems, The sand kilometres away from the sea it supposedly Book of Festus (Palimpsest Press), was a Speak to me, o goatherd, of belief! borders and just as far from Mexico’s coal deposits. finalist for the 2016 J.M. Abraham Poetry of the simple life! Then there is his awful Spanish. Nearly every Award. Work appears in American Poetry Teach me how to suffer! page of the Mexico chapters contains a line of Review, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, Take me on the goat trails Spanish dialogue which is repeated in English. Poetry Ireland Review, and Best of the of the heart! O villagers, Nine times out of ten the Spanish is wrong: often Best Canadian Poetry. His poem, “Smog help me praise the goat spelled incorrectly, and sometimes embarrassingly, Mother,” was co-winner of the Malahat howlingly mistaken. For example, an underworld & the goatless goat! Review’s 2017 Long Poem Prize. He is cur- boss supposedly says of the imprisoned Mary, “It (I write all this down. rently living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is important that the stakes for her become very It is all gold.) There is a funeral and is on the editorial board at Painted high.” The ungrammatical Spanish actually reads, in progress by the river. Bride Quarterly. “It is important to her that the pointy fence posts become very tall.” The English too suffers at times from typos, garbled syntax, inconsistent style, and confusing her for being the child of a British war bride, the steadfast refusal to submit and her equally steadfast shifts in point of view. Some of the narrator’s state- stepmother who practiced an ambivalent sem- quest to get even. ments read like the author’s notes to himself or they blance of love, the Dutch friend of the family who Fearlessness and wiles—and a bottomless explain what the reader has already grasped. I can saddled the Cyrs with the Mexican mine, his son chequebook—have seen Mary through many only wonder if the book was rushed into print, or if who won his ­university post by publishing articles tribulations and allowed for settling quite a few Richards refused to allow it to be edited. attacking her and her family, the bored “Toronto accounts. Against the nearly Biblical media fire- David Adams Richards is an iconoclast. The spark girls” who taunted her beloved cousin, the Toronto storm, however, they are powerless. Not only of his impressive creativity and productivity may writer-boyfriend who dumped her after not win- does her trial-by-media overshadow the fact that well come from the many axes he has to grind. Now ning a literary prize set up by her grandfather, the thirteen miners are dead or dying, it gives nearly that he is a senator representing New Brunswick, it media who hounded her after the accidental death everyone involved the irresistible chance for per- seems only fitting that he recently resigned from the of her handicapped son, and more. sonal aggrandizement, especially the activists, “independent” senators group in order to be even Most memorable of these riveting flashbacks journalists, and commentators who keep the scan- more independent. At his best, when he gets out of is her brutally believable seduction by a smarmy dal mill running. Nevertheless, several of Mary’s his own way, his writing is inspired. And, despite its teacher who claims to be a champion of activism antagonists grapple with mixed feelings as they flaws, Mary Cyr is a wonderful yarn offering much and women’s rights, yet impregnates her at age feed the flames. Empathy and envy, bigotry and wisdom. But when his resentments get the better of fifteen. “People mistake activism for morality,” tolerance do epic battle in their hearts, leading to him, the objects of his ire can turn into caricatures, she wrote to John Delano. “And are disgusted by an operatic finale. and his overwrought indignation can sideline the morality that shows activism for what it really is.” I mentioned the chip on Richards’s shoulder. His story. Then, no matter how compelling the tale or But Mary is no willing martyr. We root for her not narrators often brim with resentment, are convinced how powerful the message, sticking with him to the only because she is innocent, but because of her they have never been given their due, feel scorned end is a challenge.

20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Sisterhood of the Secret Pantaloons Suffragists and their descendants Susan Whitney

representative assemblies were estab- One Hundred Years of Struggle: lished in colonial Canada, the vote The History of Women and the was restricted to those who met a Vote in Canada certain property threshold. Property Joan Sangster owners had a greater stake in society, UBC Press the thinking went, and thus could be 328 pages, hardcover trusted to vote responsibly. Nothing ISBN 9780774835336 specifically prohibited women from voting, and so a smattering of prop- Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance erty-owning women cast their votes of the Women’s Liberation in early elections, which were public Movement in Cold War Canada affairs often held in alcohol-fuelled Christabelle Sethna and settings and which lasted days. Fake Steve Hewitt votes and bribes were common McGill-Queen’s University Press occurrences, and hired thugs not 318 pages, hardcover unheard of. Not surprisingly, the ISBN 9780773552821 elections’ very raucousness became justification for excluding the so- called gentler sex. Despite the limited t this point in history, number of women who went to the women have governed polls and the unremarkable results A six Canadian provinces; of their doing so, the provinces and Beverley McLachlin presided over the Province of Canada both moved the Supreme Court for eighteen Feminism’s second wave was as underestimated by authorities as its first. by the mid nineteenth century to critical years; Chrystia Freeland ‘New feminists abortion caravan’ (1970), By Jac Holland / Toronto Telegram. prohibit women from voting, in what serves as minister of foreign affairs Courtesy York University historians, Sangster included, view as and negotiator-in-chief to Donald a masculinization of politics. Trump’s America; and the prime minister pro- There were some narrative challenges in achiev- That women were prohibited from voting did claims himself a feminist. It can be hard, then, to ing that aim. Middle- and upper-class suffragists not stop them from becoming politically active. imagine—or remember—just how long Canadian often held views of Indigenous peoples, black They wrote for journals, lobbied friends and family, women had to battle for that most basic of political Canadians, non-British immigrants, the poor, participated in popular protests, circulated peti- rights, the vote. Joan Sangster’s One Hundred Years social reform, drinking, and eugenics that are out tions, worked behind the scenes in political parties, of Struggle jolts us back into women’s often grim of step with present-day sensibilities. Moreover, the and became active in trade unions. The right to historical reality, reminding us that the political Canadian movement was, as suffrage movements vote emerged only gradually as a central femin- rights that we often take for granted today were go, a pretty tame affair. There were no defiant mass ist demand, in part because nineteenth-century keenly opposed in years past. marches; no disruptions of all-male political meet- women faced so many other, more pressing inequi- Timed to coincide with the centennial of the ings; no women chaining themselves to gates; no ties. In fact, the first woman to receive Sangster’s 1918 law granting women the right to vote in federal hunger strikes; no burning of slogans such as “Votes sustained attention, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, was elections, this is the first major study of women’s for Women” into the putting greens of beloved golf little interested in the vote. Shadd Cary arrived suffrage in decades, as well as the most compre- courses. As Sangster admits midway through the in Ontario in 1851 as part of the wave of black hensive. The lead volume in a series on the subject, book, “Canadians who wanted to embrace mil- American emigration following passage of the it takes a national perspective on a deeply regional- itancy…were better off moving to Britain.” 1850 Fugitive Slave Act (which gave slave owners ized effort. (The regional and Indigenous suffrage Sangster, one of Canada’s pre-eminent histor- virtually unlimited power in hunting down escaped campaigns will be taken up by other authors in six ians of women, confronts these challenges by slaves), and returned to the United States after the subsequent volumes.) Sangster aims to tell a story approaching women’s suffrage from a new angle, death of her husband, in 1860. While in Canada, that speaks to twenty-first century readers, many of going back in time all the way to the eighteenth this teacher-turned-journalist used the pages of whom have lost confidence in the vote’s power as a century, as well as according non-white women her paper, the Provincial Freeman, to publicize political tool. a central place in the narrative. Along the way, the ideas and activities of American abolitionist the book brings to life such women as Isabella women, whose work on behalf of slaves had led Susan Whitney is an associate professor of history Macdonald, who, while pregnant, led a group of them to the discovery of their own bondage. At mid at Carleton University. She has taught and written rebellious P.E.I. farmers against an armed tax col- century, these American feminists campaigned for on women’s history since teaching her first under- lector in 1833, and the American-born socialist women’s access to education, the right of married graduate course in comparative women’s history at Margaret Haile, who had the temerity to run for women to control their earnings, and women’s Rutgers University in 1991 and will teach the core the Ontario legislature in 1902. right to custody of their children in the case of course in Carleton’s graduate program in women’s, As it happens, being female had not always divorce. Canadian women took up these issues, gender, and sexuality history this fall. disqualified women from voting in Canada. After soon making some gains. In 1871, for instance,

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 21 married women gained the right to own land in “a deep and abiding feeling for suffrage.” This com- particular security threat, but rather because they their own names in Manitoba. mitment provided protective armour against the were concerned that the feminists were vulner- Sangster embeds ideas about race into her insults often rained down on them from some of able to infiltration by so-called subversives intent history of the vote from the outset. Of course, the the era’s most celebrated cultural figures. Stephen on overthrowing the state. For the authors, the black-white racial divide that dominated Mary Leacock put his talents to work ridiculing suffrage “red-tinged prism” came together with assump- Ann Shadd Cary’s native land did not pertain in and its supporters, while Charlie Chaplin donned tions about appropriate female behaviour to cause Canada, even if Canada never proved the utopia for women’s clothes to mock British suffragettes in the the RCMP to miss what was truly radical about escaped slaves and other black residents depicted film The Militant Suffragette. women’s liberation and downplay the legitimate in Heritage Minutes. By the time elected officials But there were men who played pivotal assisting security threats the movement sometimes posed. began in earnest to consider extending the vote to roles. Suffragists did not need Sheryl Sandberg to This risk is on vivid display in the lively chapter women in the late nineteenth century, Indigenous tell them how important a supportive husband on the Abortion Caravan of 1970. Organized by the men comprised the largest group of unenfran- could be to a woman’s success—all the more so Vancouver Women’s Centre, the caravan journeyed chised men. In 1885, two years after receiving a in a political system where women could not dir- to Ottawa to protest the 1969 law prohibiting abor- petition requesting the vote from a Toronto suf- ectly represent themselves. James Hughes, chief tion except in cases where the mother’s life was at frage group, prime minister John A. Macdonald inspector of the Toronto School Board, husband risk. Led by a Volkswagen bus with a black coffin introduced a bill that would enfranchise a limited of feminist and pioneer kindergarten educator strapped to its roof, symbolizing women who had number of property-holding Indigenous men and Adeline Hughes, and founder of the Men’s League died from illegal abortions, the caravan made its white women. Opponents catalogued the horrors for Women’s Suffrage, exemplified those men who way east at a pace of roughly three hundred miles that would surely result from women voting. One made a difference by speaking, writing, and agitat- a day, trailed by Mounties in unmarked cars and Quebec MP foretold “indescribable trouble and ing for suffrage. Hughes was such a supporter of the occasional local policeman. Each night, the social disorder” while others warned that suffra- the cause that he gave his daughter Laura a lifetime women performed guerrilla theatre and held a gists secretly wanted to “wear the pantaloons.” At suffrage membership on her eighteenth birthday. public meeting to publicize their cause. Upon arriv- the same time, Canada’s two main political parties In the end, it was the First World War that cre- ing in Ottawa, they held a large rally on Parliament portrayed Indigenous peoples, in Sangster’s words, ated the immediate conditions for women getting Hill. At one point, roughly half of the crowd, an as “lower down on the scale of social and political the vote. Starting in 1916, women began to win estimated two hundred and fifty women, took off in development” than white Canadians and lacking the vote in provincial legislatures, with the Prairie the direction of 24 Sussex Drive to demand a meet- the “education, ability, experience, or inclination provinces leading the way. In September 1917, ing with the PM, who, unbeknownst to them, was to engage in politics.” For their part, Indigenous the Wartime Elections Act allowed women with at his summer residence on Harrington Lake. At 24 leaders were divided on the benefits of franchise, close relatives serving overseas, as well as soldiers’ Sussex, the women overwhelmed the eight guards with many fearing the loss of treaty rights—­ widows, to vote in federal elections. According and three policemen guarding the west entrance understandable given that the federal Indian Act to Sangster, this “tore the suffragist and women’s and made their way onto the grounds. Eventually allowed Indigenous men to become “enfranchised” reform organizations apart,” heightening tensions the women were allowed to leave their coffin there as British subjects, but only if they gave up their between pacifists and war supporters, sharpening if they agreed to leave peacefully. One gave an Indian status. Meanwhile, white suffragists shared the French-English divide, and fracturing the vari- impromptu speech over the coffin, explaining how the racist views of men of their class. ous ideological strains within the movement. The the objects deposited there—Lysol, garbage bags, Sangster, who has written extensively on labour federal Act to Confer the Electoral Franchise upon knitting needles, and a vacuum hose—were used in history, is sensitive to the role played by class in suf- Women, which granted the vote to women who illegal abortions. According to one participant, the frage politics. Although property-based qualifica- were British subjects over the age of twenty-one, guards “turned green at the gills.” tions declined in importance by century’s end, class followed in 1918. The next day, adopting the time-honored female divisions continued to mark and divide women. In the book’s remaining pages, Sangster analyzes activist’s disguise of dressing like a respectable, As Sangster reminds us, middle- and upper-class the uses to which white women put their new pol- middle-class woman to escape police notice, women were able to devote their time and energy to itical weapon; describes how Quebec women cap- twenty-five young women accessed the public gal- suffrage and other reform causes precisely because tured the vote provincially; and demonstrates how leries in the House of Commons on forged passes. working-class women were busy performing their racially based exclusions finally gave way to enfran- Taking inspiration from the British suffragettes, domestic labour for them. Some working-class chisement for all Canadians after the Second World they chained themselves to their chairs using women nevertheless became involved in the War. It was not until 1960 that all Indigenous people bicycle locks. At three o’clock, the contingent stood Socialist Party of Canada or joined utopian social- were allowed to vote in federal elections without to denounce the abortion law. One woman threw ist communities, such as the one established by having to give up their legal status as “Indians.” a water bomb, which landed near the prime min- Finnish socialists on Malcolm Island, off the coast of If winning the vote in 1918 was the culmination ister’s empty chair. Another managed to take over B.C. These women have been traditionally excluded of what came to be seen as first-wave feminism, the simultaneous translation system and used it to from suffrage histories, but Sangster demonstrates a second wave of feminism washed over North broadcast her speech to the House. According to how they often combined paid labour with militant America in the 1960s. Begun at the end of the dec- the authors, the House was suspended for the first advocacy for a range of causes, including suffrage, ade by female university students frustrated with time in its history. and joined socialist men in puzzling over the rea- their treatment in the era’s student movements, The authors astutely situate their analysis of this sons for women’s inequality. In the process, they the women’s liberation branch of the movement type of surveillance within current discussions of pushed the limits of femininity in ways not always aligned itself with other 1960s global movements racially biased law enforcement, the treatment matched by middle- and upper-class white women. of the left. Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt’s meted out to women brave enough to join the Canada’s vast size and low population density, Just Watch Us provides some wonderful glimpses RCMP once it began accepting women in 1974, cultural and linguistic divisions, and varying pol- of women’s liberation, though the RCMP’s surveil- and twenty-first century surveillance overreach in itical practices all prevented the development of a lance of this cohort is the book’s central focus. liberal democratic states. That the RCMP was spy- centralized movement—and complicate any organ- Combining their expertise in women’s history ing on the first women’s studies courses at McGill izational analysis now. Instead, Sangster takes a (Sethna) and the Canadian security state (Hewitt), and the University of Toronto is eye-opening to say more thematic approach. The two chapters devoted the authors have much to say about the biased, mis- the least (though it would have been helpful had to suffragists explore, for instance, how suffragists guided, and ultimately unnecessary surveillance to Sethna and Hewitt uncovered more evidence of brought their ideas to life in the cultural realm, pro- which the young feminists were subjected. how this surveillance affected those who ended up viding a lively tour of the mock parliaments, plays, The RCMP and its security service do not come in RCMP files). The authors nicely document the novels, posters, cartoons, and films produced by off well in this account. A preserve of white men, police force’s perplexity when faced with the fem- the international suffrage movement. In these early the Cold War-era RCMP was obsessed by the threat inists’ leaderless organizations and performances days of advertising and consumer culture, suffragists of communism. For Sethna and Hewitt, this obses- of guerrilla theatre. They are persuasive in arguing used billboards, sandwich boards, and all manner sion distorted both how the RCMP’s security service that the men of the RCMP security service—not of paraphernalia (suffrage dolls, hats, pins, dishes, understood threats to national security and how unlike the men opposing the suffragists—simply salt and pepper shakers) to embed their cause in the informants and intelligence officers interpreted the did not take the women’s liberationists terribly ser- fabric of daily life. The goal was not only to persuade individuals and activities they were spying on. The iously. The gendered assumptions they brought to outsiders, but to forge an emotional bond between RCMP surveilled the women’s liberation movement their duties often caused them to miss the remark- the women, to create what Sangster describes as not because its agents viewed the movement as a able work that was really going on.

22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Americanization of Oscar The early days of a modern celebrity Gregory Mackie

Making Oscar Wilde Michèle Mendelssohn Oxford University Press 368 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780198802365

n “De Profundis,” the ­harrowing chronicle of his imprisonment, IOscar Wilde memorably identi- fies the two “great turning points” of his life. They are, he says, “when my father sent me to Oxford, and when Society sent me to prison.” Most bio- graphical and critical assessments of the legendary Victorian writer follow his own lead by emphasizing these moments, and with good reason. It was at Oxford in the 1870s that Wilde encountered Walter Pater and John Ruskin, on whose philosophies he first molded his personal brand of Aestheticism. And later, in 1895, his trial and imprisonment for “gross indecency” with other men marked not only a personal but also a cultural turning point. With his conviction, one of the world’s foundational and Mendelssohn’s book presents a pragmatic manipulator of the media as seen in his early, more vulnerable years. enduring images of gay male identity Photograph by Napoleon Sarony. (c.1882) Courtesy Wikimedia Commons was forged in a spectacle of homo- phobic state power. Wilde’s plays on the London poses two broadly consequential questions about on the singular accomplishment of being famous, stage were forced to close, his books fell out of the Irish writer. First, to paraphrase Mendelssohn, Oscar Wilde could be ranked as the first modern print, and within five years he died in Paris, desti- what happens to our view of him if we attend pri- celebrity. But to many in Britain, Wilde was merely tute and in exile. The twin locales of “Oxford” and marily to the “transformative events of 1882 [that] notorious, and notoriously silly at that. His proto- “prison” give us Wilde the artist and intellectual, would divide his life sharply into Before and After”? campy style seemed to invite the satire that made on the one hand, and Wilde the queer outcast, on Second, what happens if we re-examine Wilde’s life his name a household word. British parodies of the other. Even after more than a century, these through the prism of nineteenth-century American Aestheticism saturated a variety of media, from two flashpoints continue to dominate Wilde biog- culture? Answers to these questions take up the George du Maurier’s popular caricatures of pre- raphy and scholarship. greater part of Mendelssohn’s enlightening and tentious arty types in Punch magazine to the com- Michèle Mendelssohn’s new biography, Making provocative study. mercial West End stage. Gilbert and Sullivan’s hit Oscar Wilde, discards this familiar template for When Oscar Wilde arrived in New York on operetta Patience, for instance, featured aesthetes Wilde’s life, achievement, and cultural resonance. January 2, 1882, he is reputed to have announced, whose distinctive argot and exaggerated fash- Instead, she principally concentrates on Wilde’s “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” ions strongly recalled Wilde. In 1882, ­however, emergence as a transatlantic celebrity during his Although this remark is apocryphal, it became American audiences had seen relatively little extensive and lucrative lecture tour of the United legend long before it was recorded in print. The of this. In an era in which the United States still States (and Canada) in 1882. This shift of focus to quip presents Wilde as remarkably self-assured, imported a good deal of its popular culture from another decisive period in Wilde’s life and career even arrogant, and this was an image that the across the Atlantic, the Aesthetic movement’s youthful advocate of art for art’s sake was eager high-art claims (to say nothing of exponents such Gregory Mackie is an assistant professor in the to promote. Having published only the volume as Wilde) represented something distinctly exotic. department of English at the University of British Poems by this point, he was relying, in making his Cannily sensing an opportunity, the Gilbert and Columbia, where he teaches Victorian literature, claims to “genius,” mainly on a talent for attract- Sullivan impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte bank- drama, and book history. He has published several ing attention. A quotable and opinionated dandy, rolled Wilde’s lecture tour to show audiences articles on Oscar Wilde, and recently completed a Wilde assiduously cultivated celebrity in an era a real aesthete, all the better to pack the seats book manuscript titled “Beautiful Untrue Things”: that witnessed the emergence of a truly global where Patience was playing on tour. During this Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife. mass culture. Because his early fame depended remarkable year, the parody and the original could

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 23 seem indistinguishable. Indeed, for part of his by representations of difference. Although he Mendelssohn makes a compelling case for re- travels Wilde and the Patience cast travelled in the spoke with an English accent, Wilde proudly evaluating the early (and ignored) essay “L’Envoi” same train. proclaimed his Irishness—an affiliation widely (1882) as a preview of the cultural criticism that Although Making Oscar Wilde retains the fam- vilified in the U.S. In caricature, advertising, and Wilde developed in the more famous writings iliar image of Wilde as a pragmatic manipulator of performance, however, Wilde tended to be aligned collected in Intentions (1891). The requirement the media in the early 1880s, the Oscar we meet at with blackness. to respond to interviewers’ questions in a snappy the beginning of Mendelssohn’s book is somewhat and memorable way, Mendelssohn further different. He is a vulnerable and earnest striver ineteenth-century America refashioned argues, “mold[ed] the dialogue in his plays and who was “terribly sincere about what he wanted Nthe Wildean spectacle of difference in criticism,” and so inspired his characteristically to achieve” in his lectures on topics such as “The its own image, and often in grotesquely racist aphoristic style. And the standard practices of English Renaissance” (as he called the Aesthetic terms. This focus, which dovetails with the turn minstrel performance, which often featured a movement) and “The House Beautiful” (in which in Victorian studies heralded by Daniel Hack’s lineup of characters onstage making witty and he theorized home decorating). “Crammed with Reaping Something New: African American irreverent remarks, structured his plays in ways practical decoration advice,” this most popular Transformations of Victorian Literature (2016), that were apparent to Victorian critics steeped in among his lectures advised the fashionable home- yields some instructive results. As Mendelssohn the generic conventions of minstrelsy, but are less owner to banish “so-called works of art that are details, blackface minstrelsy and satirical/racist so to audiences today. For example, in her bravura unpunished crimes.” “The House Beautiful” not depictions of African Americans broadly structured reading of A Woman of No Importance (1893), only excoriated the unoriginality and bad taste the response to Wilde’s persona and message. Mendelssohn picks up on the play’s borrowings that Wilde felt afflicted American homes; it also Race became the measure and method for how to from minstrel performances to show us how to afforded him a high-minded riposte to his crit- represent (and deride) the departure from conven- identify jokes that we might not have known were ics. “Rather than attacking his imitators directly,” tion that Wilde embodied, and he emerges here as even there. Even if Wilde didn’t invent the stage Mendelssohn observes, “Wilde made an impas- an intersectional figure, shuttling between dispar- dandy—already a minstrelsy staple—he invested sioned argument against the fakes that cheapened aged categories. The Irish lecturer was parodied in that figure with irony and cool detachment, home life.” racial terms all over the country in both print and thereby making it his own. Despite appearing in an outlandish cos- performance, and his “affiliation with blackness Making Oscar Wilde is a breezily paced and tume complete with pumps and knee breeches, would become stronger as his tour progressed”: entertaining read, and throughout Mendelssohn’s Wilde really meant what he said. His lectures, there was even a sendup of Patience called Black style is refreshingly unstuffy. She is not above which ranged from the philosophical sources of Patience, which mocked Wilde by incorporating throwing shade on Aestheticism’s older genera- Aestheticism to its practical applications, advo- blackface and drag. Although Wilde’s personal tion, describing the poet Algernon Swinburne as cated a subjective and romantic devotion to art reaction to this racist mockery proves elusive in “a drunk,” Wilde’s Oxford mentor Walter Pater as and the cultivation of personal taste. In them, Mendelssohn’s account (was he offended? did he a “young fogey,” and (my favourite) his rival the Wilde exuded the reformist zeal of an painter James McNeill Whistler evangelist. For Mendelssohn, Wilde as a “frenemy.” Her candid tone was also far from being confidently Mendelssohn argues Wilde’s fame was reassures us that we aren’t going and fully in control of his image while to miss the good stuff, as when we on tour. The twenty-seven-year-old, predicated on his immersion in two are told, “here is what really hap- she asserts, was “a young man in thrall pened on Wilde’s first night in New to his managers’ hype and dazzled particularly American cultural forms: York.” (Don’t get too excited; he was by the speed of his own transforma- a terrible lecturer at first.) Previous tion.” She charts the “making” of Oscar the journalistic interview and the accounts of Wilde’s American trip, Wilde as a celebrity first and foremost, blackface minstrel show. such as Lloyd Lewis and Henry and persuasively argues that his Justin Smith’s Oscar Wilde Discovers fame was predicated on his immer- America, 1882 (1936) and Roy sion in, and engagement with, two particularly laugh it off?), the impact on him of American cul- Morris Jr.’s Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in American cultural forms: the journalistic interview tures of popular performance nonetheless stands North America (2013) are, at core, mainly trav- (Mendelssohn startlingly reveals that 95 percent of out as compelling and original. elogues. While Mary Warner Blanchard’s Oscar the interviews that Wilde ever gave took place in The substantive middle section of Mendelssohn’s Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age “one American annus mirabilis”), and the black- book, which covers the lecture tour, culminates in (1998) is more substantial, Mendelssohn’s is the face minstrel show. The latter was a popular and Wilde’s contradiction-riddled visit to the region he first Wilde biography to assert the centrality of pervasive form of entertainment on both sides called the “beautiful, passionate, ruined South.” American culture to his formation as a thinker, of the Atlantic, and it would prove an adaptable However susceptible he was to the romantic, an artist, a “spectacle-maker,” and ultimately as medium for mocking the lecturer. Both forms, white-supremacist mythology of the Southern “lost an Irishman. Mendelssohn further argues, would crucially exert cause,” in his interactions with (white) Southerners Alas, the later and arguably more significant an influence on his drama. Wilde also insistently linked their alienation to years of Wilde’s life (from 1883 until his death Making Oscar Wilde is a lavishly illus- a cause closer to his own heart: Irish home rule. in 1900) receive relatively short shrift here, but I trated book, and its methodology exemplifies His response to the South, like many of Wilde’s understand why. This book is about telling a rela- Mendelssohn’s characterization of scholarship in publicly enunciated affinities, was as Mendelssohn tively familiar story in a profoundly new way, and the present day as “the Golden Age of the Archive.” cogently puts it, “tactical.” Her assiduous research in order to do that, Mendelssohn needs to empha- The book recovers and analyzes overlooked his- debunks a legend circulated by nineteenth-cen- size certain periods at the expense of others. As torical narratives and images, and in synthesizing tury purveyors of “fake news” that Wilde witnessed a biographer focusing on a single year, she has them Mendelssohn forges some unexpected and a lynching in Louisiana, and records his refusal taken an approach that recalls the method of illuminating connections. As a son of Dublin’s to travel—­without his African American valet— James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Anglo-Irish Protestant ruling class who was in a segregated train. (Whether that refusal can be Shakespeare (2005). By turning her archival eye to brought down by an epochal sex scandal, and a ascribed to principle or class privilege is left up to historical representations of race and ethnicity, writer of plays populated by aristocratically fierce the reader to decide.) At the same time, she spares Mendelssohn also manages to give us an Oscar women and fey men, Oscar Wilde is, for modern us neither the uncomfortable history of Wilde’s Wilde for our time. Even so, as a reader in and from readers, generally defined by the categories of slave-owning Confederate uncle Judge John Canada, I would have loved to have read in Making class, gender, and sexuality. Although her Wilde is Kingsbury Elgee, nor of his sycophantic visit to Oscar Wilde something (anything!) about Wilde’s not without his manifold paradoxes—“he wanted the former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. side-trips into this country, but Queen Victoria’s to be English, [but] he had no wish not to be Irish. Meeting American celebrities, no matter their Dominion merits nary a mention. Mendelssohn Shrewdly, he chose to be both,” she observes— politics (he had also visited Walt Whitman), was is herself a proud Montrealer, and Wilde spent the Mendelssohn productively outlines the shaping simply part of the aesthete’s itinerary. longest part of his visit to this country in that city, a effects of race and ethnicity, in American contexts, For me, as a book and theatre historian, some place with its own lengthy and complex history of on Wilde and his subsequent literary production. of the most fascinating revelations in Making racial and ethnic tensions. Maybe there is another Wilde’s tour, Mendelssohn shows, was ­dominated Oscar Wilde are those that pertain to his writing. book on the horizon.

24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Scenes from a Marriage A grandmother’s story against the backdrop of Haile Selassie’s rise and fall Donna Bailey Nurse

­overwhelms her: Edemariam has only The Wife’s Tale: to utter the magic word, “she” and A Personal History Yetemegnu manifests before our eyes. Aida Edemariam She is born in the northern city Knopf Canada of Gondar around 1916. When she is 336 pages, hardcover eight, her family marries her off to an ISBN 9780307361714 ambitious deacon two decades her senior. Up until that time Yetemegnu has spent her days climbing trees and ot long ago my ­daughter playing wedding with her friends. was a bridesmaid in Indeed, her real-life ceremony strikes Nan Ethiopian wedding. her as little more than a game. While The ceremony, which was held in she eats up the attention—she loves Toronto, was Orthodox, and the fes- to dance and will always adore the tivities lasted several days. A stirring spotlight—she does not fully grasp part of the reception featured the what is happening to her. She is only young couple surrounded by mem- afraid to drink too much in case she bers of the congregation dressed in wets the bed. Because Yetemegnu is white muslin chanting and dancing too young to consummate the mar- to the throbbing beat of magnifi- riage, her husband, Tsega, leaves cent African drums. How moving to her with her grandmother, where observe the rites of an Afro-Christian she can remain a child, and heads tradition reaching back seventeen to the capital, Addis Ababa, to seek a hundred years. promotion. The Bible contains many allusions Tsega is a compelling figure in his to Ethiopia. Moses’s marriage to an own right. He is born in the province Edemariam’s biography reads like a long-lost book of the Bible. Ethiopian woman named Zipporah of Gojjam in 1893. After his father ‘The Faithful Rescued by Saint Michael in Paradise’ from a 17th-century (Numbers 12) was opposed by his sis- illuminated manuscript from Gondar province, by the scribe Zämänfäs Qeddus. catches him sketching pictures of ter Miriam, who was forthwith struck Courtesy of Walters Art Museum devils as a boy Tsega is forever for- with leprosy. The Queen of Sheba bidden from picking up a pen, a travelled from her native Ethiopia to meet famous Edemariam is a journalist for the Guardian restriction that he obeys, incredibly, for more than King Solomon (1 Kings 10). Their passionate newspaper, the biracial daughter of an Ethiopian three decades. Even so, this limitation becomes an affair produced Menelik, who went on to become father and Canadian mother. Her book is com- advantage as he masters the skill of memorization, emperor of Ethiopia, establishing a dynasty that prised of stories she coaxed from her grandmother, learning all of the Psalms by heart. One passage reigned virtually uninterrupted until Haile Selassie always pressing for more details. The pressure pays of the book depicts Tsega as a young man leaving was overthrown in 1974. Still, today, a determined off in an engrossing psychological portrait of a home to study with a famous scholar, scenes of Eurocentric interpretation tends to suppress the woman of considerable charm and courage, whose which evoke Jesus and his disciples. Bible’s black African element. riveting literary presence cannot be diminished by Encountering Aida Edemariam’s absorbing the crippling gender bias of her time and place. [H]e pulled his head through a rough sheep- biography of her Ethiopian grandmother is like dis- Edemariam has immersed herself in the litera- skin cape, picked up his leather book case, covering a missing book of the Bible: the imagery ture of the region; her encyclopedic knowledge of and left for a nearby village, where he had and landscapes, the individuals strictly defined by the political and cultural history is felt on every heard a respected teacher was working. their Orthodox world, the anachronistic practices, page, enriching the context for Yetemegnu’s life. A handful of others had done the same, walk- and the ancient spiritual writings woven through Occasionally, this rich background is summarized ing in through the valleys and the mountain are all reminiscent of the Holy Book. Of course The in a manner that provides both too little informa- passes, choosing mastery of poetry in Ge’ez, Wife’s Tale is much more contemporary. The life of tion and too much. And yet, as with true works of the church language, over homes that they Yetemegnu, whom we meet as a child bride, spans art, a flaw can sometime create an arresting effect: often never saw again. For five years the most of the twentieth century, paralleling the rise Edemarian’s accounts of saints and miracles and sun rose to find them gathered around their and fall of Haile Selassie, and stretches into the kings and battles produce a distinct language, a teacher, listening to him describe stanza twenty-first. Notwithstanding its spiritual aspects, haunting music evocative of the qiné (spiritual forms, explain particularly pleasing meta- The Wife’s Tale is also a down-to-earth account of a poetry) for which the Ethiopian church is known. phors, recite useful examples. long and challenging marriage. Yetemegnu’s voice is integral to this music. Edemariam does not use quotations or punc- In Addis Ababa, Tsega’s talent wins him an Donna Bailey Nurse’s collection of essays Black tuation that might make it stand out in any way. audience with the Princess Zewditu, who awards Girls: Women of African Descent Write Their Yetemegnu is inseparable from the cultural fabric of him the leadership of Ba’ata Mariam church, World will be released by Palimpsest later this year. her life. Miraculously, the sweeping narrative never making him the most powerful church official in

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26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Gondar and Yetemegnu one of the most influen- The perverse facts of Yetemegnu’s early life swear allegiance to their king, Victor Emmanuel III. tial women. The pair eventually set up house in constitute a predicament for the author. The text is As is often the case, the conquerors begin to fear Gondar, where he begins to educate her in her new sometimes ambiguous. Do Yetemegnu and Tsega the people they have defeated. The next time Tsega role. He is advised not to teach Yetemegnu to read begin living together when she is ten or twelve? Do is called before Italian officials, two priests are (she is already too bright). She for her part sees they consummate the marriage at that time? It’s all shot. The horror escalates with the Italians killing Tsega as both father and husband, in that order. quite disturbing—off-putting, even—to contem- more than three hundred monks and intellectuals Tsega often cares for her when she is ill—she porary readers. And no doubt, it’s complicated for in February of 1937. comes close to death several times—and after her Edemariam as well. She clearly loves and respects When Gondar falls, Yetemegnu flees to her many difficult pregnancies. her grandmother and desires to protect both her father’s village, another scene out of biblical times. Yetemegnu’s parents were divorced. She was grandparents from judgment. raised by her father, whom she describes, some- Edemariam is likewise reticent on the subject Eventually, early one morning, her husband what disdainfully, as a materialistic smooth talker. of slavery, which continued to flourish in Ethiopia and a cousin and a manservant lifted her, Her mother, on the other hand, she calls beautiful, into the twentieth century. Yetemegnu’s father pregnant again, onto a mule. She stretched generous, and kind. Is it possible that her father’s obviously held slaves because when she is mar- out her arms for the baby and waited as mules possession of slaves contributed to their estrange- ried off, a slave girl accompanies her to her new and donkeys were loaded with the older ment? Edemariam may hint at this when she tells home. Slaves also help run Yetemegnu’s household. children, with clothes and cooking pots, with us that Yetemegnu’s mother was not impressed While this may not be the grotesque form of the a hundredweight of the whitest teff, with forty by his “military skirmishes” with the “prisoners of institution associated with the Atlantic slave trade, kilos of dried spiced chilli and a generous war who became (his) valuable slaves.” At any rate it seems necessary to discuss this abhorrent aspect measure of shirro. Her husband kissed each Yetemegnu understands from her mother’s experi- of the culture alongside the conversation about pol- child goodbye. When they finally set off, ence what it means to be unhappily married. Her itics and faith. But Edemarian simply avoids provid- a single manservant trotted alongside. own husband, a highly respected priest, generally ing context for certain awkward subjects, and those treats her with tenderness. But he is also insanely moments, while rare, unsettle the reader. Edemariam draws many analogies between her jealous. She is not permitted to go anywhere Despite a challenging marriage, the couple grandmother and the Virgin Mary, especially in the without him. Whenever he is overcome by his proves devoted to one another. Together they serve excerpts from the classic Ethiopic text Legends of unreasonable emotions, he beats her with a stick. the men and women of Gondar and rebuild their Our Lady Mary the Perpetual Virgin and Her Mother She leaves him more than once. church, Ba’ata Mariam. It is a prosperous period for Hanna, interspersed throughout her book. As a One day many years into the marriage, he raises the family and the country, with the new emperor grieving mother who has lost three of her eleven his hand to strike her and she stares him down. introducing Ethiopia into the modern world by children, Yetemegnu identifies with Mary. And as a After that she begins to assert her freedom, travel- means of universal education and the printing devout but illiterate woman, she studies the images ling to family functions unaccompanied, stepping press. But then in 1935 the Italians invade Ethiopia, of Mary on the walls of Ba’ata Mariam to develop an out to visit the market, or even attend church on and the emperor flees to Djibouti. understanding of God’s word. her own. Her neighbours greet her with warmth Yetemegnu’s life turns out to be an interesting After the war a jealous colleague betrays Tsega and respect. By now she has developed superior lens through which to observe twentieth century and he is thrown in jail. When he dies, Yetemegnu culinary skills. She is noted for her hospitality and Ethiopian politics. When the Italians take the city commits her life to clearing his name. Her courage generosity, qualities befitting her position as Aleqa of Gondar, Tsega is asked to gather the priests for and determination cannot be defeated. The Wife’s Tsega’s wife. a meeting with Italian officials who make them Tale is also The Life of a Saint.

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June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 27 The Oil Stays in the Picture The tar sands, and a war of images Brian Jacobson

Even as oil animates the headlines about Kinder Morgan and co., something of its reality is kept hidden away. illustration by joe sacco, from global warming and the sweetness of life. Courtesy mit press.

the power of human ingenuity and economic In Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: opportunity, others see environmental destruc- A Tar Sands Tale, Vancouver-based scholar- A Tar Sands Tale tion and exploitation. It’s a sensible explanation, activists Matt Hern and Am Johal team up with Matt Hern and Am Johal, with Joe Sacco but it also understates the power of these images. cartoonist Joe Sacco to tackle such questions in the MIT Press Photographs may be open to interpretation, heart of Canadian oil country. The book’s central 232 pages, softcover but they also guide it. Oil companies have long argument—and its signal contribution to the ever- ISBN 9780262037648 known this and have learned that some images expanding literature about climate change and the and interpretations should simply be avoided. so-called “Anthropocene”—is that any question The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet Not surprisingly, many have been reticent to allow of ecology must start with land politics and sover- Written by Hugh Goldring and illustrated photographers to document their work at all. “They eignty, an idea (discussed recently in the LRC’s by Nicole Marie Burton couldn’t see an upside to letting me in,” Burtynsky pages) developed in rich dialogue with Indigenous Ad Astra Comix recalls. “They could only see a downside.” thinkers. To balance this overarching claim, Hern 118 pages, softcover The fact that oil production takes place far from and Johal add the equally critical on-the-ground ISBN 9780994050786 most people’s lived experience has allowed the story of those who live and work in the tar sands industry to own the upside, ensuring, as best as region. In the face of monumental and abstract public relations people can, that every image will be problems raised by a warming planet, individual een from above, in photographs and the right one. Most of us will never travel overseas action often seems futile, especially for those of us films by Edward Burtynsky or Peter Mettler, or offshore, or even to northern Alberta, to trace who experience oil and its effects only in the most S the Alberta tar sands appear as Earth-scale our energy sources. With few exceptions, then, the remote fashion—by flipping a switch, streaming inkblots, their forests cut clear and soil scraped images we have come from those with the most to a show, or filling the tank. What difference does clean, their ink spilled into smooth tailing ponds gain. And so even as oil animates headlines—most anything we do make when the challenges are so carved out in straight lines and graceful curves. recently about the fate of the Kinder Morgan pipe- large and seemingly so beyond our control? Part of They are at once beautiful and terrifying, geo- line—something of its reality remains hidden away, the power of Hern and Johal’s approach is to trace metric and enigmatic, lyrical and dreadful. In a truly a case of out of sight, out of mind. these challenges to the people who experience word: sublime. How does oil enter our minds? What role do them up close, implicitly asking what a few indi- Burtynsky has described his oil photographs images—with their capacity both to convey ideas vidual experiences can tell those of us who remain as “a bit like a Rorschach test.” Where some see quickly and to deliver meaning slowly—have in far away. shaping how we understand the problem of oil The book frames those experiences within a Brian Jacobson is an assistant professor of cinema power and its environmental consequences? And now-familiar story about the ecological effects of studies and history at the University of Toronto. how do we find a path out of the “age of oil” when extracting and burning fossil fuels and the rising His writing about media, energy, and the environ- so much of our thinking—and our image of the call to abandon the oil-backed economy. In recent ment has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles future—has been shaped by the energy source that years, a chorus of scholars and activists have rallied Review of Books, Film Quarterly, and other places. named it? around various versions of an anti-development

28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada idea proposed again here by Hern and Johal—what and a worldview based on relations rather than learned about life in Fort McMurray, the broad Naomi Klein, in This Changes Everything (2014), resources, the Lubicon offer a vision of a different strokes of climate-change criticism, and even the describes as “managed degrowth.” Pushing back future. Paraphrasing writer Leanne Betasamosake basics of the tar sands extraction process (mix against the term “Anthropocene”—useful as it may Simpson, authors Hern and Johal describe this bitumen and hot water, stir, skim, repeat). The have been in catalyzing academic and popular as a “political life raft for non-Indigenous folks,” comic brings the tar sands and Hern and Johal’s responses to the crisis of global warming—­scholars a deliverance that can only work if Indigenous stories about the people who live there to life such as Donna Haraway and Jason Moore have land is returned and their ways of life allowed (while also providing some relief from the polit- also called attention to the fact that this new to endure. ical philosophizing). epochal -cene has been shaped by only certain In one particularly comical frame, the authors members of the Anthropos: Western fossil-fuel he tension between individual lifestyle practise repeating “oil sands,” a reminder of the burning nations and especially their corporations. Tchoices and the worldwide historical changes political charge even the terms themselves used Meanwhile everyone else—the global south, the that we all face—even if to different degrees and to (and for some still do) carry. In its most power- island nations, the communities that have resisted on different time scales—has long defined modern ful frames, the comic does precisely the work of the logics of development—will suffer its worst environmentalism. “Think globally, act locally,” as imagination described by McCurdy. In an image outcomes. As Hern and Johal put it, “the term itself one of the movement’s early mantras maintained. of a community drowning in flood waters—its mocks [this] difference.” For many critics, the idea has become increasingly population struggling to stay afloat on the roof of Looking beyond the Anthropocene debate, quaint. No matter what each of us does, dramatic a sinking car—an inset text box establishes a hypo- they turn to thinkers such as Alexandre Kojeve via changes will come and modern Western lifestyles thetical time when “all of Alberta’s oil sands are Giorgio Agamben (and later Gilles Deleuze), to will end. Why bother to act locally if the inter- excavated, processed, and blown out our exhaust ask the most difficultly abstract questions: What national community can’t agree to reduce emis- pipes.” There’s a whole a cli-fi narrative in this does it take to imagine our world otherwise and to sions or develop alternatives? If it’s up to national single image. constitute new possibilities for living? At its most governments to safeguard our future via environ- Images like this one help show the degree to specific, the book envisions a “sweetness of life” mental and energy policy, what’s left for individ- which climate change and its causes are a visual lived beyond work and beyond capitalism; a life of uals to do anyway? As Vanessa puts it to Hern and problem. The extraction industry, as Burton’s mock “freedom through equality, through differentiation Johal about her bar job in Fort McMurray, “how advertisements remind us, is driven by images and complexity, through a relationship with land is me working here, or not working here, going to and hides itself behind them. But with projects and other-than-human-beings.” change that?” operating at the tar sands’ massive scale, and It’s an appealing idea, but here’s one stumbling Similar questions drive The Beast: Making a with activists challenging pipelines and bringing block: For people whose livelihood comes from— Living on a Dying Planet, a graphic novel about visibility to the issues, that image control has its and has been defined in the image of—an oil-pow- individual choice and the ethical imperatives limits. By understanding the worldview that oil ered world, what does an anti-oil, anti-development of a warming world. Written by Hugh Goldring companies have put in place so carefully over the agenda offer? To get at this issue, Hern and Johal and illustrated by Nicole Marie Burton, The Beast last century, and its power to shape our imagina- picked up Sacco and hit the road. Between May follows friends Mary, who earns a living in oil tion and capture our enthusiasm, we can find new 2015 and August 2016, the trio travelled to Fort advertising (one mock-up evokes the Keystone XL visions and new images to replace that image of McMurray, the Athabasca tar sands, and nearby pipeline), and Callum, who makes ends meet as a oil. But as Hern and Johal show, we don’t have to Indigenous communities to take stock of the situa- freelancer while trying to kickstart a career as an imagine the world all over again. Models exist, at tion firsthand. In Edmonton and Fort McMurray, ecology-themed artist. Mary’s work vexes Callum, least while they still do, in Indigenous practices they find ethnically and culturally diverse com- but it also keeps a roof over his head and a pint and worldviews. munities of Canadians seeking their own good life in one hand, iPhone in the other. They end up in Rather than treat the Anthropocene’s most in a place with the jobs and salaries to provide it. Fort Mac, where Mary goes on assignment hoping at-risk communities only as victims, Hern and They spend time with people like Vanessa, a pub to boost an oil company’s image by advertising its Johal, in perhaps the book’s most rewarding move, waitress who, like most everyone else they meet, land reclamation project, while Callum finds work look to them for ways to replace Western ideas is smart enough to understand the tar sands’ crit- shooting a photo spread for a mining magazine. of development with non-Western notions of ics but needs to make a living too. “Sure I’m wor- They survive the 2016 wildfire that gives the novel sustainability. They turn, for instance, to Leanne ried about climate change,” she explains, but she its name, but also lose their jobs. Can there be a Betasamosake Simpson, who in the opening pages also needs a job. They meet Reinalie, an activist happy ending on a dying planet? describes a conversation with a community elder fighting to ameliorate working conditions for Fort Produced in collaboration with Patrick McCurdy, who dismisses the idea of sustainable develop- McMurray’s population of (largely Filipina) domes- a University of Ottawa media and communications ment altogether. And they call upon proponents tic labourers, but who nonetheless defends the city scholar, The Beast means to call attention to the of sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, a Quechua con- and its oil economy. “This isn’t a boomtown,” she struggle over the tar sands’ image. In addition to cept that translates loosely as “good (or right) proclaims, “it’s a hometown.” For these Canadians, Mary’s PR assignments, it intersperses a series of living.” Such ideas offer models for what Hern and the development narrative remains persuasive and satirical oil advertisements: in one a maple tree Johal, paraphrasing writer Simpson, describe as its effects material and immediate. is tapped for oil, not syrup; another announces, “respectful relations between humans and ‘animal Even ignoring climate change, one need not “Plastic. (It’s what’s for dinner).” “Image” is the and plant nations,’ ” relations predicated not on look far to find cracks in this story. Despite policy key word here. The novel isn’t just about visual domination and exploitation but on fidelity and initiatives that greatly reduced crime in the region entertainment or bringing environmental politics generosity. Instead of ever-expanding markets between 2008 and 2015, Fort McMurray continues to new audiences. It’s also about the unique role and spiking economic indicators, we’re invited to fit boomtown stereotypes found similarly images have to play in debates about energy and to imagine the “sweetness of life” named in the in U.S. fracking country. Drug rates and sexual the environment. As McCurdy rightly puts it in the book’s title: a life that economic development assaults, in particular, well outpace national aver- short introduction, “struggles over the environ- could never buy. ages, the latter by about two-and-a-half times— ment, climate change and energy transition are With temperatures soaring, storms raging, gla- hardly the makings of a good hometown. Those equally struggles for our imagination.” ciers melting, and seas rising; with oil spills and numbers only go up in nearby rural areas, many That struggle points to the importance of Joe plastic filling our waters and poisoning our food; populated largely by Indigenous communities, Sacco’s contribution to Hern and Johal’s book. and with wildfires like “the Beast” that scorched a fact that further highlights just who is harmed In acclaimed cartoons on topics including war, Fort McMurray in 2016 becoming more and more (and first) by oil-powered industry. When Hern refugees, and poverty, Sacco, much like Art common, global warming foretells hard times to and Johal visit local Lubicon communities, they Spiegelman or Marjane Satrapi, has demonstrated come. Are we sure economic development is going find families frustrated by the oil companies’ the image’s power to narrate and distill complex to protect us—all of us—when the worst arrives? flagrant flaunting of land laws, by lack of govern- politics in engaging form. For Sacco, it’s about Simpson reminds us that there’s another way. ment oversight, by decades of pollution and its accessibility and immediacy. The image can draw “My ancestors didn’t bank capital…they banked adverse effects on human and animal health, and in readers of all kinds and transport them, much relationships…with the land, with plant nations by the slow destruction of a whole way of living. as a film might, to another place and time. Sacco’s and animal nations and neighbouring families and The situation appears dire. But they also find the comic, “Bitumen or Bust,” attempts to do this for neighbouring Indigenous communities. In times of seeds of something else. In the form of renewable Hern and Johal’s tar sands tale. In ten lean pages, hardship they relied on these relationships.” What power installations, zero-waste living practices, it recounts the journey to Alberta, the lessons will the rest of us rely on?

June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 29 Letters

R e : “T h e N e w C a mp u s P u r i ta n s ,” n his very interesting review, Ira Wells ques- In short, academic freedom is at stake when uni- b y I r a W e l l s (M ay 2018) I tions the centrality of freedom of expression to versities stifle free expression precisely because the the mission of universities, and argues that some former relies so fundamentally on the latter. n the current free speech debate, the relation- commentators—myself included—ignore the dis- I ship between the university and the world out- tinction between academic freedom and freedom Emmett Macfarlane side its walls is as impermeable as ever. Demands of expression. Associate Professor, Department of from identitarians (white supremacists) to speak in In a CBC opinion piece about the Wilfrid Laurier Political Science university-owned spaces are lobbed like shells at University-Lindsay Shepherd affair, I wrote that University of Waterloo the fortress walls, but hardly noticed by the citizens Laurier failed to defend Shepherd’s academic writing journal articles inside. Academics under- freedom or freedom of expression. Wells notes that stand that the speech they must pay attention to my claim “suggests that those two concepts are rofessor Macfarlane claims that academic is that practised among themselves, not that of the interchangeable, as though ‘academic freedom’ is P freedom is a “broader” concept than the free- generalist. Ira Wells clearly explains the distinction simply the name we give to ‘free speech’ when it is dom of speech. It is in fact narrower, since much between the university’s duty to protect academic employed by academics.” of what is protected on free speech grounds—that freedom and its agnostic stance on freedom of While academic freedom and freedom of slavery was a choice, that Kim Jung Il invented the expression. Yes, universities protect speech: when expression are distinct concepts—a fact that my hamburger, or whatever—cannot appeal to aca- peers who can vouch for the speaker’s reasoning explicit use of both terms readily implies—they demic freedom protections. Macfarlane implicitly and expertise have vetted it. are fundamentally related. The former is broader, recognizes this in his parenthetical mention of the But in underlining this distinction, Wells cedes in that it expressly encapsulates protections for “limits of disciplinary and programmatic needs.” an important source of the power and authority the research and teaching functions of university Clearly, free speech is not subject to such disciplin- still enjoyed by our higher education institutions: faculty, including the freedom to engage in lines ary “limits,” though Macfarlane is correct to suggest the ability to help the world solve its problems, and of inquiry and control over teaching and course that academic freedom is. to engage with it on any terms available. For many content (within the limits of disciplinary and pro- Professor Macfarlane challenges my “narrow academics—and I am thinking now not only of grammatic needs). vision” of academic freedom with reference to race, Indigenous, and feminist scholars, but also of Wells notes that free expression protections the “memorandum of agreement” between the political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and are missing from most university mission state- University of Toronto’s governing council and its economists—academic scholarship is a method that ments and strategic mandate agreements. Yet faculty association. He quotes the agreement’s serves their work with communities. It is not a home. freedom of expression is an integral component of assertion that academic freedom “involves the These scholars address issues on the ground, at academic freedom, and it is a shame Wells did not right to investigate, speculate, and comment various levels: Does diversity harm trust between look further for evidence that universities ingrain without reference to prescribed doctrine.” He does citizens? Do single young men have a higher pro- this value in their governance documents and not quote a following sentence, which, in part, pensity to violence? Why did Donald Trump win? policies. Wells relies on the Universities Canada situates academic “freedom in pursuing research What happens to our health when we live in dense statement on academic freedom to support his and scholarship and in publishing.” The second urban environments? None of these questions can own framing of the concept, a statement that pre- sentence exists for a reason. Academic freedom be answered within the confines of one discipline; sents a far more narrow vision of academic free- protects the freedom to do academic work: spe- the principle of academic freedom protects even as dom than that of other post-secondary umbrella cifically, work that is recognized as “research” and it polices the boundaries of knowledge. organizations and most universities. (My “scholarship” and other activities undertaken in The world outside the university is increasingly Waterloo colleague Shannon Dea has done excel- the “pursuit of truth, the advancement of learn- impatient with this narrow, nuanced expertise. It lent work collecting these statements on her Daily ing, and the dissemination of knowledge.” Of wants simplified analogies (lobster, anyone?) to fill Academic Freedom blog, dailyacademicfreedom. course academic freedom must include freedom the treasure chest of infinite content to which we wordpress.com.) from institutional censorship—who would sug- have grown accustomed. It seems too late to invoke The statement on academic freedom from the gest otherwise? But academic freedom becomes civility as a response. The conversation outside Canadian Association of University Teachers, for “academic” freedom through adherence to insti- the university may be misinformed, xenophobic, example, not only explicitly refers to freedom tutional norms: disciplinary standards or “limits” homophobic, and misogynist, but it carries on, of expression but also includes “freedom from that clarify the lines separating “research” and regardless of who is participating. institutional censorship.” (Notably, it also applies “scholarship” from opinion, belief, or superstition. In the wake of the Lindsay Shepherd incident, the concept to all academic staff.) The University It is precisely through upholding the line separat- Wilfrid Laurier University released a statement on of Toronto, where Wells teaches, enshrines ing the former from the latter that universities freedom of expression. It, too, stresses the role of the academic freedom in the “memorandum of can (in Simona Chiose’s phrase above) “show the university as an environment of scholarship, and not agreement” between the university’s governing value of speech by talking sense over the ravings as a public square. At the same time, it notes that on council and its faculty association. The agree- of the mob.” campus, free expression will be more challenging. ment notes that academic freedom “involves That’s where experts are needed: to show the value of the right to investigate, speculate, and comment Ira Wells speech by talking sense over the ravings of the mob. without reference to prescribed doctrine, as well Toronto, Ontario as the right to criticize the University of Toronto Simona Chiose and society at large.” It also includes freedom Toronto, Ontario from institutional censorship.

30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada R e : “T h e B ru t e W i t h i n ,” b y J ac k might be familiar with, then it is “healthy masculin- do this kind of thing, which leaves a gap in our col- U rw i n (M ay 2018 LRC) ities.” Whatever the terms being bantered about, it is lective understanding of how politics works. not surprising to see the recent publication of three The perspective of political staff is not well his is an important conversation that needs books that glance inward to explore the “crisis of understood because, in their jobs, they do not Tmore people to join in. As Urwin says at the masculinity.” Urwin’s review is perhaps driven by a speak with their own voice. Instead, they either beginning of his review, this conversation cen- public appetite to rethink masculinity and, in some don’t speak at all or speak only on behalf of ters around one question: “What’s wrong with way, find the answers to a perplexing problem. their ministers. They serve at pleasure; they hold modern men?” But what exactly is the problem with boys that no authority of their own and do not enjoy the My father died by suicide in September 2017. we yearn to understand? Do fatherless boys make job security that protects public servants—nor He was seventy-five years old. My dad came from violent men? Are boys born naturally aggressive? should they. A staffer’s actions are legitimate a generation where no one talked about mental Violent? More compellingly perhaps, can we raise only to the extent that they are directed by the illness or suicide. Men, in particular, showed no boys to be unlike the rest of the boys? Can we nur- appropriate minister. Ministerial responsibility, vulnerability to any struggle. To show any emotion ture boys that are sensitive yet competitive, cour- a constitutional convention in Canada, requires was to appear weak. I never saw my father cry. In ageous yet vulnerable? ministers—not political staff—to account for the fact, my father never told me he loved me until I left This series of questions is timely in a bleak decisions taken by their offices. In this context of home at age twenty. Unfortunately, my experience landscape that has recently seen repeated disturb- concentrated power, a successful staffer is loyal, with my father is not out of the ordinary. ing incidents of aggression and despair from boys strategic, networked, thick-skinned, and remark- Sadly, neither is my father’s suicide. In Canada and men. Collectively the books may offer hints of ably tight-lipped. the suicide rate is three to four times higher for optimism about rethinking masculinity, glimpses In his book, Brodie reclaims his voice to offer men than for women. There has not been much of into different masculinities, windows from which an explanatory defence of concentrated power and a conversation about this by either health officials to peer into the worlds of some boys—but they will central coordination. It is a perspective that merits or the media. Actually, aside from so-called “men’s not offer answers. consideration, particularly given his unique van- rights” groups, no one is talking much about these Readers can see that there are competing and tage point. Many political observers, on different trends. (Even then it’s dealt with in a superficial indeed overlapping masculinities. Whether they sides of the ideological divide, have lamented the way.) According to these groups, the issue is that are raised by a single mother as I was, or raised by negative implications of concentrated power in our men are dying and no one cares because we’re two mothers (or indeed two fathers), boys can and parliamentary system. Brodie’s account provides too caught up in the feminist narrative fed to us by will respond to a multitude of ways for learning something of a counter-argument, or at least an mainstream culture. what it means to be a man. Boys are not restricted, alternative narrative. Even those who find his argu- But no one seems to be asking why men are doomed, or biologically hard-wired to be one way, ments unconvincing will benefit from his bringing dying by suicide at such a higher rate than females. even though some may believe that to be the case. them forward. Why do men select more violent methods of sui- The fact that some boys have no fathers should not His book raises the question: Should we be cide? What does this say about us? leave anyone in despair. Masculinities are compli- more nuanced in our descriptions and analyses What are we to do? I firmly believe that these cated and messy. Rethinking masculinity means of concentrated power? It is easy to find evidence books, and Urwin’s review, are important steps in challenging what has gone un-challenged in order for the argument that the Canadian prime min- the right direction. Because talking is healing. The to think differently about how boys learn to be cer- ister has too many levers of power, with very few more of us that talk about this, the better it is for tain kinds of men. effective checks to act as counterbalances. It is men, and young boys in particular. But it not just a more difficult (not to mention time-consuming) men’s issue—it’s a societal one. We are all impacted Michael Kehler to take account of the imperatives behind con- regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Research Professor of centrated power and to establish a litmus test for So let’s keep the conversation going. Masculinities in Education distinguishing between its use and abuse. It is Werklund School of Education no doubt a thankless job to provide a defence of Rev. Robert Cooke Calgary, Alberta concentrated power (I admit I’ve never tried it), St. Mark’s Anglican Church but in so doing Brodie has made an important St. John’s, Newfoundland R e : “S u r e H e I s , a n d W h at o f I t ?” contribution. b y P au l W e l l s (M ay 2018) Lori Turnbull hen we talk about masculinity in everyday e are fortunate that Ian Brodie has written a Interim Director, School of Public Wparlance, we are really talking about “toxic Wbook about his experiences as chief of staff Administration masculinity.” And if it is not toxic masculinity one in Stephen Harper’s PMO. Too few former staffers Dalhousie University

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June 2018 reviewcanada.ca 31 Andy Lamey Sex versus Power Is the male libido really to blame for #MeToo?

he #MeToo movement has given rise perpetrators in all the high-profile #MeToo cases. and other hierarchies. Yet to date #cancelmen has to the view, expressed with alarm in Junot Dìaz is only the latest example. Another writer, trended as a hashtag while #cancelbosses has not. T social and other media, that men are pigs. Zinzi Clemmons, stepped up to the microphone Other areas of sexual life support the thought Such a view was on display in a letter an anonym- during a live Q&A at an Australian literary festival to that it is conditioned by power. Consider sexual ous woman sent to sex columnist Dan Savage, in publicly accuse the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist tourism. For decades, it was something men pur- which she said she doubted she would ever sleep of having harassed her six years previously when she sued. But in recent years media stories have docu- with a man again after reading so many stories of invited Dìaz to a literary workshop. After Clemmons mented women doing it too. A 2007 Reuters piece sexual harassment. “I know #notallmen, but I have challenged Dìaz, other women came forward with noted that Kenya had become popular with British to admit, I wake up and read the news, and I find stories of his abusive behaviour. In this way the and Scandinavian women in their fifties and sixties myself saying, my god, men are disgusting.” Toronto allegations against Dìaz repeat the same pattern: who travel there because it is “just full of big young writer (and Literary Review of Canada contributor) a man harassing and abusing multiple woman, boys who like us older girls,” as one British tourist Stephen Marche expressed a similar view in in a stretching back through Weinstein, Franken, and put it. The women sleep with men thirty years their widely discussed New York Times article. It argued the rest. junior, whom they reward with “gifts”—a scenario that the exposure of Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, A salient fact about Clemmons is that at the time that was once unthinkable. What has changed over and other harassers should prompt an overdue of her harassment she was a graduate student. In time is not women’s body chemistry. It is that there conversation about “the masculine libido and its her words, “I was an unknown wide-eyed twenty- are now women with enough economic power to accompanying forces and pathologies.” Savage six-year-old, and he used it as an opportunity to participate in a practice that well-off men have vividly summed up the view of men expressed by his corner and forcibly kiss me.” Dìaz was a famous always engaged in. letter writer, Marche, and many other people who writer harassing a lower-status member of the liter- Of course, female sexual tourism is not equiva- follow the news in the age of #MeToo. “Men,” Savage ary world. In this way he is typical of the big #MeToo lent to sexual assault. Men in the developing world wrote, “are testosterone-soaked dick monsters.” cases, which invariably involve men exploiting a who sleep with Western women often tell research- This view offers an explanation of sexual harass- position of status or power. Weinstein, who may ers that they enjoy it. One reason is that unlike when ment that emphasizes the raw barbarism of the be the most extreme case, has been charged with the roles are reversed, the men are rarely in physical male sex drive. Of course Savage, Marche, and other raping and assaulting actors who needed to stay danger. The average body sizes of men and women proponents are not so simplistic as highlights biology’s obvious relevance to blame harassment on male body to determining whether someone is chemistry and leave it at that. Their There is a long history of ascribing vulnerable to sexual exploitation and, articles inevitably contain qualifiers. natural causes to practices and by extension, harassment. But biology But the view they share is noteworthy is relevant because it affects the kind in the degree to which it explains institutions that are the product of of power one person can have over sexual harassment by reference to another, and power is not a chemical a particular aspect of biology. It is human decision-making. property but a relational one. sometimes said that the best way to If sexual harassment is signifi- understand a political writer is to ask what they are on his good side for the sake of their careers. cantly about power, this can explain the full com- afraid of. Proponents of the sex-monsters theory Weinstein, however, was also a major fundraiser for plexity of sexual harassment. Take female high of harassment may fear that when we describe the the Democratic party. In this capacity he came in school teachers, who regularly make headlines for ultimate causes of predatory behaviour, an excess contact with many women, including senators for initiating inappropriate relationships with male of gentility will cause us to overlook the central role whom he raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. students, including boys as young as twelve or played by men’s most basic sexual urges. The female politicians and staffers Weinstein inter- those who have mental disabilities. Reliable num- I have a different fear. It is that we too easily acted with had reasons to stay in his good graces, bers about the frequency of such cases are hard to overlook the degree to which sexual harassment is but he did not have the same make-or-break power come by: academic studies suggest that the practice a product of power. There is a long history of ascrib- over their careers. None of the accusations against is severely under-reported. But if we hear about ing natural causes to practices and institutions that Weinstein to date have involved political women. female teachers doing this more than women in are the product of human decision-making. To If he did harass them, it seems to have been far less other professions it may reflect the fact that high our ancestors, everything from poverty to female often than he abused women in his own profession. school teaching is a form of authority in which fainting fits all had perfectly natural explanations. Dìaz and Weinstein in this way are typical of women are disproportionately represented and that Proponents of the view that the inner drives of other high-profile harassers. They did not inflict the boys over whom they have authority are less men are the primary cause of sexual harassment themselves on women who are their social equals physically imposing on average than men. Female are just as horrified by harassment as anyone. But with anything like the frequency they targeted less teachers can also be seriously harassed by male their explanation of it courts complacency by exag- powerful women. This suggests they are perfectly students, subject to catcalls and other verbal abuse. gerating how impervious harassment is to efforts to capable of restraining themselves around women The point of such behaviour is not to initiate a sex- eliminate it. when they deem it prudent to do so. This self- ual relationship with a teacher but to redefine the The idea that male lust is the problem derives control is hard to reconcile with understandings of relationship of teacher and student as one between support from the obvious fact that men are the harassment that emphasize sheer libidinal desire. a man and a woman—to undermine one source of If the main driver is sexual attraction, why do few power by accessing another. Andy Lamey teaches philosophy at the University men harass their bosses? But, if Weinstein and other The testosterone-driven view of sexual harass- of California at San Diego and is the author predators who gave rise to #MeToo deliberately ment obscures the truth that abuse exploits power of Frontier Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis target lower-status women, then their behaviour imbalances of any kind, social or biological. That is and What to Do About It (Doubleday Canada). reflects not an inability to control their natural worth bearing mind if we are serious about making Twitter: @amlamey. urges but a ruthless willingness to exploit workplace harassment a thing of the past.

32 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada BEYOND

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