S Nessie & otheralem delusions Map mysteries • Procreating morally • Arctic Rangers A rno A K laton opecky &
$6.50 Vol. 21, No. 10 December 2013
Stephen Henighan Goodbye to all that The cultural causes — and fallout — of climate change
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
John English The Ignatieff phenomenon
Beth Haddon 100 years of Canadian Press
Mark Fried Jeffrey Sachs’s African folly
Publications Mail Agreement #40032362 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to PLUS: LRC, Circulation Dept. PO Box 8, Station K non-fiction Melanie Adrian on “Canadian values” and Muslim realities + Trevor Herriot Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 on returning to nature + David Homel on Sheila Fischman and the politics of translation + J.J. Lee on Chinese family albums + Kevin Sylvester on Can-Am football fiction Steven Hayward reviews Kicking the Sky by Anthony De Sa + Larry Krotz reviews The Strength of Bone by Lucie Wilk and My Heart Is Not My Own by Michael Wuitchik poetry Sue Chenette + Mary Rykov + Naomi Beth Wakan + Crystal Hurdle UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
Greening the Maple: Marion Nicoll: Canadian Ecocriticism Silence and Alchemy in Context Ann Davis and Elizabeth Herbert Edited by Ella Soper and With Jennifer Salahub and Christine Sowiak Nicholas Bradley 150 pp, $39.95, illustrations 624 pp, $44.95 9781552387078 9781552385463 “Devotees of Canadian art know Canadian landscapes and their something about Marion Nicoll, her apparent distinctiveness have iconic paintings and prints are found fascinated writers and critics in most public collections, she is throughout the history of literature in mentioned in almost every Canadian Canada. This volume surveys the rise art history text…. Nevertheless, hers of the field of ecocriticism, reflects on was a life and career defined by mid- it beginnings, and looks ahead to its century conventions and expectations future. Contributors include Margaret regarding women, art, craft, teaching, Atwood, Pamela Banting, Misao Dean, and the writing of art history. If I Northrup Frye, Sherrill E. Grace, was fascinated by what I read in the Linda Hutcheon, Laurie Ricou, and contemporary literature, it was the Rosemary Sullivan. caveats and what I didn’t find that Also available as ebooks intrigued me more.” – Jennifer Salahub
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In Praise of Winners Upcoming Speakers PAUL WELLS RAY JAYAWARDHANA December 2, 2013 February 3, 2014 The Gardiner Museum | Toronto The Gardiner Museum Canadians have a deep suspicion of politi cal Toronto winners, argues Paul Wells, which is refl ected in criti cism of both Jean Chréti en and Stephen Harper. But what do the careers of these two individuals, who have collecti vely dominated the last 20 years of Canadian politi cs, reveal about our best hopes for the federati on’s future? Ray Jayawardhana is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto, and the Paul Wells is the politi cal editor of Maclean’s author of Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien magazine, as well as the author of Right Side Planets and Life beyond Our Solar System. Up: The Fall of Paul Marti n and the Rise of Stephen Harper’s New Conservati vism and The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006–. For the inside track on more Toronto evenings in this series, To purchase tickets for Paul Wells’s talk — or a to be announced soon, email discounted LRC subscription, which gets you FREE [email protected] and entrance to the event — visit reviewcanada.ca/events ask to join our invite list! Literary Review of Canada 170 Bloor St West, Suite 710 Toronto ON M5S 1T9 email: [email protected] reviewcanada.ca T: 416-531-1483 • F: 416-531-1612 Charitable number: 848431490RR0001 Vol. 21, No. 10 • December 2013 To donate, visit reviewcanada.ca/support
Editor 3 Heroes and Windbags 16 Apple Cake Variations 24 Hanging On Forever Bronwyn Drainie [email protected] A review of Fire and Ashes: on a Palmerston A review of The Book of Success and Failure in Politics, Immortality: The Science, Contributing EditorS Avenue Theme Mark Lovewell, Molly Peacock, Anthony by Michael Ignatieff A poem Belief and Magic Behind Living Westell John English Forever, by Adam Leith Gollner Mary Rykov Associate editor Salem Alaton Robin Roger 5 A Glimmer of 16 Allergic: White Spot Globalization 25 Credulity Lives! Poetry Editor A poem Moira MacDougall A review of Mr. Selden’s Map Crystal Hurdle A review of Abominable copy editor of China: Decoding the Secrets Science! Origins of the Yeti, Madeline Koch of a Vanished Cartographer, by 17 Making Soup in Nessie and Other Famous January Cryptids, by Daniel Loxton and Online Editors Timothy Brook Diana Kuprel, Jack Mitchell, Stephen R. Bown A poem Donald R. Prothero Donald Rickerd, C.M. Sue Chenette Arno Kopecky 7 Nation Building by ProofReaders 17 Three Breakfast 26 Redefining Citizenship Rebecca Borkowsky, Heather Schultz, the Column Inch Robert Simone, Rob Tilley, Jeannie A review of Islam in the A review of Making National Tanka Weese A poem Hinterlands: Muslim Cultural News: A History of Canadian research Press, by Gene Allen Naomi Beth Wakan Politics in Canada, edited by Rob Tilley Jasmin Zine Beth Haddon 18 Africa Through Editorial Assistants Melanie Adrian Michael Stevens, Michael Solda 9 Wild Memories Western Eyes 28 They Stand on Guard Design A review of The Once and A review of The Strength of James Harbeck Future World: Nature As It Bone, by Lucie Wilk, and My A review of The Canadian Rangers: A Living History, by Design Assistant Was, As It Is, As It Could Be, Heart Is Not My Own, by Heather Fulton by J.B. MacKinnon Michael Wuitchik P. Whitney Lackenbauer John Baglow ADVERTISING/SALES Trevor Herriot Larry Krotz Michael Wile 10 Procreating Properly? 19 A Haunting Crime 29 Building the Dream [email protected] Director, Special Projects A review of Why Have Revisited A review of The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Michael Booth Children? The Ethical Debate, A review of Kicking the Sky, by Poverty, by Nina Munk publishers by Christine Overall Anthony De Sa Mark Fried Alastair Cheng Ronald de Sousa Steven Hayward [email protected] Letters and Responses Helen Walsh 12 The Southern Blitz 20 Goodbye to All That 31 Nelson Wiseman, [email protected] A review of End Zones and An excerpt Charles Blattberg, Board of Directors Border Wars: The Era of Stephen Henighan John Honderich, C.M., Patrick Brethour, Bob American Expansion in the J. Alexander Houston, Frances Lankin, CFL, by Ed Willes 23 A Chinese-Canadian Plamondon, Arthur Jack Mintz, Trina McQueen Schafer Kevin Sylvester Tapestry Advisory Council A review of Lives of the Michael Adams, Ronald G. Atkey, P.C., 13 Tribute to a Families: Stories of Fate and Q.C., Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Translator Circumstance, by Denise Chong Drew Fagan, James Gillies, C.M., A review of In Translation: Carol Hansell, Donald Macdonald, J.J. Lee P.C., C.C., Susan Reisler, Grant Reuber, Honouring Sheila Fischman, O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, edited by Sherry Simon Mark Sarner, Bernard Schiff, David Homel Reed Scowen Poetry Submissions For poetry submission guidelines, please see
The Left in Undaunted British Columbia The Best of BC BookWorld A History of Struggle z Alan Twigg, Editor z Gordon Hak The contributors in this “Best of” include Jane Rule, George Woodcock, W.P. Kinsella, Stephen Vizinczey, broadcaster Mark Forsythe, and This comprehensive history of the left in BC biographer Joan Givner, with illustrations by David Lester. from the late 19th century to the present explores the successes and failures of individuals and 978-1-55380-253-2 ½ 242 pp ½ $19.95 organizations striving to make a better world. Hak explores the fight for union representation, He Moved a Mountain women’s suffrage and equality, human rights, The Life of Frank Calder and the Nisga’a Land Claims Accord Canadian z Joan Harper nationalist visions, racial equality and The first biography of Frank Calder, the Nisga’a chief who brought environmental the “Calder Case” to the Supreme Court of Canada, the blueprint for protection. world-wide aboriginal land claims. With 20 b&w photos. Includes both 978-1-55380-227-3 ½ 202 pp ½ $21.95 the old and new lefts. How Happy Became Homosexual With 20 b&w photos. And Other Mysterious Semantic Shifts z Howard Richler An informative yet humorous account of the ever-changing meanings 978-1-55380-256-3 of words in the English language. Learn how “gay” morphed into 284 pp “homosexual” and thousands of other examples. $21.95 978-1-55380-230-3 ½ 164 pp ½ $19.95
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2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Heroes and Windbags A search for political meaning, from Machiavelli to Weber and beyond. John English
Martin against Chrétien in 1990 Fire and Ashes: and stayed out of Canadian pol- Success and Failure in Politics itics during the Chrétien ascend- Michael Ignatieff ancy. Brock had worked for John Random House Manley, and all three supported 224 pages, hardcover John Manley’s ill-fated leadership ISBN 9780345813268 bid. John Geddes of Maclean’s later reported that Davey had left the Manley campaign when ong ago, when Pierre others refused to heed his advice Trudeau arrived as prime to hit frontrunner Martin harder. Lminister and Liberal Party The clumsy dismissal of Manley leader at 24 Sussex Drive, he met from the inner ranks of power by the fabled Liberal political wizards Martin’s team irritated Manley gathered at his dining room table. and his supporters and they Recalling his Conservative father’s became Martin critics on the right. rants about the terrifying Liberal Whatever the polls said, machine, he asked the admen, the men in black believed that pollsters and plotters before him, in the corporate world and on “Is this all there is?” editorial boards the Liberals were Michael Ignatieff probably in deep trouble, partly because should have asked the same ques- of the Quebec sponsorship scan- tion when “the Toronto Three”— dals that refused to go away two Bay Street lawyers, Alf Apps and partly because American and Dan Brock, and film produ- neo-conservatism and security cer Ian Davey—made a pilgrimage to Harvard’s how the Harvard professor became Liberal leader, fears were fraying the ties that bound the North Kennedy School of Government to ask him to come missed the chance to become prime minister in American economy. When Liberal members to Canada to replace Liberal prime minister Paul 2010 and suffered a devastating defeat in 2011 when unexpectedly rose in thunderous applause as Martin, whose government, Brock reported, was Canada’s most successful political party finished Chrétien announced that Canada would not join “heading for a train wreck.” Ignatieff labelled his third with only 34 seats. It is an astonishing tale with the American war on Iraq, Manley, the minister visitors the “men in black.” As they disappeared into many unexpected turns. responsible for Canadian-American border rela- the night, he quickly began to take their invitation There is, however, a problem with the initial tions, clapped politely at first, then became visibly seriously.1 One wonders why. setting. Recalling the conversation with the men disturbed and finally sat down. Although Ignatieff had left Canada in 1978 and in black, Ignatieff claims that Martin “had just sur- Ignatieff recognized why he would appeal to his last contact with the Liberal Party was during vived being defeated in the election of June 2004 those who stood aside from the Chrétien-Martin Pierre Trudeau’s 1968 campaign, his mind immedi- and was heading toward collapse.” In fact, Martin wars and to others troubled by the deterioration ately turned to other intellectuals who made the had won 135 seats in the election, 36 more than in Canadian-American relations after Iraq. On the transition to public life—Mario Vargas Llosa of Stephen Harper’s newly created Conservatives, and one hand, he possessed impressive credentials as Peru, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico and Václav Havel the Liberals had gained considerably on the united a public intellectual, the author of a seminal his- of the Czech Republic—and to that fabled spring of right during the last week of the campaign. Things torical work on the history of penitentiaries and 1968 when to be a young Liberal in Canada was got better for Martin immediately after the elec- a well-received biography of Oxford intellectual Heaven. Those memories were misty, and his long tion. An SES poll, taken in August 2004 just as the Isaiah Berlin. More recent publications such as absence in Britain and, more recently, the United Torontonians planned their trip to Massachusetts, Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and States had made him focus on the concerns of revealed that the Liberals stood at 38 percent in the Afghanistan and The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an empires past and present rather than the constitu- polls compared with 36 percent in the election and Age of Terror attracted attention and international tional follies and quotidian concerns of Canadian the Tories had fallen to only 26 percent. Columnists recognition. On the other hand, Ignatieff’s argu- politics. But in his teens he had openly professed were speculating about a sullen Harper’s possible ments that the United States was an exceptional and his goal to become Canada’s prime minister. Now, resignation. Martin, like Jean Chrétien before him, necessary empire that was justified in its war against at last, he had his chance. Fire and Ashes: Success was having more trouble with his party than with the murderous Saddam Hussein gave him credibil- and Failure in Politics tells the remarkable story of Canadian voters. ity in George Bush’s Washington that other liberals Martin knew that he had not won over his ene- and Liberals lacked. Ignatieff’s personal biography John English has recently published Ice and Water: mies within the party, but Ignatieff’s memoir shows and beliefs created credentials for him on Bay Street Politics, Peoples and the Arctic Council (Allen that Martin had more of a problem with his friends and with conservative editors and intellectuals that Lane, 2013). He has written biographies of prime than he imagined. The men in black were not angry all other contenders lacked. It certainly helped when ministers Robert Borden, Arthur Meighen, Lester B. Chrétien supporters. Apps, an early conservative Foreign Policy ranked him in 2005 as the 37th most Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. (but still Liberal) critic of Trudeau, had backed influential public intellectual in the world.
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 3 Ignatieff knew that Canadians have a habit of of conviction with total opportunism.” Ignatieff preferring leaders whose hands have few stains admits he could not “throw him off his game,” NEW FROM DUNDURN from toil in the domestic political trenches. even when Harper stumbled during the proroga- Mackenzie King, probably the Canadian who most tion affair in 2009 and faced a united opposition. influenced American public life through his rela- A groggy Harper got off the floor, fought back and HOSTILE SEAS tionship with the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, dominated once more. He is, Ignatieff writes, “one A Mission in spent most of World War One in the United States of life’s natural dominators.” Ignatieff’s descrip- Pirate Waters and his absence from Canadian wartime quarrels tion of his encounters with Harper leaves the clear helped him to win the Liberal leadership shortly impression that the prime minister intimidated by JL Savidge after the conflict ended. Lester Pearson spent him. In a long-forgotten crisis over isotopes, most of his adult life as a soldier and diplomat Ignatieff worked with the government against the A memoir of outside of Canada until he returned to become NDP. When the NDP was effectively sidelined, life on a deployed Canada’s foreign minister and, in the view of Harper approached Ignatieff in the Commons and navy ship, written by King and Pearson himself, the obvious successor “whispered words to the effect that I had got as an intelligence to Louis St. Laurent. Laurier’s finance minister much as I could out of the situation and shouldn’t o cer. W.S. Fielding and Paul Martin Sr., who had spent try my luck any further.” Ignatieff asked whether decades in the murky and muddy world of con- he was threatening him. Harper “laughed a mirth- Set in 2008, Hostile Seas is a personal account of life aboard the Canadian stituency politics, did not stand a chance against less chuckle and went to his seat.” Harper’s is the naval ship HMCS Ville de Québec as the glamorous cosmopolitans who defeated them. strongest portrait in the book. the crew attempts to escort pirate- But these are simply details, and Fire and Ashes Ignatieff is not writing a political memoir nor, menaced cargo ships carrying World does not have many, particularly about Canadian certainly, is he writing an essay on Canadian Food Programme aid to Mogadishu. politics and its history. There are some autobio- politics. He wants, above all, to situate his own graphical fragments, but, apart from his obvious experience in the broader debate about democ- deep affection for his wife, Zsuzsanna, Ignatieff’s racy’s fate in the 21st century. He is relentlessly skill as a sharp-eyed biographer is strangely cosmopolitan in his references, with the final absent from this book. Although he gives a fas- eight endnotes referring to Cicero, Machiavelli, cinating description and analysis of his work in Burke, de Tocqueville, Mill, Louis Menand, Isaiah COMBAT DOCTOR his Toronto constituency office, one gets a sense Berlin, Tolstoy and Max Weber. He refers often Life and Death that the number of people who mattered on his to Machiavelli’s The Prince but it is Weber’s bril- Stories from political journey was small. There were the three liant 1919 address, “Politics as a Vocation,” that Kandahar’s Military men in black but, like Trudeau, Ignatieff is puzzled Ignatieff seeks to emulate. Like Weber, a defeated that those who made the machine work were so politician and pre-eminent German intellectual, Hospital few. Nevertheless, and despite the few actors, the Ignatieff seeks to combine personal experience by Marc Dauphin play fascinates. with reflections on the nature of a political voca- tion in a world where, to quote Weber, “nine out Powerful and vividly told, these are After Ignatieff decided to heed the political the stories of the head of Kandahar’s call, he made his own pilgrimage to Toronto to of ten” politicians were mere “windbags” spewing military hospital, which took in over- meet with money (Elvio DelZotto), Liberal icons nonsense. whelming numbers of wounded (David Smith and Donald and Adrian Macdonald) Ignatieff points to the best-known quota- troops — and achieved an unpreced- and former premiers (David Peterson). His new tion from Weber’s essay—“politics is the strong ented survival rate against all odds. friends somehow persuaded Paul Martin’s legend- and slow boring of hard boards.” At first glance, ary “board” to allow Ignatieff to be the keynote it seems an inappropriate reference to apply to speaker at the March 2005 policy convention, a Ignatieff’s relatively brief political career that treasured pulpit from which he issued a sharp came to an end when too many Canadians con- critique of recent Liberal ways. A puzzled Martin cluded that he was “just visiting,” a view that asked to see the upstart the following morning: Fire and Ashes, with its face turned outward, will Ignatieff, still a Harvard professor, reports on the confirm for many.2 But Ignatieff, who taught a bizarre meeting. “He was gracious, but he could much-lauded course on “Renewing Canadian not have been pleased with my speech or with Democracy” at the University of Toronto last year, its reception.” Describing the event that occurred now seeks a broader prescription for democracy’s only five months after the men in black had ills. UPRISING called, Ignatieff recalls that Martin was guarded: In a stupid and base world, Ignatieff still finds by Douglas L. Bland “I was too obviously a rival.” The chapter is entitled purpose in politics, an enticing chance to attain “Ambition.” It follows “Hubris.” the impossible. But, as Weber wrote, “to do that a “... the ctional conditions under- Fire and Ashes has attracted much criticism for man must be a leader, and a hero as well.” At the lying the uprising in the book so its brevity, its absence of policy discussion and party meeting when he stepped down as Liberal mirror the reality of modern Canada.” its attitude toward the author’s colleagues and leader, Michael Ignatieff repeatedly said that he — National Post predecessors. Although Ignatieff declares that his had “failed.” Bob Rae, then the Liberal interim “A native insurrection is virtually a book is written in praise of politics and politicians, leader, challenged that denigrating description, taboo subject. Politicians, the media both fare badly on most pages: Martin is dither- pointing out that he had achieved the honour of and the general public tacitly agree ing and weak; Bob Rae jealous, Bob’s brother being a democratically elected MP and had served to ignore it … [and] Bland is con- John vicious; and Chrétien misguided in his zeal as the leader of a great political party. Fire and vinced that a native uprising is inevit- to overthrow Harper in 2009–10. While Ignatieff Ashes firmly rejects Rae’s gracious rebuke. It sides able if its feasibility is not reduced.” compares himself to other intellectuals who chose with Weber and, implicitly, with the men in black. — Hu ngton Post Canada politics such as Havel and Vargas Llosa, he does In the end, only winning matters. not see Stéphane Dion as a fellow intellectual trav- eller. Rather, he is especially harsh in describing Notes Dion’s naiveté and incompetence. The memoirs of 1 Ignatieff calls his three visitors the “men in black,” a Available from your favourite bookseller curious evocation of the mysterious men in dark suits and as ebooks. Martin and Chrétien get no attention, and there is and big cars who threaten people to keep quiet about nary a reference to academic works on Canadian extraterrestrial sightings written about by Gray Barker politics or the musings of Canadian journalists. and Alfred Bender in the 1950s, on which the popular 1997 film Men in Black was based. However, the term /dundurnpress | @dundurnpress | dundurn.com There is, however, a Canadian politician whom sometimes also refers to secret security agents, who also Ignatieff respects: Stephen Harper. He is without tend to behave mysteriously. firm principles, to be sure, but he has “tenacity, 2 The endorsements on the back cover are from British Conservative member of Parliament and author Rory discipline and ruthlessness in spades.” He pos- Stewart, New America Foundation president Anne- sesses the “rare gift to combine the impression Marie Slaughter and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa.
4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada A Glimmer of Globalization Tracking a merchant map becomes a voyage of tantalizing digression. Stephen R. Bown
academic transgressions against the Mr. Selden’s Map of China: entrenched powers of the English court. Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished He was also known for the radical idea Cartographer that, as Brook puts it, “the purpose of law Timothy Brook was to ensure not the power of the rul- House of Anansi ers but the liberty of the people.” In the 211 pages, hardcover early 17th century these were just philo- ISBN 9781770893535 sophical ideas. (Sometimes we are still wrestling this concept, it seems.) Selden was also England’s first Orientalist. One ut we have got there, to the of his portraits is inscribed with Chinese “ origin of the map—well, more characters; although he understood them Bor less. With an unsigned and poorly, there was no one more proficient undated document such as ours, this is in England at the time, therefore no one not a bad showing,” Timothy Brook con- to challenge him. Knowledge of the “East,” cludes with great understatement near the one of the most precious cargoes of the end of his intriguing new book, Mr. Selden’s Map of it is now called, is so accurate that it could nearly neophyte English East India Company, was only China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartogra- be modern, and yet it is not a forgery. The Selden slowly trickling into England. pher. Not a bad showing indeed, and a marvellously map was seemingly unique in an era when maps Selden’s famous contribution to international meandering and illuminating journey through the were always, at least in part, copies of previous law and history is his classic philosophical and seemingly disparate worlds of 17th-century Europe maps. Where did it originate, this map with neither legal tract Mare Clausum, the Closed Sea, a direct and East Asia, through the politics, economics and progenitors nor progeny? rebuttal to Mare Liberum, the Free Sea, written by history of these regions, the history of cartography, Brook leads us through a series of clues to the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius. Both men were and the foundations of international law and the unlock the map’s secrets. A professor of history at arguing over the nature of sovereign powers on the law of the sea, complete with a gallery of unusual the University of British Columbia and the author open water and their tracts have formed the basis characters. This is my favourite sort of book, one of the delightfully eccentric and wide-ranging Ver- of modern international law and the law of the sea. that begins with the specific and progresses to the meer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn “That the Sea, by the Law of Nature or Nations, general and universal, transcending merely techni- of the Global World, Brook has a lifetime of experi- is not common to all men, but capable of private cal information to become something that is greater ence to draw upon in decoding the map. With a spe- Dominion or property as well as the Land … That than the sum of its parts. cialist’s understanding of Chinese history, culture the King of Great Britain is Lord of the Sea flowing We do eventually get to the promised solution and language in this period, he is well positioned about, as an inseparable and perpetual Appendant of the cartographer’s likely identity and some of the to tease information from the slimmest clues, clues of the British Empire.” With such morally superior map’s secrets, but that is not really the main point that would entirely be lost on someone without his language and reasoning, it is ironic that Selden’s here. The journey upon which we embark is the knowledge. But Brook has something else equally impulse was not philosophical but mercantile: King true treasure, not the destination. If you are the sort valuable in his favour: an imagination and a story- James felt that the Dutch were plundering English of reader who wants a clear dissection of the facts teller’s instinct for finding a “door” or entry into the and Scottish fish stocks without paying local taxes. and a definitive conclusion, the point proven, this lost world of his expertise, something unfortunately “It is incredible,” Selden claimed in a letter, “what book may be a disappointment. On the other hand, in short supply among most academic writers. a vast sum of monie the Hollanders make by this if you enjoy being led on a tour full of digressions The map first found its way to Oxford in 1659, Fishing upon our coast.” and tangentially related stops along the way, the donated as part of the estate of John Selden. Selden But back to the map. It formed part of Selden’s voyage itself will be the reward. is not widely known today, except perhaps among estate because of his intense interest in the expand- The mystery begins with the 2009 discovery of students of legal history, but in his era he was a ing commercial world in the early 17th century. In a highly unusual map in the Bodleian Library in superstar in a London where “Shakespeare was 1488, when Iberian mariner Bartolomeu Dias suc- Oxford. The map, unused for generations, seemed premiering The Tempest, Ben Jonson inventing the ceeded in rounding Africa and entering the Indian to blend Chinese and European cartographic tradi- musical to amuse King James I, and John Donne Ocean, he laid the foundations of the Portuguese tions and to have an uncannily accurate depiction being pressured by that same monarch to give up Empire by discovering a sea route from Europe to of the coastline around the South China Sea. There love poetry for sermon-writing.” Brook explains: the spices, one that bypassed Islamic intermediar- is no more accurate map before it, nor one for “New vistas were opening, old horizons faltering, ies. A voyager could take years to return and would about four decades afterward. The Selden map, as accepted truths giving way to controversial new have to contend with many dangers along the way, ideas. Ordinary people in their hundreds of thou- from mighty storms, shipboard disease such as Stephen R. Bown is the author of eight books on the sands were on the move in search of work, survival scurvy, jealous and violent middlemen, pirates and, history of science, ideas and exploration, including and adventure. Ships in their tens of thousands as the rumours held, ferocious sea monsters. Spices the early spice trade. His most recent book is The were sailing from every port in Europe and Asia. were exceedingly valuable in Europe, for their Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen (Douglas Commodities produced on one continent were reputed medicinal properties, their exotic flavour and McIntyre, 2012). He is working on a biography reshaping economies on another.” and the social status they bequeathed for their rar- of Knud Rasmussen, the Danish/Inuit ethnogra- Selden was a London business lawyer, politi- ity. The source of spices such as pepper, cinnamon, pher, poet and explorer. cal activist and one-time convict because of his cloves and nutmeg was a well-kept mystery for
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 5 generations of Spanish and Portuguese mariners, ical discoveries in a world that was just opening up. how people have not changed much over the cen- a state commercial secret ensuring their value “Where great wealth once had consisted in owning turies. A few examples: “when the [Chinese] court remained high. The challenge to this monopoly vast tracts of land,” Brook writes, “now it involved found itself unable to control piracy and smug- came in the wake of the Protestant Reformation owning vast cargoes of ships … An entirely new gling, it preferred simply to shut down all private in the late 16th century, primarily from the Dutch structure of law was required to hold up the new trade. This usually had the effect of only increasing and English. The early 17th century was the era order.” piracy and smuggling.” One of Selden’s London when England and the Netherlands, through their Brook follows the different strands of the map’s companions “was a shrewd man, instinctual in his respective national exploring and trading monopo- story to their convergence, just as a cartographer ability to manipulate others, but he was also vain lies, the English East India Company about his own judgements and thus and the Dutch East India Company, Maps were national secrets, and easily gulled by his own certainties.” were challenging the commercial And this, which brought a smile to empires that Portugal and Spain had sharing the information on them was my face: “Perhaps I am being unfair. built through their early monopoly. Who of us can look into the future England and the Dutch Republic sometimes punishable by death. and guess with any confidence what wanted commercial access to the will become common knowledge and spice trade of the eastern seas. Gaining part of this might draw all the tributaries of a river funnelling what will sink into obscurity?” lucrative market could mean enormous wealth into the main channel. Brook pieces together the Mr. Selden’s Map of China will transport the or, in the case of the Dutch Republic, the funds map’s clues, from the style of cartography and the reader back four centuries to the beginning of to secure political independence from Spain. Any placement of the compass rose and cartouches, to globalization and the birth of the current world knowledge that could help in controlling this trade the type of Chinese characters used in the writing order, when trade and empire were flip sides of the network—for European nations were not willing to and the size of the map’s scale and orientation. same coin, more blatantly than they are today. It share the wealth because of political and religious This is all fascinating detail, particularly if one is will confirm suspicions about the fickle nature of conflict—could be worth a fortune. It is in this era familiar with at least the rudiments of cartographic consumer demand—what was worth its weight in of intriguing political and commercial change that history and the history of the spice trade. There is gold back then is cheap and common now. Some- the Selden map was acquired and shipped back to a fair bit of technical detail about European and times scarcity and the whims of fashion influence England from the “Indies.” Chinese cartographic traditions, but it is an inter- world events more than we would like to admit. In Maps were national secrets, and sharing the esting example of the process by which an inves- this book Brook does a rare thing, perhaps the most information on them was sometimes punishable tigator, historical or otherwise, begins to unravel valuable thing any historian can do but few achieve: by death, particularly if they contained commer- the threads of a mystery, to reveal the answers he reveals the continuity between our world and cial secret information. Maps can depict different to questions, and how the answers often lead to the murky past. “Our ancestors,” he observes in one things; a map is a mindscape showing what is more questions. aside, “traded and travelled, migrated and thieved, important and what is considered inviolable. The Brook’s story is sprinkled with passages and aided and intimidated, playing along with whoever Selden map, Brook shows, was a map of the sea, general insights that are a delight to someone who held all the cards so that a very few could become a map of sea routes and trade routes, rather than a appreciates language, and that serve to elevate the pointlessly rich and the rest of us might just survive political map of national boundaries. It is not a sov- book from being overly technical and narrow. The until morning. The world has changed much in the ereign’s map, but a merchant’s map, from that era story is peppered with amusing observations on intervening four centuries, but we have changed when new markets were linked to new geograph human nature that bring it alive and also show less.”
LRC pres.
6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Nation Building by the Column Inch How a century-old news cooperative helped Canadians learn who they are. Beth Haddon
sciousness and national under- Making National News: standing, I confess to a warped A History of Canadian Press judgment of the factors and forces Gene Allen that promote the building of a University of Toronto Press nation.” 443 pages, softcover ISBN 978144261532‑8 Wartime When World War Two broke out, CP was determined to be the he Canadian Journa source of war news for Canadians. lism Foundation, an Staff was added in London and Torganization that aims New York. The Canadian military to promote excellence in journal- developed a close working rela- ism, has a slogan—“as journalism tionship with CP, viewed by gov- goes, so goes democracy.” It is ernment as useful in the war effort. a lofty ideal and, if it is true, the In 1939 when Gillis Purcell went Canadian Press has surely done its with the First Canadian Division to bit for democracy in this country. England as CP’s war correspond- CP has been around for almost ent, his was the only Canadian a century. While its website news organization accredited. says “Many Canadians are familiar with THE been a frenzy of journalistic productivity, he would Later on when Purcell joined the Canadian mil- CANADIAN PRESS credit on countless newspaper then rewrite, shorten and send the stories out, bear- itary as a public relations officer, CP topped up his stories,” my guess is that most Canadians have ing in mind wire capacity and different deadlines military salary by $20 per week, allowing Purcell to never heard of CP. It has been described as one of in different time zones. The member newspaper assure himself that “it means that I am still in fact the most overlooked institutions in Canadian life. editors would choose which stories to run in their as well as heart a CP man.” This caused a few raised Modelled after Associated Press, the U.S. news local papers. That way a Toronto newspaper could eyebrows within the CP membership and the top- wire service, CP was founded as a national not-for- report on a Calgary news story without having up was dropped after a year. In journalism today profit cooperative in 1917 by a group of competing a correspondent in Calgary. And all would have such an arrangement would be unthinkable. newspaper owners who wanted to reduce costs by the benefit of a correspondent in Ottawa where News about the war was less about the big exchanging news stories rather than hiring repor- CP hired its own reporters. The editorial decision picture and more about hometown news, let- ters all over the country. making that went into determining which stories ting Canadians see the names of their husbands, When it was founded, Canadian Press had to select and send out effectively determined what fathers and sons in the local paper. In 1942 Ross 117 member newspapers (the number of daily Canadians knew about their government in Ottawa Munro sent this fulsome dispatch: “Lieutenant newspapers in Canada had peaked in 1913 at 138) and about the far-flung regions of the country. O.A. (Hoodley) Nickson of Toronto led the detach- with 43 editorial and administrative employees, A 1943 magazine article describes the “job ments … Sergeants in charge of different sections 14 telegraph operators in seven Canadian bureaus memo” one filing editor relied on to help him were Jack Stone, Roly Guiton and W. P. Hubbard, and one in New York. remember the kinds of stories to send to the papers all of Toronto. Riflemen included Bob Catlow, Reg As Gene Allen’s scholarly Making National he was responsible for: Barrett, Bill Ackerman, George Bolton, who drove a News: A History of Canadian Press shows, the way carrier, John Fleming, Robert Menzies.” CP operated did much more than cut costs. This Soo [Sault Ste Marie] wants steel and wolves In keeping with the times, journalists covering complex, nationwide news distribution system in full … Kingston gets all drama and Welsh … the war tended to write uncritical reports of “our played an important role in nation building and Orange [Order] celebrations and cheese in full side’s” successes and little information or analysis the creation of a Canadian identity. And it also had for Woodstock … cheese for Belleville … obits about military failures or the horrors of war. This a significant and positive impact on the quality of for Galt … odd stories for Peterborough … cheerleading approach backfired with the 1941 journalism in Canada. Brantford likes postwar plans but hates mis- raid on Dieppe, which left CP with what Allen calls Here is how the system worked: CP member placed “todays”; items with morgue-picture “a complicated legacy.” The Canadian reporters newspaper editors sent local stories from their possibilities for Welland … rubber for Sarnia. who went on the mission were subject to the usual papers to central CP “filing editors.” The filing censorship but additionally in this case, under editor would read the dozens of stories and many In 1933, M.E. Nichols, the president of Canadian instruction from Lord Mountbatten, were not thousands of words that came in from across the Press, spelled out how he saw CP’s contribution allowed to file their stories before attending a mil- country, and would assess the newsworthiness and to nation building: “The Canadian Press through itary briefing the day after the event. Their delayed suitability of each for the various papers he (it was the daily newspapers it serves keeps the people of news reports were dramatic and gripping but failed always a he) was responsible for. In what must have Canada in daily touch with each other. It makes to report the extent of the casualties, which “were known to the whole country simultaneously the of horrendous proportions. Almost two-thirds of Beth Haddon is a journalist and former broadcast goings on in every part of the Dominion … If that the [5,000] Canadian soldiers who landed at Dieppe executive. … does not promote national unity, national con- were killed, wounded, captured or missing in
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 7 action, but it took almost a month for this informa- state of existence, now at risk in light of various Contrast that cozy relationship with the icy tion to be made public.” press controversies such as the phone-hacking interaction between Ottawa politicians and the Besides censorship there was another explana- scandal in the United Kingdom, is based on the press today. While writing his book Harperland: tion for the journalistic lapses. In his landmark underlying democratic principle of free speech. The Politics of Control, veteran Ottawa columnist book The First Casualty: The War Correspondent Although unregulated, journalism operates Lawrence Martin got nowhere in his quest for as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, within a powerful culture of deeply entrenched an interview with Stephen Harper. So he went Phillip Knightley explains that patriotism and values and codes of conduct involving fairness, after others close to the prime minister, including strong personal beliefs in the just nature of that balance, verification and right of reply, which were Harper’s campaign manager Doug Finley. Martin war caused journalists to stumble into the terrain once learned on the job and are now taught in jour- writes: “I worked through intermediaries to try and of propaganda. nalism schools. It was not always thus. get to him. The word came back, ‘Tell Lawrence Some years after the war Purcell wrote a master’s In the heyday of “yellow journalism” in New York Martin to go piss up a river’.” Martin goes on to say: thesis in which he acknowledged that CP had failed in the late 19th century, when William Randolph “Others—even old Tory senators whose jobs were on the Dieppe story. Today, in the age of the inter- Hearst waged a circulation war against Joseph safe—were terrified of what Mr. Harper might do to net and citizen journalism it would be impossible to Pulitzer, sensational headlines, fake interviews, them if they uttered a word. They wouldn’t even talk contain news as devastating as Dieppe. crime stories and purple prose were the order of off the record.” the day. Here is David Remnick of The New Yorker Despite those examples from CP’s Ottawa bur- Quebec introducing a collection of essays by A.J. Liebling: eau, the fact that CP was owned by media compan- During the 1960s the rise of Quebec nationalism “One of the commonplaces of feature writing at ies of varying political stripes meant that CP repor- and the quest for “Canadian identity” thrust CP into the time was a tendency to embroider. That is, ters developed a neutral—some said dull—news a complex debate that continues to this day. What there was a lot of making things up or, at the very reporting style acceptable to all member papers. does it mean to be a national institution? least, helping things along. What is now a hanging As early as 1927, an internal document titled The Quiet Revolution in Quebec might not have offense was then a risible demeanor. Details were “Instructions for Correspondents” set the tone: been so quiet if Canadian Press had been more embellished, colours heightened, dialogue faked.” “The Canadian Press is a non–partisan organiza- attuned to the historic change tion, serving daily newspapers of unfolding there, although that is every political stripe, and in pol- easier to see in hindsight than it The story of Canadian Press is a itics wants records of fact without was at the time. comment. Endeavour to keep all CP, under pressure from its romantic tale of a great Canadian color and prejudice out of des- Quebec members, had begun patches.” offering a French service in 1951; institution infused with high purpose and This approach laid the ground- the English CP Report was trans- an uncanny knack for survival. work for the professionalization of lated into French and transmitted. journalism in Canada by setting It is not clear if translation went standards that spread to other from French to English as well, although it appears In the 1920s, half the daily newspapers in the news organizations. CP published its first style not, and there is a suggestion that the French- United States maintained affiliations with political guide in 1940, setting down rules about writing but language papers did not bother sending much copy parties. Politicians provided financial support to also guidelines on standards of accuracy, journal- to CP. What is clear is that there was a distrust of newspapers with printing contracts, patronage jobs istic sources and balance. Because member papers CP among francophone journalists who saw it as for editors and publishers, and direct contributions all across the country used CP stories daily, their an English institution. Some even refused to use its of money to start new papers or keep existing ones editors and reporters were influenced by these French name, La Presse canadienne, insisting on afloat. standards. calling it “Canadian Press.” At CP, as with so many In Canada, the early days of journalism may have The year 2010 marked the end of an era. national institutions, the two solitudes prevailed. been less bare-knuckled but Canadian newspapers Canadian Press was sold as a for-profit business to At one point, in an astonishing act of oblivi- also had political affiliations—theToronto Star was a consortium of three of its members, Torstar Corp, ousness, CP hired a full-time staff writer to cover Liberal, The Globe and Mail Tory and, according to The Globe and Mail and La Presse. In the preceding Quebec culture who did not speak or understand The Canadian Encyclopedia, the Calgary Herald, years, facing the global financial crisis, the general French. This decision could only have fuelled the early in the 20th century, used the organizational decline of newspapers and changes in technology, demand by some members for a separate French- apparatus of the Alberta Conservative Party to many news organizations had pulled out of the language news agency. The idea was seriously sell subscriptions. Allen reports that the Quebec cooperative and CP was at risk of going under. explored by CP and deemed financially unviable, newspaper Le Soleil put its motto, “Organe du parti but the complaint did result in CP signing a con- liberal” on the front page until the 1950s. Conclusion tract with Agence France-Presse for international Allen describes how Thomas Green, who The story of Canadian Press is a romantic tale of news to serve the French-language members. worked in CP’s Ottawa bureau in the 1930s, a great Canadian institution infused with high There had, however, been progress in Ottawa attended the Conservative Party convention both as purpose and an uncanny knack for survival. It is a where, in 1959, a reporter was sent by CP “to report a reporter for CP and as a party delegate. Moreover, story of power struggles, financial crises and many on federal affairs, in French, from the point of view he was a member of the resolutions committee. strong-willed individuals. But this is not a roman- of French Canada.” One far-sighted CP newspaper At the convention, Green handed the resolutions to tic book. It is a detailed academic work drawing owner, John Bassett of the Toronto Telegram, argued the CP telegraph operator before giving them to the on a myriad of facts gleaned from archival docu- that “Canada was a bilingual country, and CP as convention chair! Now, that’s insider journalism. ments, complete with nearly a hundred pages of a national organization should be bilingual at the And there is this description by the news editor citations, positing concepts such as “mediated pub- capital.” in the Ottawa bureau in the 1940s of how political licness” and frequently reminding me of Emperor When French president Charles de Gaulle news was gathered by bureau chief R.K. Carnegie: Joseph II’s famous complaint about Mozart’s music: visited Quebec City in 1967 and made his famous “Too many notes!” The book may be of small inter- “vive le Quebec libre” speech, CP was caught in Once we’d heard a rumor there was a story est to a general audience, but to those of us who the controversy. Its coverage was criticized by Le in one of the government departments. follow with fascination the continuing evolution Devoir’s eminent intellectual editor Claude Ryan McCook had worked on it, and Flaherty and of journalism it is a landmark achievement not to because “it often seemed that CP did not grasp the Blackburn, and they got nowhere. About 11.45 be missed. real meaning of events.” Maurice Dagenais of La Randall or I would go into Carnegie and say, It is often said that Canadians do not know their Presse accused CP of unbalanced coverage for fail- “We hear that so and so … and can’t raise it.” own history. There is something quintessentially ing to emphasize that de Gaulle also said “Vive le “Leave it with me, leave it with me, John,” Canadian about the history of Canadian Press. Canada” four times. he would say. It was a testing ground for all of our great chal So we’d leave it with Andy, and at two lenges—Quebec nationalism, relations with the Evolving Journalism Standards o’clock Andy would come back from the U.S. and regionalism. It lasted as a co-op for nearly a Journalism, as distinct from other professions, Rideau Club, having had lunch with half the century without anyone much noticing. It is to his- operates without government regulation or licence cabinet, and say, “John, I’ll write the story.” torian Gene Allen’s great credit that he did notice. or even much self-regulation. This unencumbered And he would.
8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Wild Memories On reconnecting with the natural world. Trevor Herriot
Hopping back and forth from continent to nature into our identities, until guarding against The Once and Future World: continent and island to island to make his case, harms to the natural world is as innate as watching Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be MacKinnon gives a lucid account of why we for- out for ourselves, our families or our communities.” J.B. MacKinnon get and why remembering matters. Like many The matter of how we weave nature into our Random House of the most respected environmental writers, he identities MacKinnon leaves aside, at least for this 256 pages, hardcover takes care to point out that even before the much- book. That question takes us to trickier terrain, ISBN 9780307362186 maligned industrial age, the wild world had already cratered with our failed attempts—political, moral, been severely modified by us. With each genera- civic, philosophical and religious—to take a culture tion, he says, the baseline of what is natural or nor- from unenlightened selfishness to enlightened self- he more you read environmentally mal in any landscape shifts. From the Pleistocene sacrifice. inclined literature, the less you are sur- mega-fauna extinctions to the reports in last week’s This fall I attended a gathering of poets, nature Tprised by the details tracing the downward Guardian that Jamaica’s poor are eating the island’s writers, naturalists, scientists and activists in Brit- spiral of the planet’s ecological health. And yet the crocodiles into extirpation, we are drifting mind- ish Columbia’s Wells Gray Provincial Park. After world is wide enough, nature fathomless enough lessly toward a world that will be much less wild recounting the rapid decline of the park’s mountain that, given time to do the research, a good writer than today’s already-tamed biosphere. That perni- caribou as well as of many other creatures and can still surprise you. J.B. MacKinnon’s The Once cious drift, MacKinnon knows, is caused by the ecologies across Canada, we discussed the political and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It incremental and uncounted decisions of human and social issues we face in trying to hold onto Could Be sets a high mark. There are astounding beings, some choosing survival instead of a healthy scraps of nature, eventually, inevitably arriving at images and facts on nearly every page. One of them environment, others simply choosing greater how we might begin to turn things around and live nearly got me run over. well with wildness. “It can take fifty years for a huge MacKinnon takes care to point out At one point, poet Tim Lilburn carcass to fully decompose, meaning spoke up and said he thinks a lot that a whale can ‘live’ after death as that even before the much-maligned about our prehistoric ancestors, the long as it did in life.” Walking while ones who made the great cave paint- you read has its dangers, but usually industrial age, the wild world had ings of Lascaux and Chauvet. They I can reserve enough consciousness journeyed deep inside the earth, to handle downtown traffic. Whales, already been severely modified by us. farther than they had any practical though, have a way of filling up the reason to go, risking encounters with mind. With the massive carcass there at the bottom comfort today without seeing or caring about what cave bears much larger than our modern grizzly. of the sea in my brain releasing its carbon slowly those choices will do to tomorrow. “What were they doing in there all that time?” Tim over 50 years, there was nothing left for navigation. Looking back intelligently is even more uncom- asked. The era of this cave painting practice extends A voice yelling “Ever see a ‘don’t walk’ sign, jerk?” mon and vexed by the usual problems of reading for 20,000 years or more, twice the span of agricul- brought me back to the surface. history. Not that long ago, romanticism and the ture as part of the human journey. If The Once and Future World were merely an idea of a nobler past allowed us a tincture of pleas- Early on in the book, MacKinnon expresses his assemblage of astonishing facts about the more- ure in remembering. In recent years, though, Jared own awe at “the great mysteries of the early cave than-human world and our less-than-humane Diamond and Ronald Wright have applied the latest paintings in Europe and Australia … the way they treatment of its creatures and ecologies, it would evidence in archaeology to disabuse us of all fuzzy represent details of large and dangerous animals.” still be worth reading, but of course it is much more. notions of there ever being a human civilization He suggests that to observe nature so closely “would MacKinnon, best known for his co-authored The that lived in harmony with nature. Discovering that have required a human being to be just another 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, has blended we are not that different from our pre-industrial species on the landscape.” Given that observation, historical ecology, memoir and environmental ancestors is the coldest of comforts, especially if and still haunted by Lilburn’s question, I have let essay to remind us what the world once was and we then conclude that destroying nature is part of myself wonder if the cave painting period was part could be once again. human nature. of a crisis of awakening in the human journey that One of the great virtues of environmental writing MacKinnon takes us to that brink gingerly in parallels our current moment of truth. In awe of is that it can help us to remember what has been the latter sections of the book as we go from the the very animals they eventually hunted to extinc- lost over time as the advance of human civilization more recent cautionary tale of Hawaii to the older tion, our ancestors went back inside the womb altered ecological relationships and landscapes lessons of Easter Island, the example most often of the earth, in a spiritual descent in which they and wiped out plants and animals on land and used in these discussions of our apparent inability would discover that that they were, for good or ill, sea. Not a happy remembering—try reading Farley to stop ourselves. Then, to consider the possibility emerging from that natal intimacy with the rest of Mowat’s Sea of Slaughter—but a vital one if we hope of reversal—no matter how remote that seems—he nature, bearing more tools and consciousness than to get to the next steps of reconnecting and rewild- asks the reader to imagine another island, one that the other animals, and dreaming forward from that ing that The Once and Future Worldproposes. is as yet undiscovered and teeming with all of the rebirth to whatever might come next. abundance and diversity now missing from most The Once and Future World is a worthy contri- Trevor Herriot, author of River in a Dry Land: A of the planet. After describing the place in detail bution to the growing list of books that address the Prairie Passage (Stoddart, 2000) and Grass, Sky and discussing the pressures for exploitation that juncture at which we find ourselves—the words Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland would make preservation difficult once the island we are writing on the subway walls, so to speak. Birds (HarperCollins, 2012), will publish a new is found, MacKinnon gets to the moral imperative What would it take for us to make another descent book with HarperCollins in April, 2014—The Road contained in his “remember, reconnect and rewild” to more beautiful depths where we might imagine is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, injunction: that is, to make such a turn and live in forward from within the earth’s long dreams for its Desire and Soul. a wilder world, “we’ll have to find a way to weave human dimension?
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 9 Procreating Properly? On the moral consequences of having kids. Ronald de Sousa
have the right to ignore his bio- Why Have Children? logical paternity and obligations The Ethical Debate deriving from it? Christine Overall In this case, Overall opts for MIT Press consequentialism. One can be 253 pages, hardcover morally obligated not to exercise ISBN 9780262016988 a legitimate right. In the case of insemination secured by deceit, the man might have a right to “I always have fun in San walk away, but he might still be Francisco.” morally bound not to exercise it, “Say, you were born there, weren’t for the child might be harmed if you?” the mother lacks the resources to “Oh yes, but I didn’t do that to bring him or her up. (Compare the have fun. That was just one of those concern one might feel for some- things that happen.” one whom one has hurt entirely —Gracie Allen and George Burns by accident.) Since requiring the man to acknowledge paternity ntil quite recently, would seem to reward deception, few had the privilege of and given that “childbearing and Upondering whether to child rearing are social goods, not have children, or why. It was just one of those things inherent in persons; consequentialist reasons merely individual enterprises,” Overall notes that that happen. For anyone now weighing the pros weigh the desirability of consequences. Genuine it would be far better if the state were to ensure “at and cons, the reasons considered can be as agon- rights trump consequential considerations—or a minimum, that no child goes hungry or without izing as they are boringly banal for anyone else. so it is commonly assumed: even to save the lives adequate health care.” Although that evades the Can I afford it? Do I owe it to my parents to “give” of five people in need of transplants, one may not question of the man’s rights, few in Canada would them a grandchild? Will I be a good parent? Should sacrifice a solitary vagrant to distribute his or her disagree. I sacrifice my brilliant career prospects to have this organs. Similarly, obliging a woman to have a child Where the preferences are reversed, what rights unplanned baby? But not many, I would surmise, violates the principle that “using people as mere can the inseminator claim? Should a woman who would ever ask if it is the morally right thing to do. means to the accomplishment of a goal—a goal that does not want a child be swayed by a man’s desire That is the question addressed in Christine Overall’s is not inherently related to their own well-being—is for an offspring? Overall grants that it might be clearly written and carefully argued book, Why a fundamental violation of their personhood.” Yet “virtuous” for a woman to take the inseminator’s Have Children? The Ethical Debate. it sometimes also happens that important conse- desires into account, but “the woman never loses The question sounds more weighty than simply quences trump a real but relatively unimportant her moral right to terminate the pregnancy.” “what shall I do?”; but what does it really mean? right: you have a right to expect me to fulfil a prom- In short, a moderate regard for consequences Some actions are freighted with moral opprobrium: ise to take you to the opera; but if another friend should temper absolutism about rights. Unfortu- stealing, murder. A few present tragic dilemmas needs an emergency ride to the hospital, her need nately, appraising consequences is extraordinarily —“Choose the child I will kill,” in Styron’s Sophie’s outweighs your right. So there is, after all, some difficult. There are two reasons for this. First, life Choice; E.M. Forster’s “Should I betray my coun- flexibility about the primacy of rights. What is tricky is essentially chaotic, in the technical sense of the try rather than my friends?”—but in most of our is deciding when. word: the sheer complexity of the web of causes choices the options seem too trivial, too private or As Overall rightly stresses, no actual or antici- makes it almost always impossible to predict con- too particular to raise issues of morality. Nowadays, pated innovations in reproductive technology will sequences; at best one can adduce statistics, but however, the most trivial options can raise moral- change the fact that “procreation requires much statistics never determine particular cases. Second, istic eyebrows. Should I drive to work? Should I eat more of women than of men.” In case of conflict we are notoriously bad at predicting our own future meat? How often should I flush? Indeed, according between an ovum-contributing woman and a responses to hypothetical consequences. This is to Overall, “virtually every area of human life has sperm-contributing man, that creates an asym- particularly true for having children. When we ethical dimensions.” metry. Both have rights, but the consequences for undertake to do so, even if we heed the warning of Overall never systematically tells us what each are vastly different. Everyone (except those experienced child raisers that it will “change your makes a reason ethical, but she invokes the two who can discern no difference between a zygote life forever,” we have only the vaguest idea about approaches most favoured (and debated) by moral and a baby) agrees that no woman is morally what we are getting into: “you cannot know ahead philosophers. Deontological reasons deal in duties obliged to carry a pregnancy to term; but should a of time what it will be like to become a parent or and prohibitions typically stemming from rights man be equally free to walk away from a pregnancy what sort of child you will have.” that he has caused? Suppose a woman has insemin- Despite these uncertainties, Overall invites us to Ronald de Sousa is a professor emeritus of the ated herself with sperm surreptitiously collected think clearly about our reasons, if only to see that Department of Philosophy at the University of from a condom, after oral sex without vaginal inter- many of those adduced in favour of having children Toronto. course. Does the inseminator, as a victim of deceit, are feeble. Carrying on the family name and hand-
10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ing on an inheritance both fail as moral reasons. analogy: “would we say that a party is so dull and excommunication, I venture to think there are good The same is true of pressures that may come from boring that it’s a bad idea to go to it, but, once reasons to resist this hegemony. One is that moral prospective grandparents or social conventions. there, the dullness and boredom are not sufficient justifications are essentially contestable. Although Divine command is inherently unknowable. Even to warrant leaving?” The analogy seems wanting: I agree with Overall on pretty much every- the suggestion that the state has a claim on citizens’ dullness and boredom are not equivalent to pain thing, I am left with the sneaking suspicion that procreative powers is unacceptable: “such an obli- and suffering. Furthermore, the reason death is an what we share are just opinions. In the absence of gation would make women into procreative serfs.” evil is that most people prefer to suffer than to die. universally agreed foundational principles, a sens- It is good to think clearly, and Overall does it This may be irrational, yet for biological reasons it ible and pragmatic mix of intuitions about respect admirably. But philosophers sometimes follow the is hardly surprising: those who did not care to pre- for autonomy and consequentialist considerations argument into what many a reader might regard serve their life were likely to lose it before reprodu- is the way to go. But that will not convince anyone as idle wheel-spinning. Two notable illustrations cing. So on that point Benatar is right: even if death whose opinions are different. Second, as noted are afforded by puzzles that figure prominently in is bad, it might be better never to exist. above, we can predict neither what will happen nor the recent philosophical litera- how we shall feel about it. Decid- ture. These make arguments for ing whether to have children is opposite and equally strange Overpopulation and ecological damage are always fraught with existential answers to the abstract question anxiety. It seems unnecessarily of whether it is good to procre- pretty much the only recognizably “moral” harsh to burden it further with ate. Overall takes them both up the puritanical admonition that at some length, and disposes of reasons people actually give for the choice “we can no longer assume that them deftly. to limit the number of their offspring. so-called private life is only per- The first, due to English phil- sonal and therefore in principle osopher Derek Parfit, starts from immune to ethical examination.” the premise that “utility” (i.e., goodness worth Overall wisely denies that non-existent beings In the powerful flood of merely practical and pru- pursuing) is additive across all persons, including can have rights or interests: “mere absence or dential considerations, the force of moral reasons non-existent but possible ones. That entails that we avoidance is neither good nor bad unless it is good will be, and perhaps should be, swamped into should prefer a world in which billions endure lives or bad for someone.” But she seems to waver on this insignificance. barely worth living to one where a thousand are point when she writes that “it is genuinely possible That said, if you do want to think about the eth- supremely happy, if the sum of happiness in the for- to regret the nonexistence of certain people. Thus, ics of having a child, you will find no better guide mer is the greater. This leads to what Parfit labelled an impoverished mother might regret that she did than Overall. And by all means, heed her parting “the repugnant conclusion” that everyone should not have the time or resources to have a second words: “Don’t miss it! … Yet please consider having have as many offspring as possible, even at the cost child.” That misleadingly exploits an ambiguity of no more than one each.” of a serious degradation of life for all. the phrase “certain people.” Those that do not exist A sort of mirror image of the repugnant conclu- cannot be referred to. And what we cannot refer to, sion concludes that it is always morally wrong to we cannot regret. What the impoverished mother procreate. That view has been defended by South regrets is not a non-existent child, but her condition African philosopher David Benatar, on the ground as a mother-of-one. Coming up that while the absence of pain is a positive good, A similar ambiguity underlies another intriguing the absence of pleasure is not in itself bad. Would puzzle, also due to Derek Parfit. This is the “non- you not choose several days without pleasure over identity problem.” Suppose a woman conceives at in the LRC one day of extreme suffering? Assuming that no a time when she suffers from a temporary condi- actual life is exempt from pain and suffering, the tion that puts any offspring at risk. She could have consequential calculus deems the ledger positive waited to have a different child. Has she made a only for those that never exist. Happy are those who morally culpable decision? It seems reasonable to Watching the watchdog are never born. say so. Oddly, though, no one is entitled to com- Kevin Page Despite the asymmetry between pleasure and plain unless the child’s life is clearly not worth pain, Overall endorses the common-sense reply: living at all. If her child reproaches her, she can March to the Great War “whether being alive is a benefit or a harm depends retort: “If I had waited, you wouldn’t exist!” Yet it Ana Siljak on the content of the life that is lived.” But if that is the does seem that the mother would have made the sole reason for rejecting Benatar’s conclusion, one morally better choice by waiting: we have an obliga- Bitter pension truths is driven back to the repugnant conclusion. Every tion to avoid “creating offspring who [we] know will possible child deprived of life is harmed, if the life experience severe suffering.” The case remains puz- Max Fawcett he or she would have had would be positive on zling, because we feel the mother is blameworthy, balance. Must we not reduce such harm if we can? even though no actual person has been harmed by Wayne Johnston’s (Not that we can do much about it. The number of her choice. Son of a Certain Woman possible beings is super-astronomically large, so On the basis of a highly unscientific informal Noreen Golfman having as many children as one can will make virtu- survey of friends with and without children, most ally no dent in the huddled masses of nonexistent people seem to agree with Overall that overpopu- Pratt portraits: beings waiting to be born.) lation and ecological damage are pretty much the So to reject Benatar’s thesis merely because only recognizably “moral” reasons people actually Christopher and Mary some lives are worth living is unsatisfactory. Over- give for the choice to limit the number of their off- Judy Stoffman all offers a better refutation when she points out spring. But if that is the case, then perhaps insisting that “mere existence is not a benefit-conferring that we should take seriously the complex ethical The white man’s or harm-conferring property. Prior to conception, aspects of procreation is somewhat idle. The ques- there is no being who can be benefited or harmed tion is not trivial: it affects many people, including literary burden by coming into existence.” That effectively disposes future people who will have rights, as well as pleas- Roger Hall of both Benatar’s argument and the repugnant con- ures and pains (even if they have none while they clusion. If non-existent beings can claim no rights, remain merely possible). That is surely enough to Family films we cannot harm them either by bringing them into make the issue one of moral concern. What I am Martha Baillie being or by failing to do so. less sure about is how much we should worry about Here and throughout, Overall’s conclusions those moral concerns. Perhaps Margaret Laurence Catholicism: development seem eminently sensible. One might cavil, however, was right in responding to the question with the with some of her arguments. Benatar claims that boutade, “Who cares?” boon or bane? the badness of life is compatible with the badness Moral philosophers are professionally bound Farouk Shamas Jiwa of death: in fact, death is just one of the things to claim that ethical concerns are more import- that make life bad. Against this Overall offers an ant than all other kinds. For myself, at the risk of
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 11 The Southern Blitz How Canadian football’s short foray into the U.S. ultimately strengthened the league. Kevin Sylvester
your-pants” that at times you think Willes is making that explained why the football game became, as End Zones and Border Wars: the anecdotes up. He is not. The renowned Stephen he puts it, front-page news. It was not just the CFL’s The Era of American Expansion in the CFL Brunt is quoted early on saying, “It was the greatest U.S. expansion that had Canadians feeling threat- Ed Willes story I’ve ever covered.” ened. The NHL’s Quebec Nordiques and Winnipeg Harbour Publishing And in just three short years it was over. Jets were sold or about to be sold to the United 224 pages, softcover So what did happen, according to Willes? States. Disney bought the promotion rights to the ISBN 9781550176148 Through original documents and current inter- RCMP.) views with the major players, he pieces together a Fans rallied around the details and the game pattern of unplanned chaos. The driving force at became a celebration of those small differences; s a sportscaster in the 1990s, I was the beginning was survival. Larry Smith became three downs, the bigger field, the “rouge”—the around during perhaps the strangest CFL commissioner in 1992 and looked out over a point a team gets if the other team does not get Atime in Canadian sports: the Canadian Canadian-based league that was hemorrhaging the ball out of the end zone on a kick (with some Football League’s expansion into the United States. money. Now a senator, Smith recalls it as a time exceptions). The Canadian players on the Lions The period brought fans the Shreveport Pirates, the when “we didn’t have a template … that would felt they were also defending their jobs and their Las Vegas Posse and the Baltimore CFLers (later guarantee success.” No kidding. reputations. Lions running back Sean Millington, the Stallions), among others. The three-year period Smith’s idea, pushed on by CFL owners Larry Vancouver born and raised, said the game proved, was tumultuous, almost broke the league, probably Ryckman and Bruce McNall (both later charged “I can compete. We can all compete.” saved the league and ended with the game back in with fraud), was to take the Canadian game south. Yes, the Lions won. And bit by bit the Canadian Canada for good. The National Football League—the U.S. football game started to come back. After U.S. expansion collapsed, just before the juggernaut—was moving teams out of places such The next Grey Cup was held in Regina, in freez- 1996 season, almost everyone was left scratching as Baltimore and ignoring smaller markets such as ing temperatures and howling winds. (I was there; their helmets and asking the same question, “What Shreveport, Memphis and Birmingham. So Smith I still have the ringing in my ears.) Baltimore won the heck just happened?” pursued the people there who had money. that time, but in such a prototypical Canadian Now we know, thanks to Vancouver Province Owners such as Fred Anderson (Sacramento), context that it seemed that the C in CFL had been writer Ed Willes and his entertaining book, End Nick Mileti (Vegas) and Jim Speros (Baltimore), the real winner. Willes includes a quote from fan Zones and Border Wars: The Era of American paid lots of money to get into the league. The league Rodney McCann that sums this up perfectly. “My Expansion in the CFL. Willes takes a meticulously did not end up getting all the money it was prom- grandfather froze at the Grey Cup. My father froze researched, and at times laugh-out-loud hilarious, ised, but apparently got enough to keep it from total at the Grey Cup. I’m going to freeze at the Grey Cup. view of the CFL’s short-lived love affair with the collapse. Willes does not necessarily credit Smith That’s what it’s all about.” United States. with any grand vision, but in hindsight, the money The league itself started to realize that its How can you lose with a period of history that he did get helped keep teams such as Hamilton and Canadianness was something it needed to nur- includes Melinda the “Glamorous First Lady of B.C. from going under. ture and promote. Willes does credit Smith and Magic” unveiling a team name in little more than a The eventual death of the U.S. experiment was others with never forgetting the small things, even G-string, or Dennis K.C. Park singing “O Canada” to caused by numerous factors, one of the biggest in the midst of the U.S. experiment. Smith, look- the tune of “O Tannenbaum” at the Las Vegas home being the complete (often willful) ignorance of the ing back, says today that, “we all loved the CFL opener? Canadian rules by many of the U.S.-based owners, and we were all custodians of a great Canadian There is more. Willes gleefully recounts the coaches, players and fans. Institution.” Willes leaves little doubt that if the CFL attempt by Memphis to cram a CFL-sized field Willes perfectly sums this up with the title of had adapted to become more American, it would into an old college stadium. The locals did indeed Chapter 6—“Half the People Here Couldn’t Even be gone today. paint 110 yards, but each yard was only 33 inches. Spell Saskatchewan”—a quote from Memphis Willes also knows there are practical reasons The end zone was too small, and was surrounded coach Pepper Rodgers, who was notorious for things have turned around. Montreal’s move from by a concrete wall. Every possible touchdown attacking the CFL rules. Willes further quotes him the horrible Olympic Stadium to McGill’s Molson throw was, as Willes describes, “a life-threatening as saying, “You Canadians can sit around and do Stadium (thanks to a bump from a U2 concert) experience for receivers.” The result was some of all you want up there in Canada but no one under- saved that team. New and smart owners David the lowest-scoring, and most boring, football, ever stands the rules here.” Braley in Vancouver and Robert Wetenhall in seen. Memphis was gone after just one season. And it is in comments such as these that Willes Montreal brought stability to those teams and the Willes quotes British Columbia coach Dave touches on more than just the clash of sporting cul- league. Ritchie, who saw the field and immediately said, tures. Canadianness, perhaps, is in the small things. The emergence of content-hungry cable chan- “That’s what we do for expansion fees.” Take the 1994 Grey Cup, for example. nels—particularly TSN—helped give the league There were some success stories. The Baltimore Baltimore was facing the B.C. Lions, the first more regular exposure and TV money. Things have franchise drew crowds, won a Grey Cup title and U.S.-Canada final in Grey Cup history. And the turned around. The league is strong. But the league did not lose too much money. (The team eventu- game took on huge overtones. Lions owner Bill learned, and Willes recognizes, that the CFL is ally moved north and became the current Montreal Comrie told his players, “It’s us-versus-them. This Canadian or it’s nothing. As Willes himself writes, Alouettes.) But overall, the period was so “seat-of- is for our country.” Willes includes a photo of a “We borrow so much of our culture and our iden- banner at the game that read, “Free Trade Didn’t tity. But the CFL is ours.” Kevin Sylvester is an award-winning illustrator, Include the Grey Cup.” Maybe it took a flirtation with the U.S., and writer and broadcaster. He was a sports journalist (Willes could have gone even further here, pos- some U.S. arrogance à la Pepper Rodgers, to prod with the CBC for more than 20 years. sibly pulling in some of the larger cultural trends Canadians into realizing this.
12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Tribute to a Translator Has cultural understanding ensued from all those Quebec books in English? David Homel
ety at the time), a kind of cultural understanding realize that this dust-up took place as the Soviet In Translation: Honouring Sheila Fischman would ensue, and this would be a step in preserving Union was invading Czechoslovakia (two countries Sherry Simon, editor the integrity of the country. that no longer exist), you have to admit that we as McGill-Queen’s University Press You will note, of course, that at the time this a country are not gifted when it comes to conflict. 248 pages, softcover was a one-way street. The assumption was that In his testimonial (the book uses the French ISBN 9780773541962 English Canada had to understand Quebec, and word témoignages, which also means the story told not the other way around. In Quebec, precious few by a witness to an event), Roch Carrier makes the people felt it was their mission to bring the English- following comment: “I … cannot stop thinking of here is no doubt that Sheila Fisch- Canadian literary imagination into the French lan- all the books Sheila might have written, had she not man, with approximately 150 translated guage. At one point, at the end of the 1970s when devoted her life to translation.” I am sure I am not Tbooks to her credit, has the only one who always suspected done the most to create and structure that she had a manuscript of original the phenomenon of literary transla- Translation does have one thing in writing hidden away in a drawer, per- tion in Canada. It is fitting then, with haps under lock and key knowing her Fischman having reached the vener- common with writing: it can be used usual discretion, and that in the full- able age of 75, that McGill-Queen’s as a tool for self-concealment. ness of time, this manuscript would University Press decided to publish a emerge into the light. A romantic tribute to her. idea, indeed, though with a serious In the academic world, such books are called I first started out as a translator of books, I heard grounding, since it underlines the inevitable rela- festschrifts, and usually consist of essays in honour members of the Quebec literary elite declare that tion between writing and translation. of a retiring professor after a long and illustrious there was nothing worth translating from English This book puts my suspicion to rest by pre- career. This tribute book is a little different. First Canada. No one is saying that any more, of course, senting original work by Fischman, which once of all, Fischman is apparently not retiring, since for a variety of reasons—but more on that later. again is a departure from the traditional festschrift. she continues to produce translations at a rate that The mission was there, but the translator needed The section called “Words of Sheila Fischman” much younger practitioners would envy. Second, a book, and that happened when Sheila Fischman features a suite of six very short prose poems called the festschrift is usually a rather formal affair, as came upon Roch Carrier’s La Guerre, Yes Sir! At “Water” that were first published in a chapbook, suits its academic setting, and In Translation: Hon- the time, Carrier was also frequenting the Eastern “the most discreet publication I know,” as Carrier ouring Sheila Fischman is anything but formal. Township town of North Hatley where Fischman points out. Of course, what he says about the books Instead, the book is a patchwork of anecdotal lived with her then-husband, the poet and profes- she did not write because she had devoted herself literary history, essays on translation, a few words sor D.G. Jones. This town, part artist colony and to translation is just him being polite. Writing and from the receiver of this tribute, and testimonials part vacation spot, and a far cry from her native translation are related in some ways, but one all- from translated authors and colleagues. No clear Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan (although Moose Jaw important difference divides them forever. When portrait of Fischman emerges, and I suspect that has a casino and North Hatley does not), played you are writing a book, you do not know how it is the book’s editor, Concordia University professor an extraordinary role in Canada’s literary history. going to turn out; when you are translating one, you Sherry Simon, was not aiming at such a goal. What It was the theatre where English and French writ- do. That uncertainty makes all the difference in the does come forward is a picture of the different ers and craftspeople came together, with results world when it comes to how you spend your days. stages in the translator’s career, and the society of both harmonious and conflictual, and it was also But translation does have one thing in common literary people in which Fischman lives. the place, appropriately enough, where Fischman’s with writing: it can be used as a tool for self-conceal- “The arc of Fischman’s career corresponds to career as a translator got going. ment. Sherry Simon makes that clear in her essay the coming of age of Canadian literary translation,” Patricia Godbout, a professor at the University about the little known Sephardic man of letters we read in the editor’s introduction. That com- of Sherbrooke, relates one famous North Hatley Edouard Roditi (1910–92). I had never heard of the ing of age began with a heroic sense of mission: evening in her contribution. The setting was a gentleman; certainly his story is the stuff of novels. translators would save the nation. That propos- poetry reading where a ruckus arose. The problem He was a translator between many languages, and ition, today, might elicit a smile. Most Canadians apparently, back in the heady days of 1968, was Simon suggests that, as a homosexual, he sought experience translation as something of an irritation that some French-speaking people thought that too masks behind which to hide, and language can that comes from having to deal with a not-quite- much English was being declaimed. Many versions do that—conceal, not just reveal. Among his other competent piece of government communication, of the evening exist, and as Godbout wisely points adventures, Roditi was an interpreter at the Nur- or a comparative exercise with their cereal box in out, all are coloured by the amount of alcohol that emberg trials and worked for the post–World War the morning. But in the 1970s, translators such as was consumed. A few things emerge from reading Two American intelligence services. The writers he Fischman, Alan Brown, Philip Stratford and others Godbout’s short piece, besides a sense of nostalgia. translated often stand at the crossroads of several thought that by helping English Canadians read the First, Fischman was truly upset by the conflict that identities, such as Italo Svevo and Fernando Pessoa. literary works of the French-Canadian imagination broke out at an event she helped organize, which Sheila Fischman is famous for asserting that she (the word “Québécois” was only just entering soci- is normal enough. Times have changed since then: was “just a translator,” and professor emeritus Kathy the last bilingual reading I attended, in September Mezei speaks in her contribution of how Fischman David Homel is a novelist with nine books to his of 2012, was entirely orderly and predictable, since wanted to “draw a cloak of invisibility around her credit, and two more scheduled for this spring. He translation is now an accepted part of the literary presence in the text.” I suspect there is confusion has won the Governor General’s Award for transla- scene, at least in Montreal—some of that state of between the persona Fischman wishes to project tion twice. affairs is thanks to Sheila Fischman. And when you and her methods of translation. As a translator,
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 13 she wants her readers to know they are reading the East German (another disappeared country) that Sheila Fischman has. In her preface, Sherry a translation from French Quebec. She leaves in cultural authorities, via their into-English version Simon mentions “a motley crowd of improvised curse words in French (in Quebec, people swear of Wolf’s novel, cleaned up its ideological content. passeurs” (including myself and several friends) by evoking the objects involved in Catholic mass Von Flotow’s reaction was to retranslate the novel, who took over from Fischman’s generation. Here instead of sexual functions), for example, and other beginning from the title. What those authorities the issue is not quality, but market. Gone are the words of local colour. When I first came across it, entitled Divided Heaven was retranslated by von days that Fischman knew so well when a big press the writer in me disagreed with this strategy. It Flotow as They Divided the Sky in reference to the like McClelland and Stewart would give major play seems to me that all books signal the fact that they Berlin Wall. to a book from French Quebec. Anansi has taken come from a foreign place; as translators we do not Concrete examples are always more illuminat- up some of the slack, and it is unclear how the have to point this out. In fact, all books arise from ing than the romantic imagery of translation as demise of Douglas and McIntyre, which published a hidden and foreign source, even those written in encounter with the Other, although it is true that a good number of Québécois writers, will affect the reader’s first language. And so I was happy to the vocabulary used to speak of translation often English Canada’s ability to read what is happen- read Michael Henry Heim’s discussion on whether has a carnal tinge to it. A shame, then, that none ing in French. Small houses such as Arsenal Pulp to “foreignize” or “domesticate” when translat- of the tribute payers undertook a close reading of Press in Vancouver are becoming more active in ing. This veteran, best known for his German-to- Fischman’s work. A good example would have been publishing translation, usually on the basis of affin- English work, comes to a pragmatic conclusion: it her translation of some of the late Gaétan Soucy’s ities—they are looking for equivalents from Que- all depends. But best of all, in his piece, he gives writing, perhaps his short piece The Anguish of the bec, or readers whom they trust give them advice examples from his own work that illuminate what Heron that is included in the book. I would have on what books they might pick up. Perhaps this is can sometimes remain a simply theoretical issue. liked to see Fischman at work, the decisions made, appropriate for a publishing sector that has always Perhaps the success of some recent English- the nuts-and-bolts anguish of the choices. Admit- been marginal. language novels from foreign sources has given tedly, this book is in English for English readers, One surprising development seems to bear the nod to Fischman’s method. Junot Díaz won the but Heim and von Flotow made me understand out Fischman et al.’s national redemptive dream Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for The Brief Wondrous Life their points regarding German, a language I do not for literary translation—but in an unexpected of Oscar Wao, a book written in Spanglish, and the normally understand. A skillful tribute payer could way. French Quebec publishers are now pub- beginning novels in “dirty” (or imperfect) English have done the same for the object of tribute. Such lishing English-Canadian books at a greater rate by writers such as Aleksandar Hemon and Rawi an addition would have been all the more valu- than ever. So the translator’s mission has been Hage have justifiably attracted many readers. able since Fischman is typically quite reticent to accomplished—only the other way around from Translation does stretch the target language, as sev- talk about herself. There are two short interviews how people imagined it in the 1970s. Whether it is eral contributors to this collection point out. And with her conducted by Sherry Simon: one dates Miriam Toews, Michael Crummey or Gil Adamson, English, as we know, is particularly stretchy. back to 1994 and the other, shorter, from 2012, was French-language publishers are taking their chan- Maybe there is something Germanic about giv- carried out for this volume. An exploration of her ces on “Canadian” writers, often in co-publication ing examples. University of Ottawa professor Luise translation work would have added to her “Words,” with Paris. And they are also paying attention to von Flotow, who also works from German, sup- but perhaps no one wanted to take on that close their Quebec neighbours writing in English, like plies examples in her discussion of the dreadful, reading. Neil Smith, Claire Rothman—and here I must ideologically motivated English version of the East include myself. No one is claiming any more that German novelist Christa Wolf. Usually bowdleriz- t is safe to say that, in the future, no one will there is nothing worth reading from the rest of ing involves the suppression of sexual content, but Idominate the literary translation scene the way Canada. For great reading at any size
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14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada A voice for many peoples
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I slice six tart Northern Spy apples into an oiled 8x8 inch bake pan then sprinkle them with sugar Allergic: White Spot dark with cinnamon. The waitress hands me bulky binder Yes, Ma Pages upon pages of product I wash the apples well Big black dots for but I don’t peel away · dairy vitamins and fibre · soy in long unbroken spirals · egg nor do I iron cotton bed sheets · corn while watching old television · wheat movies on Sunday afternoons. Salmon burger I beat · no one cup of sugar into Veggie patty three eggs with · no a half cup of oil and Even pie the stalwart standby a teaspoon of pure vanilla extract · no using an old rotary hand beater Resign myself just like yours. to onion rings without the secret sauce and clam chowder Yes, Ma For me each laminated page slashed by a big I preheat the oven to 350˚F X marks the spot but these days we call it 175˚C. I’m so sick of Allergy
Into this liquid I sift What if I ask for the Braille menu? a cup of flour with Eyes closed, under my fingers palping greedily two teaspoons of baking soda raised dots for the things I cannot have — using a tin wheel sifter chicken pot pie, milkshake in the galvanized tumbler, broccoli cheese soup — with a red knob on the handle Fingertips eating them up just like yours. Then I mix this I will open my eyes wide, so wide into a fluid batter using look around me at what I can an old wooden spoon with nicks and stains Crystal Hurdle just like yours.
Yes, Ma I run the rolling pin over the paper bag filled with a cup of shelled walnuts just like you did.
I fold these walnut pieces into the batter and pour everything over the crisp tart apples waiting in the oiled pan now ready Crystal Hurdle teaches creative writing and English at Capilano University in North for the oven. Vancouver, British Columbia. In October 2007, she was guest poet at the International Sylvia Plath Symposium at the University of Oxford reading from After Ted & Sylvia: Yes, Ma Poems. A novel in verse for young adults is forthcoming from Tightrope Books. She is after one hour inhaling everything written by the droll, astute and profound Meg Wolitzer. In small sublime harmonies rations, she is reading Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture and rereading Stag’s Leap by Sharon of vanilla and cinnamon Olds. blend to perfection just like yours. Mary Rykov is a music therapist who serves as inclusion consultant to the Viva! Youth Singers of Toronto. She is currently reading Music: Promoting Health and Creating Mary Rykov Community in Healthcare Contexts, edited by Jane Edwards, and reviewing manuscripts for Supportive Care in Cancer and Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Her first poetry collection, Dear Mr. Rilke and Other Poems, needs a publisher.
16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Making Soup in January
A kind of violence required — thwack of knife on cutting board, sweet potato’s tough flesh split, onion chopped to tears Three Breakfast Tanka grey day Pohk — the can opener’s on the west coast cranky circuit still liberates chick peas, the eggs are sunny side up and highlighting a need first forsythia brightens the table for colour: green pepper to wake last night’s tiff an eye, dispel is forgotten as freshly made granola sluggishness — oh, logy perfumes the table and honesty as a sleep-drugged bear, glistens in a pewter vase stiff as the backyard’s crusted snow porridge Months until in pottery bowls and green breaks through a jar of maple syrup as we watch the first hummingbird In the pot, onions release sample its sugar water raucous fragrance, yams soften, tomatoes bleed acid into broth — Naomi Beth Wakan
the steam a moist balm as I stir
Sue Chenette
Sue Chenette is a classical pianist, a poet and an editor for Brick Naomi Beth Wakan is the inaugural poet laureate of Nanaimo Books. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Slender (2013). She has published more than 50 books. Her books of Human Weight (Guernica Editions, 2009) and The Bones of His poetry include Sex after 70 and Other Poems (Bevalia, 2010) Being (Guernica Editions, 2012), as well as three chapbooks: A and And After 80… (Bevalia, 2013). She is a member of the Transport of Grief (Lyricalmyrical Press 2007), Solitude in Cloud League of Canadian Poets, Haiku Canada and Tanka Canada. and Sun (Silver Maple Press, 2007) and The Time Between Us She lives on Gabriola Island, British Columbia, with her hus- (2001). She is currently reading Collected Poems by Philip Whalen, band, sculptor Elias Wakan. She is currently reading Life after Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A.S. Byatt and Her Red Hair Life by Kate Atkinson and The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Rises with the Wings of Insects by Catherine Graham. Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling). More information is available at
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 17 Africa Through Western Eyes Malawi and Sierra Leone provide the backdrop, white doctors the viewpoint. Larry Krotz
named Mariama who was his colleague ten years (seemingly straight up and without irony) as God’s The Strength of Bone earlier in war-torn Sierra Leone. Mariama penned gift to women. He never meets a nurse who can Lucie Wilk the diary while imprisoned by RUF rebels (the rap- resist him and the encounters wincingly evoke Biblioasis ing, marauding child soldiers famous for cutting Harlequin romances, whether making love with 312 pages, softcover off people’s arms). Rourke decides he needs to his wife—“We’re in the garden … Misty ribbons of ISBN 9781927428399 travel back to Sierra Leone to look for his former steam rise up like ghosts from the slate patio. I’ve co-worker, taking with him a shamanistic mask prepared a lunch of cheeses, smoked salmon and My Heart Is Not My Own that has been hanging on his office wall like a kind a baguette. Nadia is drinking Perrier, I’m having a Michael Wuitchik of tourist souvenir. Mariama’s story is told through glass of wine. Her eyes are as full of love as eyes can Penguin vivid excerpts from the diary, with Rourke, the foil, be”—or with Mariama, who recounts their brief 367 pages, softcover trying to find her without any evidence she is even coupling in her diary—“I never have a man who ISBN 9780143187981 still alive. love me like he do. He put his tongue in my ear, The women in both books come off as strong askin to come in. You come in! my eyes say to him. survivors, caught between the city and the village, You are welcome to come in.” One love scene reads: first novel is a brave venture. Both between traditional beliefs and western medicine. “she slides her body on top of mine, and again of these, The Strength of Bone and My Stuck in cultures with strict gender roles, they she takes my hands, one on each side of my body, A Heart is Not My Own, stretched out, Christlike, as she are in their own ways laudable, brushes against me, her nipples yet neither, likewise, is completely The idea of guilt-tormented white men painting long strokes against my free of problems. skin.” The two books have many seeking some kind of expiation in the Two intensely interesting similarities. Each is the first novel aspects (one might argue, the by Canadians whose day jobs as back corners of Africa is a theme that core) of both books are unfortu- medical doctors had them serving demands examination. nately addressed by their writers for a time in the countries where only obliquely: the presumption their stories are set—Lucie Wilk of the western writer telling the in Malawi, Michael Wuitchik in Sierra Leone. Both struggle to adjust to the shifting realities of both life stories of African women and the presump- books similarly do something slightly disconcert- their times and their societies while the western tion of outsider characters—the doctors—moving ing: after leading the reader to assume the tale male characters turn into sort of supporting actors. into foreign places and situations. The reader (or will be about a white foreign doctor working in an Wilk’s Henry Bryce is, for Iris, a mentor, a teasing at least this one) feels compelled to psychoanalyze African hospital, each veers sharply to offer the (unconsummated) love interest and a case to be the doctors, mostly because the authors did so only substantial story of black African nurses who get rescued. Wuitchik’s John Rourke, an obstetrician sparingly. Both are propelled to a large degree by involved with the visiting white doctors. who served in field hospitals during the Balkan guilt. Bryce failed to save his own small child who The Strength of Bone begins with Torontonian wars of the 1990s and the civil war in Sierra Leone, died of cancer back in Toronto. “[Henry] started Henry Bryce arriving at Malawi’s Blantyre airport, is a self-described “medical cowboy” with a pen- planning the trip when he knew he’d lost her. When about to take a post at the local hospital where he chant for nurses (his wife, a Croat, turns out to have it was official. This is why he is here … one last will work with a crusty Australian named Ellison worked the same war he did though they did not lurching effort to hold on to things, aspects of life and a staff of Malawians. One, a nurse named Iris, meet until Vancouver). For Mariama he was a men- that can be grasped, like where you live, what you forms a kind of unspoken alliance with Bryce by tor, a brief (one-night stand) love interest and then do, who you help.” Rourke failed to protect either doing things that perplex Ellison and the senior a lost soul she watched scramble with the rest of the nurse Mariama or a newborn he and she had just Malawians, like repainting the dingy wards in bright ex-pats to board a fleeing helicopter. The men have delivered from a dying mother during his last days colours. The story intensifies when the team takes a lot to live down and they attempt to do so: Bryce in Freetown. His leaping onto a helicopter to save off on a field trip to a place that turns out to be Iris’s by struggling to decide whether or not he is going to his own skin has bothered him for ten years, caus- ancestral village. There, she shifts to the forefront, “go native”; Rourke by deciding to abandon his new ing him to lose confidence in obstetrics and turn to wrestling with the contradictions and demons that and pregnant wife and return to Sierra Leone to try psychiatry. confront her life while the visiting Canadian, Bryce, to track down Mariama. The idea of guilt-tormented white men seeking undertakes odd things such as climbing the local Through it all, Lucie Wilk’s prose is terse and some kind of expiation in the back corners of Africa sacred mountain, getting lost and needing to be spare. “In Toronto the hospitals are neat white is a theme that demands examination. “Westerners rescued. boxes, packaged like takeout containers,” she off to Africa to do good” is such a recurring trope In My Heart Is Not My Own, John Rourke, now writes. “The stink of illness is swept clean and that it cannot be allowed to stand as self-evident; practising in Vancouver, receives, through circuit- the suffering is tucked into bed with the curtains everyone has a right to know what is proper. Are ous channels, a battered diary belonging to a nurse drawn. Here in Blantyre, bodies are wet with the Malawians allowed to go to Canada or Australia to sweat of prolonged struggle and the air is thick with work out their personal demons? More analysis is Larry Krotz is the author of seven books, including the sour odour of a losing battle.” Wuitchik’s My needed and I looked eagerly in both books to find The Uncertain Business of Doing Good: Outsiders Heart Is Not My Own, although vivid and engaging, some. But the looming question remained: why in Africa (University of Manitoba Press, 2008). His particularly as Rourke travels though the Sierra should Africa and Africans—and African women most recent title is Piecing the Puzzle: The Genesis Leone countryside in search of Mariama, unfortu- in particular—have to put up with such characters of AIDS Research in Africa (University of Manitoba nately slips whenever the character gets close to a using their countries and situations as laboratories Press, 2012). woman. Wuitchik portrays his first personnarrator to work out their own problems?
18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada A Haunting Crime Revisited The Emanuel Jacques murder through the eyes of a young Toronto boy. Steven Hayward
yellow or lime green—became buffers to city ful man I had ever seen, more handsome Kicking the Sky noise. A persistent hum was all we heard. than the Marlboro Man or any of the actors or Anthony De Sa singers my sister had cut out of Tiger Beat and Doubleday Canada This “persistent hum” that pervades the city in plastered on her bedroom walls. 360 pages, hardcover the aftermath of the Jacques murder is heard with ISBN 9780385664387 particular clarity by young Antonio Rebelo, the If the scene is somewhat heavy-handed—homo- novel’s narrator. Like Jacques, Antonio is twelve erotic desire makes its debut at the very moment years old, and, although he has not actually met De Sa’s protagonist mounts a bleeding pig—it also n the summer of 1977 Toronto was a city the murdered boy, Antonio understands the two of captures the confusions of adolescence and the on the move, a boomtown rising out of the them to be part of the same Portuguese commun- unpredictability of desire. The enticing face in Iashes of the Big Smoke. Finishing touches ity. Like his best friends, Manny and Ricky, Antonio the crowd belongs to James, a seductive stranger were being placed on an improbably ambitious sees the Jacques murder as a reminder of his vul- who remains both a forbidding and inviting pres- building in the south of the city that, when com- nerability, but also a call to action. “Our parents had ence to Antonio for the rest of the novel as he pleted, would be the tallest freestanding structure told us to be afraid,” Antonio relates, “warned us of struggles to define and accept his sexual orienta- in the entire world. The glittering tion in a place and time where Eaton Centre had just opened its homophobia—after the Jacques doors. The Maple Leafs seemed on De Sa gives us a coming-of-age novel, murder—is rampant. De Sa gives the precipice of greatness follow- us what is a coming-of-age novel, ing a season in which their cap- but one that takes place in a world in other words, but one that takes tain, Darryl Sittler, had scored ten place in a world where innocence points in a single game. The Blue where innocence seems an impossibility. seems an impossibility. Jays were winging their way into Things become more complex existence. And then, amid it all, for Antonio after he sees the face of arrived the news of the Emanuel Jacques murder. the dangers lurking on the city’s main drag. But we Jesus in a limpet shell, a miracle that would be hil- Jacques was a twelve-year-old shoeshine boy wouldn’t let their fears stop us.” arious if not for the fact that everyone in Antonio’s who had recently immigrated to Canada from Despite such resolution—or perhaps because of world takes it so seriously. “It’s a sign,” declares his the Azores. Offering him $35 to help move some it—Antonio finds himself affected by the murder, father, holding the shell in his shaking hands. “It’s photography equipment, three men lured Jacques his life enveloped by it. “Our teachers … spent those what everyone’s been waiting for,” whispers his into a room above the Charlie’s Angels body-rub first weeks trying to make sense of Emanuel’s mur- mother. Antonio’s parents are firmly working class: parlour on Yonge Street where they held him cap- der for us,” he recalls. “From day one, every assign- his mother works long hours in a hospital steril- tive for twelve hours. They assaulted and raped ment, every class discussion had a kind of sadness ization department “where they fired up all the him repeatedly. Afterwards, he was strangled and to it.” In one of the most memorable scenes in the test tubes and beakers that held diseases and body drowned in a kitchen sink. Three days later, one of novel, the slaughter of a pig coincides with the news parts”; his father runs a construction business spe- the men confessed and led the police to Jacques’s that Jacques’s body has been discovered. De Sa’s cializing in digging out basements. Antonio sympa- body, which had been hidden under a pile of debris prose works subtly to convey how the two events thizes with the plight and position of his father at on the building’s roof. The two remaining men were have become enmeshed in his youthful narrator’s the same time as he is alienated by it, embarrassed apprehended shortly afterward on a train bound for mind as the death of the pig is described with a by his parents’ fervent Catholicism, but also by the the West Coast. morbid sensuality: “The pig continued to struggle, nakedly entrepreneurial manner in which his father It is the Jacques murder that provides the back- letting out high-pitched squeals. My uncles took reacts to the sighting of the limpet miracle, turning ground of Anthony De Sa’s affecting, intensely per- up their positions along the pig’s haunches and Antonio into a local celebrity, allegedly able to cure sonal second book, Kicking the Sky: pressed their weight against its rough skin … before the sick and console the inconsolable. “It’s the right I knew it I had climbed onto the table and found thing to do,” Antonio tries telling himself as he sur- It was the summer that no one slept. During myself sitting on top of the pig’s hind legs.” An veys the line of people who have come to be “cured” the last sticky week in July, the air aban- active participant in the slaughter, Antonio is ush- by him, as unmoored from their certainties by the doned us, failing to stir and stream through ered into manhood. But at the same time—indeed Jacques murder as he is himself, “they just needed our streets and between our crooked alleys. at the very instant when the neck of the animal is to believe in something.” The grass in our lanes stood tall and still, opened—Antonio catches a glimpse of a face in the Kicking the Sky reminds us of a time before barely rooted to an urban soil of gravel and crowd to which he is inexplicably drawn: Toronto was the megacity it is today, when it was on discarded candy wrappers. The narrow brick the precipice of the cosmopolitan, but was not quite row houses that lined Palmerston Avenue The pig’s muscles tensed, its squeal stretched there. De Sa takes us back to the summer when the and Markham Street—painted electric blue or into a cry … I was looking for Manny and city found itself suddenly transformed, when it, Ricky when I saw a face I had never seen like Antonio himself, struggled to understand itself. Steven Hayward teaches in the English Department before. He stood in the laneway with the Like the riot at Christie Pits in the 1930s, the mur- of Colorado College. His most recent book is the others, but he didn’t belong. He was younger der of Emanuel Jacques seemed to many—then, as bestselling novel and Globe 100 selection, Don’t Be than all the rest, maybe twenty or so. His blue now—the sort of thing that could never happen in Afraid. He is also the creator and host of the NPR eyes looked at me sitting atop the pig. He Toronto the Good. De Sa’s novel reminds us that radio program Off Topic. smiled, and I thought he was the most beauti- this is not the case. That it was never the case.
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 19 Excerpt Goodbye to All That The cultural causes — and fallout — of climate change. Stephen Henighan
In 1984, recent university graduate Stephen Henighan went hiking in Alaska with a friend, an emerging wildlife biologist. As they experi- enced the state’s austere beauty together, the biologist predicted that by 2050 or so, it would probably all be over. “We would be choking on fumes, murdering each other for the last scraps of food and mouthfuls of fresh water. Why? ‘Too many god- damn people.’” Three decades later, Henighan has written A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change, in which he tries to come to grips with his friend’s dire prediction, not in terms of the science but in terms of the cultural impact climate change is having on our lives and our thinking as members of the human species. Here are two excerpts:
No Other World In 2011 the United States launched its last space shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS). After thirty years and 135 launches, the shuttle was discarded as expen- sive, unreliable, and unable to recoup on the hundreds of billions of dollars that had been invested in its development and maintenance. The closure of the ISS was announced for 2020. The to visit the moon by the 2030s, yet it was obvious sions: the need to recover from the loss of face Russians continued to send cosmonauts into orbit that intergalactic travel had slipped down the list of caused by the Sputnik launch and establish control close to the earth, the Chinese, having launched planetary priorities. of the heavens in order to confirm the superiority of the first taikonauts, announced vague ambitions To anyone raised during the Cold War, when our side’s system here on Earth. expanding the realm of human activity to other It is astonishing that, with the relatively primi- Stephen Henighan, nominated for the Governor planets, and eventually other solar systems, tive technology of the 1960s, men were able to land General’s Literary Award for his essays, is the seemed to be only a matter of time, this news had on the Moon. In fact, to the average Blackberry- author of ten books, including A Report on the a certain poignancy. How many of us gathered wielding yuppie of the 2010s, the claim that the Afterlife of Culture (Biblioasis, 2008) and the novel around black-and-white television sets as Neil rudimentary computers of 1969 were able to chart The Streets of Winter (Thistledown Press, 2004). Armstrong’s shadowy boot descended from a lad- a spaceship’s route to the Moon is downright suspi- His journalism has appeared in many publica- der onto the lunar surface! We followed Star Trek cious. And if it was possible to go to the Moon in tions, including The Walrus, the Times Literary and gobbled down science fiction novels. Just as it 1969, why did President Richard Nixon abolish the Supplement, Toronto Life and the LRC. never occurred to me, until I was perched on a high lunar program in 1973? Surely with time the trip Excerpted with permission from A Green bluff in the Alaskan wilderness, that human civiliza- should have become easier? Witnessing the mul- Reef: The Impact of Climate Change by Stephen tion was in peril, I never doubted that I would live tiple failures that have attended NASA’s attempts to Henighan (Linda Leith Publishing, ISBN to see the day of free and easy transportation to the use the technology of the early twenty-first century 9781927535271). This is the fourth volume in the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Yet, like most people, to supply and maintain the ISS, which circles in the Linda Leith Publishing series of Singles, essays on I failed to realize that my conception of the future relative proximity of the Earth’s orbit, has stoked subjects such as public education, migration and was a product of the ideology and circumstances many people’s secret belief that the Cubans are the future of Canadian broadcasting. Available in of my past. The frenzied race to get to the Moon by right to teach schoolchildren the lunar landing bookstores, from etailers and from
20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada space as a boundless “final frontier,” as Star Trek as it was restricted to the privileged, and not exces- blance to our own physiognomies and behaviour, proclaimed, has withered. To offset the ensuing sively heavily populated, regions of Western Europe are among those most endangered by the fall-out pessimism, the U.S. government followed up the and North America. As this life—or “lifestyle,” as it is from our gluttony. African economic growth—as we final shuttle launch with the announcement of a now called—has spread throughout the world, par- conceive “growth”—reduces the chances of survival century-long feasibility study on intergalactic travel. ticularly to very heavily populated nations in Asia, for Kirk’s red colobus monkey or the mountain gor- Given that the select group of scientists chosen for it has become a liability. And, since it has spread illas of Uganda and Rwanda, just as, in earlier eras, the “One-Hundred-Year Starship Study” is not due hand-in-hand with an ideology of mass consump- economic growth put an end to Great Britain’s wolf to deliver their report until approximately 2115, it tion, profit maximization, and individual liberty, to populations and North Americans mowed down is clear that not only will we not be building cities the verge of libertarian social irresponsibility, it has the buffalo and clubbed the passenger pigeon. on Mars any time soon, it is possible that humans become impossible to curb. In fact, our history of spreading extinction goes will never go there. Unmanned craft have visited all We are victims of our global triumph. There is no much farther back; it is almost our defining charac- of the planets, yet whether humans would survive natural habitat on Earth where we do not dominate. teristic to snuff out other species. The appearance the return journey of more than a year’s duration to A species like any other, we measure our success of humans during the Pleistocene epoch (the time the red planet, with its attendant exposure to solar by our proliferation, our ability to flood the world between 2.6 million and 11,700 years ago) coincides flares and other perils of the intergalactic highway, with genetic extensions of ourselves until there with the great Quaternary Extinctions, a rolling is a very large question. Even the Moon seems are “too many goddamn people.” Yet we are a spe- succession of species annihilations that started increasingly irrelevant to our dilemmas here on cies like no other. Where other species consume about fifty thousand years ago and in many cases Earth. As our planet’s orbit becomes clogged with according to instinct, eating sprouts or insects or coincided with the arrival of humans. As people satellites conducting cellphone signals, predicting fish or other mammals, we consume omnivorously walked out of Africa, where we originated, and the weather or spying on the competition, it grows and extravagantly. We gobble down not only plants invaded the rest of the planet, many of the world’s increasingly evident that this hub of activity is the and animals, but trees, rocks and petroleum. We populations of larger mammals were hunted outer rim of our world. to their last survivor. In North We have no planet but this one. America, the crescendo of this For much of the last fifty years we We have no planet but this one. For march of death occurred between have been able to delude ourselves ten and thirteen thousand years on this point. But with the elimina- much of the last 50 years we have been ago. Of the one hundred and tion of an active space program, able to delude ourselves on this point. three species of large mammals underscored by the final shuttle that became extinct during this launch in 2011, this evasion time, seventy-nine were found in ceased to be viable. simply must sample caviar or prawn eggs or Pacific the Americas, the most recent territory conquered As we face the prospect of “too many goddamn salmon or ostrich or sushi from the ocean floor, by humans. In Africa, where large mammals had people,” with its calamitous side-effect—which my regardless of the consequences. Over even brief been coexisting with humans for far longer (and, friend and I did not discuss in detail in 1984—of periods of time, we have grown bigger and fatter some paleontologists think, had evolved to survive severe climate change, the resources we can muster and needier. North American airline regulations, in human-dominated environments, much as the to solve the problem are limited to those present written in the 1970s, assumed an average airline raccoon has done in urban areas in recent decades) here on Earth. Since I first began to worry about cli- passenger weight of 170 pounds (77 kilograms); only two large mammal species became extinct mate change a few years ago, I’ve been astonished by 2010, the regulations were out of date because during these centuries. by the number of people who have shrugged off my the average airline passenger weighed 215 pounds The holocaust wreaked by the new human concerns by casually saying, “There’s no problem, (98 kilograms). inhabitants of the Americas is one of the central we’ll just move on to Mars,” or “Don’t worry, if To fuel our pleasures and stuff our expanding events of pre-history. Prior to the Quaternary the US Midwest turns into a desert, we can always guts with New Zealand lamb, South African apples, Extinction, the plains, forests and mountains of build greenhouses on the Moon and produce more Chilean wine, and thousands of burgers made from what is today Canada harboured mammoths, food than we’ll ever need.” Fifty years of television beef raised in clear-cuts in the former Amazonian mastodons, sabre-toothed cats, pronghorns, stag science fiction, the lightweight sidekick of Cold rainforest, to give our love a rose that was picked moose, Yukon wild asses, northern llamas, native War propaganda, has left us deeply misinformed yesterday in Kenya or Ecuador, we burn carbon, American horses, short-faced bears, and dozens about our place in the universe. We will never be deplete the ozone layer, and heat up the planet. We of other creatures that fell before the thoughtless interstellar cowboys. Like survivors of a shipwreck, are the most savage of all animals because, unlike hunters’ clubs, spears, and arrows. Today we praise humanity clings to a small, fertile blue-green reef other predators, we do not eat individual members the aboriginal peoples of the Americas for having in the middle of a limitless, hostile ocean. If we of other species, but rather drive the entire species learned to live in harmony with nature. This wis- become too numerous to live on the bounty of this to extinction. We are aware of how our species is dom was attained at a price. By the time Europeans reef, there is nowhere else to go. We will die gasping doing on other continents: we know that Africa, a began to settle in the Americas in the early six- for breath. dismal place for most of its inhabitants as recently teenth century, indigenous people had enshrined The end of the US space program, and the com- as the mid-1990s, is now showing promise. Millions animals as sacred. The hunt was a religious ritual, parative lack of urgency with which the Russians of Africans remain trapped in desolate poverty, or conducted with respect and restraint to ensure and Chinese approach their space endeavours, is are even vulnerable to periodic bouts of starvation; that species would survive to provide sustenance a salutary event: a reminder, precisely when we yet the number of Africans who can live like us, and in coming years. At some point thousands of years needed it most, that human life is inseparable from consume like us, increases every year. By speeding ago, the indigenous peoples absorbed the know- the life of this planet. A renewed commitment to up the loss of species and raising the temperature ledge that by depleting the environment that sus- Earth, a sensitivity to the interconnections between of the planet, this victory for humankind brings our tained them, they would also destroy themselves. our ability to breathe and nourish ourselves, and own species one step closer to self-destruction. But this awareness was not there at the beginning those of the plants and animals, is indispensable to Human activity has accelerated extinction. It is a of aboriginal American civilization, just as it is lack- us. There is no escape, no other place of refuge. We normal part of the evolutionary process for super- ing in the ways in which we comport and govern live here or we die here. At the moment, the odds annuated species to go extinct. Prior to human ourselves today. are that a large number of human communities, interference, about one species out of every hun- Like the aboriginal people of the Late probably a majority of them, will die. Our death will dred thousand went extinct each year. This rate has Pleistocene, we are on the brink of demolishing our be caused by the fact that more and more human increased by a factor of at least one hundred and own longhouse. Yet, even as species vanish before beings aspire to live—and now have the means to perhaps as much as one thousand (not all species the encroachment of highways, oil fields, clear-cuts, live—the lives enjoyed by most of the people who have been documented, and scientists tend to be housing developments, poachers, the drying-up of will have the opportunity to read this book: eating cautious about declaring species extinct); species wetlands, and the blighting of coral reefs, others fruit in the dead of winter, flying to other cities for are now going extinct before successor species have migrate in response to the threat of climate change. business or to other continents for pleasure, turn- been able to develop. The last time species were Just as in Central Canada, the raccoon has adapted ing on the air conditioning when it gets too hot, disappearing as quickly as they are today was sixty- to the human environment by changing from owning a private car and using it even for errands in five million years ago, during the extinction of the an animal of the forests to a creature of the city the town or city where we live. This life posed only dinosaurs. Ironically, our primate cousins, who streets—masked neighbours who hang improbably a limited threat to the home we all inhabit as long look and often act in ways that have an eerie resem- from lamp-posts in downtown Toronto and feed off
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 21 the city’s garbage as they once fed off the residues from his loss will be a distant ache. The polar bear into our daily travails. As politicians warn of the of the woods—so tropical life-forms that were not may live on in our culture as a mythological beast. incursions of Spanish or Japanese factory fishing part of the Canadian landscape in the past are Yet what will have been destroyed is the idea that ships on our Atlantic coast and the unannou‑nced venturing farther north as the planet warms. The Gould was able to take for granted and which he arrival of shiploads of undocumented immigrants mountain pine beetle, the Japanese ladybug, and explored in his program: the belief that the north from China or Sri Lanka on our Pacific coast, so the African killer bee, previously contained by our was almost infinite; that it was the place that epit- our north is now a frontier with the world, where long, cold winters, contribute to the alteration of omized Canadian solitude. the opening of the northwest passage to shipping our environment. As our world grows hotter, the We now understand that, like the rest of the embroils us in disputes about territorial limits and range of some insects and animals expands, while planet, the north has finite resources that are fast Arctic sovereignty with the Russians, the Americans, others, like polar bears, struggle to the Chinese, the South Koreans, and survive. The extinction of species We live here or we die here. At the even the peace-loving Danes. The proceeds along multiple axes, some- climate of the north is heating up in times as the direct result of human moment, the odds are that a large all ways imaginable. Glenn Gould intervention, and in other cases concluded “The Idea of North” with as collateral damage of the larger number of human communities, the prediction that in the future the process of global warming. Many north would look like everywhere species’ best hope for survival lies in probably a majority of them, will die. else in Canada; that it would “look the possibility that the species that like suburbia.” What is certain is that caused our planet to begin getting hotter, the spe- being depleted; that if one tramples lichen, it may climate change has already integrated the north cies that destroys the habitats of others, will have its take five hundred years to grow back. Te fact into daily life more than we ever expected. We have numbers drastically reduced. of being bordered by the north has cushioned been stripped of a zone of purity and mystery that And that is almost certainly about to happen. Canadians’ perceptions of the world; where other was one of the keys to the Canadian self-image of countries had difficult neighbours, we had nothing- living at a one-step remove from the hurly-burly of The Loss of the North ness stretching to infinity. Sheer space insulated planetary life. Just as we have been deprived of the For Canadians, at least, part of the difficulty in us, making us feel exempt from the crafty diplo- knowledge that robust polar bears prowl the firm ice accepting the reality of global warming is that we matic manipulations enforced on peoples in more of our Arctic, so we are losing the defining traits of always imagined we would die of cold. Winter was cramped geographic locations. Global warming has long, hard winters, the reassuring routines of con- our monster, the equivalent in our mythology to the already evaporated this Canadian presumption of sistent bird migration patterns, and the possibility of dragons of the ancient British Isles or the minotaurs morally superior separation. Since public figures, using cross-country skis for five months of the year. of classical Greece. In school we read Sinclair Ross’s foregoing the traditional Canadian A mari usque ad This is only the beginning. There is no public will short story “The Lamp at Noon,” and other accounts mare that adorns our coat of arms, began to speak to implement a solution, and in any event it may be of the lethal fates that awaited those who got caught of a Canada “from sea to sea to sea”—a phrase too late; even the most drastic measures will pro- outside their cabin in a blizzard. Snow and wind, as popularized in the early 1990s by the Yukon polit- duce limited results in the very long term. But even in Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska, were the malevolent ician Audrey McLaughlin—the north has become if we did have the collective will to do something to forces that kept lovers apart. We listened to radio merely one more region of Canada. The melting save our natural world, of which we ourselves are a recitations of Robert Service poems about Dan of the polar ice has incorporated the Arctic Ocean part, what actions could we or should we take? McGrew deciding to button up his shirt at sixty degrees below zero. We anthropomorphized winter until it became almost visible, nearly possessed of facial features. In her analysis of E.J. Pratt’s poem The Titanic, Margaret Atwood summarizes Pratt’s description of the iceberg that sinks the ocean liner by concluding that, “Pratt renders it as semi-alive, a sort of Night of the Living Dead zombie, complete with a face, a claw, a lair, and an ‘impulse.’” … Winter was our monster, but the north, where winter went on even longer than it did in New Brunswick or Ontario or Saskatchewan, has always felt remote to Canadians who lived in the ten prov- inces rather than the three territories. Relatively few of us have visited Whitehorse or Yellowknife, much less Iqaluit, Resolute Bay, or Ellesmere Island. In 1967, when the pianist Glenn Gould prepared a CBC radio documentary entitled, “The Idea of North,” he broadcast all of the voices against a back- drop soundtrack of the so-called Muskeg Express making its two-day journey over the rails from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba. The relentless chugging of the train along the track, accompany- ing each interview, conveyed a sense of infinite, almost unimaginable distance. As Gould astutely observed, the north belonged to the imagination of Canadians, not, in most cases, to their lived experi- ence. As we watch skinny polar bears churning for a foothold on dissolving ice floes on television, the spectacle feels impossibly remote; yet it does strike a chord within us. The polar bear is far away and he is ours. He is almost one of us, yet not quite suf- ficiently one of us for us to be willing to reduce our consumption in the hope that the bear will be able to tread on more solid ice floes in the future. Even if the polar bear becomes extinct, at some level he will still be there in our minds, as an emblem of Canadianness and northernness; since he was never part of our lived reality, the wound we feel
22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada A Chinese-Canadian Tapestry Individual stories, woven into a subtle picture of immigrant life. J.J. Lee
with his second wife and a stepbrother. To do in the restaurant. This may sound rather blunt, but Lives of the Families: so, Fay-Oi must leave behind her own biological I say this with all humility and love, believe me. I Stories of Fate and Circumstance mother, or First Mother, and pose as the daughter cannot be a puppet and at the same time a creative Denise Chong of her Second Mother. Alternatively, she is offered human being.” Random House the chance to come later as a wife of another Chong acknowledges in the book’s introduction 240 pages, hardcover Chinese man. Either way, the bargain demands that she avoided the gaudier, more arabesque life ISBN 9780307361233 that she strip away portions of her identity and histories, like Ruth Lor’s, when she encountered adopt another. Once reunited with her father, she them in her research. She explains, “I honed in on tentatively adopts the name Marilyn. When she dis- the lone Chinese family and their restaurant in a n Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and covers she cannot pronounce the “l”, a family friend Canadian town as a way to convey the immigrant Circumstance, the award-winning non-fiction bestows upon her the name Marion. experience. Behind that sign on the business, and Iauthor Denise Chong tells the story of Chinese On the other side of the country, Chong intro- in the rooms behind or the apartment above, the immigrants and their adjustment to life in Canada duces readers to the Fongs of Perth, Ontario. The everyday life of the family would test their ability during a time when clan adopts an English to adapt.” their opportunities name, Johnston, and As a result, the book is both big and small, inti- were limited. The book is both big runs Harry’s Café. mate and distant, and it comes together in a way Chong’s first work and small, intimate and Working in the kitchen that I can best describe as anti-epic. Lives of the in the area of family is Hum Sang, brother Families shares the many features of an epic. It has history focused on her distant, and it comes to the family matriarch, a sweeping scale covering decades, a large cast of own. The Concubine’s Mabel Johnston. Sang characters, and a number of historical and social Children: Portrait of a together in a way that I on arrival decides to go forces—laws like the Chinese head tax and the Family Divided, which by James, then Jasper. Chinese Exclusion Act, and ground-shifting events became a bestseller, can best describe as When he finds out his like Japan’s invasion of China, the Second World explored the life of May- older brother has been War and the communist takeover of China—that ying, her fiery maternal anti-epic. killed by communists act with the capriciousness of gods to motivate, hin- grandmother, whose der, upheave and ulti- life was marked by betrayal, gambling, alcohol- in China, Jasper passes mately haunt Chong’s ism and sexual misadventure. This time around, off his nephew as his The stories go on, protagonists. But the through interviews, letters and archives, Chong son and brings him jumping from one family author eschews grand expands the scope and recounts the small struggles to Canada. The boy, gestures and focuses on for dignity, the good life and sense of belonging of age seven, takes the to another, from one a domestic sphere. It is several families of Chinese immigrants in various name Kenny. And so a close, muted world parts of Canada. the stories go on, jump- person’s perspective to of café kitchens, back Her protagonists, Chong shows, are at times left ing from one family booths and upstairs with little opportunity for any agency. But despite to another, from one another, like so many apartments, where loss their confinement, they do strive. And many of person’s perspective to and even great hor- their successes arise because they are able to rely another, like so many shuttles on an ever- ror are deflected by on people like themselves for survival. The families shuttles on an ever- both the author and seek each other across a strange and sometimes expanding loom. And expanding loom. her subjects. Of a pair bleak Canadian landscape where even a slippery the thread of Fay-Oi, if a of neighbours, Chong Ottawa sidewalk can present itself as an obstacle. reader can remember her, re-emerges only near the writes: “The two friends did not bring up the past Families are reunited. New ones are formed from end of Chong’s book to make a connection to the that was China … to bring up the past would be to the broken pieces of tragedy. Their lives become Johnstons, again, if the reader remembers them. talk about it too much and not enough at the same deeply intertwined and, as a result, Chong ends That is not to say that Chong fails to uncover time. Memories push up and then you have to push up shaping a genealogical tapestry that at times fascinating lives. Indeed, there are standouts such them back down.” favours the overall pattern of their immigration as the young Ruth Lor, who in the spring of 1954 Chong’s insistence on pushing up and then rather than the warps and wefts of her subjects’ fails to return home to work at the family restaurant pushing down, favouring doggedness over individual stories. and joins the American civil rights movement in brilliance, to weave an emblematic whole of In the first chapter, readers are introduced to Washington DC. Ruth’s story tantalizes. A reader the Chinese Canadian experience rather than 15-year-old Fay-Oi Lim. In 1950, her father, already can imagine Ruth’s struggle with internalized rac- highlighting the bright strands, suggests a near- in Vancouver, beckons her to immigrate to Canada ism and, more significantly, how she may have Tolstoyan reading of immigrant history. Leo Tolstoy confronted her own prejudices and stereotypes of exhorts in the last line of War and Peace, that it is J.J. Lee is the author of the 2011 memoir The black people. Indeed, Ruth’s summer of escape and “essential to surmount a consciousness of an unreal Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son social awakening could well be the stuff of a whole freedom and to recognise a dependence not per- and a Suit. It was shortlisted for the 2011 Governor novel but in Lives of the Families her arc is truncated ceived by our senses.” General’s Literary Award for nonfiction, the 2012 into a mere anecdote and one fragment of a tart let- With Lives of the Families, Chong brings those Charles Taylor Prize and the 2012 Hilary Weston ter from Ruth to her mother, “I cannot be a puppet, connections, some strong, some weak, to the fore. Writers’ Trust Prize. which is what I am every time I come home to work
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 23 Hanging On Forever The deeply human desire for everlasting life. Salem Alaton
engagement for the next 370-plus pages, however, sometimes overpriced even for a quarter. The St. The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief he soon follows with “immortality is an abstract Augustine site is in a ramshackle state today, with and Magic Behind Living Forever concept that helps us make sense of death.” It is the water pumped from below ground rather than Adam Leith Gollner from this premise that Gollner takes us on a some- burbling above it like an ejaculate of divinity, and Doubleday what improvisational journey among those who that town’s own historical society disavowed any 402 pages, hardcover articulate the urge to evade death or be reconciled longevity claims since 1929. The episode confers ISBN 9780385667302 with it. As flagged in the subtitle, the book is divided a kind of road-trip jauntiness to Gollner’s inquiry, into sections on belief, magic and science. The tasty although readers may wonder why they must tarry irony is that since science is also caught without so long in examinations of unvarnished huckster- once asked Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail plausible avenues to endless life, all such impulses ism, a global tradition in the peddling of immortal- film critic, a number of years before his pass- hinge on a form of faith, including the version that ity for millennia. Iing from AIDS, if he was afraid of dying. “I’m has us glibly extrapolating from progress in stem- So the author provides his share of wry afraid of not being alive,” he said, responding with cell research to an unlimited corporeal existence observations, but also does something slightly his usual alacrity to loose ponderings in our tweedy that leaves intact all the psychological tics that have unexpected—he largely favours a tone tempered by arts ghetto at the newspaper. “There’s a difference.” already maddened our spouses for the last 20 years. respectfulness. On one hand, we see that science, While some Buddhists discern little differ- Indeed, we are told that 70 percent of Canadians or pseudo-science that passes as the real thing for ence in being or not being alive, a while, is as given to credulous- seeing death as simply part of ness at times as any other belief an infinite churn, humans have According to Gollner, 70 percent of system; on the other, the value of echoed Scott’s concern since time mythologies that underpin reli- immemorial: Neanderthals buried Canadians believe in life after death. gious thought hinges on releasing kin in a fetal position in anticipa- factuality in favour of evoking tion of rebirth. We have run with faith. “We can’t understand,” says remedies to extend life from harvesting the lichen believe in life after death. In the long struggle Gollner’s old teacher, the priest, of the life force, from the skull of a hanged man (medieval super- between belief and knowledge, neither side can “so stop trying.” While rationality cannot access the stition) to the transplanting of ape testicles onto fully prevail. unseen, Gollner tells us, whatever we cannot prove, human gonads (1920s science). Semang pygmies Death starts as a mystery to children, one whose we can believe in. believed that having all bones broken and eyes properties seep through inexorably to generate Gollner brings this courtesy to views such as reversed to look inwards would permit immortal fearful wonder. When I was very small, my parents an Islamic principle that physical immortality is access to breast-milk fruit on an island for souls. pulled the car over at some rural gas station where unavailable but the immortality of the soul “is Barely less fanciful to those who insist on a strictly another vehicle sported freshly shot deer on its roof. obvious.” A Hasidic rabbi tells him that life is a hall- rational reckoning, a contemporary cryogenics “Are they sleeping?” I asked my mother, unable to way in which we work on repairing the soul before movement freezes corpses with the notion that understand the alternative. Jung counselled that we it is housed in another body to repeat the process. there will eventually be a means to reanimate them find a goal in death, Gollner reminds us, but that is Then again, it also turns out that mainstream with personality intact. an undertaking only for the ripest maturity. Judaism is mostly unconcerned with an aftermath If it sounds as though there are not always dis- Yet to the fear of not being alive, some forms to death. And on the scientific side, some paths to cernable lines between legend, faith and scientific of “immortality” have traction, the author allows. continuity would be unattractive even if they were adventure when it comes to the matter of what Worms eat our corpses and nourish the soil and plausible. A mind-machine meld, for example; comes next, that is exactly the ongoing reveal in thus new life; or our genetic presence is granted without sex or pizza, what is the point? Adam Leith Gollner’s The Book of Immortality: The extension through children. But this is not what Gollner’s concession to the human need for Science, Belief and Magic Behind Living Forever. Pope Innocent VIII had in mind in drinking on his belief is most apparent in the book’s central portion A Montreal-based journalist who previously took deathbed the blood of three boys who lost their own on magic, anchored by a long description of inter- readers on a global search for exotic edibles (The lives in a futile effort to continue his. Woody Allen’s actions with celebrity magician, David Copperfield. Fruit Hunters), Gollner goes calling at sites ranging non-joke on the matter was that he did not want The star eventually permits Gollner to visit an from the nursing home of a priest who had taught to live on through his work, but by not dying. “We exclusive resort he has created in the Bahamas, him cinema in university to a tourist-trap fountain want immortality so badly that we’re always ready where there is talk Copperfield has come upon vivi- of youth in Florida to the Harvard Medical School. to be swept away into unthinkingness,” remarks fying waters. Even in a billionaire’s luxury version of Along the way he encounters outlandish assertions Gollner. St. Augustine, there is something almost poignant about immortality or receives blunt admissions This last point is readily bolstered with a quick in the way the master illusionist reveals his craving from clergy and researchers alike that the answers trip to St. Augustine, Florida, where the sometimes for the magic that operates on the unseen plane far are not forthcoming. “The smartest longevity sci- pure tawdriness of the quest for endless life is on from his triumphant stage shows. Gollner never entists in America are gathered here today,” one impressive—or is it depressive?—display in the gets to see these waters but permits himself a kind expert told him at the Harvard conference, “and putative Ponce de Leon stomping grounds. At of yearning for them that transcends journalistic none of them know how aging works.” the turn of the 20th century there, the tall tales of query. Gollner opens his book with the ultimate well- a woman best known to posterity as Diamond Lil But, as if with a whiff of the shaman Jim Mor- that’s-that pronouncement: “Immortality doesn’t (wife of Eddie “Easy Money” McConnell), drew rison in his nostrils, he snaps back soon enough: actually exist.” Mindful of the need to secure reader visitors to pay 25 cents a glass for sulphur-inflected “[Death’s] our condition, and we deserve to cele- spring water. With its birth, rebirth and beginning- brate it. Death, too, is inescapable. It awaits all of Salem Alaton teaches journalism at Humber of-life-on-Earth associations, water is present in us always. It’s our one true friend, our constant College. much mythology of our coming into being, but is companion, our soul mate.”
24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Credulity Lives! Human belief in flim-flam appears to be limitless. Arno Kopecky
Apparently, that the credulity of our species knows 1970, 1981, 1982, 1987 and 2003, without locating Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, no bounds. anything larger than a seal. The legend survives, as Nessie and Other Famous Cryptids Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero, the skep- do the hotels. Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero tics who penned Abominable Science!, deserve But, the believers insist, absence of evidence Columbia University Press applause for this definitive response to a century’s is not evidence of absence, as Sherlock Holmes 411 pages, hardcover worth of international flim-flam. Ninety-three told us (and it is worth noting, as Loxton and Pro- ISBN 9780231153201 pages of footnotes attest to their researching zeal; thero do, that Arthur Conan Doyle unintentionally the book’s compassionate tone demonstrates the helped prepare the ground for all this with The love they have for their subject—or rather sub- Lost World, in which humans and plesiosaurs y god, what do you have to jects, for in addition to exposing the fraudulent shared the landscape). In cases like these, though, “ show them before they’ll take it testimonies and fake artifacts on which the legend it is pretty close. For Nessie to exist, she must have Mseriously?” of Bigfoot (aka Sasquatch) rests, they also take on radar-proof skin similar to that of certain U.S. attack So cried Bigfoot quester René Dahinden in 1967, the Loch Ness monster, Yeti (aka the Abominable helicopters. By the same token, the Congo dinosaur after scientists at the American Museum of Natural Snowman), the Great Sea Serpent feared by ancient must have erased the last 65 million years of its History in New York, along with their counter- mariners and, lastly, the Congo dinosaur known fossil record, just as the flesh and bones of Bigfoot parts at the Smithsonian, the University of British as Mokele Mbembe, “one who stops the flow of must dissolve at the moment of death, in order for Columbia and several other notable institutions, rivers.” Perhaps motivated by the knowledge that humans to have failed to discover a single cadaver unanimously discounted the most famous Bigfoot ridiculing people is a bad way of converting them in its well-trodden habitat. video in history as a hoax. to your cause, Loxton and Prothero take care not to And what of it? Is it so bad, you may ask, for That video, filmed in 1967 in northern California insult the millions of people who believe the fan- adults to indulge in a few tooth fairy fantasies by two cowboys named Roger Patterson and Bob tasies described. They are kind and cautious, but of their own? What is wrong with a few winking Gimlin, is embedded in the North American psy- also resolute: footprint by footprint, photograph by conspiracies if they get people out into nature and che. Recorded on shaky, hand-held 16mm film, photograph, video by video, Loxton and Prothero generate a few tourism dollars? the video shows something that could either be uproot the pranks and misconceptions that gave That is the question posed in the book’s final, Bigfoot or a man in a gorilla suit marching away rise to this pantheon of modern-day monsters. and arguably most interesting, chapter, in which from the camera through a gravelly forest clear- (Soon after their book’s publication, an Oxford sci- the authors ask: “Why do people believe in ing. As it passes behind a thigh-high collection of entist made global headlines by analyzing the DNA monsters?” For his part, Loxton, a self-professed woody debris, the creature looks back toward the of two samples of Himalayan “Yeti” hair that turned “believer in everything … who eventually became filmmaker and into Bigfoot history, before passing out to be bear fur.) a ‘professional skeptic’,” sees little harm in monster out of sight. The result is an entertaining book full of illustra- hunting. “The love of cryptozoological mysteries As the authors of Abominable Science! Origins tions and photographs you forgot you had seen may offer some of the same educational benefits of the Yeti, Nessie and Other Famous Cryptids point when you were young. If some of the chapters that science advocates promote: love of the natural out, the question of the Patterson-Gimlin video’s carry on well after their point has been made, the world and experience grappling with the nature authenticity can never be 100 percent resolved authors should be forgiven: “cryptozoologists,” as of scientific evidence,” Loxton claims. It may even unless one of three things emerges: “a live or dead monster hunters call themselves, are an especially serve as a “‘gateway drug’ for science literacy,” as Sasquatch, powerful new documentary or physical stubborn lot. was the case for him. evidence that exposes the film as a hoax (such as Consider this: On April 10, 1933, King Kong Not so for Prothero, a former lecturer in geo the suit itself), or a confession.” But that does not opened to sellout crowds in London; one of the biology at Caltech and currently a research associ- mean we cannot get a pretty good idea from the movie’s more memorable scenes was of a night ate in the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology circumstantial evidence surrounding the video—in attack by a long-necked water monster. Four days at the University of Los Angeles. “Rather than particular, from the character of the principal film- later came the first sighting of the Loch Ness mon- merely wasting time and resources, the widespread maker, Roger Patterson, a man described by his ster, a long-necked denizen of the deeps that, like acceptance of the reality of cryptids may feed into own family and friends as a “highly artistic, small- the King Kong version, was clearly inspired by the the general culture of ignorance, pseudoscience, town hustler with dreams of the big score” who dinosaur fossils that had recently seized the pub- and anti-science,” something that does indeed “seems to have ripped off everyone he met.” When lic’s imagination. From that moment on, Nessie cause a great deal of demonstrable harm. Consider someone who makes money selling books and sightings soared along with their attendant hazy the discredited but still widely accepted belief that other Bigfoot paraphernalia announces that he is photographs and murky videos and newspaper routine inoculations cause autism. Or the stubborn heading into the woods to capture his subject on headlines. Tourists flocked accordingly, and by resistance to belief in evolution that persists, espe- film, then does so on the first day of his attempt 1934, loch-side bus traffic was so severe that new cially but not exclusively, in the United States. The and subsequently reaps more than $100,000 for highway rules were introduced to control the traf- list is long and growing, and it veers quickly from the effort, what is a Homo sapiens to conclude? fic. The spectacle was such that Germany’s min- locally benign prank to globally malicious propa- ister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, declared ganda. If 29 percent of Americans and 21 percent of Arno Kopecky is an environmental journalist and that Nessie was a hoax created by British tourism Canadians believe in Bigfoot to this day, should we the author of two books: The Devil’s Curve: A Jour- agencies. Never mind that the most famous Nessie be surprised that an even greater proportion of vot- ney into Power and Profit at the Amazon’s Edge photograph, shot by Marmaduke Wetherell in 1934, ers in each country refuse to believe that the Earth (Douglas and McIntyre, 2012), and The Oil Man was confirmed as a hoax by Wetherell’s son in 1975; is warming due to human activity? and the Sea: Navigating the Northern Gateway never mind that successive sonar dragnet oper- It is enough to make even an atheist cry: My God, (Douglas and McIntyre, 2013). ations scoured the entire loch in 1962, 1968, 1969, what do you have to show them?
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 25 Redefining Citizenship The Muslim-Canadian experience raises uncomfortable national questions. Melanie Adrian
analysis, with the caveat that when Islam in the Hinterlands: Muslim such stories involve Muslims, these Cultural Politics in Canada accounts are often taken as general Jasmin Zine, editor fact and readily and uncritically University of British Columbia Press accepted as “the way it is in Islam.” 325 pages, softcover ISBN 9780774822732 An Ill-Informed Media Popular media accounts about Islam are ill informed. “Muslims remain hat Pesky Muslim Prob- on the margins as demonic, abject, “ lem, Again” reads the threatening, and invasive Others Theadline of an article on belonging to the mysterious, fan- the Chronicle of Higher Education atical, premodern, and somewhat blog on the day I sit down to write this ruthless Islamic faith.” This is the review. It struck me that the headline conclusion drawn by Yasmin Jiwani aptly encapsulates the sentiment that after analyzing media coverage in the book Islam in the Hinterlands: two of Canada’s largest daily news- Muslim Cultural Politics in Canada, papers—The Globe and Mail and the edited by Jasmin Zine, is trying to National Post—in the week following counter: Muslims in Canada are not September 11, 2001. By concentrat- pesky or a problem, but provide an ing on the media coverage during opportunity to expand notions of that extraordinary week, this might citizenship and the meaning of the be construed as a skewed picture. On multicultural nation. the whole, however, the argument is Islam in the Hinterlands is a vol- convincingly advanced in this chap- ume of essays written by self-identified Muslim involvement as activists in civil society.” As con- ter (and in at least three others in the book) that the scholars (only one of the authors is not Muslim) tributor Katherine Bullock states, more research is popular media uses a simplistic binary to situate that is organized around four thematic lines of needed in order to assess the scope and effect of Muslims into very specific roles. Depending on the inquiry including gender, media, education and their involvement. topic, Muslims are cast as being anti-citizen, anti- security. The volume is well conceived and writ- Muslim women are also working for social and nation or anti-woman. On reading these chapters, ten and is a considerate reflection on Muslims in political change in Canada by taking on and cri- one gets the impression that we have not advanced Canada. tiquing certain facets of Islam directly. In Chapter 5, very far into genuine multiculturalism if a Muslim There are three main messages that emerge “Marketing Islamic Reform: Dissidence and scholar, writing about how Muslims are viewed in throughout the book that merit further discussion Dissonance in a Canadian Context,” Meena Sharify- our society, must come to these conclusions. here: Muslim women in Canada are politically Funk compares two books detailing personal But maybe we have come a little further. I would and socially engaged in their communities, Can- perspectives on Muslim communities written by suggest, based on other material in this collection, adian media accounts on Islam are ill informed Muslim women. One book tries to reform Islamic that we have. In a subsequent chapter discussing and deliberations on multiculturalism in Canada interpretation and practice and the other challen- the CBC television show Little Mosque on the Prai- are commonly caught in a problematic “us versus ges Islamic beliefs and doctrines. If we can separate rie, the reader is given a different view of how the them” binary. I will briefly look at each in turn, but the content of the books and Sharify-Funk’s per- popular media represents Muslims. On air since focus particular attention on the question of multi- spective on them for one moment, it strikes me that 2007, Little Mosque shows Muslims as complex, culturalism in Canada. the chapter demonstrates how two Muslim women varied, empowered and funny people. The show are challenging their communities in a very dir- breaks common stereotypes in every episode. Thus, The Engagement of Muslim Women ect, forthright manner. Their actions demonstrate Aliaa Dakroury argues, the CBC has, in a concerted Islam in the Hinterlands makes a strong case that both gumption and engagement and, even if we way, tried to malign prevailing labels and stereo- Muslim women are politically and socially engaged do not agree with their method or approach, this types by confronting them head on, and is using people. The volume argues that Muslim women should be recognized. Their actions help show that sitcom humour as a medium. Perhaps, one may are, on the whole, socially and politically involved it is incorrect to paint a general picture of Muslim conclude, it is not the entire media world in Canada in their communities, from working within the women as meek and afraid to speak their minds. In that portrays Muslims in a negative light … only the non-governmental sector to running for political fact, numerous studies in recent years suggest that overwhelming majority of it. office. It is a myth that ethnic minorities are less quite the opposite is true of many Muslim women.1 politically active than others, and the same is true Importantly, though, the initiative of these auth- The “Us versus Them” Double Standard for Muslims. Muslim women, while less likely to be ors is not the central point of Sharify-Funk’s chapter. Deliberations on multiculturalism in Canada are working formally, focus their attention primarily on She argues persuasively that their approaches are caught in a problematic “us versus them” binary. making change in informal sectors. Muslim women ultimately unhelpful and unenlightened due to Islam in the Hinterlands is also a work that high- are “deeply engaged in informal-sector politics” their lack of critical purchase. Their stories are per- lights and navigates the flaws of Canadian multicul- and are “politically engaged with society via their sonal and do not necessarily reflect the community turalism, revealing in thoughtful ways the historical experience as a whole. Individual and anecdotal forces, conscientious policy decisions and unequal Melanie Adrian is on faculty in the Department of accounts of life inside a faith community provide power relationships that are at the root of why Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. one important perspective in the comparative Muslim Canadians continue to be treated and
26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada labelled as not-quite-Canadian, even though they non-Western cultures as inherently ‘barbaric’.” are. Chapters 9 and 10, which take up the security The wording is certainly unrefined at best and discussions in Canada and resulting security laws it is vexing that the government chooses to target in the wake of 9/11, make this abundantly clear. certain cultural practices over others (practices The title of Chapter 10 says it plainly: “The Anti- not uniquely associated with Islam, it should be terrorism Act and National Security, Safeguarding noted—six percent of Canadians are in situations $59.99 hardcover 415 pages of spousal abuse, according to the 2011 “Family the Nation against Uncivilized Muslims.” The point 21 b/w illus., 10 tables of the chapter is also apparent: in a post–9/11 Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile” produced 6x9 world, the Muslim man was the enemy of secur- by Statistics Canada). The point Jasmin Zine is 978-1-55458-932-6 ity and threatened a vision of nationalism that making is that the type of language used in the allowed for inclusivity. According to the authors, guide reflects an “us versus them” binary that is multiculturalism and equal citizenship would carried through, and reflected onto, immigrants have to outwait this era because the security of the and citizens, ultimately rendering them less-than. country came first. Especially in times of emergency, this double stan- This is what is at the heart of the book’s critique: dard becomes more stressed. Map Worlds: A History of Women in the way multiculturalism, its policy and actors is Hinterlands points to a concern that citizenship, engaged and operates in Canada, excluding rather particularly when it comes to Muslims, depends Cartography than including Muslims from realizing truly equal on a predefined set of ideas that people are reluc- Will C. van den Hoonaard citizenship. Even when push does not come to tant to change, which are not recognized as having Map Worlds plots a journey of discovery through the shove, but especially when it does, Muslims are too an import value—or bias for that matter—of their largely unrecognized world of women map-makers. The author examines challenges faced by women in the often portrayed as “subaltern citizens.” own, and that serve to exclude other citizens. In profession, sets out the situation of women in technical What is not clear to me is if this vision of this way, Zine argues, citizenship is contingent. fields and cartography-related organizations, and multiculturalism allows for a national project that On the one hand, having a predefined set of explores their common goals of social justice and mak- puts at its heart a meaningful definition of what ideas that undergird the country is a good thing. A ing maps work for the betterment of humanity. it means to be Canadian. Statehood is, after all, society based on human rights norms and forms the way we have chosen to organize and protect of democratic action has increased resources on ourselves, so it would seem reasonable to ask all of which to cooperatively negotiate the shared values a country’s inhabitants to commit to, in continu- that delimit our national character. From this per- ously contested and differentiated ways, a certain spective, contingency may be helpful in upholding vision of citizenship. The tricky bit is, of course, and fostering a set of shared norms. On this score, $48.99 paper how one balances and demonstrates respect for perhaps Kenney might have looked up a page from 314 pages 6 colour; 1 b/w illus. varied cultures while maintaining a strong national our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms and taken 978-1-55458-984-5 framework. a human rights stance on gender in the citizenship Cultural Studies series The issue that arises is that the word “mean- guide by simply stating that Canadians strive for all ingful” in this context might come awfully close forms of equality, period. to “contingent,” a concept advanced with a nega- On the other hand, if these predefined ideas tive connotation in the introduction of the book: become too rigid or serve as a discriminatory tool “Multiculturalism is a contingent form of politics of exclusion, it might be time to rethink how we that hinges on the ability of minoritized groups to define and enact them; when citizenship becomes Parallel Encounters: Culture at the render themselves ‘citizenship-worthy’ through too narrow to realize its own evolution, we may the performance of dominant ideals, values, and wish to reconsider its meaning. Two problems with Canada-US Border practices.” The critique, as I understand it, is that contingent citizenship, for example, are that it may Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup, editors citizenship has been littered with lofty norms to be prone to ready political manipulation (as in the These essays offer analysis of cultural representations of the Canada–US border, in both site-specificity and in which all potential citizens must show allegiance— case of the citizenship guide) and that it borders the ways they reveal and conceal cultural similarities including, for example, a certain understanding on valuing certain people more highly than others. and differences. Contributors examine a variety of of equality and liberty. These norms, when they The other point often forgotten in these debates forms, including poetry, fiction, drama, visual art, are translated into practice, can (and do) become is that once anyone accedes to Canadian citizen- television, and cinema. overly constrictive, creating more exclusions than ship, his or her concerns become our collective inclusions. Add to that assumptions made about unease. While female genital mutilation may have Muslim communities in particular—about the been initially imported as a practice, it becomes treatment of women, for example—and the situa- ours once Canadian citizens are affected. This is tion becomes especially problematic. Exhibit one, how cultures change and norms are rejected and according to the editors, is the new Canadian adopted in common parlance and practice. It hap- $85.00 hardcover citizenship guide entitled “Discover Canada: The pens all the time. After all, apart from our Native 372 pages Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship.” populations, what phenomenon or idea is not a 25 b/w illus. 978-1-55458-328-7 Revised in 2009 under the direction of then cultural hybrid or imported? Multiculturalism cer- Indigenous Studies series minister for citizenship, immigration and multicul- tainly is, and maybe liberalism too. turalism, Jason Kenney, the 65-page guide includes Muslims in Canada are providing an opportun- a section highlighting the equality of men and ity to reflect on what it means to be a citizen and women in Canada. It states: Islam in the Hinterlands is giving us some clues as to how to do this. Could it be that the way we In Canada, men and women are equal under have thought about citizenship and multicultural- the law. Canada’s openness and generosity ism needs significant change? Perhaps it is time to The Nature of Empires and the do not extend to barbaric cultural practices move toward a notion of citizenship where being Empires of Nature: Indigenous Peoples that tolerate spousal abuse, “honour killings,” Canadian can allow even Muslims to see them- and the Great Lakes Environment female genital mutilation, forced marriage selves included at all times. Karl S. Hele, editor or other gender-based violence. Those guilty Drawing on themes from John MacKenzie’s Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires (1997), this book of these crimes are severely punished under Note explores the power of nature and the attempts by Canada’s criminal laws. 1 See, for example, Najwa Raouda’s The Feminine Voice of Islam: Muslim Women in America (Victoria Press, 2008), empires to control it. It also examines contemporary Amina Wadud’s Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform threats to First Nations communities from ongoing This section of the guide is portrayed by the in Islam (Oneworld, 2006), Des filles comme les autres : political, environmental, and social issues. book’s editor as highly problematic on vari- au-delà du foulard by Alma Lévy and Lila Lévy (Éditions WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS ous fronts: “This statement disturbingly rein- La Découverte, 2004) and Roxanne D. Marcotte’s “Mus- Available from your favourite bookseller or lim Women in Canada: Autonomy and Empowerment” in call 1-800-565-9523 (UTP Distribution) scribes the racist civilizational discourse of the September 2010 issue of the Journal of Muslim Minor- www.wlupress.wlu.ca colonialism and social Darwinism that branded ity Affairs. facebook.com/wlupress| twitter.com/wlupress
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 27 They Stand on Guard Canada’s mostly indigenous icons of Arctic sovereignty. John Baglow
a northern incursion of U.S. military engaged on communities. Indigenous people had replaced the The Canadian Rangers: A Living History various work projects, both of which raised serious nearest available whites as Ranger leaders. Ranger P. Whitney Lackenbauer Canadian sovereignty concerns. Prime Minister training offered an opportunity for older Rangers to University of British Columbia Press W.L.M. King observed that the Americans saw pass on traditional skills and knowledge to the new 657 pages, hardcover Canadians as “a lot of Eskimos.” The time was ripe generation. ISBN 9780774824521 to show the flag. Indeed, Rangers across Canada were taking on a On May 23, 1947, the Canadian Rangers were social role, initiating community-building projects, born, with a recruiting limit of 5,000 men (women including the highly successful Junior Canadian he Canadian Rangers were in the news were permitted to join much later). Like their pre- Rangers program. In Quebec, the Rangers’ loyalty to not so long ago, during Prime Minister decessors, the Rangers would be community based, Canada was seen as a counter to Quebec separatism. TStephen Harper’s annual summer pil- reporting signs of possible enemy activity; in the The political incentives for maintaining the Ran- grimage to the Arctic to reassert Canada’s territorial North they patrolled mines, oil fields and landing gers were clear. By 1995 a Rangers Enhancement claims as global warming widens the Northwest strips. Members were issued armbands, surplus Program was begun, with a five-year budget of Passage. “It was an honour to patrol with the Ran- Lee-Enfield rifles, a yearly allotment of ammuni- $5.1 million. Rangers received better equipment— gers,” he said, “as they work to defend our territory tion and minimal training. Hudson’s Bay Company GPS and radios—and were issued “uniforms”: the from potential threats and emergencies and keep factors and Department of Transport managers in now-familiar red hoodies, toques and t-shirts. our North strong, secure and free.” remote areas were appointed platoon commanders. By 1999, the Rangers were 3,446 strong, in That one statement summarizes the enigma that The project got off to a shaky start. By September 140 patrols. Search-and-rescue work, which they is the Canadian Rangers. Precisely how do they do 1948, there were just 19 companies—composed of had carried out almost from the beginning, was that? And what are the threats and emergencies 44 officers and 57 men of other ranks. The collapse formally added to their “task list” in 2002. The they face? Military historian P. Whitney Lacken- of the fur trade, however, which imposed enormous present Conservative government expanded and bauer, tracing the history of the Rangers, indicates privations upon the Inuit, made the free rifles and modernized them still further—for the Rangers had that this has been a source of debate almost since ammunition attractive for hunting. Recruiting become, in Lackenbauer’s words, “icons of Can- their inception. picked up and, by the end of 1952, 1,513 Rangers adian sovereignty.” Many of us think of the Far North as the Rangers’ had enrolled. Described by Sergeant Simeonie Nalukturuk in bailiwick. But Lackenbauer rightly reminds us that As Lackenbauer wittily observes, “Canadian Inukjuak as “the eyeglasses, hearing aids, and walk- the Rangers also operate in the northern reaches officials anticipated and planned for the kind of ing sticks for the [Canadian Forces] in the North,” of most of the provinces, south as well as north of war that fit their budget.” In part, this was to let the the Rangers now draw down a budget of $38 mil- 60, and along all three of Canada’s coastlines. They Americans know that Canada was doing its bit—to lion annually. And this year, the 5,000th member were modelled on the Pacific Coast Militia Rangers, keep them from doing it for us. The Rangers filled of the Rangers was signed up, reaching at long last mobilized in British Columbia in 1942 to defend the bill, and indeed their low cost was probably the maximum complement set in 1947. against possible Japanese invasion. The PCMR were responsible for their continued existence through This was perhaps the most successful experi- a public-calming presence, watching the coast and years of austerity and military reorganization. ment in our military history: letting the Rangers be sounding the alarm if needed—hence their motto They won over many of the skeptics, including Rangers, doing what they do best, finding their own “Vigilans,” now that of their successors. In case of Major-General Chris Vokes of central command. In ways of carrying out their mission, yet maintaining attack, they were also to defend their own com- 1955, Rangers in Yellowknife took part in an exer- a relationship with the Canadian state bearing no munities. But to perform the latter task legally, they cise against the fabled Van Doos—and triumphed hallmarks of co-optation or assimilation. If this were required to be part of the military. over the “enemy” with landskills and sheer invent- was largely due to the historical constraints of a These were not regular reservists, but one step iveness, in –52°F temperatures. An admiring Vokes budget too small to permit rigid command-and- removed, both in terms of their physical location called this the “greatest upset the Cdn Army has control—which would have quickly failed had it (remote communities) and of their relation to the ever had in war or peace.” been attempted—no matter: it worked. regular forces. Their first organizer, Lieutenant- But the army was modernizing, and the Rangers’ Lackenbauer’s account is not an easy read. A Colonel “Tommy” Taylor, noted, “Only experienced usefulness was once again questioned. From the prodigious amount of detail swamps the narrative, men accustomed to rugged, timbered country late 1950s into the ’60s, the organization declined. and his writing is far from graceful. And somehow could adequately undertake much of the work While its paper strength had risen to 2,690, it was I suspect there is much more to be said—by mem- required if the [Japanese] gained a foothold.” Taylor a different story on the ground. Many Ranger bers of the communities in which the Rangers valued their individualism, which did not fit them companies had withered away, or lost all contact serve, or by the Rangers themselves. Yet one of the for the “life of an ordinary soldier where unified with military command. Even the much-vaunted book’s strengths is that it is informed throughout action is imperative.” Indeed, after successfully landskills of the northern Rangers were disappear- by a respectful, non-patronizing deference to the resisting conscription, B.C. First Nations men ing as sedentarization and “welfare colonialism” people he writes about. joined the Rangers in droves. The force gradually demoralized the Inuit. In 1970, it was recom- Whether the Rangers offer, as Lackenbauer extended into the Yukon, up to Dawson City. mended that the Rangers be disbanded. suggests, as much symbolism as substance, they The war ended, and the PCMR were stood down. Fortuitously, however, the U.S. tanker Manhat- have become a permanent feature of the Canadian But then came the Gouzenko revelations, and also tan had barged through the Northwest Passage the imaginary, while they themselves continue to sup- previous year, once again setting off sovereignty port and build capacity in their communities, on John Baglow is a consultant on social and public alarms. The Rangers were spared. By 1982 they were their own terms. It has been a voluntary, productive policy, and a student of anthropology. His most receiving basic military training. When the U.S. ice- engagement in a country where relations between recent scholarly work, “Intersections: A Journey,” breaker Polar Sea traversed the Northwest Passage the state and indigenous populations remain bit- was published this fall in Anthropologica. His in 1985, their future was assured. terly contested. Let us hope that the present gov- late partner, Marianne MacKinnon, served in the By 1986, the northern Rangers were 87 percent ernment’s investment, driven to some degree at Carcross Patrol of 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Inuit and 12 percent First Nations, well respected least by wider ideological considerations, does not Group. and many of them prominent actors in their upset this delicate and hard-won arrangement.
28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Building the Dream Why lasting success eluded an experiment in “scientific” foreign aid. Mark Fried
as a “clinical economist,” called The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and in when the patient is in cardiac the Quest to End Poverty arrest in order to shock the econ- Nina Munk omy back into life. His failure to Signal, 2013 replicate the feat in Russia in the 260 pages, hardcover early 1990s apparently did little to ISBN 9780771062506 damage his standing or his ego. After Russia, the next house call Dr. Sachs made was to Africa. estern efforts to His landmark 2001 report for reduce poverty over- the World Health Organization Wseas have long been made a compelling business case plagued by two very human ten- for treating the diseases laying dencies: we yearn for simple solu- waste to the continent, such as tions and we crave quick results. AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Celebrated economist Jeffrey “Because,” Munk quotes a leading Sachs played to these tendencies health advocate, “you can’t have when he announced in 2005 he development if everybody is sick all would end extreme poverty in iso- the time.” lated and desperately poor African Sachs came to believe that, communities within five years. even more than illness, poverty Most development professionals shook their heads and Ruhiira, a banana-farming one in southwest- itself was the trap that kept people poor—what in disbelief. ern Uganda. Munk calls “an overwhelming interconnected Journalism suffers from a parallel affliction, Munk portrays herself as an even-handed burden of disease, illiteracy, high fertility rates, especially in these days of news written to convince witness, unburdened—and unenlightened—by dismal agricultural productivity, lack of capital, rather than to inform: so many reporters want previous knowledge of development or of Africa. weak or nonexistent infrastructure, debt, hunger, the story to make a grand statement that speaks Her reporting on the messy contradictions of local drought, [and] malnutrition.” Piecemeal efforts to common wisdom, reinforcing or critiquing our development work—the gaps between needs, were doomed, he concluded, and in his bestselling prejudices. Nina Munk succumbed to this urge expectations and achievements—shows verve, pur- 2005 book, The End of Poverty: Economic Pos- when she framed her insightful account of Sachs pose, compassion and keen observation. The narra- sibilities for Our Time, he called for a “big push” and his Millennium Villages Project (MVP) as tive arc is unsurprising: the journalist discovers the of foreign aid and technical expertise to eradicate an investigation into whether aid can ever work. bully under Sachs’s brilliance and, once the MVP’s poverty once and for all. I shook my head in disbelief. outsized objectives meet problem after problem, To those who said $700 billion in aid to sub- Sachs’s audacious idea was to concentrate a her curiosity dwindles. Saharan Africa since the 1960s had not achieved significant amount of aid spending in a handful The heroes of the tale, and Munk’s primary much, Sachs insisted we had not spent nearly of villages, addressing all major problems at once interlocutors, are the African project leaders in the enough. He estimated that $250 billion a year, (health, education, agriculture, water and sanita- two villages, two young professionals who rose from double total current aid spending, could end tion, environment, energy and more). The MVP poverty by dint of luck and their own wits, deter- extreme poverty by 2025. “It’s much cheaper than was to be a demonstration project, lighting the way mined to use their PhDs to benefit their poor com- having wars,” he told Munk. “And it’s much cheaper for governments and donors to take the program patriots. Her riveting portraits of them offer crucial than having mass migration.” to scale. historical context for the struggles of their peoples. Rereading The End of Poverty now, eight years Assigned to write a profile of Sachs for Vanity Munk charts how their enthusiasm, buoyed by later, I still find his case for aid compelling. He Fair, Munk travelled with him to Africa for the pro- the project’s initial success, was eroded by the vil- favours not individual charity but public invest- ject’s launch. She then spent six years following its lages’ innumerable difficulties. We learn how they ment in “the schools, clinics, roads, electricity, fortunes in two of the villages: Dertu, a community tried to bring a sense of reality to Sachs’s grand ports, soil nutrients, clean drinking water, and the of semi-nomadic herders in northeastern Kenya, plans and how, after repeated clashes with higher- like” that can create a healthy, skilled workforce ups in New York, each came to acknowledge that and an integrated national economy. Such public Mark Fried recently retired as head of policy progress was fitful at best and could not happen at spending (sometimes underwritten by aid, as in for Oxfam Canada. He edited Duncan Green’s the pace Sachs believed possible. Korea and Taiwan) has underlain the success of From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Munk’s Sachs is boundlessly self-confident, every country that has ever emerged from poverty. Effective States Can Change the World (Oxfam, clever, sophisticated and obsessed—a condescend- Also evident in his book, however, is the rather 2008) and his most recent publications are ing know-it-all with a solution for every problem authoritarian worldview that would later haunt the translations of Eduardo Galeano’s Children of the and nothing but scorn for doubters. A full Harvard Millennium Villages Project. Sachs sees develop- Days: A Calendar of Human History (Nation Books, professor at 28, famous for designing the radical ment as a technical matter, to be achieved with 2013) and Severo Sarduy’s Firefly (Archipelago free-market reforms that stopped Bolivia’s and cash and the right policies, rather than a process, Books, 2013). Poland’s slide into chaos, Sachs viewed himself political and social as well as economic, by which
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 29 people strengthen the institutions that can sustain promote (people did not view travel to the existing 2011, drought had wiped out Dertu’s visible gains, improvements in their lives. market three days away as time lost). war had done the same in an MVP village in Mali Given his reputation, his voice carried; when What is more, although technology can relieve and Ruhiira’s advances were looking doubtful. Jeffrey Sachs called, prime ministers and billion- suffering, even in the hands of Jeffrey Sachs it is Despite Munk’s detailed and sympathetic portrayal aires picked up the phone. He gave speech after not likely to get at why people in these villages of the villagers (bound by tradition, yet eager to speech, teamed up with Bono, and, within months, are poor. In the Ugandan village, Ruhiira, hybrid learn and deeply frustrated by the bungling of aid enthusiasm reached a historic apogee. And seeds and fertilizer expanded agricultural produc- powerful outsiders), and despite her reiterations then came the curious twist that is the subject of tion, and better marketing eliminated intermediar- of the MVP’s achievements, the reader feels only Nina Munk’s book. Donor governments did not ies. But rats ate the bumper corn crop and greater sorry and helpless. hike aid anywhere near the amount Sachs deemed efficiency seemed to enrich a few and impoverish Munk’s focus is narrow—the book is reportage, necessary, so he decided to show them the way. others. As Munk notes with some frustration, “every not analysis. She glosses over aid’s history of vying With $5 million in seed money from an American intervention … had unintended consequences.” approaches, omits its lively current debate. Yet she cable TV magnate, in 2005 the Millennium Villages Munk recounts a prescient exchange with Ugan- proffers her research as evidence for answering Project was born. dan president Yoweri Museveni in which Sachs fundamental questions: Can extreme poverty be If Sachs’s theory of development was relentlessly extolled the potential of modern agriculture and eradicated? Can people be lifted out of poverty? macro—prosperity depends on a steady rise in pub- urged the president to supply fertilizer to all his And she concludes with a verdict on the entire lic services and infrastructure—the MVP was outra- country’s farmers. Museveni, who had been only enterprise of international development assist- geously micro, based on the notion that spending mildly interested in Sachs’s appeal, then looked at ance: the unfathomable complexity of Africa will $120 per person per year in an isolated village could him seriously: “This is not India or China. There are thwart the best-laid plans. end extreme poverty in short order. The MVP would no markets. There is no network. No rails. No roads. Thanks to this unfortunate overreach, The Ideal- bypass and essentially replace government, provid- We have no political cohesion.” ist ends up reinforcing three erroneous common ing clean water, basic health care and education, Not all was failure. Munk chronicles Dertu’s wisdoms: that aid is about giving people living in and distributing anti-malarial bed nets, fertilizer, growing prosperity: tin roofs, vinyl flooring over the poverty things we think they need, that develop- hybrid seeds and so on. ment is mainly about economic Initial results in a pilot village growth and, most regrettably, that were hugely encouraging: maize The Idealist is a case study of how being the very possibility of contributing production tripled; malaria infec- to positive change is dubious if not tions fell by two thirds; school supremely smart does not prevent you hopeless. attendance shot up. Armed with from being supremely dumb. Beguiled by Sachs’s timetable this good news, Sachs garnered and economic bent, Munk under- another $50 million from finan- plays the long-term impact of the cier/philanthropist George Soros, and expanded sand, the first television set and the sudden advent improved health and education the MVP achieved. to 14 villages, including the two Munk explores in of mobile communications. Halfway through the Unquestionably, literate and healthy people are detail. MVP’s five-year plan, “people’s lives were slowly better placed to improve their lives and those of What distinguished the MVP from the programs improving. There were many noticeable changes: their villages. Neither does Munk examine the of Oxfam, CARE or World Vision? Munk says it was new classrooms and health clinics, better roads, social and political changes the MVP may have his plan, a turgid 150-page handbook, drawn up by safer drinking water, ample supplies of staple foods, sparked, such as attitudes toward women’s educa- a committee of academic specialists. She calls it a the growing use of cell phones.” However, “[MVP] tion, organizational capacity to make demands “method” to be proved: in essence, introduce sci- staff was stretched to capacity, budgets were tight, on government or government’s willingness to entific approaches that work, reinforce them with and there was a limit to how much could be accom- respond to such demands—all of which could bring training and education, and encourage community plished.” The health clinic in the Ugandan village long-lasting payoffs. participation. No news here. Such “integrated rural Ruhiira, for example, still had no running water Munk’s evident empathy for the villagers slips development” has met with both success and fail- and electricity was intermittent. Munk concludes, when she assumes that aid should “teach self- ure all over the world. “the long-term goals of the Millennium Villages sufficiency” to people whose resourcefulness in What makes the MVP unique is what is not in Project—to set people on the path of sustainable circumstances that would overwhelm most Can- the plan. Good development projects complement economic progress, to teach them self-sufficiency, adians is nothing short of astounding. So what if technical assistance with efforts to address crucial to lift them out of extreme poverty—were as elusive their sophisticated coping strategies include taking social and political questions such as discrimina- as ever.” handouts from rich westerners? tion against women or citizen interaction with She then poses a question that has dogged Aid can support the efforts of citizens and gov- government. Despite a nod to gender equality, village-level development work for decades: what ernment to deal with the challenges they face. It Sachs’s technocratic—what Munk calls “scien- happens when the funding ends? The local doc- can help build capacities and institutions that last tific”—approach, in contrast, relies overwhelm- tor, after a ten-hour shift in Ruhiira’s bare-bones long beyond any project’s lifetime. At the village ingly on modern technology and seeks, above all, operating room, tells her, “Without the Millennium level, I have seen how Oxfam’s support for farm- economic efficiency. Project there would be no drugs, there would be ers’ organizations in Mozambique and Ethiopia As Munk points out, the handbook ignores com- no surgical equipment, there would be no way to helped them gain clout in markets, how small mon challenges such as crime, epidemics and nat- operate the generator—I would be redundant most grants to local women’s organizations in Zimbabwe ural disasters, all of which undermined the MVP’s of the time … when the funding stops, most likely and South Africa transformed attitudes and won initial success. She makes mincemeat of the MVP’s everything we have done will be put to waste.” improved public services. On a larger scale, bilat- textbook assumptions. Her sensitive account of Sachs had a “solution.” In mid 2008 he urged eral aid to Malawi allowed government to hire hun- Dertu, the Kenyan village, for example, shows why his staff “to think big,” to move beyond social work dreds of frontline health workers, raise their wages people used anti-malarial mosquito nets to protect and become entrepreneurs promoting export farms and reopen the nursing school. their goats instead of their children (goats often that could attract foreign investment. His field lead- Munk attributes many of the MVP’s failings to ensure family survival) and why they had no use for ers had no luck convincing him such dreams were Sachs’s personality. The Idealist is indeed a case the livestock market that MVP worked so hard to unrealistic; the business plans they laboured to study of how being supremely smart does not produce found no takers. prevent you from being supremely dumb. And my By then, Sachs had extended the project from goodness, how many organizations, companies five years to ten and fundraising had become an and governments are led by bullies. get extra obsession. In Munk’s telling, the MVP fell into a trap Although Munk does not go there, I see a Updates • News • Insight • Events not unfamiliar in the development world: the pro- broader lesson in Sachs’s desire to wish away the ject began to pay more attention to marketing than roles of government and citizen activism. Viewing to programming, proposing activities based not on development as a technical exercise avoids the FOLLOW US ON TWITTER best practices, but on the goods corporations would messy and often unpalatable arena of political and @lrcmag donate or on what might appeal to investors. social struggle. But that is the realm in which power By the time the MVP launched phase two (again is apportioned and, I believe, the best hope for with most of the financing from George Soros) in long-term development success.
30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Letters and Responses
Re: “Twilight of the Pundits,” by Andrew nature of politics: that it is a struggle for power, not that pipeline be to the south? To the east to New Potter (November 2013) a conversation about truth. Brunswick? Across the mountains to Kitimat and fact: Conrad Black did not decline to Potter is largely right and deeply wrong. the open ocean? Or to Vancouver and the tidal Acontribute to The Public Intellectual in Politics may be highly adversarial today, but it is Burrard Inlet, a heavily populated coastline with Canada. He penned a piece from his Florida cell. not a stone. It is a cultural practice, which means numerous fisheries? Unfortunately, the term “public intellectual” did that, just like public intellectuals, it can change. Despite decades of spill-free shipping in B.C., not appear in it. When the book went out for blind And one way of encouraging this is to reject Tom there is no guarantee that an oil tanker will never peer review—something that academic publishing Flanagan’s and Potter’s belief that the politician’s founder. The Northern Gateway pipeline may requires, unlike market-driven trade publishing— life is “completely separate” from the intellec- not be the best way to export Alberta bitumen, the reviewers wanted Black to write something tual’s—because values are just not like that; on and protecting the Great Bear Rainforest should more apropos the book’s rubric. Conrad told me the contrary, they’re defined contrastively, as be a large factor in deciding where oil should and the reviewers to shove it: “I am not prepared partly overlapping features of a whole. That is why, flow—alongside the jobs created in Kitimat, and to be treated by anonymous university critics as whereas Potter follows Flanagan in affirming that elsewhere in Canada; alongside the fact that being if I were a graduate thesis writer and honours BA “public affairs are fundamentally adversarial, while a country requires acknowledging a duty owed to candidate.” I fought to keep Black’s contribution, intellectual life is fundamentally authoritative,” fellow citizens, equally applicable to those who but the publisher refused to proceed unless he was when I look in my dictionary I find that one of the would protect the Great Bear and those whose dropped. definitions of power is “government, influence or livelihood depends upon energy exports; and Another fact: “Tweeds” and “sherry” are rare authority” and one of the definitions of intellect is alongside a careful consideration of other routes, at universities these days. Perhaps Dr. Potter, the “the understanding or mental powers (of a particu- and other risks. former professor, saw them but it would have been lar person etc.).” Potter is simply too enamoured of Oh, and the killer whales I saw from the ferry? an oddity. divisions: of concepts, of labour (between journal- They were swimming in waters that an oil tanker The blogspot by Glen McGregor—the best ists, academics and politicians), and of opponents would pass through before long. Canadian political investigative reporter these (turning them into adversaries rather than people Patrick Brethour days—is spot on. If reporters rely on spin doc- who disagree about a common good). If instead Toronto, Ontario tors, political scientists and social media to fluff he thought a little more about how to bring things up their stories, the shortcoming is that of the together rather than take them apart, one of our Re: “He Daunts Us Still,” by Mark journalists, not of those on the other end of the best would become even better. Lovewell (October 2013) phone. I don’t know of a single professor who took Charles Blattberg n his review of my book, The Truth About offence at what McGregor wrote. Perhaps that Montreal, Quebec ITrudeau, Mark Lovewell raises a point I often is because I don’t use Twitter, which is Potter’s hear in conversation: whichever side Trudeau source. Ironically, he directs us to Twitter to locate Re: “Focusing on the Small Picture,” by chose on the national unity question would have the true public intellectuals of our day. Serious Kevin Patterson (November 2013) prevailed. arguments like Potter’s and good reporting like here have been many moments of natural Trudeau was known in intellectual circles in McGregor’s, however, generally require more than Twonder during the years I’ve lived in British Quebec before he entered politics, but not always 140 characters. Columbia. An eagle diving for prey into a lake in as a person of respect. After Trudeau attended a Potter suggests that the working-class reflexes suburban Coquitlam. The large, curious but ultim- state-sponsored propaganda conference in the of journalists—their drinking, swearing and ately implacable male seal that made sure a canoe Soviet Union, members of the clergy labelled him a contrarian impulses—have led them to look with two humans remained an acceptable distance “communist” and the “Canadian Karl Marx.” When up to academics. Actually, when journalists from his sun-bathing colony. A pod of killer whales Trudeau sought permission from the Church to drank, smoked and swore, they did not set foot that tagged along for a ferry ride one September, sue, the bishop replied that given Trudeau’s writ- on a university campus, nor did they call politi- crisscrossing the wake. Life in British Columbia is ings, “I hesitate to consider this libel.” cal scientists. Now that journalists have been to bound up in the experience of nature. When Trudeau accepted a state-sponsored trip J-school, they do. To Potter, the business model of So I have a certain amount of sympathy for to China in 1960 with his friend Jacques Hébert, the “media-intellectual economy” is dead. It may Kevin Patterson’s plea for the preservation of they wrote they were immune to reprisals since be for Potter’s newspaper industry. It has never B.C.’s North Coast. But sympathy cannot trump both had been “generously reproved, knocked off been much of an economy or a model for political reality. Patterson writes about the industrializa- and abolished” as a consequence of earlier jour- scientists. tion of the B.C. coast, as if this were not already neys. They added, “The prospect of being assas- No one in the book asserts “academics would a decades-old fact. Logging, ferries, a container sinated yet again on their return from China was make for good politicians.” It is a tad hyperbolic port that has ambitions to displace Vancouver to hardly likely to impress them.” and a bit cynical to say as Potter does that there is the south and an aluminum smelter in Kitimat, When Lester Pearson recruited union leader a contradiction between searching for truth and where the Northern Gateway pipeline would reach Jean Marchand to help shore up Liberal support in exercising power or that “public life and scholarly the Pacific—all of these are part of the idyll that Quebec, he insisted that Trudeau be included in life are completely separate endeavours.” (Pierre Patterson wants to preserve but whose pristine the deal. Jean Chrétien responded that it would be Trudeau? Václav Havel? Woodrow Wilson?) Is nature has already been marred. hard to get a provocative guy like Trudeau elected. it not possible that intellectuals can sometimes Another reality: oil tankers pass through B.C.’s The Liberals ultimately imposed Trudeau on a pre- expose the public to certain truths about power southern coastal waters every week, within earshot dominantly upscale English-speaking riding with a and/or reveal to the powerful the best uses of of another national jewel, Vancouver’s Stanley significant Jewish population. power? Park. Unless one takes the hard-core environ- Quebec separatists were not dismayed to see Nelson Wiseman mental stance—Alberta’s oil sands should be shut Trudeau representing the federalist cause. Pierre Toronto, Ontario down—the real question, the adult question, is: Bourgault, one of Quebec’s independence move- what is the safest way to transport bitumen crude ment founders, called Trudeau “the best candidate or years now Andrew Potter, one of our best to market? we could hope for.” Of the confrontation that was Fpublic intellectuals, has been writing books With all due respect to the safety protocols of to come, Bourgault said that Trudeau purposely and articles containing an assumption about the railways, the clear answer is pipelines. Should aggravated the rift between Quebec and the federal
December 2013 reviewcanada.ca 31 government. “He exists only on the strength of his Remember that not one of the people imprisoned adversaries. If [separatism] didn’t exist he wouldn’t under the War Measures Act was subsequently be in power.” charged with a crime. Remember also the pre- Trudeau’s political legitimacy originated in cipitating event that spurred Trudeau’s “fearless” Get monthly English Canada, which was only too happy to suspension of civil liberties: two kidnappings, one see someone from Quebec making forceful argu- of the British trade commissioner, the other of ments for a strong central government in ways a Quebec provincial Cabinet minister and, after updates from they could not. That support lasted for only one the proclamation, one murder, which might be election. Trudeau ultimately won votes in Quebec thought retrospectively to justify the War Measures because it was his home province and he deliv- Act. The fundamental justification offered by the LRC’s ered the goods. Unemployment insurance reforms Trudeau and his government was, “Trust us. We benefitted Quebec, as did massive increases in know things which we can’t reveal to you now editor-in-chief. equalization payments and regional development but that, if you knew them, you would accept as programs. He implemented official bilingual- justifying the extreme measures we have taken.” ism and made room for French in the public John Turner was the Cabinet minister who made Sign up online for our service and military. But Quebecers were wary of the most of this “trust us—we have special know- Trudeau’s brutal and oppressive response to the ledge” argument. At the time, Canadians did trust e-newsletter to receive October Crisis, and sent René Lévesque to Quebec Trudeau and Turner. But the promised revelation a monthly Editor’s Note City to counter Trudeau’s centralist vision. never came. It turns out that there was nothing to If Trudeau was the saviour of federalism and a reveal that could conceivably have justified the from Bronwyn Drainie, force extraordinaire, why was he muzzled during claim of an “apprehended insurrection.” By the with the details of new the 1995 Quebec referendum? tenth anniversary of the War Measures Act it was Bob Plamondon difficult to find anyone who thought that there was LRC pieces now online— Ottawa, Ontario any reasonable justification for its proclamation. including topical full-text Lovewell goes on to write that no one can doubt n his review of The Truth about Trudeau, Mark Trudeau’s “passionate regard for … the principles articles republished from ILovewell argues that its author Bob Plamondon on which he believed [Canada] should be based.” our archives for newsletter gives “credit where credit is due” and then cites Passionate regard for civil liberties? Cannot be as an example a passage from the book where doubted? subscribers—and other Plamondon describes Trudeau as “the gunslinger Arthur Schafer magazine-related news. who showed no fear in the face of terrorism.” Winnipeg, Manitoba Does Lovewell really wish to endorse Plamondon’s commendation of Trudeau’s suspen- The LRC welcomes letters—and more are available Visit reviewcanada. sion of civil liberties across the entire country and on our website at union activists and student leaders) in Quebec? reviewcanada.ca>. ❆ ORDER BY DECEMBER ❄ 12! Great reading. ❅ Great ideas. 3 gifts for just $100! 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New from UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS First Peoples of Canada Masterworks from the Canadian Museum of Civilization by Jean-Luc Pilon and Nicholette Prince This beautifully designed book showcases 150 unique artifacts produced by Canada’s First Nation Peoples and offers a rare opportunity to experience a celebrated exhibition that has toured the world, yet has never been shown in Canada. ‘The masterworks featured in this book, and the exhibition on which it is based, are a sumptuous feast for the eyes – quilled, tufted, beaded, carved, fringed, and painted in a wondrous array of colours and materials.’ Allan J. 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