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2 Thinking in Public 17 Hapless Old Harridans Editor In Chief Michelle Dean in conversation Flapping Their Traps Sarmishta Subramanian [email protected] with Michelle Orange Who says the alt-right doesn’t like poetry? Assistant Editor Aaron Giovannone 5 The Problem of Refuge Bardia Sinaee What do we owe our fellow humans in need? 19 Goodbye to All That Associate editor Beth Haddon Rescue by David Miliband; Refuge by Alexander The politics of romantic exits Poetry Editor Betts and Paul Collier; and Running on Empty Hard to Do by Kelly María Korducki Moira MacDougall by Michael J. Molloy, et al. Anne Thériault Howard Adelman copy editor 21 Come From Away Patricia Treble executive assistant 8 Oh Look—a Good Book Do we have a chance against alien species? Evangeline Holtz Criticism in the shadow of think-piece poptimism The Aliens Among Us by Leslie Anthony John Semley Contributing EditorS Mark Winston Mohamed Huque, Andy Lamey, Molly Peacock, Robin Roger, Judy Stoffman 11 Soggy Soup Bread I: 22 The Third Sister ProofReaders The Overture A poem Suzanne Mantha, Heather Schultz, A poem Lyn Butler Gray Tyler Willis Gina Hay Design 23 The Thin White Line Rachel Tennenhouse 12 ‘The Thunderous Brows. The shifting boundaries of racial identity ADVERTISING/SALES The Long Silences.’ The Limits of Whiteness by Neda Maghbouleh Michael Wile Those marvellously unrelatable Greeks Bardia Sinaee [email protected] Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens by business manager Robin Waterfield and Mythos by Stephen Fry 25 Uncommon Sense Paul McCuaig Jack Mitchell Jordan Peterson’s complicated truth PUBLISHER 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson Mark Lovewell 13 Savage Lands Marc Lewis [email protected] A poem Board of Directors Tom Kierans, O.C., Don McCutchan, kerry rawlinson 28 Letters Michèle Mendelssohn, Andrew Baldwin, Trina McQueen, O.C., Jaime Watt Synanthropes David Dodge, David Berlin corporate secretary 14 Vali Bennett A poem Advisory Council Ben Robinson Michael Adams, Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald 15 A Guardian of Time Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Grant Reuber, A family’s story and the burdens of the past O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Vi by Kim Thúy Mark Sarner, Bernard Schiff Donna Bailey Nurse Poetry Submissions For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK Founded in 1991 by P.A. Dutil Poems in this issue are inspired by the theme of “migration.” The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization.

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April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 1 interview Thinking in Public Michelle Dean in conversation with Michelle Orange

he past few years have marked a golden age for Twomen critics and essay- ists. In 2017, there were trenchant new collections from Joan Didion, Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay, Mary Gaitskill, and more. And much- anticipated new books of essays by Zadie Smith and Marilynne Robinson have been published in the first few months of this year. In Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (Grove), the Los Angeles– based Canadian writer Michelle Dean explores the experiences of the genre’s pioneers, a wave of twentieth- century critics who included Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and Mary McCarthy. (The book’s title captures both their wonderfully incisive writing styles and the label frequently affixed to them by their Women critics in a male-dominated field have had a complicated relationship with the feminist label. mostly male peers.) ENGRAVING BY M. DARLY, THE VIS A VIS BISECTED OR THE LADIES COOP (1776) Dean is a journalist and critic and IMAGE COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION recipient of a National Book Critics Circle citation for excellence in reviewing. She has idea that each of these women were outliers in their how seriously good it was. contributed to publications such as The New time, but that doesn’t seem worth celebrating. In I suppose it’s not great that these women are Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s, and Slate. She spoke some sense you rescue these women from that, and left out of the academy, but I sometimes think about the past, present, and future of female criti- tell a different story. [Joan] Didion is so popular because she’s not stud- cism with the New York-based Canadian essayist Michelle Dean: Sometimes I wonder if they ied that much. Kael too. You can experience their and writer Michelle Orange, whose acclaimed 2013 would be mad at me for linking them in this way, work out of passion or accident. That tends to be a book This Is Running for Your Life: Essays (Farrar, even though in various ways they all seem to have better experience. Straus & Giroux) investigates through critical, jour- acknowledged connections to each other. It’s tricky. Orange: In tracing the arc of many of these writ- nalistic, and personal essays a world increasingly Women, for obvious reasons, don’t really respond ers’ lives you often confront the challenge each of mediated by images and interactivity. Orange’s well to having their individuality flattened. them faced with regard to developing confidence writing has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Orange: Were you taught the work of any of the and authority on the page. I appreciated your focus the New York Times, and The New Yorker, and her writers you include in Sharp? How did you encoun- on that, because for women that challenge can be second book, Pure Flame, is forthcoming. ter them? Somehow I got through a double-major in particular. I’m thinking of Janet Malcolm: It struck They spoke over email. English and film studies and a graduate degree in the me, in your chapter on her, how much of her career latter without being assigned to read, say, Pauline she has had to spend in a defensive posture. You Michelle Orange: You’ve chosen a number of Kael. Have certain of your subjects suffered for being detail the decade-long legal battle that surrounded prominent twentieth-century female writers—each left out of the academy? Or does it matter anymore? In the Freud Archives, where her subject filed a of them known for a certain critical acumen—and Dean: At McGill, I did a degree in twentieth- $10-million suit against her, and the intense criti- drawn them together to tell a story about, among century cultural history. I read quite a lot of Hannah cism of The Journalist and the Murderer by other other things, the nature “of being a woman who Arendt in that context. Later, I did a graduate law journalists. Some portion of the controversy sur- thinks, and talks about thinking, in public.” degree at the University of Toronto, where my rounding her work seems unavoidable, but another What I found most revelatory are the chains of advisor, Jennifer Nedelsky, was of one of Arendt’s portion of it appears tied to a sense of outrage that influence, exchange, and progression—direct and last students. But almost no one else in the book a woman should write as powerfully, critically, and indirect, personal and creative—that you suggest was on my shelves until much later. I ran across decisively as she does. between writers like Dorothy Parker and Rebecca Parker because she’s ubiquitous. But I really sought Norman Mailer is a sort of shadow figure in a West, Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag, Arendt these names out on my own. So the book is a stealth number of these chapters, and one can’t help but and Mary McCarthy, and so on. The success of the catalogue of my own education in women critics. I think of someone like Malcolm, and what she has book for me feels tied to that assertion of a context don’t remember what thread got me started. I think endured, in contrast to Mailer and the reward he for their various achievements and a rough sort of it may have been reading Nora Ephron’s journal- reaped for his provocations. lineage between them. There’s some truth to the ism, a little while before she died, and realizing just Dean: I did ask Malcolm directly if she herself

2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada felt the pushback on her work had been a product Orange: Our experience has some parallels. the circuit working that was going on between the of being a woman. And I remember her “yes” came We’re both Canadian women who moved to New men, the benefits of which were very real. They very quickly. It almost surprised me how quickly. York to write. Can you describe the literary “scene” were there to reinforce their status, solder existing I’d been told all my life that certain women writers as you found it here? Was there such a thing? relationships, and further themselves, and we were were very hostile to being told that either their work Having written about the lives of mid-century there—why? I spent a couple of years trying to par- or the reception to it bore any relationship to their women who forged their way as writers and critical ticipate and then just pulled the chute. gender. But once I dove into this project it became thinkers in a realm dominated by men, were you Dean: We have had some advances in certain so clear that they had more complicated feelings more struck by the differences or the similarities to rarified spheres—academia, what’s left of literary or about the interplay of gender and authority than your own experience? intellectual journalism—and a lot of setbacks else- had been captured by anything I’d read before. Dean: I still feel I slipped in through the back where. I don’t think The New York Review of Books Orange: I was part of a panel of women critics door. I started out writing small feminist items for would publish something like Mailer’s review of The you organized a few years ago in New York, and I outlets like The American Prospect and Bitch. Then Group today, at least not complete with insults like remember, at one point, attempting to express the I fell in with this website called The Awl, which was “duncey broad.” But it is, as we learned in the last idea that women critics confront a resistance to a publication with proper editors and such, but election, or frankly in the everyday political news, their authority in a way that their male counter- which also felt like something of a community. And still very difficult not to come across as a harridan if parts, generally, do not. I was scolded by another something about virtual space, at that particular you happen to have a strong opinion. Both men and panel member for making this observation—in my moment of the internet, felt open and inclusive. It women still seem to have a lot of trouble respond- memory she rolled her eyes and said, Aren’t we past wasn’t particularly male-dominated, and it was a ing to confident women. all that by now?, and this was not at all her experi- space where people who in another place might Orange: Speaking of loathsome expressions, ence: men had been her great mentors and editors have been thought of as amateurs were allowed to yesterday I happened across a 1999 David Carr and promoters, etc. experiment with their writing. profile of a young female journalist and critic At the time I wondered if there was a mis- The graduate writing program I’d enrolled in whom Carr describes “taking occasional turns as understanding. I was thinking more in terms of the before that, and dropped out of, was totally the a culture babe in the back of the book” at The New way a woman’s writing enters the world, how it is opposite experience. Almost all the professors were Republic. The back of the book is where a lot of the received, and how her status as a figure of critical men, and some admissions fluke had left me one of women you write about started out—doing theatre authority develops (though I would say the resist- two women students in my little class. And it was a and movie reviews. Of course that’s where many ance/bias exists to different degrees and in different brutal education, because the men in that program writers start out. But one gets the sense that the forms at all levels). In any case, the moment both- read primarily men and talked endlessly about how path out of the back pages was less clear and less ered me for a long time, and I have thought about it they idolized John McPhee and Tracy Kidder, writ- traveled for a woman. recently and wondered if that exchange would have ers who I regret to say had never meant that much Dean: Yes—though I want to stress that mov- gone quite the same way had it taken place, say, in to me. And mostly they did not take women writers ing criticism to the back of the book is a relatively the last six months. Not least because recent development, at least from one of the mentors this critic cited what I saw in my research. But it is was outed for sexual harassment. A teleological, purely argumentative true that much of the time, these were Dean: I do sort of remember this. essay culture would be boring— not thought of as serious subjects and Although what I remember chiefly that’s why it was acceptable to have was my annoyance as a moderator but the other extreme seems equally the women do them. What is amus- as the comment prompted the panel ing, in a grim way, is how later many to do what women always do when dreary, people leaving behind of these women were accused of writ- this subject comes up, which is that ing only about trivialities. Dorothy we started to go around the room and all these records of under- Parker was said to have preoccupied list all our male mentors. As though to herself too much with reviewing bad reassure the men in the room that we processed experience. books and bad plays; Mary McCarthy weren’t talking about them. Except of was dismissed by Isaiah Berlin as course, we were. seriously, not out of any conscious malice I think “fine on life in general” but “no good on abstract It’s hard to drop the habit of needing to reassure but mostly out of what they would have termed ideas” and “not a great thinker.” Nora Ephron’s these men, a habit I think they tend to cultivate their personal preferences. They were not in the reputation, too, has sort of remained stuck in this when they “mentor” you, of you always being there habit of reading many women. One of them once idea that she wrote frivolously and humorously, but to serve their own emotional needs. When you are a referred to Heidi Julavits as “Ben Marcus’s wife,” about personalities and not ideas. young person it can be very hard to see mentorship then when I challenged him, earnestly argued that Another way of putting this is that this qual- as anything but a vast favour being conferred on Marcus was better known than Julavits. Which I ity of wit and sharpness was seen as okay in the you. It’s a really difficult awakening when you real- don’t think is true. back of the book, yes, but not in the middle. The ize that the mentorship can serve emotional needs If I had arrived to it a little younger and with tone itself was read as somehow unserious. And for the mentor, too, and that it’s not always altruistic. fewer bylines under my belt, I think it would have a hard line got drawn between serious writers, on Orange: I could have used a mentor, but who squelched my desire to write altogether. It definitely the one hand—your Edmund Wilsons, your Lionel knew where to look? On moving to New York from left me with a chip on my shoulder. Trillings—and what the women were up to. Even Toronto, I learned that a significant portion of the Orange: What surprised me the most was the though I don’t know that they saw themselves as people you meet in positions of editorial author- abject sexism of the “literary community” as I found caring about entirely different issues than those ity (and often the writers they champion) have a it. I had held a job for several years at that point, other (male) writers. very specific pedigree and chain of connection. before I moved to New York, and fancied I knew a Orange: I admire the way you engage with the I was quite naive, actually. It seemed impossibly bit about how the world worked. But nothing could relationship some of your subjects had to gender, retrograde that it could matter so much where you have prepared me for those parties. I moved to the extent to which they wished or didn’t wish to went to school, that you had a certain fancy intern- Brooklyn, started publishing, and somehow wound be identified as “women” in their work and in their ship, that you knew the right people when you were up back at my high school. It was crushing. lives, and specifically with feminism. In each case twenty-two. I realized that I could never catch that Dean: Well, New York is a hothouse in the worst some mixture of conscious and unconscious calcu- train, and would have to find another way. possible sense, sometimes. I didn’t do a lot of par- lation comes into play, as the women forged indi- Dean: Well, I had a few mentors. But I was and am ties, largely because at one of the first ones I went vidual paths through a male-dominated field. Have also surprised at how much pedigree mattered here. to I had a “bad experience” and stopped feeling you experienced some version of the same thing? Though it was my impression pedigree mattered comfortable at them. It was funny how many things Dean: I think so. Though honestly, my personal in Canada, too—just not school pedigree: it often I think I missed out on, though, because I didn’t context is so different. I am not sure I would have seemed like one inherited status as a writer or editor work the circuit. ever developed the confidence to actually write directly from one’s parents. I didn’t really come from Orange: A friend would tell me horror stories without feminist blogs. In that way I’m a lot more people who even got arts degrees, with their dubious about a party, then try to convince me to come with like people younger than the ones chronicled in the employment prospects, so the whole idea of writing her to the next one. She had more stamina than I book—people who were actually helped in discov- for a living just seemed impossibly foreign to me. did. I couldn’t bear the sense of being shut out of ering their voices by feminism. And having “grown

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 3 up” in that particular environment has made me comfortable speaking from personal authority in point or an argument, or else that they shouldn’t be both more frustrated and less frustrated with the essays. Which I honestly have mixed feelings about. obligated to either find any message in their experi- demands the movement might make on me. Initially, I was heartened—I believed all the things ences or to convey one in the process of chronicling I’ve rarely had trouble with being identified as we now know as almost dogma: That women were them. And I find that so depressing. I see why a a feminist in the way the women in the book were. enabled to speak in a way they hadn’t before, and teleological, purely argumentative essay culture For me, the word casts wide nets and in that sense I that their open embrace of subjectivity was a great would be boring—but the other extreme seems to embrace it. But I’ve felt myself wanting to pull away, challenge to the false universality behind which me equally dreary, people leaving behind all these become more specific, which inevitably takes you many male essayists tend to hide. It was a great records of under-processed experience. That’s not away from an abstraction like gender. For example, moment when that all opened up and I got swept what I read for, personally, to hear from a writer in the last few years I’ve tried not to use the word up in it. who has no interest in meaning. “feminist” in my work where not directly referring Lately I’ve been less thrilled, because it does feel Orange: Many of the women you write about, to a political identification someone’s made for her- that the takeaway is that the authority of personal notably Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, self. It’s not that I’m ashamed of the word. It’s more experience is the only authority worth having. To and Renata Adler, devoted some significant por- that as the popularity of feminism tion of their writing lives to fiction. exploded, the term actually began to “Serious” twentieth-century writers obscure more than it revealed. And Sontag insisted she was a fiction wrote novels. Though a writer like as a writer I just started to be hostile Sontag insisted she was a fiction to a word like that, that was morphing writer first, and rued her status as writer first, and rued her status as into jargon. an essayist. She is to some degree an essayist, she is to some degree I actually feel it would be a triumph responsible for the shift in the cul- for feminism if we could all talk about responsible for the shift in the ture’s attitude toward non-fiction, feminism without spending so much and specifically the essay. time on the word. It prepares us to culture’s attitude toward non-fiction. Dean: Sontag also really wanted to start articulating some answers to the be a filmmaker, so I think more than harder questions about what feminism asks of us be clear, it’s not the use of “I” in an essay I have a feeling like a novel was the one true writer’s art, she instead of being stuck at the “I am feminist, end of problem with, or even the inclusion of personal wanted to be an artist. She wanted to create things, discussion” phase we seem stuck in at the moment. anecdote to illustrate an idea. But people don’t and she had some notion, I suppose, that essays Orange: That makes sense to me. The working seem to think there’s room for additionally feeding were not creative. Not in the same way as fiction. title of the book I am writing, Pure Flame, derives their “I,” for lack of a better metaphor, with anything I think that longing is pretty common to crit- from a Sontag line in The Volcano Lover: “Indeed, other than more personal experience. Essays get ics and essayists, actually. Though I think if you I did not think of myself as a woman first of all…I published (in fancy literary places!) in which the spend a lot of time looking at the history of writers, wanted to be pure flame.” What effect has the explo- essayist is making a trite point and doesn’t even as I have, it no longer seems quite so creative, the sion of popular feminism had on the essay genre, if seem to know that the point’s been made in other, novel. You end up cobbling together bits and pieces any? It could be argued there has been a correlation prior work that she could have read. of reality, and though you have more freedom to between the resurgence of both. Other essayists, I’ve noticed recently, have even arrange and modify them as you see fit, the world is Dean: On the one hand it’s made people more begun arguing that they shouldn’t have to have a never very far off in the distance.

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4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Problem of Refuge What do we owe our fellow humans in need? Howard Adelman

restoration of those rights. Rescue: Refugees and the Political Anyone who has read a newspaper Crisis of Our Time in the past decade can see the lim- David Miliband itations of the refugee-rights model Simon & Schuster in practice. In Refuge: Rethinking 160 pages, hardcover Refugee Policy in a Changing World, ISBN 9781501154393 Alexander Betts and Paul Collier criti- cize refugee rights as a basis for deal- Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy ing with the refugee crisis; they try to in a Changing World create an alternative model. They dub Alexander Betts and Paul Collier Miliband’s approach as moral grand- Oxford University Press standing, for one reason: the existing 288 pages, softcover Refugee Convention and asylum sys- ISBN 9780190659158 tem are silent on which state has pri- mary responsibility for the refugees Running on Empty: Canada and, therefore, where those rights can and the Indochinese Refugees, be recognized and enforced. Absent 1975-1980 an alternative ethical grounding, they Michael J. Molloy, Peter Duschinsky, write, “it is politics—and more spe- Kurt F. Jensen, and Robert Shalka cifically power—rather than law or McGill-Queen’s University Press principle that primarily determines 612 pages, hardcover who takes responsibility for refugees ISBN 9780773548817 and on what basis.” For Betts, the director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford here are 66 million University, and Collier, a profes- forcibly displaced people sor of economics at Oxford, power T in the world today. A third illustration by ka young lee should not determine how refugees of those people left their homelands, are treated. They reject an idealism crossing a border; most will not likely return, even of compassion that begins with and is primarily of rights to asylum in favour of a refugee’s socio- though repatriation to the country of origin is directed at members of one’s own family, commun- economic rights to autonomy in the country of first claimed by UNHCR to be the preferred solution for ity, and nation. That is not the limit of ethics, but its asylum. And they meld this foundational norm of refugees. Further, most do not qualify as Convention foundation; ethics is not and cannot be restricted economic rather than political rights with a prin- refugees because they were not targeted for individ- in this way. But what is the basis for going beyond ciple of burden-sharing. Wealthy countries must ual persecution; they fled war and mass violence. such boundaries? Does it require establishing a provide the investments to assist refugees in first The second-best solution is said to be settlement new universal boundary that binds us all? countries of asylum to become independent. in countries where they have found initial asylum. In Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Betts and Collier claim that Miliband’s ideas fail Certainly, those countries—Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey Time, David Miliband, the former British Labour because his universality is abstract and idealistic in the case of the Syrian refugees (some 5.4 million politician, who is now president of the New York- and not applicable to the differing circumstances were forced to leave their nation with another 6.1 based International Rescue Committee (IRC), where refugees are located. Is their own founda- million uprooted within Syria)—are burdened with claims that, “by upholding [the] rights [of refu- tional norm, a refugee’s socio-economic rights to 90 percent of those fleeing war and oppression. gees]…you don’t just help them, you set a bench- autonomy in the country of first asylum, subject to However, not one of those countries wants the refu- mark for the way shared problems are tackled. You the same weakness? They focus on temporary safe gees to remain as permanent residents. establish mutual responsibility as a founding prin- havens as an alternative to camps, and on alleviating What moral obligations do we have toward ciple of international relations. And you set the stage the immediate crisis, not via humanitarian aid but these refugees? Three timely books grapple with for tackling other problems, from climate change to through development aid and creating opportun- this question from three distinctive perspectives, health risks.” Miliband’s argument is premised on ities for the refugees to become autonomous. For although each bases its ethics on a foundation an ethical framework of refugee rights that is more example, they recommend providing the economic than a half-century old: Everyone has rights, a right private sector with incentives to invest in economic Howard Adelman was a professor of philoso- to be free to speak and to be free from oppression. zones where refugees would have job opportunities phy at York University for thirty-seven years and Therefore, it is in the mutual interest of all to defend and could re-establish their economic independ- then a research professor at Princeton University anyone whose rights are being abused. That is the ence. They are half right; economic aid is certainly and Griffith University in Australia. He initiated benchmark, the ideal. In recognizing these rights, critical, but it must go beyond the stopgap of help- Operation Lifeline, founded the Centre for Refugee particularly the rights of refugees fleeing persecu- ing refugees to become economically independent, Studies and the journal Refuge, in addition to writ- tion and oppression, we are obligated to defend the instead ensuring that such a goal is also based on ing or co-authoring nine books. rights of refugees, and go beyond defence to seek political inclusion and full membership­ in a state.

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 5 Betts and Collier’s exposition of the existing combined with an economic determination to Of course, as Betts and Collier correctly note, regime for sharing refugee responsibilities in solve the problem. Refugees fleeing ethnic and most refugees today are faced not with the three Europe, and especially its inherent contradictions, violent conflict do not and cannot return home traditional solutions to a refugee crisis—repatria- is extensive and often brilliant. They offer a valu- unless they return behind a victorious army. As a tion; settlement in first countries of asylum; or able summary in writing of a Europe lurching back contemporary and recent example, the inter-ethnic resettlement—but rather three other non-solu- and forth from a heartless head to a headless heart. violence between the Hema and Lendu in the tions: “Long-term encampment, urban destitu- But the authors appear to contradict themselves Democratic Republic of the Congo, thought to be tion, or perilous journeys.” Perhaps, however, a in other places, as when they identify camps as healed, recently escalated with widespread brutal- new approach is not needed. Perhaps solutions the main problem but note, correctly, that more ity, rape, dismemberment of victims, and kidnap- borrowed from past successes would help more, than half the refugees fleeing war never end up in ping of small children. Nearly 400,000 Hema were particularly ones that recognize, contrary to Betts camps. (This includes the largest outflow in the last displaced, while 40,000 fled the Congo across Lake and Collier, that dealing with the refugee crisis is few decades, that from Syria; 90 percent of those Albert in rickety boats to Uganda. Vomulia Yeruse, not just about providing refuge, but about providing refugees did not settle in camps.) who fled her home in the northeastern province of long-term membership and security, the under- More significantly, their application of their Ituri in the Congo in mid March of 2018, articulated lying purpose of any refugee regime. theory seems to undermine their proposed abstract the issue this way: “You can’t live a settled life there, duty to rescue. Why should we feel obligated to not now, maybe never. Maybe I will die in Uganda.” n offering an imagined solution that can be sus- some refugees and not others, and which “we” Historically, efforts to resolve the problem Itainable and at scale, it would be helpful to turn bears the primary obligation? One proposed appli- through economics alone, without resolving the to some practical solutions that have been tried and cation is particularly absurd. The authors suggest problem of membership in a state in which they worked since 1951, as well as similar ones to Betts that Israel, which controls the Golan Heights that can be protected, have been proven to be doomed and Collier’s proposal that failed. The Canadian formerly belonged to Syria, should have made the to failure, as Elazar Barkan and I wrote in our 2011 experience, in particular, proves instructive. territory available for Syrian refugees to settle. The book, No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Consider the International Conferences on proposal is not based on where the refugees have Minority Repatriation. The chances of return in Indochinese Refugees of both 1979 and 1989. The found first asylum (the basis of their own proposed cases of ideological conflict are somewhat better, 1979 meeting was intended to generate recipro- solution) or which governments, on a basis of but not by that much. cal government commitments for that crisis. Betts solidarity and economic comparative advantage, What about the prospects of settlement of the refu- and Collier conclude that the solution developed would be willing to share the economic responsibil- gees in countries of first asylum? If the Palestinian in that conference resulted from two factors: anti- ity for their settlement. refugee record is any guide, in inter-ethnic and inter- communist motivation plus exceptional leadership Why do all three writers crash against the religious conflict, this will not take place as long as by the UNHCR that resulted in the Comprehensive problem of an ethical application of their differing the countries of asylum continue to choose war and Plan of Action in 1989. In their analysis, they con- principles? Is it because they try to solve the refugee return over resettlement, no matter what economic fuse American and Australian motivation with that crisis primarily on the foundation of abstract uni- incentives are offered. Though there is a tangential of other countries, such as Canada and Sweden. versal ethical principles and then try to Running on Empty: Canada and be pragmatic in the application rather Economic zones don’t give refugees the Indochinese Refugees, 1975-1980, than developing solutions from lessons by Michael J. Molloy et al., whose learned from practice and precedent? what they really need, which is not central focus is on Canadian initia- tives and efforts, tells a very different here is little doubt that an alterna- simply a safe haven from physical story, of a massive movement after Ttive is needed to the quick-fix the end of the Vietnam War—from approach of camps designed for tran- harm, but, in a world of nation- 1975 on, but more universally, after sience that has, by default, become 1979—to resettle Indochinese refu- permanent. The general pattern until states, membership in a state. gees and not let them wither away recently has been to ignore these refu- in destitution in camps. gees, to warehouse them until they could return. reference to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, a The volume offers a historical retrospective on Refugee camps rather than self-settlement have better knowledge of the history of the Palestinian one country, Canada, and its response forty years been used as the primary mechanism for dealing refugees and the efforts at settlement might have ago to a single, historically very large refugee crisis. with refugees since the 1980s, according to Betts made Betts and Collier humbler in suggesting the As the book makes clear, Canada, and not the and Collier, although in reality the history of camps use of economic zones today to employ refugees. UNHCR, provided the lead in 1979, however com- goes back much further. Immediately after the That would not give refugees what they really need, mendable the latter’s efforts were. And Canada was Second World War, the camp population of Jews in which is not simply a safe haven from physical not motivated by Cold War concerns. This country’s Europe rose to more than 200,000; with miniscule harm, but, in a world of nation-states, membership contribution remained modest immediately after exceptions, no country would take them until Israel in a state dedicated to their protection, as both 1975 when the first wave of refugees fled Vietnam. came into existence in 1948. Britain had previously Hannah Arendt and Michael Walzer recognized. Over the next three years, Canada came to the grad- cut Palestine off as a haven. In the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment ual conclusion that the refugee outflow was a prod- The oldest refugee population still in camps, the and the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, and uct of Vietnamese government repression rather Palestinians, preceded the creation of UNHCR in Lord Shaftesbury, Walzer articulated an alternative than the American-led war. It then took significant 1951. About 720,000 fled or were forced to flee their ethical foundation, one of common-sense com- initiatives, based on pragmatic grounds rather than homes in 1948. They were housed in camps until passion—that is, compassion extended as far as ideology or universal abstract principles. they could be settled in what had been envisioned cultural habits and self-care allow rather than any We know from historical precedent—the move- as new economic development areas, such as overarching universal principle. Further, it is an ment of Indochinese refugees provides a prime ones in Iraq to be developed with an economic ethical tradition that esteems practice rather than example—that when resettlement countries step model based on the Tennessee Valley Authority abstract ethical arguments, either legal or socio- up to the plate and assume a share of the respon- (TVA) in the U.S. In the period prior to the Refugee economic. Unlike the ethical theories of Miliband sibilities, the inclination to get rid of the refugees by Convention in 1951, a version of the Betts and or Betts and Collier, which begin with a universal countries of first asylum recedes. Canada pioneered Collier economic autonomy model was in fact the principle of distributive justice within a bounded the practice of involving civil society extensively in premise upon which Palestinian refugee settlement world of everyone on Earth, Walzer’s ethics works the sponsorship and resettlement of refugees. Only was to be based. The Iraqi government and the outwards from a group of people committed to very recently have a few countries taken tentative refugees would be provided with economic incen- dividing, exchanging, and sharing social goods, steps to copy the model. Betts and Collier not only tives and opportunities to settle. It did not work. first of all among themselves, and then to others on fail to explore this option, but in light of the recent The refugees, the states of first asylum, and other a principle of justice that makes the primary goal backlash in Europe (in part a response to the totally Arab states that shared a sense of solidarity with membership for the refugee in a similar type of inadequate resettlement policies documented in the refugees, opted for war and used military might polity. People of this ethical persuasion work first Refuge), they give up on this option in advance. to return the refugees to the areas from which they and foremost through giving witness to what they Running on Empty offers a detailed template fled or were forced to flee. believe rather than deductively from an abstract for an alternative. Instead of a grand new schema, The root of a refugee regime is not compassion­ general principle. which in the end proves not to be very new, the

6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Canadian initiative began with a very minor change and will serve as a critical historical source book. ­humanitarianism its task and governments facili- to refugee legislation permitting the private sector Moreover, its implicit thesis emphasizes that the tate such activity. Running on Empty documents to sponsor refugees. It involved the development of crucial factor in the exceptional reception for the that this was indeed the case in 1979 and 1980. a cadre of civil servants capable of diagnosing the refugees forty years ago was not an enormous res- Miliband wants to infuse fire into the old rights- dimensions of a problem and formulating realistic ervoir of goodwill—the policy was almost always based model. Betts and Collier believe such an solutions, solutions that entailed not a vision, but opposed by a majority of Canadians. Nor did it effort would be minuscule and ineffective given the a detailed plan of action operating on many fronts depend on lofty universal principles of human scale of the problem; they propose erecting a new from selection to transportation to integration. The rights and respect for the dignity of others, nor on a model. There is no real recognition of the need for initiative entailed excellent management; it was new paradigm of socio-economic rights. Rather, the an experienced, well-trained, and dedicated inter- comprehensive and coherent without an ounce of initiative and its enormous success rested in large national civil service requisite to implementing any grandiosity. One does not need to go back to the measure on the capacities and decision-making model. We do not need big new ideas, but far better initiatives in globalization of the IMF in 1971. One structures of personnel and institutions critical to application of the old ones. can go back to the initiatives in dealing with refu- the resettlement of refugees. If the Molloy book offers a thorough and excel- gees from 1978 for the next decade lent historical model, the Migration following. The issue is one primarily Policy Institute in a recent report by of having in place excellent adminis- The Vietnamese refugees were not Hanne Beirens and Aliyyah Ahad, trative tools and personnel backed by “Scaling up Refugee Resettlement a political commitment. admitted into Canada because they in Europe: The Role of Institutional Molloy et al., document in detail Peer Support,” suggests a more stra- the performance of Canadian gov- held universal rights, but because they tegic approach in resettling refugees ernment officials responsible for touched the hearts of a minority, and that does learn from experience, but developing the policy framework as concentrates more on inter-state well as the administrative tools for because of a small change to a law. cooperation than domestic in-state locating Indochinese refugees, who support and resources. Similarly, a were then in seventy camps spread recently published working paper, among seven countries, identifying, documenting, The refugees were not admitted because they “International Responsibility-Sharing for Refugees,” screening, selecting, processing, and arranging possessed universal rights, but because their needs for the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration for their transportation to Canada, as well as the touched the hearts of a small minority of Canadians and Development, relies on data collection to assist reception and integration of those refugees within and a much larger minority supported the exer- migration policy makers and zeroes in on the very Canada. Further, because of the unique Canadian cise of humanitarianism even though a majority refugees from the Middle East and Africa that most private sponsorship program, they had to match a opposed the effort. Nor was the effort preceded by a preoccupy the world today. In the details of school little more than half of those refugees with sponsors new vision. The key ingredient was not the goodwill enrolment numbers and health care use, we can (32,281 of some 60,000 Indochinese refugees). of the private sector nor the vision of international find greater value for forging better policies than in The Molloy book is captivating, surprising for a stakeholders, but the foresight of Canadian man- grand visions. Likewise, reading the actual histor- volume on the workings of a bureaucracy. It is the darins and politicians and the preparations they ical record instead of misrepresenting that history best and most accurate record of what took place put in place. It is sufficient if a minority makes and ignoring key parts offers a good start.

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April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 7 Oh Look—a Good Book Criticism in the long shadow of think-piece poptimism John Semley

“In most modern instances, inter- ­sometimes wholly delusive) notion pretation amounts to the philis- of authorial intent. James’s story tine refusal to leave the work of art offers a stern warning against the alone. Real art has the capacity to narrowness of interpretation, about make us nervous. By reducing the forgetting the pleasure of the text work of art to its content and then and treating it as a hermetic object, interpreting that, one tames the to be dismantled in one correct way work of art. Interpretation makes like a lawnmower engine. The story art manageable, comfortable.” stages what the British literary theor- —Susan Sontag, “Against ist Terry Eagleton has identified as a Interpretation,” 1964 recurring preoccupation in James’s work, namely the “hunt for the single, Carmela Soprano: Billy Budd is secret principle which will transform a story of an innocent sailor being experience into the cohesive intel- picked on by an evil boss. ligibility of an artifact.” It is about Meadow Soprano: Who is pick- reducing a text to a work. ing on him out of self-loathing Yet despite its admonitions against caused by homosexual feelings the (mis)uses of criticism, one finds in in a military context. re-reading “The Figure in the Carpet” Carmela Soprano: Oh please. a nostalgia, and even a sorrow for —The Sopranos, “Eloise,” 2002 the role of the critic. Here is a story about the critic dedicating—and destroying—himself in the pursuit of he single best text about that Lebensarbeit, the labour of life. criticism is Henry James’s For, as half-mad and bedevilled as T1896 story “The Figure in James’s nameless narrator is, he is the Carpet.” I emphasize the word possessed by a passion that seems text because I mean it in the sombre, almost unfathomable to us sitting serious, literary theory way: as a lin- here, circa 2018. guistic and symbolic architecture of Just for fun, let’s imagine the nar- meaning. Following Roland Barthes’s illustration by ka young lee rator of Henry James’s “The Figure in distinction in Image, Music, Text, the Carpet” operating in the present a work is that “which can be held in the hand,” being awfully clever and your article’s being awfully moment, grappling with modern criticism’s more whereas the text is “held in language [and] only nice doesn’t make a hair’s breadth of difference.” popular tools to chip away at the imposing marble exists in the moment of a discourse.” I also mean As a self-described “ardent young seeker for of his favourite author’s new novel. The results may text in the more literal way, as in, from the Latin truth,” the critic is driven by insult into a kind of be something like this: textum meaning “fabric”—crude words which, per mania. He becomes consumed by his failure, and · “Hugh Vereker’s new novel is an antidote for the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, “must be weaved even further consumed by the author’s suggestion modern monogamy” together into a fine and delicate fabric.” Like a tap- that there is a meaning in the work to be revealed: · “Reading Hugh Vereker in Trump’s America” estry. Or a carpet. “the string the pearls were strung on, the buried · “Hugh Vereker’s new novel is obtuse and mysti- “Something like a complex figure in a Persian treasure, the figure in the carpet.” What the narra- fying. And that’s a problem.” carpet,” is how the narrator of James’s story tor never seriously considers is that Hugh Vereker · “Why the new Hugh Vereker book is the novel describes the meaning of an author’s work. James’s is a prankster, perversely relishing in dispatching we need right now” hero is a literary critic who fancies himself intelli- a passionate and serious young man on a literary In one sense, these hypothetical headlines gent. He takes special pride in his analysis of a new wild goose chase. James’s narrator forgets that with speak to the expansive possibility of the text itself. work by a novelist named Hugh Vereker. Vereker, for a novel, as with any text, there isn’t one unifying They suggest an explosion of opinion, an infinitude his part, doesn’t share in the narrator’s enthusiasm figure in the carpet, but many—an infinitude of of meaning, a garden of forking takes. Yet where for his own work. When the two meet at a party, the elucidations, exegeses, essays, and “takes” that “the figure in the carpet,” as a metaphor for the author dismisses the review as “the usual twaddle.” overlap, intersect, reflect, refract, and, fractal-like, aim of criticism, privileges the roaming eye of the Pressed on, he is unforgiving: “You miss it, my dear contain each other. Vereker’s work may be closed. critic, and the likewise ambling, freewheeling mind fellow, with inimitable assurance; the fact of your But the text is wide open. scanning for a meaning that (one hopes) reveals The subject of “The Figure in the Carpet” is itself in time, what we have today is something John Semley lives and works in Toronto. He is the criticism itself. It is about the mind-bending, else entirely. The text does not reveal a shape but is author of a book of criticism, Hater: The Virtues life-ruining desire to understand, and about the rather torqued into shape. Meaning is not revealed, of Utter Disagreeability, coming this fall from ways in which that understanding can be stymied but imposed. Understanding is found not inside the Penguin. by recourse to the always unsatisfactory (and intricacies of the fabric, but traced over top, like the

8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada chalk outline of a corpse drawn atop the delicate “judge”—had fallen prey to a watery niceness that The year 2000 feels like an appropriate locus texture of the Persian rug. betrayed “the absence of involvement, passion, for this phenomenon: a new millennium that character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the liter- brought the era of Bush II, and the Golden Age riticism at its best serves a vital function. The ary tone itself.” Such lamentations of critical culture of TV. Television may seem a funny progenitor Ccritic is a necessary intermediary or interlocu- quickly acquire a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” quality. for a broad critical movement, but the advent tor, bringing professionalized expertise to the work The catch, however, is that the boy who cried wolf of subscription cable networks such as HBO— of sense making, serving a public that, frankly, may rather famously did eventually see a wolf. which were beholden directly to the viewer, and have had better things to do than acquire a store- In the nearly sixty years since Hardwick railed not meddling intermediaries such as corporations house of esoteric knowledge and references. And against the pervading critical torpor of her age, buying ad time—resulted in a new breed of cultural criticism still exists: in specialized magazines and that sense of literary languish has only swelled. The consumers, who, as the writer Ian Leslie has written, journals (such as this one), on blogs un-beholden tone, too, has slumped from blandness to an almost enjoyed “grappling with complex, difficult char- to commercial interests, and in the ever-narrowing hyperactive, and utterly indiscriminate, enthusi- acters, and genre-busting shifts in tone.” This new pages of newspaper arts sections, where panicky asm. When critical writing is negative, it is almost philosophy of televisual narrative was best summed writers (such as this one) purvey evaluations of unanimously so, and against insignificant cultural up by David Simon, creator of HBO’s “novelistic” books and albums and films, attempting to convey objects (like a 50 Shades book or an Adam Sandler critical hit, The Wire. In an interview with BBC2 in what the august American literary critic Alfred movie). More typically, one encounters effusive 2008, Simon was accused of exhibiting contempt Kazin called their “intense and meaningful experi- recommendations, profiles, how-they-did-its, and for the casual viewer. At this he leaned across the ence with a work.” articles yoking a work to a salient social moment. table, and in a hushed tone, confirmed the charge, But contemporary criticism takes place along- See, for example, “Why you should read books you declaring, “Fuck the average viewer.” side (or, increasingly, in the long shadow of) a hate” or “Why Black Panther is a defining moment The advent of what the New Statesman pop cultural environment heavily influenced by the for black America,” or “Why Fahrenheit 451 is more culture critic Anna Leszkiewicz called the “avid critical-adjacent endeavour known as the think relevant now than ever.” (Really? one wants to ask. viewer” demanded new frameworks for writing piece. Merriam-Webster, which defines that lat- More relevant now than in the historical and social about television. Where, pre-2000, a major tele- ter genre by its reliance on “personal opinion and context in which it was produced?) vision show could expect a few kind write-ups in analysis” rather than plain fact, traces the first The problem has only been compounded in broadsheets and (if they were extremely lucky) known use of the term “think piece” to 1941, but more recent years, with the rise of what Jaime J. a TV Guide cover, TV’s Golden Age inspired a new the earliest use I found dates back a bit further, to Weinman, writing in Vox, called “socially conscious journalistic ecosystem. Websites such as Vulture a November 1936 issue of The Nation. In a column criticism,” which reveres (or censures) art based and the A.V. Club began churning out episode-by- simply titled “Think pieces,” Paul W. Ward called on its ability to embody some woozy consensus of episode recaps, which as a rubric for evaluating out the emerging process of filling reporters’ down- what the world itself should be. Details of character, long-form storytelling feels about as fair as writing time with idle speculation: plot, theme, and even quality itself are subsumed in chapter-by-chapter reviews of a novel, attempting to divine the figure in a carpet that is It is the time when the men who still on the loom. Reflecting what can report to the nation the doings only be read as an intensified desire and misdoing of its federal A book is hailed for being ‘woke’ for criticism—for keeping that con- government find the springs of and festooned with prizes, leading to versation going—podcasts emerged factual news all but dried up and as another medium for talking about reduced to turning out, in the the production of more such books, (or listening to other people talk guise of the news, dispatches that about) television. in major part are the product of turning the endeavour of empathy Desperate to capture readers in the the reporters’ communion with wide open, revenue-draining wilds their own imaginative souls. The into just another pulpy commodity. of the internet, publications began production of such dispatches behaving like the cable networks: is known to the craft as “thumb playing to the tastes and interests of sucking” and the products themselves investigations of “larger” issues of diversity and rep- the avid viewers. When people weren’t watching as “think pieces.” resentation, with films, TV shows, with even young Mad Men (or Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead or adult novels living and dying on the perceived Boardwalk Empire or Westworld) they were reading In his 1941 media literacy guide, How to strength of casting calls and plot synopses. about it, or listening to commentators chat about Understand Current Events: A Guide to an Appraisal The de-consolidation of hoary cultural canons it. They wanted more content, and critics, for better of the News, Leon Whipple warned readers against dominated by dead white men, and the rise of or worse, stepped in to blandly, enthusiastically, these think pieces, which are “draped around a complementary or alternative canons, is undoubt- bogusly discriminate on their behalf. phantom authority.” In those early days, think edly good. In literature alone, diverse and defiant In her landmark treatise “Against Interpretation” pieces seemed to resemble what are now called voices such as Roxane Gay, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Susan Sontag warned of a content-driven style of op-eds and were thus quite distinct from cultural Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are expanding the criticism that was inherently reductive. When one criticism. After all, critics, unlike those “men who range of cultural and personal experience reflected distills A Streetcar Named Desire’s Stanley Kowalski report,” could hardly be condemned for commun- in serious literature and thoughtful non-fiction. The and Blanche DuBois into archetypes of barbar- ing with their own imaginative souls, and their issue arises when such voices are held up simply ism and Westernized civility (respectively), Sontag claims to authority are (ideally) not phantasmic. for their perceived difference or diversity—or are writes, the range and possibility of Tennessee Still, these earlier uses of the term anticipate a feel- cruelly subordinated by their usefulness to this time. Williams’s play is delimited; the text becomes ing that remains in this era of think-piece ascend- narrowly “intelligible.” For Sontag, such intelligibil- ency, in which thumbs have been sucked to the urrent critical writing is influenced by the ity was only one constituent part of art’s sprawling bone. At its core, the think piece remains what its Ccontemporary think piece, which recalls what tapestry of possibility. “Against Interpretation” was earlier iteration had been: a substitute for some- in university literature or cultural studies classes published in 1966, and Sontag’s concerns have thing more serious. used to be called “reflection papers.” A quick skim proved almost embarrassingly prescient, if not Decrying the collapse of Serious Criticism in the across modern syllabi suggests that some profes- more-relevant-now-than-ever. “Interpretation,” face of commercial frivolities is, I know, a tack as sors are now just straight-up calling such papers she wrote, “violates art. It makes art into an article old as the practice of Serious Criticism itself. In a “think pieces.”1 The reflection paper was distin- for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme 1959 Harper’s essay, Elizabeth Hardwick whinged guished from the more comprehensive, critically of categories.” that more acerbic, hostile literary criticism was investigative form of the essay. Where the formal being overtaken by “sweet, bland commendations.” essay is defined, in William Harmon’sA Handbook 1 The earliest meaning of the term think piece was as a synonym for the skull or brain, as in a 1909 story, The critical impulse—once productively domin- to Literature, as possessing “serious purpose, dig- “Terwillinger and the Senorita” by W.A. Scott in The ated by a mean-spirited opprobrium practically nity, logical organization, length,” (and typically a Overland Monthly, in which a man is struck “over the synonymous with criticism’s other definition, i.e. as lot of research), the think piece springs more from think-piece with a six-gun, an’ he took an immediate trip into the trailless hills of dream-land,” which is the a form of condemnation or sustained disapproval, the author’s mind, sometimes on the rushed route sort of place one might reasonably wish to drift off while or its Greek derivation from the word meaning to market. suffering through so many modern think pieces.

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 9 The think piece doesn’t so much diminish art Where what might be snobbishly termed belief, in pointing to an infinite total concern that as render it wholly incidental. The mere existence “proper” criticism once stood in antagonism (or, can never be expressed.” of a work—and the contemporary proliferation of at the very least, ambivalence) to the larger culture When this horizon is hemmed in by contempor- work after work after work—is enough to justify industry, much of mainstream modern criticism, ary expectations of good taste and social rectitude the think piece. The fundamental problem with and its relative, the think piece, operates in service (however progressive), literary production is itself so much contemporary criticism is that the pro- of it. When AMC’s Mad Men went off the air in 2015, stifled, held hostage by the fickle vicissitudes of spective critic is structurally encouraged to not it was easy to imagine that the pink slips served to its fashion. The very dignity of literature, and of what care, to treat the value of one-or-another book/ writing staff were handed down to writers at Slate, we might call “art,” is that it holds such capricious TV episode/movie as wholly irrelevant to the Salon, Vulture, A.V. Club, etc., as the single-track social and political affairs beneath its concern. task of writing about it. Sontag wrote that desper- content conveyor belt driving both production and In Sontagian terms, socially conscious criticism ate, interpretive searches for meaning constitute reception ground to a halt. How a work relates to is likewise guilty of turning art into an “article for “the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius.” the history and tradition of its medium and, indeed use.” To use the language of Theodor Adorno and (One thinks of Henry James’s yearning lit-crit whether it is good or bad, hardly matters. What’s subsequent Marxian critics, it “instrumentalizes” protagonist.) The think piece effectively inverts more, so much time is spent dissecting mainstream art, only further ensconcing it in the logic of dom- this formulation. Now it is more common to see entertainment—the stuff that doesn’t need critical ination from which it yearns to break free. genius (or perhaps “genius,” the work of people advocacy, yet surely benefits from it—that high art Of course, this style of writing recalls the hoari- who, to nip a phrase from the controversial and and serious literature are all but ignored. est history of literary criticism, in which intensely cuttingly mean critic Armond White, “think they For a critic these days, a stance of critical antag- partisan publications like The Edinburgh Review, think”) pay compliments to mediocrity. The clarity onism constitutes professional liability. One thinks The London Magazine, Blackwood’s Magazine, of critical judgment alights on every rotten movie, of Dorothy Parker reviewing Dashiell Hammett’s and the Tory-friendly Quarterly Review used liter- grating pop singer, or paperback book written for The Glass Key and The Maltese Falconin an April ary essays as mere vehicles for smuggling polit- awkward adolescents alive in the throes of their 1931 issue of The New Yorker under the sumptu- ical agendas. Criticism of such eighteenth- and protean horniness, and dissolves, ultimately, into ously snarky headline, “Oh, look—two good books.” nineteenth-century schools treated a book review a sprawling field of meaninglessness. It’s not that, Could any critic working now risk exhibiting such like an ideological Trojan Horse—a shoddily built following Sontag, erotics has replaced bloodless radiant contempt for their medium of inquiry? It one whose exterior is all-but-exposed, so that the hermeneutics. It’s that we’re now subject to soft, would be all the more difficult given that the guid- Trojans crammed inside are plainly, absurdly vis- dopey forms of both. Enormously erudite and ing ethic by mainstream editors and publishers— ible to the naked eye. More recent literary debates intelligent expositions about extremely stupid as expressed to me, a person who is often paid to have been subtler. In a case of history being not so things have degraded both the standard for writing write this kind of stuff—is, quite simply, that trad- much progressive as cyclical, the contemporary about serious things and the seriousness of those itional criticism doesn’t sell. In lieu of deep textual trend of socially conscious criticism constitutes less serious things themselves. analysts of content, to say nothing of formal analy- a major leap in critical thinking than a reversion; sis of style and structure, editors seem more eager another bit of history repeating—with the full force he mid-2000s trend towards “poptimism” in to commission pieces that are vaguely “connected of late capitalism behind it. Tmusic writing accelerated this elevation of to the moment.” mediocrity. As defined by journalist Jody Rosen, Likewise, a generation of overeducated and n his Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope poptimism (or pop-ism) operates on the principle underemployed writers (present company Idescribed the critical impulse in terms that that “Beyoncé is as worthy of serious consideration included) enter both a bland cultural ecosystem were more didactic than democratic: “Men as Bruce Springsteen, and ascribing shame to pop and a struggling market for criticism. Instead of must be taught as if you taught them not;/ And pleasure is itself a shameful act.” Poptimism was being afforded the time (and financial security) to things unknown proposed as things forgot.” H.L. pluralist, uncaringly commercial, and—as the port- undertake study of an art form and develop exper- Mencken, similarly biting and misanthropic, in a manteau suggests—cheerily optimistic, and the tise over years, they freelance their way to the best 1914 column cites the advice of a senior critic, “an think piece was its ideal bedfellow. The Pollyanna- approximation of authority, and sometimes substi- ancient”: “Unless you can make people read your ish exalting of popular taste, often taking the form tute personality for it instead. Where the best critics criticisms, you may as well shut up your shop, and of a kind of enlightened philistinism, was regarded once used style to, as Daniel Mendelsohn put it in the only way to make them read you is to give them by more perspicacious critics as fundamentally his 2012 “A Critic’s Manifesto,” dramatize their own something exciting.” Mencken responded by adopt- reactionary. As Saul Austerlitz wrote in The New thinking, for the modern purveyor of think pieces, ing a pose of utter ferocity. Some of his peers, he York Times Magazine in 2014, in a rare reaction their own writerly persona surges to the fore. And writes, abandoned the requisite critical combative- against the poptimist stance, who can blame them? Met with an editor seeking ness for populism (early poptimism). “The primary stories filed with impossibly tight turnarounds, aim of all of them,” Mencken writes, “was to please Poptimism embraces the familiar as a means what can the struggling hopeful do but will a hasty the crowd, to give a good show.” He accused them of keeping music criticism relevant. Click “take” into existence in exchange for two hundred of operating behind a “veil of self-deception.” culture creates a closed system in which very real dollars? Such self-deception is the default mode of the popular acts get more coverage, thus becom- Social justice, too, is a pillar of this new economy think piece. The internet’s push toward a “dem- ing more popular, thus getting more cover- of publishing. Woke takes get “eyeballs”; particu- ocratization” of voices and opinion has served to age. But criticism is supposed to challenge larly incendiary pieces go viral. The problem of undermine the authority of cultural gatekeepers. readers on occasion, not only provide seals listicles and “quick hits” is not merely their length And cultural gatekeepers, in turn, have responded of approval. or speed. It is that in a media environment rich with by abdicating something of their responsibility. headlines such as “10 ‘woke’ works of literature you Instead of appearing knowledgeable, savvy, and Poptimism provoked a shallow rethinking of the need to add to your reading list this year” (Elle) even a bit miserable, they adopt the forged mantle function of criticism itself. Criticism’s once serious, or Buzzfeed’s “21 books by POC writers that you of vox populi. They’d rather be the guy you can have dignified function mutated. The impulse quickly should definitely read at some point” (a list topped, a beer with than the guy across the room squinting spread to other forms of cultural writing, with incidentally, by that noted literary obscurity Toni at you warily through a monocle at a cocktail party. film criticism (“In defence of Zack Snyder”), book Morrison), book selling rather than book reviewing A culture that vaunts the popular, gives voice to reviewing (“In defence of young adult fiction”), and seems the focus. A book is hailed for being “woke” the amateur, and drives toward the mellow middle even food writing (“In defence of Guy Fieri”) seizing and festooned with Social Justice Literature prizes of consensus, is invariably chary of didacts, of on the trend, with critics singing the praises of zero- (yes, these exist), leading to the production of more experts, of snobs, of anyone who can be cut down calorie entertainments with a wholly unearned air social justice literature and turning the endeavour with a damning accusation of pretentiousness.2 of defiance. It’s as if that experience of intensity of tolerance and empathy and human fellow feeling Yet isn’t this precisely why one turns to criticism? Kazin prized has been turned inside-out. (One into just another pulpy commodity. Not merely to validate one’s own taste, but to be can’t help wondering if the current critical turn Such readings, however well-meaning, for- belies a deeper, more embarrassed knowledge that sake the very spirit of literature. As the great critic 2 As Dan Fox notes in his lively essay Pretentiousness: Why 99 percent of mass culture is unredeemable junk, Northrop Frye wrote, literature is not valuable It Matters, calling someone or something “pretentious” which can only be talked about in terms that con- because it reflects our beliefs or aspirations, but is often a reflexive gesture: “The pretentious flaws of others affirm your own intellectual or aesthetic expertise. veniently skate over the formal and textual stuff of a rather because it “has such a vast importance in Simultaneously, their fakery highlights the contours of work of art or entertainment.) indicating the horizons beyond all formulations of your down-to-earth character and virtuous ordinariness.”­

10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada met with a rare insight borne from deep knowledge of a subject, to encounter the pleasure of a new text, to rise above one’s delimited cultural horizons and assume a love of alien cultures in a way that is, Soggy Soup Bread I: pretty much by definition, pretentious? Why would I, or anyone, confine themselves to picking up a magazine or clicking a link on a website to read The Overture articles about why Budweiser or Beyoncé or other best-selling, entrenched bulwarks of the culture Drawing flavour out of plum tomatoes are worthwhile? Out of celery sticks, bound in grime The answer, counterintuitively, provides some- As they draw in the heat thing like hope: the flotsam upon which the aspir- Drink up the water ing, irrelevant, proudly pretentious Serious Critic might buoy herself against the deluge of think Pour salt into the broth pieces and watery woke “takes.” Readers read this Or it won’t boil right stuff precisely because they care about critical In a shivering pot, rattling religiously validation; they want to read, and understand. Delivering a fevered gospel Otherwise they’d be content to crack a Coors Light Until it foams over and play a few Taylor Swift MP3 files without both- ering with the attendant literature. The critical voice Fuck still matters. What criticism and the dopey, bloviating culture I draw meaning out of the light of think-piecey optimism need, then, is renewed, How it splits up your back radical pessimism, an acknowledgment that the Into twin halves machinations of the culture industry are bad, not I draw it out of the things you don’t do good, and that it is the duty of the critic to oppose I am poured onto it, like condensed milk them. It is a cruel function of late capitalism that it Stick myself to it, like crushed aloe makes all righteous complaint seem cliché, render- Dripping from its hands ing its critics foolish, like mid-’90s standup comed- In sweet droplets and yellowing goo ians wondering “what’s the deal” with the price of When we talk on the phone popcorn at the multiplex or the swelling cost of a When you say goodbye once cup of coffee. But this is an unflattering pose worth Rather than repeating it assuming. If the critic—or journalist, or aspiring Making your voice mushy and soft belle lettrist, or run-of-the-mill writer—encourages hostility towards the products and operations of Goodbye mass culture, if she attempts to lay bare its machin- Goodbye ations and schemes, then perhaps the so-called Hushed and coming apart “average consumer” may absorb something of this At the gaps between words productive skepticism. At the fractured glimpses of quiet A fundamental myth of our times is that cul- Squeezed in between the syllables ture gives us what we want. This is an obscenity. Good bye As anyone who has napped through an episode of Good bye AMC’s prestige advertising-and-philandery drama Until your substance thickens Mad Men likely knows, the culture only gives us In the quiet what we want after dictating what it is that we want. Before it can satisfy desire, first it must structure Break apart three stock cubes into the pot that desire. For flavour If, as a quote commonly attributed to Picasso Add more salt goes, “art is a lie that tells the truth,” then mass culture is a lie that tells a lie. Criticism that does And the dial tone draws meaning not speak truth to this lie only serves it. Criticism Out of the things you make orients itself toward the sharpening of reason and You are standing, straining, blending up the solids the awakening of passion. It is the painstaking mar- Into a mush riage of hermeneutics and erotics. It is not enough to enthuse. It’s about the constant interplay of enthusi- Add more salt asm and the ruthless inquiry of that enthusiasm; of Let it simmer the commingling of intensity and meaning. Taste it The function of criticism today, then, is simply Or a gunk the function of art itself. In his seminal text Expanded Deformed words that I can’t boil down Cinema, media theorist Gene Youngblood counters the cultural aim of entertainment with that of art, Add more salt writing, “Entertainment gives us what we want; art Regardless of what you think gives us what we don’t know we want.” Echoing Pope’s sentiment about teaching without teaching, Into something this formulation provides a standard for criticism, It tastes like too. Instead of turning art into artifacts, of reducing its possibilities to a sprawling supermarket aisle They’re not of bulk “takes,” the critic aims to account for the unknown and ambiguous, and so expands the hor- Gina Hay izons of literature, of art, of civilization itself. It’s not even so much about explaining the A young, lesbian, Dutch-Caribbean writer, Gina Hay called Holland and the small Caribbean mystery of the text as restoring a belief in that island of Curaçao her homes. She came to Victoria, British Columbia, to pursue a degree in mystery; less about finding the figure in the­carpet creative writing. She has been published in The Warren. than about the faithful, half-mad belief that there is one.

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 11 ‘The Thunderous Brows. The Long Silences.’ The marvellously unrelatable world of the ancient Greeks Jack Mitchell

Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece Robin Waterfield Oxford University Press 544 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780190234300

Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold Stephen Fry Michael Joseph 432 pages, softcover ISBN 9780718188740

oday’s classicist is often asked, “How are the ancient Greeks relevant to me, to T our society?” To which the awkward answer must be: “They’re not, which is why I like them.” It’s different with Rome. In law, for example, or in lyric poetry, or in the very idea of “the West,” half the Empire still survives; parallels between Donald Trump and the more grotesque emperors, for instance, are by now taken for granted. But the Greeks are a people apart: we are far closer in worldview to their comfortable neighbours, the more even-keeled Egyptians and Lydians and Persians, than we are to that hard-headed, hot- hearted race whose fierce little city states somehow gave rise to an unparalleled artistic and intellectual achievement. The Greeks are deeply alien, whence their perennial fruitfulness. “I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time,” protested the civic-minded Nietzsche, “if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” Still, the gulf will not bridge itself. How to inter- est today’s civilized reader in the antique? Robin Waterfield’s Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens approaches the problem from a historical perspec- The richness of Greek history is equal to that of Greek myth. tive, laying a firm foundation in historical narrative OIL ON CANVAS BY HERBERT JAMES DRAPER, THE LAMENT FOR ICARUS (1898) for an appreciation of ancient Greece. Hefty but IMAGE COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS highly readable, with well-produced maps and figures, it can be relied on as a distillation of twenty- pick the rockiest spots, whether for safety or from timeline into Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic first-century historians’ overall view of the subject. affinity. (One recollects Dr. Johnson’s jest, upon phases. This does scant justice, unfortunately, to Thus he begins with the environment: though the being told of some Scottish settlers who had picked the deep history of Greece prior to the Dark Ages. Greeks were prone to migrating and colonizing, a North American home that was oddly barren, For five centuries starting in about ­1600 BCE— as they scattered out from their rocky homeland that surely Scots could not be expected to notice.) what we today designate the “Mycenaean” phase— (roughly modern Greece) to new settings from Economically, the result was small-scale, low-yield Greece was not a constellation of city states but of Spain to Libya to the Caucasus, they tended to subsistence farming, with little opportunity for micro-empires centred on large palace complexes, coalescence into large, centralized states on the in Thebes, Pylos, Athens, Knossos, and Mycenae Jack Mitchell is a poet and novelist. His latest Near Eastern model. The feisty, microcosmic civic itself. This was, moreover, a literate world, albeit book is D, or 500 Aphorisms, Maxims, & life of the Greeks was thus first and foremost the one that used writing to count the king’s chariots Reflections (2017). He is an associate professor product of geography. rather than to record poetry. Its palace archives, of classics at Dalhousie University. In keeping with tradition, Waterfield divides his miraculously preserved, attest to a centralized,

12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada economically complex, heavily bureaucratized society, far beyond anything found in the appar- ently feral centuries of the subsequent Dark Ages. By way of example, the recent discovery of the Savage Lands “Pylos Combat Agate,” a thumb-sized engraved seal dated to c. 1450 BCE, has upended our view of Mi’raj grasses on its spores. The Garden rejects Mycenaean art: as fluid as Donatello, as energetic her tenants. What’s left to pick? Passion fruit as Michelangelo, it is the absolute polar opposite It’s plentiful in Paris, but Buddha?—not yet. Canta- of the abstract, ornamental art of the Dark Ages. loups are common in Budapest, yet leaning wolves So the later Greek perfection of form and design, are rare. Pests seem to be everywhere in Manchester like their alphabet, constitutes a gigantic project of where man chests are in bud. No body dares mention cultural renewal. Likewise, the Archaic period’s oral Africa. literature (some of which survives) comes infused Oh, Africa. with nostalgia for that vanished, heroic world; the birth of the polis (city-state) was very much a rebirth Tall, remote cities bear your scattered, alien fruit. of Greek culture. Such long-term trends, evident in They float in silently by night on grey, heaving boats art, should surely be taken as historical evidence of sculpted from poached Mediterranean trunks that the first order and find a place in the narrative. once upon a time stored seeds of the mind. We beatify Of course, the richness of Greek history prevents exodus with the milk of blindness, babies bobbing the treatment of every subject at adequate length, face down; stowaways of salt. The ancient towns even in a 500-page volume. Waterfield has vast ground to cover, from the rise of the polis (and, exhale, hollow-handed & dry-eyed, preaching decay simultaneously, inter-polis institutions like the and eternal bruising. Our massive, studded doors Olympic games) to political and cultural struggles creak open, just a crack. In the wilderness, warring among aristocrats, tyrants, and plebeians (kings nails scratch out tainted names. Thirsting loups burst being quickly ditched, except in Sparta). Naturally with avenging juices, watering thick, devout crops of Athens takes centre-stage early on and keeps it: the Athenians, being almost excessively literate, were weeds. Opulent bodies recuse. Do you remember where devoted as much to huge, expensive inscriptions you left Buddha? Pest. Fruit. What’s in a name? as to massive theatre festivals, and welcomed many Oh Africa. generations of ambitious intellectuals from across Whatever leads us away. the Greek world, in addition to their home-grown historians, philosophers, and comic and tragic poets, and these sources naturally draw the histor- ian’s gaze back to Athens, however much he may strive to include Sparta, Ionia, and the “wild west” of Sicily and Magna Graecia (the vigorous Greek poleis in Italy). We are in sure hands as Waterfield guides us through the major historical milestones: kerry rawlinson the grand alliance that resisted Persia’s attempt to absorb Greece into the officially civilized world (the “Persian Wars” as the Greeks termed them; kerry rawlinson gravitated from sunny Zambian skies to solid Canadian soil, eventually mak- the Persian term is unknown but was surely one of ing the Okanagan her home. Her works have been featured in fiction, poetry, and art contests exasperation); the upheaval of the Peloponnesian including those by Geist, Princemere Poetry, and Fusion Art; and she’s written recently for War, the rise of Macedon and the world-upending Grey Borders, Reflex Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, Salomé, Riddled With Arrows, Arc career of Alexander the Great; the “Hellenistic” Poetry Magazine, Boned, Pedestal Magazine, and Pioneertown. world of superstates and pan-Mediterranean Greek culture that preceded the Roman conquest. Any of these would warrant a volume in itself, and the fact that Waterfield keeps the whole huge from the sheer interest of the material, the joy of him narrating Winnie-the-Pooh in the morning, freight train on track, indeed clacking elegantly studying Greece lies in continually confronting ringmastering the kids’ television show Pocoyo along, is proof of an experienced engineer. There such questions—and­ never finding an answer. Even in the afternoon, and popping into some Netflix is nothing idiosyncratic: his aim is to demar- if they are not prominent in Creators, Conquerors, program at night. He has also published five novels cate a neutral common ground of historical and Citizens, this book will inform any interested and three volumes of autobiography; he has given fact, and readers will have to look elsewhere not reader, and it is upon such general interest and the world delightful beginner’s guides to classical just for detailed studies of particular aspects— information that loftier interests are built. music and to the composition of structured poetry; for example, philosophy, sculpture, or poetry— Turning from history to culture, it is pleasant to he has been politically active in favour of human- but also for big-picture ideas after the fashion note how Greek myth has the wind in its sails these ism, peace, and free speech. In short, he is a lead- of, say, Jacob Burckhardt’s nineteenth-century days: Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey ing cultural figure in many spheres simultaneously, lectures on The Greeks and Greek Civilization. (the first by a woman into English) has been and it is this fact that puts him in a peculiar position Today historians are shy of discussing the “Greek acclaimed in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, as an author. spirit,” as Burckhardt’s contemporaries, and so while a novelistic retelling of the same work by One of the pleasures of reading is that the reader many others before and after them, did, mainly Canada’s own Alex Boyd, Army of the Brave and slips into the author’s style as into a new wardrobe, because the questions it forces us to ask admit Accidental, draws inspiration from James Joyce’s as though trying on a new version of one’s own no definitive answers: Why were the Greeks Ulysses in the way it infuses a contemporary tale personality: in reading Jane Austen, I turn witty and so aggressively anti-sentimental? Why were with the logic of ancient epic. So Homer continues astute, while, in reading Gibbon, I’m the picture of they so exuberant yet so pessimistic? Why did to steal the spotlight, 2,500 years later; but there erudition; for their part, politely meeting me half- they so worship the naked male human body? is far more to ancient mythology than the Trojan way, books adopt a Canadian accent. Even when Why were they wholly addicted to hearing long, War, and that core canon finds new life in Stephen I’m familiar with an author’s real-life voice, as I am meticulously argued, elaborately constructed Fry’s Mythos. with, say, Gore Vidal’s, the prose speaks with my speeches, whether in tragic verse or in dramatic Fry is of course beloved unto millions for his voice: for the reader, an author’s real-life self is, if political debates? Why, in short, were they so differ- acting, from A Bit of Fry & Laurie and Blackadder in not moot, mute. In Stephen Fry’s case, however, ent, in these regards, not only from their neighbours the 1980’s through one of the lengthier filmograph- the writer’s voice and style comes already so firmly but, above all, from today’s pervasive moralizing, ies in the British scene; he is also a prolific narrator fixed in the reader’s inner ear that the usual mind- passivity, optimism, prudery, and glibness?­ Apart of television series and audiobooks. One can catch meld is difficult to achieve.

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 13 “Ante,” ait, “emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri.” Rettulit illa nihil nisi “Sit tibi Synanthropes copia nostri.” “May I die,” said he, “before you make Bold beasts, they sensed some lack me yours.” understood that we could be menaced To which she answered nothing but— hollow cardboard cut-outs of our ancestors “Make me yours.” [translation mine]

They came for the country clubs Fry instead swings for the fences: the campuses, the immaculate greens “I suppose like all the others you’ve the fresh water features too much to resist fallen in love with me.”

“Love with me!” Last week, a flock sauntered across the 401 “Love! I’m fed up with love.” in protest of their felled kin, clogging all but “Up with love!” the carpool lane – traffic honking for a mile. “It’ll never happen. Never. Go away!” “Never go away!” Back in ‘09 the bravest among them downed an A320 — dove headfirst into the jet engines, And so on, for about a page. Fry is not one to resist a the others cackling as the flight slumped into the Hudson. vivid detail: “Arachne sat down, cracked her knuck- les and began.” The bare bones are fleshed out, Subsisting largely on trash and plastic the gist elaborated, sometimes to tedious length and in doubtful taste. In Hesiod, for example, the they spout new Hydraic heads, mutant Canadiana incarnate, Earth Mother Gaia (“Earth”), enraged at her partner each of their six insatiable mouths calling out more, more! Uranus (“Sky”), summons her Titanic children to parricidal slaughter: “Children of a vicious father, Watch them march up to your children if you will heed me, pay him back his foul outrage, and take the grain right out of their hands for he was first to plot shameful deeds!” (Again, the translation is mine.) In Fry’s soap operatic narra- This is what happens tion, Gaia must first track down her son Cronus, when nothing hunts you. eventual spouse of her daughter Rhea, who tells her mother that Cronus is dissatisfied with Uranus and just might prove helpful:

“Really?” cried Gaia. “You say so? Well, where is he?” “He’s probably mooching around down by the caves of Tartarus. He and Tartarus get on so well. They’re both dark. Moody. Mean. Magnificent. Cruel.” “Oh god, don’t tell me you’re in love with Kronos . . .” Ben Robinson “Put in a good word for me, mummy, please! He’s just so dreamy. Those black flashing eyes. The thunderous brows. The long silences.” Ben Robinson is writing poems about Don Cherry at Disneyland, commemorative Al Purdy Gaia had always thought that her youngest’s stamps, and starting the conversation with your dog about vegetarianism. Bird, Buried Press long silences indicated nothing more than published his first chapbook, Mayami in October 2017. The Walrus called his work, “barely dullness of intellect, but she refrained from legible.” He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario. saying so.

Apart from reservations about the burlesquing of a violent creation myth (even one tinged, in This peculiarity, far from being a disadvantage, More power to him. If there is one consistent Hesiod, with sardonic humour), this representa- is in fact the saving grace of Mythos. On the one trend in the history of Greek mythography, it is tive sample of Fry’s style is a challenge for my hand, the book (a hefty paperback, lovely to hold the fluidity of the retelling. Classical myth never inner reader’s voice, which just can’t manage this in the hand, with a nice selection of colour plates) became a holy book, never went through an official dialogue. But it hardly needs to, since I already is a straightforward modernization of ancient recension: ancient scholars might strive to throw know Fry’s own voice and manner so well that I sources. Most stories are one to three pages long, doubt on scenes of outright Olympian adultery, am effectively listening to him rather than reading sometimes reaching to fifteen. Hesiod’s Theogony but they never eliminated them from the epics. him. Indeed the whole book—which, somewhat contributes the creation myth and the Succession Hesiod himself provides two different versions annoyingly for a volume packed with hundreds Myth of Cronus’ and Zeus’s seizures of supreme of Prometheus’ fire-theft; tragedians might sud- of names, somehow lacks both table of contents power (complete with castrations, child-swallow- denly recast their mythic plots for dramatic effect and index—seems less like a traditional book ings, paranoia, vainglory); the Homeric Hymns (as Euripides is said to have done in being the first than a script for the Fry-narrated audiobook. This adds the Olympian biographies; Hesiod again to make Medea kill her own children). It is surely is perfectly in keeping with the most venerable contributes Prometheus’s theft of fire; the Library owing to the embroidering genius of Ovid that the performance traditions of Greek myth— of Apollodorus fills in the supporting cast of god- stories of Arachne’s hubristic weaving competi- (mythos) originally meant “authoritative speech born heroes. (We stop before the Trojan cycle.) tion with Athena, Phaethon’s cosmic joyride with act”—and if Fry the tale-teller means to lead his Above all there is Ovid, who two thousand years the Chariot of the Sun, or the nymph Echo’s tragic myriad listeners to Greek culture down the path of ago ransacked the agreed-upon canon as gleefully pursuit of Narcissus have taken root in the Western sheer glee, I for one shall not protest. Something of as Fry does here, reordering and reimagining it: imagination. By way of tribute, Fry sometimes play- the alien nature of the old Greeks—their fondness as Fry says in an end note, the Roman poet was fully competes with Ovid. Here is the Roman poet’s for irascible, jealous, impulsive deities; their love of “happy to add, subtract, and invent, and this has Echo, a nymph who, stripped by Juno of the power life as it is actually lived instead of how it somehow influenced and emboldened me to be—shall we say to originate words, must cleverly (indeed poetic- ought to be—is authentically communicated in ­imaginative?—in some of my retellings too.” ally) echo her beloved, who takes to his heels: this unique volume.

14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada A Guardian of Time Kim Thúy and the heavy burdens of the past Donna Bailey Nurse

Vi Kim Thúy Translated by Sheila Fischman Vintage Canada 144 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780735272798

u, by the Montreal writer Kim ThÚy, was one of the most successful debuts in RCanadian literary history, sold to twenty countries, winning a Governor General’s Award and CBC’s Canada Reads at home, and receiv- ing an Italian prize for multiculturalism as well as three French awards, including Salon du livres de Paris, abroad. The story is told from the perspec- tive of Nguyen An Tinh, a ten-year-old girl whose family flees Vietnam to escape Communist rule. Readers were mesmerized by Thúy’s lightly fiction- alized account of her own experience, in which the Nguyens, along with two hundred fellow passen- gers, cram into a rickety boat, surviving for days on In her travels to Cambodia, Thúy’s protagonist finds herself facing the echoes of the past. biscuits soaked in motor oil. Their vessel smashes THE BAYON, KHMER TEMPLE, ANGKOR, CAMBODIA to bits on the coast of Malaysia, where they suffer IMAGE COURTESY PX HERE many months in a refugee camp before being spon- sored and granted entry to Canada. I never leave a place with more than one of the ­literature of Canadian immigrants, offers an As compelling as the story itself is the manner suitcase. I take only books. Nothing else can original conception of time. in which it is delivered: Rather than comprising become truly mine. I sleep just as well in a uninterrupted chapters, the narrative is broken hotel room, a guest room, or a stranger’s bed ime is the first subject we hear about in Thúy’s up into chunks of text often less than a page long, as in my own. In fact, I’m always glad to move; Tmost recent novel. Vi, the book’s eponym- fitted together to form a vivid mosaic, a pastiche it gives me a chance to lighten my belongings, ous eight-year-old heroine, is the youngest of four effect that mirrors the workings of memory. An to leave objects behind so that my memory children, the only girl in a prosperous Saigon family. Tinh recounts her early years with simplicity and can become truly selective, can remember Her favourite daily task involves tearing a page off candour, but the book’s overall tone exudes a quiet only images that stay luminous behind my the calendar that hangs high on the wall. Vi is the sophistication. closed eyelids. family’s “guardian of time.” But when her twin broth- Critics expressed astonishment at the confi- ers turn seventeen, the passage of time becomes dence of Thúy’s first effort. Jurors for one of the Thúy’s economical prose is reflective of a per- threatening. Soon the two boys will be drafted into French awards celebrated the book’s structure sonal ethos, a drive to relinquish the heavy burdens the army to fight in Cambodia or at the Chinese and form. Ru does recall the precision and under- of her own past. The entire family in Ru presses border. Their mother is convinced that either posting statement of French writers like Gide and Camus. steadily toward the American Dream symbol- will result in death. So, with the help of Ha, her bold, Although Thúy may not have been a practised ized throughout the novel by the horizon. Which Americanized friend, she plans her family’s escape writer when she published Ru, she was almost cer- is not to say that An Tinh never looks back—she from Vietnam. Shockingly, her husband declines to tainly a practised reader. The novel is a testament to does. As an adult she returns to Vietnam on an accompany them on this perilous journey. Spoiled her impeccable, quite musical ear. extended business trip, though, admittedly, she by his wealthy parents, doted upon by his lenient In Vietnamese Ru means lullaby. In French it is not the same. Her time in her new home has wife, he cannot fathom a life of struggle. means the flow of a river or tears. Thúy is fascinated made her “more substantial, heavier, weightier. After a terrifying voyage, Vi’s family washes with language, its nuances within and across cul- That American Dream had given confidence to my up on the shores of Malaysia, living a year in a tures. Yet she is as frugal with words as she is with voice, determination to my actions…,” she says, refugee camp before moving to Canada and set- memories. An Tinh explains: “I no longer had the right to declare I was tling in Quebec City. This premise is similar to that Vietnamese because I no longer had their fragility, of Ru, and in fact Vi can be read as a response or Donna Bailey Nurse is the editor of Revival: An their uncertainty, their fears.” reconsideration. While her first work earned inter- Anthology of Black Canadian Writing. Her col- In general the experience of exile manifests national accolades, it also met with criticism for lection of essays Black Girls: Women of African as tension between the present and the past. The taking a view that appeared to absolve the French Descent Write Their World will be released by curious thing about Ru, however, is An Tinh’s colonial government for its deplorable politics and Palimpsest later this year. invincible forward march, which, at least in terms deadly actions. Other readers voiced skepticism­

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 15 about Thúy’s portrayal of Canada as a nation dark. Still, Thúy makes her point. She bravely providing aid for political reform. In Hanoi, she warmly welcoming of refugees; they questioned, exposes the sordid reality of racism in Vietnam, meets Vincent, a French ornithologist preoccupied as well, the psychological ease with which An Tinh where Indigenous groups not only face discrimina- with saving endangered birds and also endangered and her extended family seemed to assimilate into tion and crude slurs, but fight to retain their lan- peoples. As a character he may sound contrived, the Canadian mainstream. guages, lands, and cultural autonomy. We learn but Thúy touches only lightly upon Vincent’s Since Thúy bases her stories on personal experi- that professors at Hanoi University insisted on giv- motives, which quickly fade from our mind. The ence, they are difficult to quarrel with. That said, ing Vi’s paternal grandfather a French name, even two fall deeply in love. “Vi”, a fragment of the name in Vi she spends more time describing the horrors though his parents, “as an act of resistance,” had not Vincent, is another example of Thúy’s playfulness the boat people faced and their lingering emotional done so. He becomes Antoine Le Van An, a judge with words. In particular, Thúy studies distinctions consequences. After Ha is gang raped by a group of and a wealthy landowner in Saigon, where, in 1954, between languages as if this scrutiny might divulge pirates, she staggers through life devoid of feeling. the new government’s agrarian reforms will reduce the reasons for distinctions between peoples. “How A woman in the camp wails day and night after wit- his property by half. We never discover the family’s did ‘bribe’ become ‘pot-de-vin,’ a jug of wine, in nessing her son and daughter attacked and thrown real name, which is lost to them. This novel about French?” Vi wonders. The novel, a slim 144 pages, into the sea. one family’s flight from Vietnam is also a bitter his- has words and phrases scribbled in the margins, Thúy also places greater emphasis on the tory of a colonized people. resembling markings in a notebook. Indeed, the role Vietnamese-Canadians play in helping their Vi is short form for Bao Vi, literally “tiny, pre- word “notebook” (cahier in French) calls to mind countrymen adapt, rather than focusing on the cious, microscopic,” a name perfect for a sister Aimé Césaire’s Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal contributions of the Canadian sponsors. Once in and daughter in a traditional Vietnamese family. (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), a sur- Canada, Vi’s older brother, Long, becomes head of As she comes of age in Canada, Vi strives to exert real, book-length poem on the psychological con- the household, guiding his siblings in their social autonomy over her education, her lifestyle, and her sequences of colonialism in Martinique. Aspects of and educational choices. Long’s friendliness and sexuality. Later, trained as a lawyer and a linguist, the novel are evocative of black experience. generosity, along with his mother’s delicious meals, Vi travels to Cambodia for a symposium on law, As regards style, Vi, like Ru, unfolds in brief transform their humble apartment into a gathering colonialism, and capitalism. passages. The prose again is simple and frank, place for Vietnamese youth. By such clever, subtle although not quite so precise and sometimes a little means Thúy affirms Quebec’s cultural diversity. If we ignored the amputees and the weapons unwieldy. Perhaps this is because the story feels In Vi, multiculturalism emerges as an important resting on the restaurant tables, it was easy to freighted with history. In Ru, An Tinh described her theme. So does race. Vi’s mother’s inner strength imagine the “Pearl of Asia” that Phnom Penh desire to jettison extraneous memories. Vi, on the derives from having to battle racism. Her dark had been, with its sumptuous temples and vil- other hand seems increasingly preoccupied with skin reveals her partly Indigenous roots. In Da Lat, las. But all it took was a visit to the temples of the collective past: “The history of Vietnam and the where she grew up, the lighter-skinned girls bul- Siem Reap, where you stumbled over the head Vietnamese endures, evolves, and grows in com- lied her mercilessly calling her “monkey,” “savage,” of a Buddha, plundered and abandoned by a plexity without being written down and recounted.” and “transvestite.” Vi rarely meets a person without looter, to hear the footsteps of those marching Each of these characters asks the reader to travel contemplating their colour, and the reader may towards death under the regime of Pol Pot. in a different direction: While An Tinh encourages tire of hearing about an individual’s “pink cheeks.” us to move forward and forget, Vi advises us to It often comes across as though Vi prefers white Soon after, she returns to the region, this time go back and remember. She is ever the guardian skin, even though her own complexion is quite to Vietnam, as part of a Canadian organization of time.

16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Hapless Old Harridans Flapping Their Traps Who says the alt-right doesn’t like poetry? Aaron Giovannone

onald Trump doesn’t exactly leap to mind when one thinks of great cul- Dtural benefactors. The U.S. president’s proposed budgets have twice aimed at eliminat- ing funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, and in early 2017, Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy advisor, aired the idea that the poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “The New Colossus” by Jewish American Emma Lazarus welcoming “your poor, your huddled masses,” shouldn’t be there. For their part, poets have been protesting the president, often through found text and erasure poetry that pilfers, repurposes, and mocks his language, like this couplet from the iron- ically titled The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, compiled by Robert Sears: “I built buildings that are 94 storeys tall/ My hands aren’t—are they small?” But as the example of the famously conserva- tive T.S. Eliot should remind us, poetry is not the exclusive preserve of liberal English professors and spoken-word social-justice warriors. These days, a cohort of angry alt-righters is finding in poetry a medium to ennoble their feelings of victimization by modernity, by women, and by liberal democracy. One such lover of verse authored what could have been the most widely discussed, if largely reviled, poem of last year. While no poet read at the president’s inauguration—a common enough fact at the swearing-in of a Republican—a poem called “The Pibroch of the Domhnall” that many believed was intended for the official event went viral online. This work by Joseph Charles MacKenzie fetishizes Trump’s Scottish background while celebrating his election victory. (A “pibroch” is a type of bagpipe illustration by leeay aikawa music, and “Domhnall” is Gaelic for Donald.) Consisting of ten six-line stanzas, it repeats many phone; he condemns literary institutions, which he ­himself as a public supporter of Donald Trump, of the talking points of the 2016 campaign, but believes have no place for his traditionalist oeuvre; Milo Yiannopoulos, and Steve Bannon. in rhythmic and rhyming couplets. One stanza and he derides “modernist so-called poetry” and A Walt Whitman scholar, Bauerlein has invokes immigration policy: “Lest a murderous lashes out at “arrogant publishers [who] continue expressed existential angst over contemporary horde, for whom hell is the norm,/ Should threaten to lose money on the usual race-gender-identity scholarship that critiques the traditional canon. In our lives and our nation deform”; another attacks hustlers they put forward as mystical idols to be a 2017 Politico piece about being the only Trump women and Hillary Clinton, if not by name: “Whilst adored.” MacKenzie conflates modernism with supporter at Thanksgiving dinner, he complained, hapless old harridans flapping their traps/ Teach the relatively recent institutional drive to increase “I spent my 20s in a grimy room reading Dante, women to look and behave like us chaps.” Bereft of diversity in the arts—but both are bad, to his mind, Wordsworth, and Nietzsche—only to find when image, lacking metaphor, strained for diction, and because they are untraditional. A further explora- I went to campus that my intellectual giants had funny without wanting to be, the poem is a fitting tion of Mackenzie’s website reveals such work as become objects of suspicion and derision.” tribute to a terrible president. “Sonnets for Christ the King,” a sombre sequence of And while it’s safe to say Bauerlein prefers dead The poem comes across almost as parody, but Catholic devotional verse. Chock full of “thees” and poets, one of his favourite living poets is Dana Gioia, that reading is challenged by MacKenzie’s grandiose “thous,” it’s the literary equivalent of a Renaissance an American writer who champions formalism in and rather perplexing biography on his website: he fair, and it seems all too sincere. poetry, and whose work—some of it published in claims Google News among his publishing credits Viral lists abound with the work of anonym- the conservative religious magazine, First Things, and says that Maya Angelou once called him on the ous amateurs, but the sentiments MacKenzie where Bauerlein is a senior editor—has a traditional expresses would find common cause with writers streak exploring themes of family and faith. When Aaron Giovannone’s most recent collection of poetry who work within the institutions he despises, such Bauerlein was asked on a podcast whom he would is The Nonnets (Book*hug, 2018). He splits his time as Mark Bauerlein, a long-time English professor have chosen as Trump’s inaugural poet, he named between Calgary and the Okanagan Valley. at Emory University who has made a name for Gioia—although one wonders what Gioia, who is

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 17 California’s poet laureate and a former chair of the ­disagree, using as an example a Toronto woman For decades, discussing Pound’s fascism was National Endowment for the Arts, would have to who had organized protests against him. discouraged in literary studies, especially by the say about that. Bukowski, for his part, didn’t have a problem dominant school of New Criticism, which saw art Apparently appreciating diversity in poetic with violence against women. In The Bukowski as self-contained and transcendent of its socio- styles more than in people, the alt-right, not stick- Tapes, the poet is shown kicking and hitting his political contexts. New Criticism itself was heavily ing to sonnets and quatrains, has embraced Charles wife when they have a disagreement about, among influenced by, and invested in, literary modernism, Bukowski, the pessimistic, libidinous, hard-drink- other things, women’s roles. allowing the New Critics to exalt the formal innova- ing Los Angeles writer who rebutted both middle- tions of Pound and other modernists while down- class conformity and the hippie counterculture. o discussion of far-right politics and poetry playing their sometimes questionable politics. Bukowski is one of the favourite authors on the Nwould be complete without Ezra Pound, Inspired by Pound, an Italian neo-Fascist Red Pill subreddit, a popular community on Reddit perhaps the most canonical American modernist political party has taken up the poet’s name and populated by men with alt-right views. Bukowski and a hardcore Fascist. Pound lived in Italy much cause. CasaPound (Pound’s House) was founded explains his generally contrarian philosophy in of his adult life, including during the Second World by members of Rome’s white power music scene the 1985 documentary series The Bukowski Tapes: War, when he wrote poems lamenting the deaths of in 2003. Through their active cultural programs “Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not Fascist heroes and celebrating the killing of Allied and student associations, CasaPound courts dis- do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning, soldiers. He also broadcast on the radio racist affected Italian youth, a demographic with 30-plus and you have the heaven they’re looking for.” propaganda in support of Mussolini. percent unemployment. In 2017, CasaPound had Although he was perhaps at the peak of his Before this, however, as a poet, critic, editor, its first success in electoral politics, winning a seat popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, Bukowski still mentor—or “village explainer” as Gertrude Stein in a municipal election in the Roman suburb of attracts a cult following. At your local Ostia. Formerly limited to the central bookstore, his titles likely take up regions of Italy, in the latest national more space on the shelf than most Ezra Pound wrote poems lamenting elections CasaPound ran candidates other poets—that is if the staff can in districts across the country. keep his frequently stolen books on the deaths of Fascist heroes, and While advocating for interest- the shelf. free housing loans—its website Bukowski writes poetry in direct, broadcast racist propaganda in quotes Pound’s poem “With Usura”— simple language, and his short lines support of Mussolini. CasaPound is on the far right on a go down about as satisfyingly as Bud litany of issues, especially immigra- Light. In “Nirvana,” one of Bukowski’s tion and refugees. Sociologists have most popular poems judging by the plethora of put it—Pound influenced a cohort of famous writ- linked CasaPound to historical fascism’s “cult of YouTube homages to it, the poet narrates the story ers. Due partly to the intervention of his powerful violence,” and indeed the group’s members have of “a young man/ riding a bus/ through North friends, Pound was found not mentally fit to stand committed numerous violent attacks on migrants Carolina.” When the bus stops at a diner, the man trial for treason after the war and spent twelve years and protesters. In a famous incident caught on is enchanted by the waitress serving him, who is: in a Washington, D.C., asylum instead. In 1958, video, a supporter of CasaPound viciously head- when he returned to Italy to live the rest of his life, butted a journalist who was interviewing him about unlike the women Pound gave the Fascist salute. his affiliations with the party. he had Pound was obsessed with his own idiosyncratic And CasaPound has been producing its own known. economic theories, detailed in books such as literature. Its cultural liaison, Adriano Scianca, she was unaffected, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, ABC of Economics, and who has written a book about Pound called Ezra there was a natural in his long poem, The Cantos. Pound saw usury— fa surf (Ezra Surfs), extolls the poet as a self-help humor which came the practice of charging unfair interest on loans— guru for chaotic times: “Pound provides the recipe from her. as the wellspring of the world’s economic and for restoring order…a spiritual order, and an political problems. Pound illustrates some of these economic-political order.” The book’s foreword, by Despite his infatuation, the man boards the problems in Canto XLV, “With Usura”: Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, misrepresents the critical bus again and rides off. The poem suggests that he consensus on Pound, downplaying the poet’s can- has just experienced “Nirvana,” but has regretfully With usura hath no man a house of onicity to fashion him a target of unfair criticism abandoned it to ride with the Greyhound plebeians.­ good stone instead: “Everyone judged this Homer of the twen- Both the man and the poem seem oblivious to each block cut smooth and well fitting tieth century…They wanted to transform him into the fact that the waitress’s job requires her to be that design might cover their face, a second-rate talent.” CasaPound sees the poet as nice to him. Bukowski’s heaven is the male gaze with usura unjustly marginalized, a metonym for their own felt safely and unwittingly ensconced in consumerist hath no man a painted paradise on his marginalization in a liberal democratic Italy. sovereignty. What’s more, this poem, while ideal- church wall izing the waitress, throws shade at all the other he poetry beloved by the alt-right speaks “women/ he had/ known.” The undertones hint at While usury undermines good and beautiful Tto the feelings informing its politics. From why Bukowski appeals to some young men with homes, Pound’s economic thinking becomes a MacKenzie’s under-appreciated traditionalism, to negative views of women. The Red Pill subreddit racialized accounting of who gets to live in those Bukowski’s misogynist rebelliousness, to Pound’s features numerous threads quoting Bukowski’s homes. In his radio addresses, Pound ranted that maligned fascism, grievances overwhelm the emo- most misogynistic comments, such as this one “the Jews” were waging war on Europe, and he tional world of this poetry and its fans. from Notes of a Dirty Old Man, a 1969 collection of advocated for small-scale “pogroms”: “The sixty The case of alt-right poetry highlights what we the author’s newspaper columns: “a woman with a Kikes who started this war might be sent to St. should already know from history: that poetry can sexy body immediately turns it into a weapon for Helena as a measure of world prophylaxis.” Pound support reactionary politics as easily as it can serve MATERIAL advancement, and I am not speaking of read and apparently believed the anti-Semitic hoax progressive ends. W.B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, the whorehouse whore.” document Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he Gabriele D’Annunzio, F.T. Marinetti—the list of One noteworthy fan of Bukowski’s is Jordan continued to promulgate racist conspiracy theories influential far-right writers of verse goes on. Even Peterson, the alt-right’s favourite professor, well after the war. Writing pseudonymously in 1956, the war criminal and ethno-nationalist politician who has tweeted a link to a YouTube reading of Pound claimed that “It is perfectly well known that Radovan Karadzic is an award-winning poet. Bukowski’s “Nirvana”: “This poem tells you every- the fuss about ‘de-segregation’ in the United States The artist as rule-breaking free spirit—an idea thing you need to know about life,” Peterson says. has been started by Jews.” inherited from romanticism and reinforced by His affinity for Bukowski makes sense. Bukowski’s Despite his political troubles, Pound’s reputa- modernism—is itself a concept subverted in our misogyny, mild at times, obvious at others, jives tion survived, and even thrived, after the war. His historical moment, in which transgressiveness with the revanchist masculinity lurking just below Pisan Cantos, published in 1948, were controver- has been used to reassert reactionary hierarchies the surface of Peterson’s lectures and writings. sially awarded the Bollingen Prize. To the sympa- and retrench against recent social gains made by In an oft-cited talk with Camille Paglia, Peterson thetic reader, the book’s melancholic tone might women and minorities. The alt-right, unfortunately, laments the fact that it is socially unacceptable for seem a mea culpa; to others, the author just seems has a place in poetry, and poetry has its place in the men to physically fight women with whom they sad that fascism is over. alt-right.

18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Goodbye to All That The politics of romantic exits Anne Thériault

The breakup is a recent phenomenon; for most of Western history, women simply couldn’t leave. PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE SERIES USA, LAS VEGAS WEDDING CHAPEL IMAGE COURTESY FRANCOISE GAUJOUR VIA FLICKR

the Great, she writes that he had “made himself a So how did we get from there to the West’s cur- Hard to Do: The Surprising Feminist History laughingstock for his indecent habit of falling in rent cultural ideas about love, partnerships, and the of Breaking Up love with his own wife.” These stories may make catastrophe of the dissolution thereof? This is one Kelli María Korducki the Ancient Romans sound as if they rivaled the of the central questions—with emphasis on the lat- Coach House Books Victorians in terms of physical prudery, but nothing ter part of that equation—in Kelli María Korducki’s 144 pages, softcover could be further from the truth; in fact, Roman men Hard to Do: The Surprising Feminist History of ISBN 9781552453520 took pride in their varied and lurid sexual appetites. Breaking Up. It was the idea of love—specifically love within Anyone who has ever wandered down the self- a marriage—that aroused their disgust. help aisle at a bookstore knows that there isn’t n Plutarch’s Lives, the first-century An Ancient Roman marriage was a social and exactly a scarcity of books about ending relation- essayist relays an anecdote in which Cato the financial contract that existed for two purposes: the ships. But, as Korducki explains early on in hers, I Elder expels a man named Manilius from the sharing of property and the creation of new Roman most of these books are concerned with either senate after Cato learns of a deeply immoral act he citizens through the birth of legitimate children. getting over a difficult split or dumping a bad had committed: Manilius had kissed his wife—that Marriages often happened for political reasons, and boyfriend; few if any attempt to understand the is to say Manilius’s own wife—in public and in were almost always brokered by senior members complex dynamics of departure, or its complicated front of their daughter. In her biography Cleopatra: of the two families. Within this framework—one in opposite, hanging in; and none examine the long A Life, Stacy Schiff tells a similar story about Mark which the father held patria potestas, or absolute history of the “expectation that [women] should Antony, saying that he had been reprimanded authority, over his wife and children—there was want to stay, to make it work, the moment we find for having “openly nuzzled his wife;” of Pompey no place for love. Because marriage was strictly a ourselves with a partner who is decent and willing.” business arrangement with no sentiment attached, Hard to Do plumbs the roots of that expectation Anne Thériault lives in Toronto. She is the author divorce and remarriage were quite common in by applying a critical feminist analysis to the history of My Heart is an Autumn Garage. Her work can Ancient Rome; after all, there is little sense in stay- of breaking up, from Ancient Rome to the present be found in the London Review of Books, the ing roped into one contract if a better one appears day. The book is less concerned with the what, why, Washington Post, and elsewhere. on the horizon. or how of breaking up than it is with who gets to

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 19 leave, and the circumstances that allow them to of black people that the American chattel slavery do so. As Korducki explains, the breakup itself, at system relied on. least in the way we currently culturally apprehend Korducki could certainly have delved more into ILLUMINATING it, is a fairly new phenomenon. For most of Western certain subjects (for example, I would have loved to The Reconciliation history, women were unable to leave even the read more about the ripple effects the trauma of fam- Manifesto unhealthiest relationships, and for a laundry list ilial separation has had on the descendants of slaves Arthur Manuel and Grand of reasons: religion, social mores, property laws, in America, or about pre-eighteenth-century mar- Chief Ronald Derrickson, and, above all else, financial dependency. Korducki riage), but in general Hard To Do is quite satisfying Preface by Naomi Klein explores how all of these factors have historically in length and depth. In any event, “it left me wanting $22.95 paperback impacted women; she also examines how legisla- more” is not the worst thing ever said about a book. Late Indigenous activist tion has shaped the issues, from Britain’s Marriage And the book may be revelatory for people who, Arthur Manuel offers Act of 1753 to the advent of no-fault divorce in the like me, grew up in a world where divorce is com- a 6-step program to 1970s. Using the exit from a relationship as her mon and women are able to have much more finan- decolonization and putting starting point, Korducki neatly picks apart com- cial autonomy than has historically been offered Canadians and Indigenous Peoples on a healthy path plex socio-economic power structures that exist in to them. Women in the Western world today take Globe and Mail to reconciliation. romantic partnerships. for granted the ability to leave (or stay with) the 100 Best Books Although Hard to Do is a short read—it clocks romantic partners of their choice. I have never had in at just 144 pages—it manages to cover a lot of what I would call an easy breakup, but the fact that territory in an area ignored both by other books I’ve had any sets me apart from many of the women THOUGHTFUL about women’s history and by pop culture, which who came before me. evinces great interest in the subject but tends There are other illuminating moments, such Oil’s Deep State tend to gloss over the way it is actually experi- as the direct line Hard to Do draws from post-­ Kevin Taft enced by a wide swathe of people. Hard to Do Enlightenment ideas about marriage to the perform- $29.95 hardcover devotes a fair chunk of its space, for instance, to ance of motherhood on social media, through “a the romantic separations of working class women, series of photogenic vignettes that establish a simu- An Alberta government insider gives an queer women, and women of colour. Korducki lacra of maternal serenity.” In the rise of the idea that explosive account of takes a particular look at what marriage meant to marriage should be a union born out of love—rather how the oil industry has women living in slavery in the American South. than a union made for financial, social, or political captured democratic She examines both the fact that legal marriage reasons—Korducki sees the roots of the modern institutions and stops action on global was often not permitted among slaves (in spite of social pressure on women to approach domestic life warming. the fact that the slave owners often espoused the not out of a sense of duty but a sense of deep joy. belief that they were Christianizing their slaves, This, then, is what Hard to Do does best: it takes Edmonton #1 bestseller and the sanctity of marriage is a core teaching in aspects of modern-day relationships that are rarely Christianity) and the traumatic dissolution of slave considered and puts them in a historical context families that occurred when husbands, wives, and that sheds an entirely new light on them. Before ENGAGING children were sold to different owners. Marriage reading this book, I had thought of breaking up as a among slaves, explains Korducki, was an act of rite of individual passage, albeit an unhappy one. It Wartime rebellion—“a claim to humanity, an assertion of turns out to be much more. Who would we be if we Edward Butts love.” For slave owners, separating and selling off could not leave the relationships that didn’t serve members of slave families not only had financial us? And who would any of us be if the women who $29.95 hardcover benefits, it also continued the dehumanization came before us had had this power? Drawn exclusively from newspaper articles during the period, this book brings the First World War home by exploring the daily tensions, tragedies, and impacts on those left behind in a small Coming up in the LRC Canadian town.

INFORMATIVE Big Business Free speech and the academy and Hitler Ira Wells Jacques R. Pauwels $27.95 paperback Together with his own research and that of recent Enlightenment under the sea German and American scholars, Canadian Irina Kovalyova historian Jacques R. Pauwels documents the role many multinationals (still in business today) Diversity versus social cohesion had in supporting Hitler and the Nazis. Will Kymlicka & Chandran Kukathas Letters from dad www.lorimer.ca Independent. Canadian. Since 1970. Heather O’Neill

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20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Come From Away Do we have a chance against alien species? Mark Winston

The Aliens Among Us: How Invasive Species Are Transforming the Planet—and Ourselves Leslie Anthony Yale University Press 400 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780300208900

very Easter, while North American children feast on E chocolate and marshmal- low bunnies, the Adelaide-based confectioner Haigh’s Chocolates offers Australian kids a less menacing alternative: the chocolate bilby, a treat in the shape of a small local mar- supial. Haigh’s phased out chocolate bunnies years ago, going “rabbit-free” as part of a partnership with Rabbit Free Australia, a wholly serious non- profit organization whose mission is to rid the country of what it calls its worst vertebrate pest. Rabbits were first introduced by European settlers to Australia in the eighteenth century, Sea lampreys have famously invaded our lakes, but wheat, corn, and apples are foreign species, too. to be raised for food, then released LAMPREY MOUTH from cages for sport hunting. They IMAGE COURTESY GREAT LAKES IMAGE COLLECTION VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS soon grew to enormous numbers, overgrazing pasture, eating crops, killing young respect for the capacity of invasive organisms to ­persistence of a light rain, and layers of slimy dead trees, initiating irreversible erosion, and contribut- spread and thrive, and a healthy skepticism that larvae that have fallen to the ground make the area ing to the decline of many native species. In spite we have much agency to stop or manage their around the trees as slippery to walk on as ice. of shooting, poisoning, and trapping, introduced long-term impact. My first encounter was with the Our mission was to develop a pheromone-based predators such as ferrets, foxes, and feral cats, gypsy moth in the early 1970s. As a recent univer- control program. We had some modest success despite construction of extensive rabbit-proof sity graduate, I was hired as a temporary employee with the research, although it didn’t turn out to fence networks, and propagation of rabbit-specific with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) be a game changer in gypsy moth control. The viruses, rabbits still cause $115 million in annual in Cape Cod, Massachusetts to develop control moths remain a major forest pest in the eastern agricultural damage. methods. Gypsy moths had been introduced to United States and Canada, although outbreaks have Introduced species are a big deal, biologically, the eastern United States in the late 1800s from become somewhat more manageable through a economically, and politically, and rabbits are one of Europe by the French astronomer and naturalist combination of control measures including pesti- myriad transplanted animals and plants that have Léopold Trouvelot, who was living in the textile cide applications, pheromone traps, and intro- radically transformed ecosystems on every contin- town of Medford, Massachusetts, and conducting duced predators, parasites, and diseases. ent. Programs to quarantine, control, and man- experiments with silkworms. Trouvelot decided to I went on from my gypsy moth days to study age such species cost billions of dollars annually, investigate gypsy moths as a silk-producing alterna- honeybees, themselves an introduced species driven by political decisions too often motivated by tive, and from this quixotic beginning an invasive- not native to North, Central, or South America. a “we have to appear to be doing something” men- species nightmare emerged. A few eggs blew out an Canadian honeybees were imported originally tality rather than much chance of success. open Massachusetts window, initiating the tenure from Europe, but I began my doctoral studies with My own career as an entomologist intersected of what became a devastating forest pest. African bees that had been imported to South numerous times with species that arrived from Gypsy moth populations in North America America in 1956 as part of an experiment to breed away. These experiences have left me with great quickly reached epidemic proportions, without superior honey producers in tropical climates. the predators, parasites, and diseases that control Twenty-six swarms escaped, and grew to become Mark Winston is a professor and senior fellow at their numbers in their native habitat. These out- what media nicknamed “killer bees.” Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue, and breaks are phenomenal; deciduous forests can be The African bees are indeed aggressive, and in author with poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar of the stripped of every leaf on every tree for kilometre addition to wreaking havoc with beekeeping and recently published book Listening to the Bees. after kilometre. Excrement drips from trees with the causing numerous human and livestock fatalities,

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 21 they were impressive in the mag- as Roundup, a highly controversial nitude of their success. These bees herbicide under constant review by turned out to be ideally preadapted regulatory authorities for its carcino- to New World tropical habitats, The Third Sister genic and antimicrobial qualities. and spread quickly and in massive For Queenie, 1904–1936 The raw material is here, then, numbers throughout most of Latin for an excellent book, but The Aliens America and into the southern United Among Us suffers from its verbosity; States. They may be the most suc- the book would have been consider- Arriving is also removal cessful introduced species ever, col- ably more effective if it were a third onizing new territory at a rate of 200 from a place you’ve always been. shorter, and if Anthony’s sentences kilometres per year and growing to and paragraphs were better organ- unimaginable populations; they now From the company of oaks ized. And, while populating a book number many hundreds of millions to lawns bereft of lilies about invasive species with the of colonies in the region. The human and in fall, so many fish— human characters associated with impact in lives lost and industries their control is usually a good way to threatened also has been notable, young male nurses climb the walls make science writing more access- with thousands of deaths due to with homemade nets and poles, ible, Anthony provides too big a cast massive stinging incidents, and a catch their shirttails on blackberry thorns of characters, and doesn’t always have a good eye for compelling per- major disruption of Latin American as if it were their right: beekeeping. sonal stories.

My third intersection with intro- Perhaps the most interesting D’ya think the consumption took her duced species came in an area moment in Aliens pops up almost as in which there is little interest in or did she just stop breathing an afterthought, at the very end of the reversing the invasions: agriculture. because of him? book, when Anthony introduces the Remarkably, 98 percent of North word “solastalgia,” meaning “psychic American crops are deliberately The silver eel of the river or existential distress caused by imported alien species. In Canada teems in the evening light. environmental change.” I had won- everything from apples (which ori- A smell of tar and the hot dered what impelled Anthony to write ginated in central Asia) and canola noise of engines. this book cataloguing species under (bred in Canada from rapeseed, first attack and in decline, but that word, cultivated in India, China, and Japan) Imagine being loved like that, the youngest says, solastalgia, suggests Aliens can best be understood as a long prose poem to corn (domesticated from maize in his net alive with spawning fish. southern Mexico) and wheat (first expressing the distress of someone cultivated in the Fertile Crescent) clearly at home in the outdoors see- to cows (southeast Turkey) and pigs Lyn Butler Gray ing the recognizable vanish during (many locations in Eurasia) are of his lifetime. foreign origin. I suspect the ecological Beyond the innumerable stories of impact of these farmed plants and Lyn Butler Gray is a pen name. The writer is from Vancouver ecological change and economic and animals dwarfs that of the trouble- Island, where she lives with her family. Her poems have appeared management challenges caused by some species we usually think of as recently in Grain, The Antigonish Review, and The Dalhousie invasive species, there is this: The nat- invasive. Ironically, invasive insects, Review. ural world is increasingly disrupted, weeds, viruses, and fungi plague agri- losing its familiar character, challen- culture, too. The cumulative impact ging our sense of stability. “Familiar” and interaction of invasive species is a highly relative term, of course, and cause annual crop losses in the United States of thrive considerably farther north, perhaps acci- the idea of “native species” is particularly fluid. What US$120 billion. dentally bringing them into Canada in soil used to is clear is that non-native species, whether intro- Leslie Anthony’s book The Aliens Among Us is protect imported plants. These exotic worms are duced deliberately or accidentally, have distorted the latest in a litany of books that shock us with slowly rebooting Canadian soil, with unknown con- habitats across the globe. The natural environments lurid stories of ecological transformation and eco- sequences for the bacteria, fungi, and plants that we know today are not the ecosystems our parents nomic devastation, then provide justification for evolved in a biota without them. or grandparents would have recognized. This has robust programs to deter future arrivals, eliminate Two other surprises in the pantheon of intro- been true ever since humans began migrating out of new infestations, or manage established species. duced Canadian species described by Anthony are Africa, but the pace has accelerated. Anthony, a British Columbia–based writer and moose in Newfoundland and deer on Haida Gwaii. What is native, and what belongs, is an artifact biologist, has a tremendous set to choose from, but Both are native to Canada but weren’t found on of historical memory. Each panicked quarantine, one of the more useful aspects of his book is that either of these islands until recently, brought in by eradication, and control program is justified by many of his examples are Canadian, some of them European settlers to provide something to hunt. benefits to particular industries and attempts to quite dramatic. Both populations exploded and they became pests, protect ecosystems, but the familiar becoming One example are the zebra mussels introduced the moose severely inhibiting forest regeneration unfamiliar may be the least appreciated driver into the Great Lakes in the mid 1980s, initiating and timber regrowth as they browsed, while also behind our concern about alien species. There are a cascade of ecosystem changes. Each plankton- becoming a danger on Newfoundland highways. few dramatic success stories with eliminating or feeding mussel produces up to a million eggs annu- Deer on Haida Gwaii have threatened the native controlling introduced species as we exert massive ally, consuming all the organisms and particulate cedar forest and impacted the cedar-based cultural effort to pull out weeds, kill mussels, cull moose, matter from about a litre of water a day. Collectively, heritage of the Haida Nation as they consume the or build pricey barriers to keep out fish. What they turned Lake Erie from turbid to clear, essen- tender shoots of newly sprouted cedar trees. usually occurs is that the aliens wreak havoc, they tially a biotic desert. The clear water allowed the Anthony covers economics and efficacy of con- evolve and we adjust, ecosystems change, man- aquatic plant Eurasian milfoil to bloom, as well as trol, which usually summarize into one basic story: agement is moderately successful, and their pres- blooms of blue-green algae, that led to downturns very expensive, with only scattered success. Control ence becomes the new normal. Eventually normal in the population of a fish related to the herring: the of sea lampreys in the Great Lakes, using physical becomes native. alewife, yet another invader. Alewives had become barriers to prevent lampreys from going up rivers The Aliens Among Us certainly highlights that the major food source for lake trout and introduced to spawn, as well as a chemical that’s lamprey- there’s good reason to feel solastalgic, with our Pacific salmonids, which then also declined. specific, costs US $50 million per year, yet they keep planet’s environment changing as dramatically as it Earthworms are one of Anthony’s unexpected coming back. has been in recent decades. The most inescapable Canadian invaders; native North American species And controls can themselves be harmful. conclusion from Anthony’s book may be the hard- reached only as far north as just below Chicago. Managing the towering Japanese knotweed usually est to accept: The aliens are among us, and they are But settlers introduced European earthworms that involves spraying glyphosate, commonly known here to stay.

22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Thin White Line The shifting boundaries of racial identity Bardia Sinaee

The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race Neda Maghbouleh Stanford University Press 248 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780804792585

mong the responses to the wave of anti-government protests in Iran in late A 2017 and early 2018 was a reignited Western curiosity about Iranian life before the Islamic revolution. Photographs circulated on social media from a 1969 Vogue spread showing models in exotic outfits posing in historic mosques and among ancient ruins. On New Year’s Eve, the British tabloid Daily Star ran a piece headlined “Bikinis, beer and beauties: Stunning photos reveal Iran before Islamic Republic,” which juxtaposed tranquil photos of long-haired, bell-bottomed Legally classified as white, Iranian Americans felt their status change during the 1979 hostage crisis. co-ed students against recent footage of govern- PHOTOGRAPH BY MARION S. TRIKOSKO, IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS STUDENT DEMONSTRATION (NOV 1979) ment forces dispersing protesters with water can- IMAGE COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION nons. We see Shah Reza Pahlavi circa 1966 smiling at his wife, Farah Diba (sporting a towering beehive American Indian; Asian or Pacific Islander. All per- bizarre, fascinating, and at times exasperating pic- hairdo), above a picture of chador-wearing women sons from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East ture: would-be immigrants attempted increasingly holding assault rifles during the 1979 revolution were classified as white. At the time, demonstrations extreme contortions to fit into the limits of whiteness that deposed him. The photo spreads and stories were spreading across Iran that would culminate in before judges whose definition of that boundary ostensibly evoke a past when Iranians were more a revolution the following spring. The hostage crisis was effectively incoherent. Armenians and Syrians free, but they are taken from the reign of the U.S.- that began the next year occasioned television’s first would use their dissimilarity from “fire worship- backed shah, whose secret police surveilled, tor- late-night news program, now known as Nightline, ping” Iranians as evidence of their own whiteness. tured, and murdered thousands of civilians. Read which broadcast footage of stern-faced ayatol- Meanwhile Parsi Indians, whose ancestors migrated against that history, their pre-revolutionary nos- lahs and mobs of angry Iranians into millions of to the subcontinent from Persia in the eighth cen- talgia involves another, more unsettling sentiment: American homes. In a period of two years, Iranians tury, argued that they were “like ‘clearly white’ wistfulness for a time when Iranians were more in America were made “white by law, [and] brown Iranians” rather than like their brown-skinned com- Western, and along the way, more white. by popular opinion,” according to Maghbouleh. patriots in India. In one case from 1923, an Indian While numerous sociological studies have These days there are anywhere from 1.5 mil- Sikh scholar named Bhagat Singh Thind argued that examined how Jewish, Italian, and Irish Americans lion to 2 million Iranian Americans living in the his ancestral connection to “Aryan” Persia “rendered have “become white” over time, University of U.S. (and more than 210,000 Iranian Canadians in him more white than the European American white Toronto assistant professor Neda Maghbouleh is Canada). The first wave came in the mid twenti- judges adjudicating his case.” interested in how Iranian Americans and those of eth century as university students, and by the mid Maghbouleh refrains from editorializing, but other Middle Eastern backgrounds have moved 1970s Iranians outnumbered all other foreign stu- it seems the claimants’ attorneys understood the back and forth across the colour line. Her new dents in American universities. The next big wave extent to which race is in the eye of the beholder, book, The Limits of Whiteness, which integrates arrived in the years after the Islamic revolution. The and the more arcane their arguments got, the the study of immigration with the study of race, is U.S. is currently home to the largest population of closer the court’s explanations came to laying bare ultimately an investigation of what whiteness is, Iranians outside of Iran, but even before they had the socially constructed nature of whiteness. In and how it’s “intermittently granted and revoked” a significant presence in the country, their racial rejecting Thind’s argument, the court employed “a for non-Western groups. status was debated in American courts. racial historiography in which Europeans (white) Quite literally so in some ways. In 1978, to pro- Until 1952, the granting of naturalized citizenship and South Asians (brown) evolved apart from any vide standards for the collection and tabulation in the United States was tied largely to whiteness, a possible common ancestor into dialectical racial of data for government programs, the U.S. for the result of the Naturalization Act of 1790. “Liminally extremes.” The convoluted and sometimes contra- first time classified American residents into four raced claimants,” Maghbouleh writes, argued their dictory rulings—Thind’s citizenship was granted racial categories: white; black; Alaskan Native or whiteness before a judge in “racial prerequisite” and revoked twice before being granted for good cases throughout the first decades of the twentieth in 1936—reflect a society that had begun to grasp Bardia Sinaee is the assistant editor at the Literary century. She opens the book with an examination of evolution, but still adhered to the pseudoscientific Review of Canada. some of these proceedings, and her excerpts paint a tenets of racial biology.

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 23 To complicate matters, Iranian Americans have Iranian parents can be, it’s easy to imagine youth like identity that both celebrates and remixes existing trafficked in racist pseudoscience themselves. In Donya speaking candidly to the sociologist—here, cultural norms, and to instill solidarity with other the early twentieth century, opportunistic nation- for once, is an Iranian adult asking them about their liminal and racialized communities—as many as alists in Persia (as Iran was known until 1935) experiences, rather than telling them who they are. one third of the participants are from mixed-back- promoted the premodern word arya (noble), a The second-generation Iranian Americans ground households. The curriculum—ultimately the non-racial self-designation that appeared in a Maghbouleh spoke with came of age after 9/11, as camp is more like school—includes sessions where sacred Zoroastrian text, as “an antecedent to the did “1.5-generation” immigrants, of which I count they read and analyze classical Persian poems, ‘Aryan’ racial science coming out of Europe,” the myself one (I was born in one country, Iran, and impersonate their parents in improv sketches, and book notes. One objective of contriving connec- raised in another, Canada). Unlike the German, watch movies depicting (or purporting to depict) tions between Iranians and Europeans was to Polish, Italian, and Irish immigrants of the twen- Iranian characters. Endeavours like Camp Ayandeh back up “racial claims of Iranian superiority to tieth century who were raised in ethnic neigh- provide a model for young “liminally raced” immi- Arabs, Jews, and other Semitic groups.” Some of bourhoods in major cities, Iranian-American kids grants from the Middle East and North Africa—like these myths found their way into Iran’s first mass- these days are more likely to go to school in mostly the thousands of Syrian children who have arrived education historical textbooks in 1928 and are per- white, “racially homogenous, highly class-privil- in Canada since 2015—to normalize their pres- petuated to this day. When 17-year-old Donya, the eged neighbourhoods,” Maghbouleh writes. Their ence in North America without whitewashing their American-born daughter of Iranian immigrants in parents are doctors, engineers, and university complex identities. It’s both heartening and sad Los Angeles, confided to her parents that she was professors. With the exception of those raised in to encounter, in the long passages Maghbouleh being bullied at school—“kids would say, ‘Wow, Iranian enclaves in southern California (or, in includes from the participants’ discussions, their you have a unibrow. You have really bushy eye- Canada, the northern suburbs of Toronto), they palpable relief at being in a room full of others like brows. You’re so hairy’…They said Bin Laden is my have few, if any, Iranian classmates. For these themselves for the first time. It’s a reminder that the dad”—her mom told her to inform the bullies that youth, 9/11 had an acute and seemingly irrevoc- social alienation felt by immigrants is not limited to Iranians were “the original white people!” able “browning” effect. the first generation. Donya is one of more than eighty Iranian The post-9/11 racialization of Iranians is also Maghbouleh’s book illustrates the inadequacy American adolescents and young adults Maghbouleh indicated by the phenomenon of non-Iranian of existing studies of American whiteness. North interviewed over five years, in coffee shops and people of colour being subjected to ostensibly anti- Americans from the Middle East and North Africa dormitory lounges throughout America, as part of Iranian hate crimes. Most recently, a man admit- will not necessarily “become white” over time. A her research for The Limits of Whiteness, and her ted to shooting two Indian men in a Kansas bar Middle Eastern male who passes for white on the findings comprise the middle chapters. The author, in February 2017, one of them fatally, because he street might feel very different when he hands his born in Oregon to Iranian immigrants, doesn’t thought they were Iranian. passport to an airport security officer. (Any illusions attempt to her erase her presence from the narrative, Near the end of The Limits of Whiteness, the I had about becoming white were dispelled in 2004 but occupies her own liminal space. Her experience author visits Camp Ayandeh (Camp Future), a two- when my teenage cousins and I were arrested by a of growing up Iranian in America would be differ- week summer camp entirely staffed and attended police tactical unit in Mississauga, Ontario, while ent from but comparable to that of her subjects. by 1.5- and second-generation Iranian-American playing in the yard with an orange-tipped BB gun.) Maghbouleh is older than them, younger than their youth. The place sounds unabashedly, almost Despite the aspirations of their parents, second- parents, and able to move between fluent English creepily utopian. Through group activities and guest generation Iranians in North America aren’t getting and casual Persian. Considering how overbearing speakers, the camp aims to cultivate a new Iranian any whiter, and this is probably for the best.

You should be angry. Find out why.

Legalizing Theft Policing Indigenous Movements No Choice A Short Guide to Tax Havens Dissent and the Security State The 30-Year Fight for Abortion on Prince Alain Deneault Andrew Crosby & Jeffrey Monaghan Edward Island Kate McKenna “In this timely and powerful book, Deneault A comprehensive account of contemporary Award-winning journalist Kate McKenna offers unveils the scope of the problems created by government surveillance. Crosby and Monaghan a first-hand account of Prince Edward Island’s tax havens, and documents the many ways in examine the intensified surveillance and policing refusal to bring abortion services to the Island, which they are weakening the very bonds of of Indigenous activists in Canada. and introduces us to the courageous women who struggled for over thirty years for change. our society.” — Linda McQuaig FERNWOOD PUBLISHING www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Uncommon Sense Jordan Peterson’s complicated truth Marc Lewis

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos Jordan Peterson Random House Canada 448 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780345816023

welve Rules for Life? Who goes around giving people rules these days? T Jordan Peterson spent much of his adult life studying and teaching the psychology of reli- gion. Maybe that’s where he got the idea. According to the Bible, God gave Moses ten rules for life, and Jesus gave his followers quite a number of guide- lines. But rules seem to have gone out of style, espe- cially lately. We like lists a lot. We like suggestions, about what to eat, what to wear, how to be product- ive, how to get the abs we want, and sometimes even how to find fulfillment. But we don’t usually like being told what to do. Who are you to say? Isn’t it all relative? Peterson certainly doesn’t flinch from telling people what they ought to do. In 12 Rules for Life, “should” appears 135 times, “must” 168 times, and rules replace chapter titles throughout. This isn’t the gentle touch we’ve come to expect from self- Peterson soars through layers of scholarship by intuition, making him impossible to check. help books. And this is a self-help book, though ILLUSTRATION FROM EDWIN D. BABBITT’S THE PRINCIPLES OF LIGHT AND COLOR (1878) IMAGE COURTESY PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW that’s not always apparent. There are the many lay- ers of philosophy, religious psychology, evolution- improve our lives and the lives of others. The rules— and an absence of standards for choosing among ary theory, primatology, politics, historical vistas tell the truth, set your house in order—sometimes them. He reminds us that we can tell right from painted in outrageous colours, and yes, a certain sound trite, about as profound as the “No place like wrong if we pay attention and look both inward amount of ideology underlying his advice. Yet the home” plaque that hung in your grandparents’ liv- and outward. Be honest with yourself, he insists. rules are still what rise to the top. Peterson wants to ing room. Others seem wise but hopelessly global Stop doing things you know to be wrong. That’s not instruct us on how to improve ourselves. and abstract. For example, “Rule 7: Pursue what a moral edict as much as a show of respect for our The tone of the book can be shocking. Peterson is meaningful (not what is expedient)” applies at capacity to figure things out. could rightly be accused of coming on brash and so many levels, in so many contexts, it loses any Perhaps surprisingly for some of his critics, combative, bombastic, and authoritarian. But that’s obvious relevance to self-improvement on the Peterson’s exhortations are softened by compas- not all he is. He is also conversational and intimate, ground. Other rules are so specific they could be sion. Today’s young people are squeezed between sometimes rancorous and disparaging, other times lifted out of a self-help book for parents or pet progressive politics and the need to excel and com- meek and self-critical, by turns harsh and compas- owners. (“Rule 11: Do not bother children when pete. Men seem unsure if it’s valid even to identify sionate, and very often funny. There’s no sense of they are skateboarding.”) But however unusual, as a man. They cringe, and they see themselves a seasoned strategist single-mindedly leading his even mystifying, the rules may sound, each leads cringing. Young women appear just as lost in an troops. The Peterson who speaks from these pages down a corridor of angst to some familiar personal equivalent set of contradictions. We lose courage is not the voice of a movement or an ideology. It’s or societal wound. and retreat to passivity. So stand up for yourself, the voice of an individual addressing other indi- But why would today’s reader even get that far? Peterson urges. Recognize your accomplishments viduals. And while he could be a lot more careful How could Peterson’s authoritarian stance and wherever they lie. He praises us for our resilience, about whom he knocks out of his path, his energy wacky phrasings lure hordes of especially young for persisting in our pursuit of value and meaning. and intelligence, his astonishing aim and unbridled male readers from his online lectures to his book? And if you can’t accomplish your goal right now, honesty, make it worth the ride—and the bruises. Peterson has somehow taken a rule-resistant he advises, break it down into sub-goals. Here he’s Peterson provides twelve rules for how to subculture, suspicious of authority and even of being a good cognitive behavioural therapist, and certainty, and sold it an instruction manual. I think that’s another form of compassion: helping people Formerly a professor of developmental psychology part of the magic is his very insistence that there is where they are most likely to trip up. All told, he at the University of Toronto, Marc Lewis writes a right way to think and to act. That may feel like comes across more like a coach than a preacher about addiction. His books include The Biology of water in the desert for a generation buffeted by con- or teacher. Desire and Memories of an Addicted Brain. trasting opinions, none of them firmly anchored, Peterson’s rules strike me as the parts of a tree

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 25 one can see above ground—the branches and not. By understanding this universal trajectory we he characterizes knowledge, even and especially twigs and even the buds and leaves. But branches can better diagnose what goes right and what goes scientific­ knowledge, as a flawed framework, and foliage have to grow from roots, and the roots wrong when one social system bumps up against because it reifies what is already known. Peterson of 12 Rules are Peterson’s underlying themes, (or replaces) another. wants us to treat knowledge with a certain disdain. which connect to the philosophical and moral I found Peterson’s discussion of order and chaos “You might start [the project of self-improvement] foundations of his thinking. These extend from fascinating but also disturbing. I was disturbed not by not thinking...refusing to subjugate your faith to the ancient Greeks, through the Bible, to phil- by what he got wrong but by what he missed. I stud- your current rationality and its narrowness of view.” osophers from Descartes to Nietzsche, authors ied the relation of order and chaos for nearly two Instead he wants us to pursue our own exploration, such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn, decades, as a psychologist and neuroscientist, in make our own discoveries, and decide for ourselves and psychologists Freud, Jung, and Rogers. These league with other scientists from across disciplines. what’s important and what’s true. That’s one avenue noble lineages are shown to evolve alongside the We were caught up in complexity theory, or chaos of discovery that science, even in its most contem- ignoble lineage of world events, the often hor- theory, a paradigm shift that began in the 1970s and porary trappings, simply doesn’t allow. Scientific rifying inflection points of societal growth and 1980s and completely rejigged our understanding insight must be consensual. collapse, the corruption, oppression, even geno- of systems. Complexity theory reconfigured several It seems to me that Peterson’s distrust of sci- cide that Peterson wants us to avoid in the future disciplines at the same time. Physicists could now entific orthodoxy bumps up sharply against his by studying the past. To face, struggle with, and see how molecules affected each other reciprocally call to respect cultural repositories of hard-earned begin to contain the excesses of human savagery until more coherent forms (like convection cur- knowledge. Don’t be stupid, he admonishes. Pay is the fundamental purpose of our intellectual and rents) emerged from their interaction. That’s order attention to what’s been laid down in our painstak- moral heritage, he claims. out of chaos, which sounds like Peterson’s favour- ing journey through cultural evolution. He wants to The central and perhaps most abstract of ite dance. In biology, the science of complexity be informed by the canons of collected wisdom. But Peterson’s themes is the relation between order made sense of evolution, ecosystems, and organic how does he reconcile this with his insistence on and chaos. He applies this seeming duality to evo- growth, all of which follow a progression of stages self-discovery? There really is no firm answer. And lution, societal oscillations over the course of his- from order, through chaos, to reorganization. maybe that’s the point: there’s a field of mutability tory, current systems of government, and of course Psychology, cognitive science, and develop- between knowing and not-knowing, and that’s the individual lives. Other themes include responsibil- mental science were equally infected by complex- condition for societal transformation and individ- ity; self-awareness and conscientiousness; bravery ity theory. The visionary Francisco Varela showed ual growth. versus cowardice, and especially the importance how cognition emerged from entrainment between Peterson’s rejection of conventional scholar- of speaking out against falsehood; attention and the organism and the environment, the brain ship allows him to cherry-pick data from across effort, which are diametrically opposed to expedi- and its sensory surround. The resultant perspec- fields to support whatever arguments he thinks ence—that’s a big one; and the necessity of facing tive, “embodied cognition,” reverberated through will benefit from it. He does not undergird his evil within ourselves, recognizing its impact on neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Complexity most far-reaching claims, his truly stunning recon- others, and identifying goodness as the counter- theory has revolutionized psychology—Peterson’s ceptualizations, with a coherent body of data or a force needed to contain it. field, and mine—replacing boring models of theoretical framework to ground them. Why not? The subtitle of the book is An Antidote to human behaviour, based on conditioning, with Because, I think, his mantle of authority comes Chaos, but this doesn’t mean that chaos is all bad. elegant models of learning that can account for from his personal journey, discovering meaning in The idea Peterson wants to impart, drawing from mob psychology, inter-group cooperation, religious his life through facing and resolving the challenges sources as diverse as Taoism and primate domin- conversion and—most interesting to me—person- we all have to face. His data base is experience, ance hierarchies, is that too much order and too ality development. These phenomena fall squarely and it’s open source. Furthermore, he believes it much chaos are both destructive. Order means cer- within Peterson’s zone of concern. gives his students and followers the shake-up they tainty and stability. That’s generally a good thing. Both in the science of complexity and in need, not through the piling on of argument and Human systems, whether cultures, governments, Peterson’s guide to self-improvement, chaos is conjecture, not through an edifice of tightly worded or personalities, are by their nature orderly. (In the transitional ground where order breaks down, propositions, but with the personal, naked voice fact, all systems in nature, from living organisms novelty abounds, and newer, better systems of of bluff authority. His writing is both authoritar- to ecosystems to galaxies, are orderly.) Knowledge, order can emerge. Given this convergence, why ian and intimate. His voice is oratorical, dramatic, frames of reference, and the reservoir of cultural does Peterson ignore complexity theory? I’d have vivid, emphatic, even inspirational—rather than guidelines available from previous thinkers are all expected him, as a philosopher and psychologist, expository and conscientious. And it works. forms of order. But too much order holds both good to be tickled that it substantiates his intuitions Although this is not a book for academics, and and bad things in place. It leads to oppression and about order and chaos and extends them across has generally not been critiqued as such, Peterson totalitarianism in societies, dominance and bully- the social and material phenomena that constitute will no doubt be challenged by other academics ing in social transactions, and narrow-minded self- known reality. and scholars for his neglect of academic proto- centeredness in personality and attitude. Moreover, It seems Peterson is not particularly interested col. And certainly he has ruffled other feathers. too much order stultifies. It entrenches what’s fam- in linking his message to hard science. One rea- Progressives find his pronouncements on mascu- iliar and obstructs change. son for this may be pragmatic; he has been suc- linity regressive and argue that his focus on the Chaos means uncertainty or disorder. But the cessful in reaching his audience by assuming a individual obscures structural causes of social chaos to which Peterson offers an antidote is spe- rather unique form of authority, based on his own problems. Polemicists who reject the very idea of cifically the confusion infecting his younger read- experience and grounded in his interpretations of authority accuse him of cultural chauvinism. These ers, floating and directionless due to an absence knowledge traditions rooted in the humanities, are what we might call group gripes, and I think of values and norms. And indeed, we frequently religion, and philosophy. He borrows liberally they lose relevance because Peterson isn’t a group; encounter media portrayals of a lost generation from the social sciences, including psychology. He he doesn’t belong to an ideological sect with an of young men who are underperforming at school cites findings from developmental and personality agenda to push. He speaks and writes as an indi- and university, addicted to porn or videogames. In theory, dips into relations between intelligence vidual with his own unique view of things. He also Peterson’s view, their helplessness is magnified by and competence, and dissects social trends. identifies his readers as individuals, each struggling the postmodernist claim that there is no objective He grabs factoids from biological science, for with a unique blend of biological, geographical, frame nor any objective means for comparing one example in his discussion of dominance hierarch- cultural, economic, and social influences. The frame with another. All is interpretation. This is a ies and the relation between submissiveness and problem is that, in launching his messages in a contemporary tragedy, he feels, a breakdown of the adaptive failure. But further than that he is unwill- homemade rhetorical style, making his own rules, order young people need to hoist themselves up ing to venture. And I think he has good reason he can offend these individuals, too. People who enough to set a course for the future. to be cautious. Even cognitive science, which is feel extremely vulnerable due to gender identity Peterson wants to guide, nudge, cajole, and located somewhere between the social and nat- issues may find it difficult to rebut or defend against convince us to find the proper balance between ural sciences, would not be likely to forgive his claims that remain ungrounded in scientific evi- order and chaos, in our lives and in our society, metaphoric applications. dence or consensual forms of debate. and to recognize the temporal relation between Another reason for avoiding the hard sciences In place of academic discourse, scientific proof, them. Things progress by stages, from one system may be Peterson’s distrust of the objectivism and and well-defended steps of argument, Peterson of order, through chaos or dissolution, to another positivism that ground them. Following Nietzsche, talks to us largely through narrative, a form of system of order which can be more beneficial—or his greatest hero in the philosophy hall of fame, communication he holds dear. He relies not on

26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada knowledge but on stories—Bible stories, personal as particularly hazardous for someone so clever, so data and pyrotechnic rhetoric. He convinces us accounts, psychoanalysis, mythology, autobiog- deeply intellectual and creative, and so ­emotionally that he’s right. Yet the too-extreme stories start to raphy, his own journey, and those of his clients in driven. It’s impossible to check a self-proclaimed add up. Is it true that “competence, not power, is therapy. Stories, Peterson argues, connect us to a authority who soars and dives through layers of a prime determiner of status” in reasonably well- reality based on experience, not knowledge, where scholarship by intuition, making brilliant off-the- functioning societies? The imbecility of quite a few we can meet each other with humility and spontan- cuff associations and arranging them in a compel- European monarchs suggests otherwise. But the eity, rather than “conniving and scheming.” Other ling tale. No one can verify whether and when his point is: Who’s to know? That kind of statement scholars aiming to make an impact on people’s lives account is valid, except by some truly mystical can’t be verified. Is it really generally mothers have also relied on narrative. Brené Brown, Frans inference based on the coherence of his narrative who overindulge their children, creating whiny, de Waal, and Oliver Sacks were able to put their and its power to convince. incompetent misfits in order to satisfy their crav- theories and data aside and tell compelling stor- Peterson sometimes claims the mantle of truth ing for acceptance? I don’t know. Fathers can be ies—stories that touch us intimately—as the vehicle for what is merely a compelling account. For just as indulgent, and there’s good evidence that for their most profound messages. example, I was astounded to read that “the society overly strict mothering has the greatest negative I’ve discovered the value of story in my own produced by Christianity was far less barbaric than impact on children’s psychological development. work in addiction. I started writing about addiction the pagan—even the Roman—ones it replaced.” While I applaud Peterson’s skillful defence against because, having been there myself through most of I’m no historian, but in Sapiens Yuval Harari pro- so-called social-justice warriors, his insistence my twenties, I wanted to make sense of it. So I went vides compelling evidence for the opposite conclu- on the biological basis of sexual differences (not to the tools of my trade and studied the neurosci- sion. While the Romans did throw a few hundred gender identity!), and his disdain for the rud- ence of addiction. I wrote about the brain changes, “subversive” Christians to the lions, the Roman derless void of postmodernism, I am unwilling the specific neurophysiological processes that go Empire was stable for long periods, and it largely to decimate every argument from those who see on, when people get addicted to drugs. But I hung tolerated its subjects’ religious diversity without things differently, especially with the vehemence these scientific details on a narrative frame. I told attempting to convert, or systematically murder, that often marks his rhetoric. Peterson decries about my own struggles in one book and the strug- those with divergent beliefs. Harari compares this extremism in his opponents, but he isn’t always gles of other people in another—stories smudged reign with the fifteen hundred years of bloodshed careful to muffle his own. with self-acknowledged dirt, clothed in the neu- that followed, highlighted in my mind by the I personally agree with most of Peterson’s pos- trality of science. My books weren’t intended as Crusades, the Inquisition, and the occupation of itions, and even those I don’t accept are provocative self-help books, but many people have thanked me the Americas, whereby entire populations were enough to get me thinking. What’s more, I admire for the help they provided. What moved them most wiped out, for the most part intentionally with the the man. I admire his bravery, his determination to were not the neural points of reference but the Catholic Church’s approval. One of Harari’s most have his say, the intelligence he calls upon, seem- stories, and what they meant for their own hopes compelling examples of Christian savagery is the ingly as a duty to his audience, and his visionary and hardship. St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in sixteenth- formula for personal growth and interpersonal But stories pose a trap into which Peterson century France, in which, to the delight of the responsibility. I think his rules for life will help has fallen hard. Stories are built on drama; they Pope, “between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were many people identify their goals, bolster their cour- don’t work without it. And drama grabs at the slaughtered [by Catholics] in less than twenty-four age, and increase their reserves of care. In fact I emotions of teller and listener, couples them, and hours”—far more than the number of Christians have already urged several of my psychotherapy cli- then moves wherever it wants to move: to extend killed over the centuries of Roman rule. Peterson ents, struggling with addiction as I once did, to read the excitement or the pathos, the struggles of the never claims that Christianity was perfect—not his words or listen to his lectures. His guidelines characters, and the ending that serves as a final even close—but his take on the character of for honest but compassionate self-evaluation and surrender. Stories are completely unbounded by Christian civilization seems utterly wrong. And yet empowerment are ideal footholds for people intent external criteria. They don’t owe allegiance to any his version makes a great story, loaded with drama: on moving beyond shame. discipline and instead are quite ready to invent “All of this was asking the impossible: but it hap- Peterson’s extremism and his unwarranted their own. Stories can’t be evaluated for truth. They pened,” he proclaims. prognostications should certainly be acknowledged can be evaluated for their persuasiveness, their Yet how would anyone know? and debated. Yet I applaud him for voicing unpopu- coherence and artfulness, how well they satisfy, Let’s say that Peterson gets carried away by lar sentiments that might have remained buried but that’s about it. the thrust of his interpretations and sometimes because they violate political fashions. Now that By assuming the role of an authority, without crosses a line between veracity and supposition. Is they’ve been spoken, they’ve become irrevocable accepting or even acknowledging the rules of that so bad? Can’t the truth be checked? Peterson elements of the public discourse on a broad array scientific or academic argument, Peterson sets is known for being ready to debate, and he’s very of social and political issues. It’s up to the rest of us himself up to get lost in his own stories. I see this good at it. He trounces his opponents with bits of to decide where they fit.

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April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 27 Letters

R e : “T h e A n o r e x i c H o m e ,” b y 0.1 percent of GDP, and the Trudeau government Re: “The Enlightenment Trap,” by M i r e i l l e S i l c o f f (F e b rua ry 2018) that succeeded it pushed us back into deficit and Andrew Potter (February 2018) has massively increased our net debt. Yet now eading Silcoff’s brilliant essay on minimalist Dodge writes: “Since governments—especially o understand that reason remains king even Rmania cured my white-sofa envy. Reframed as the Harper government in Canada—were overly Twhen we, like Bertrand Russell, note that a symptom of the trend towards anorexic domes- zealous in reducing fiscal stimulus, central banks there’s lots of rubbish around, is to understand that ticity, that sofa instantly lost its appeal. I trust that found themselves needing to provide some support reason is alive, generative, and the source of both her essay will have had the same miraculous heal- for growth.” It seems that Harper is now to be cas- good arguments and bad ones; of claims that seem ing powers for many LRC readers, and at $6.50 an tigated for following Dodge’s advice, while Trudeau ridiculous to me even as they strike my neighbour issue, that makes it some of the cheapest and most is not to be criticized for ignoring it. as the doctor’s orders. effective therapy available. An inflation-targeting central bank like the Bank We need to stop turning up our nose at the But it’s worth bearing mind that the current of Canada or the Bank of England would, other Enlightenment, to resist rolling our eyes at those prophets of the domestic purge, Marie Kondo & things being equal, follow a tighter monetary policy who were undoubtedly overwhelmed by Newtonian co., were not the first. In 1882, Oscar Wilde spent a if there is a lower target inflation rate. However, physics. It’s better to learn the Enlightenment year lecturing Canadians and Americans about how Dodge rejected lowering the target rate below two through both its proponents and detractors: their homes were crammed with shams. “The house percent in 2009. Voltaire, d’Alembert, Condorcet, Rousseau, and beautiful” and “The decorative arts” lectures were Dodge notes that between 2011 and 2016, Mably together with Giambattista Vico and J.G. like show homes into which Wilde invited his audi- “inflation remained well below the two-percent Hamann. Better to see the Enlightenment and the ences. As the aesthetic lord of the manor, he opened target” for Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Counter-Enlightenment as two sides of the coin the door onto a more gracious domestic scene and Germany. This is incorrect for the United Kingdom. called reason. Only then do we give ourselves suggested that their lives would improve if they sur- From 2010 Q1 to 2016 Q4 the annualized consumer a chance to go somewhere new. rounded themselves with true beauty. He advised price index inflation rate was 1.93 percent, so by Upon what faculty would we be relying if not removing many of the usual objects he had seen in any reasonable standard the Bank of England met reason? The quick answer is vision. Vision does their homes: no taxidermied animals, no artificial its target. For the other countries what he said was not argue, but always seeks out a better alternative, flowers, no embroidery-covered piano, no cast iron more or less true. a higher resolution that, when it works, makes us stove, no carpeted floors, no clashing colours, no However, this only creates more problems for forget what all the fuss was about in the first place. Gothic furniture, no “great flaring gas-chandelier,” Dodge. In his 2009 lecture he pronounced himself or “horrible pictures of historical scenes.” in favour of price level targeting. In a price level David Berlin In sum, he proposed to get rid of their obnox- targeting framework, central banks wouldn’t even Toronto, Ontario ious clutter. dream of hiking interest rates. They would instead be dropping them to try to achieve the higher infla- Michèle Mendelssohn tion rates required to balance off years of below two correction Associate Professor of English Literature, percent inflation. Dodge can’t see how his policy Oxford University prescriptions are completely out of sync with what Marian Botsford Fraser’s review of Dead Reckoning he has laid out as an appropriate framework for by Ken McGoogan and Hunting the Northern monetary policy. Character by Tony Penikett in the February 2018 Re: “What, Me, Worry?” by David Dodge Literary Review of Canada incorrectly identi- (February 2018) Andrew Baldwin fied the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen as Ottawa, Ontario Danish and described the Arctic Monitoring and odge’s stance on fiscal and monetary policy Assessment Program as “an area”; it is actually one Dhere is glaringly inconsistent with the stance ontrary to Mr. Baldwin’s assertion, my views on of the six working groups of the Arctic Council. taken in his May 2009 Doug Purvis Memorial Cthe general appropriateness of the principles The review also stated that “eighty-five percent of Lecture to the Canadian Economics Association. of sound monetary, financial stability, and fiscal Northerners are non-Native.” To clarify, this figure However, he not only offers no explanation for his policies have not changed since my 2009 lecture. reflects the demographics of the circumpolar Arctic change in views, he doesn’t even acknowledge it. Flexible inflation targeting remains the best guid- as a whole, and not the Canadian Arctic. (According He said then that “to preserve confidence in the ing principle for monetary policy, and prudent to the 2016 census, the collective population of future stability of public finances it is very important control of public debt the fundamental principle for Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut is less that Canadian governments (federal and provin- budgetary policy. However, economic and financial than fifty percent non-Native.) The review has been cial) now make commitments to reduce (eliminate) conditions have changed greatly since 2009. As eco- amended online to include these corrections. the new discretionary spending or to increase taxes nomic conditions change, the appropriate applica- in order to regain fiscal balance as quickly as pos- tion of those policy principles should evolve. When sible after 2010.” This was because our aging popu- distant early warning lights begin to flash yellow, lation made it “very important to enter the second prudent policy makers take notice. half of the next decade with low levels of net public debt.” As it happened, the Harper government David Dodge only achieved a surplus in 2015-16, amounting to Ottawa, Ontario

28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada 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.

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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

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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.

April 2018 reviewcanada.ca 29 Now available in English Writing Herself into Being Quebec Women’s Autobiographical Writings from Marie de l’Incarnation to Nelly Arcan Patricia Smart Paperback, 344pp WINNER – Prix du livre d’Ottawa 2016 WINNER – Prix Jean-Éthier-Blais 2015 WINNER – Prix Gabrielle-Roy 2014 FINALIST – Prix littéraire Trillium 2015 Quebec women’s struggle for self and portrayal of their society in autobiographies, letters, and private diaries.

Getting a Life The Social Worlds of Geek Culture Benjamin Woo Cloth, 272pp What the “triumph of the nerds” can tell us about the place of media in people’s lives. Spring From Revolution to Ethics, Second Edition Putting Trials on Trial May 1968 and Contemporary Comes Sexual Assault and the Failure of the French Thought Legal Profession Julian Bourg Elaine Craig Paperback, 512pp Cloth, 328pp “In the valuable tradition of intellectual Again “This spectacular, thoughtful, and hard-hitting history, this book is a unique and fascinat- book pushes all of us to reconsider the impact ing analysis of difficult French thinkers of trials on those caught up in the justice and their movements.” –Michael Seidman, system. Elaine Craig has done us all a service. author of The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian This is the most important book you’ll see Students and Workers in 1968 Poetry From MQUP this year.” –Clayton Ruby

The Art of Dying Short Histories of Light Slow War Sarah Tolmie Aidan Chafe Benjamin Hertwig Paperback, 110pp Paperback, 112pp Paperback, 144pp A satirical look at the euphemistic practices of Vivid, haunting, and rhythmical, these poems Finalist Governor General’s Literary dying today. illuminate the struggles of mental illness and Award for Poetry (2017) uncover the sinister side of religion. Hate to tell you, but you’re going to die. / “Hertwig touches on some of our deepest Quite soon. Me, too. / Shuck off the Shiver. Swift whip of wind. / Fangs of the national myths, only to push in, breaking wisdom while it’s warm. / Death does no low front / stinging fierce as forest fires. / the veneer of patriotism to reveal some- harm / To wisdom. Frost thickening the stoop. thing much more potent.” –CV2

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30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada