Elspeth Brown and the Pride of M.A.C Cosmetics

$6.50 Vol. 27, No. 4 May 2019

The Vancouver That Could Have Been by Spencer Morrison

Krzysztof Pelc The Myth of Canada Geoff White Kosovo Twenty Years Later Matthew j. Bellamy Televised History Leanne Toshiko Simpson On Mental Health

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Vol. 27, No. 4 • May 2019

2 Letters 20 The Soap Myth 31 The Horizons Beyond Leslie Buck, Brian Danko, Bill Engleson, A Holocaust artifact in a post-truth era Living with albinism in a dark world Murray Reiss, Edward Harvey Daniel Panneton Emily Urquhart 3 To Nie Kanada 22 Positively Shady 32 Classical Accompaniment Our country through the eyes of others The glamorous activism of M.A.C Cosmetics The arrangement that shapes my characters Krzysztof Pelc Elspeth Brown Adam Foulds

7 Taking Refuge 25 Reading with Mental Illness Poetry Nineteenth-century Americans look north For us, the finish line is a mirage Interior with Sudden Joy Michael Taube Leanne Toshiko Simpson Erin Emily Ann Vance, p. 9 10 The City That Could Have Been 27 The Cherokee Scot Aluminum Vancouver didn’t just happen A new edition of a wartime memoir Kayla Czaga, p. 11 Spencer Morrison Donald B. Smith Theseus Amanda Jernigan, p. 15 14 State of the Unions 28 Well Versed The birth and promise of Unifor How poets describe the indescribable The Girl Who Turns to Bone Amy LeBlanc, p. 21 John Baglow Bardia Sinaee 16 Blind Spotting 29 Cautionary Tale The CBC’s narrow take on Canadian history A woman shouldn’t have to Matthew J. Bellamy explain herself Rose Hendrie 18 Defence Mechanism Questioning the Kosovo War, 30 Blurred Borders twenty years later The human stories behind immigration Geoff White David Wallace

John Baglow wrote The Public Walter Scott Prize. His latest book Leanne Toshiko Simpson is a a PhD in folklore from Memorial Service Alliance of Canada: 50 is Dream Sequence. writer living with bipolar disorder. University of Newfoundland. Years . . . and Counting. He was Her work was featured as part of the organization’s executive vice- Rose Hendrie has contributed to the 2018 Bell Let’s Talk campaign. David Wallace taught English president for nine years. the Sunday Times, Precedent, and literature at Humber College, in The Walrus. She is currently writing Bardia Sinaee is a poet and Toronto, for twenty-one years. He Matthew J. Bellamy teaches history a novel. contributing editor for the LRC. retired in 2014. at Carleton University. In 2006, he won the National Business Book Spencer Morrison holds a PhD Donald B. Smith, professor Geoff White is a former diplomat Award for Profiting the Crown: in English literature from the emeritus of history at the University and journalist. From 2009 to 2013, Canada’s Polymer Corporation, University of Toronto. He works as of Calgary, is writing a book about he served as a political counsellor in 1942–1990. a policy analyst in Ottawa. non-Indigenous perspectives of First Pretoria, South Africa. Nations. Elspeth Brown, an associate Daniel Panneton is the education Illustrations by Christy Lundy, professor of history at the University and programs assistant at the Sarah Michael Taube was a speech who has done work for the Boston of Toronto, spent twenty years and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust writer for prime minister Stephen Globe, Reader’s Digest, and writing and researching her new Education Centre, in Toronto. Harper. He has a master’s degree Monocle. book, Work! A Queer History of in comparative politics from the Modeling. Krzysztof J. Pelc, an international London School of Economics. relations professor at McGill Adam Foulds wrote The Wolf’s University, just won the CBC Short Emily Urqhart, a National Mouth, a novel shortlisted for the Story Prize for “Green Velvet.” Magazine Award winner, earned

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©2019 Literary Review of Canada. All rights, earth’s survival, that can’t be our instigator. The risk Fetherling (March 2019) ­including translation into other languages, is too immense. Canada’s government, concerned are reserved by the publisher in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and all with corporate sponsorship in the next election n 1961, a colleague and I bought the Scene, other countries participating in the Universal Copyright Convention, the International Copyright cycle, is content to give lip service to voters. Ia Victoria jazz club, from the lawyer-cum-­ Convention, and the Pan-American Copyright Convention. Nothing in this publication may be We can influence our political leadership, how- saxophonist Wally Lightbody. It was right across re­produced without the written permission of the ever. Vote intelligently — vote to survive! the water from Vancouver and also featured big publisher. names like Phineas Newborn and Charles Mingus. ISSN 1188-7494 Brian Danko After Mingus packed the Scene for a week Literary Review of Canada is indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the Burlington, ON straight, I had the pleasure of taking him to Canadian Index, and is distributed by Disticor and Magazines Canada. Vancouver for his Cellar gig. He was a big man with Re: “Say It Loud” by Drew Fagan a short fuse and had cut his teeth in New York’s (March 2019) toughest neighbourhoods. I saw evidence of this when a burly customer made a racist comment. read Drew Fagan’s review of Megaphone I wonder if the B.C. Lions, whom George Fetherling I Bureaucracy through the lens of SNC-Lavalin. mentions, fared any better. Considering his observation that bureaucrats are Edward Harvey “most comfortable in the shadows,” I couldn’t help Toronto but think of our erstwhile clerk of the Privy Council, From time to time, the LRC may allow carefully selected organizations to contact subscribers with Michael Wernick. offers that may be of interest. If you do not wish to receive such correspondence, email Subscriber Two months ago, he exploded — or, more accur- Write to [email protected], or post to our Services at [email protected], call ately, imploded — into public view by lobbing a social media channels. We may edit comments and (416) 932‑5081, or write P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto, ON M4P 2G1. broadside at Conservative senator David Tkachuk, feedback for length, clarity, and accuracy.

2 Literary Review of Canada To Nie Kanada Our country through the eyes of others Krzysztof Pelc

t’s a pleasing question to consider, in a way: How has Canada been spared? Is it Isomething we’ve been eating? Does our cold climate breed some resistance against would‑be strongmen? Over the past two years, looking at the club of Western democracies, commentators have remarked on how everyone but us seems to have come down with the same bug. Its symptoms are well known and frequently recited. Nationalism, xenophobia, anti-­elite sentiments, protection- ism, isolationism, a rejection of international and counter-majoritarian­ institutions — the whole lot subsumed under the banners of “populism” and “illiberalism.” How is it that Canada has emerged unscathed? A first response is that it has not. We have Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party, we have Quebec’s recurring fixation with laïcité and eradication of religious symbols, and we have a re-­emerging Conservative Party that, at one point, seemed bent on replicating Donald Trump’s campaign tactics. Immigration may well become a wedge issue in October’s federal election. These are all true caveats. Compared with the affliction’s advanced stage elsewhere, though, they’re mere sniffles. Nowhere is the question more puzzling than in the comparison between Canada and the United States. How is it that we have sunny ways — occasional clouds notwithstanding — while the Americans have Trump and white nationalism? How is it that the world’s longest undefended border divides such different expressions ofdemocracy? ­ Immigrants and refugees have long been attracted by the myth of Canada — not necessarily the reality. One explanation is that we were subjected to a decade-long­ inoculation under Stephen Harper, those Americans who came to Canada and stayed, The individuals whose stories she tells, spanning which provided just enough of an irritant to ensure eventually becoming a television broadcaster two centuries of migration, have come to Canada Canadian liberalism did not grow complacent. and a prominent social activist. The plays and for various reasons. They’re escaped slaves turned Harper threatened the long-form census, and that unproduced film scripts are mostly her own. British loyalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth triggered sufficient antibodies to temper the polit- centuries; targets of McCarthyism in the 1950s; ical effects of the global economic slowdown and Vietnam War draft dodgers in the 1960s; and refu- income inequality. Discussed in this essay gees from homophobia in the 1990s. They share Another explanation looks further back, to our something else beyond their eventual destination: oronto Publi c L ibrary oronto divergent origin stories. Lately, historians have whatever has led them from their native land to T American Refugees: emphasized the true violence of America’s founda- Turning to Canada for Freedom the plains of Saskatchewan, where Deverell her- td. / td. tional moment — just how formative and bloody its Rita Shelton Deverell self ended up, or the shores of Nova Scotia, where Revolutionary War was — whereas Canada weaned many escaped slaves landed after the War of 1812, itself off colonial rule gradually, until it came to Northern Passage: American their experiences continue to shape their behaviour rest at its current arrangement, one that enshrines Vietnam War Resisters in Canada once they arrived. a cozy relation with a distant Crown. John Hagan Migration is a difficult, often risky enterprise. Rita Shelton Deverell’s new American Refugees And so, in a natural way, it is those most aggrieved offers an intriguing third explanation. The book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by injustice, those most willing and able to work reads as a sort of scrapbook, a compendium of Stephen Leacock against it, who undertake it. Once these people characters who all left the United States for the make it to their adopted land, American Refugees “promised land” to the north. It contains family Days of Moonlight suggests, they keep reacting to the injustices they photos, excerpts from local newspapers, comic André Alexis witness around them. strips, obituaries, plays, unproduced scripts. “As a black person from the American South,”

tar, L Whit e S tar, by Cunard I llustration Deverell herself is ever present; she is one of Deverell says, “when I travelled from northern

May 2019 3 Ontario to the prairies in the 1970s, I quickly iden- ­progressively become a larger one. Generations the people living in the fictional town of Mariposa, tified with racism directed at Indigenous peoples, of new arrivals — escaping enslavement, dis- Ontario. “Mariposa sounded terrific,” she writes. and this identification led to years of chronicling crimination, and persecution, attracted by the Deverell’s intimate recounting invites readers to Indigenous issues in my media career.” That the staid promise of “peace, order and good govern- relate to her story, and the stories of the other char- lived experience of racial discrimination would ment” — would expand on it, collectively bent on acters in American Refugees, on a personal level. prompt newcomers, facing their own share of opposing the maladies they’d run away from. Over And I couldn’t help but do so: the Canadian national challenges by virtue of being newcomers, to seek time, it would breed a social reflex against the pit- myth has proven consequential for me. It is, simply and assist victims of discrimination in their new ting of one cultural group against another by polit- put, the reason I’m here, writing these words from ­country — that such a concern would travel, literally, ical entrepreneurs, or the use of fearmongering as my office at McGill University — which is housed, across borders and ethnic identities — proves genu- an electoral device. If such self-­selection has indeed incidentally, in the Stephen Leacock Building. inely moving. Deverell tells the story of a number of been at work since the American Revolution, then, newcomers who likewise connected with the plight little by little, whatever myth attracted people to he myth of Canada has long held a fascina- of Indigenous peoples and made it their life’s cause. Canada would prove self-fulfilling.­ Ttion for Eastern Europeans, just as it does She may well be speaking to a broader for those Deverell describes. In phenomenon. The hardest test of democratic Poland, my birth country, there’s an John Hagan comes to an analo- expression, “To nie Kanada,” which gous conclusion in Northern Passage, liberalism is a nation’s willingness to translates to “It ain’t Canada.” That from 2001, where he examines is to say, “Let’s be reasonable — you those Americans whose objections probe the dark corners of its past. It can’t have it all.” These received to the Vietnam War led them to notions go back generations. Before Canada: “The politically active resist- is a blind spot of liberalism itself. the Second World War, my great-­ ers . . . became part of a variety of grandfather — true story — owned social networks that produced patterns of com- Indeed, a myth. a confectionery shop, to which he gave the most mitment that have persisted to the present.” Draft None of this takes away from the fact that appealing, sweetest-­sounding name he could dodgers became lifelong activists who sustained something has attracted generations of American think of: Kanada. Then the Communists came and Canada’s role in international peacekeeping. refugees, along with immigrants from around expropriated it. That’s right, the Communists took When the Iraq War began, for example, they were the world. Deverell writes of her own initial Kanada away. Half a century later, when martial at the forefront of the anti-­war movement. “Some ­guilelessness: “As a black person who grew up in law in Poland was lifted in the early ’80s and my Americans who came limited their resistance to the the American South, the story I knew about Canada parents fled Communist rule, where else were act of migration in response to draft and military was that, as soon as slaves or the descendants of they going to go? The true richness of American laws,” Hagan writes. “The majority of the Toronto slaves crossed the border, they were free at last!” Of Refugees comes when it moves beyond shared pre- resisters in my sample, however, actively protested course, expectations are not always met. conceptions of Canada, to consider what happens the war before leaving the United States and con- Deverell explains how her original idea of when new arrivals confront the contrast between tinued their active protest after arriving in Canada.” Canada came from her husband, who would read their expectations and reality. If this pattern holds, even a small differ- aloud from Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches Yes, the Underground Railroad allowed many ence in the character of the two nations would of a Little Town, that folksy Edwardian account of escaped slaves to settle in southwestern Ontario.

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4 Literary Review of Canada Some were even given Crown land to farm, in Stephen Leacock, the creator of Mariposa places like Oro-­Medonte Township. But Deverell and author of Deverell’s imagined Canada, was reminds us that Canadian authorities did their ­himself a one-man embodiment of these incongru- best to staunch the flow of refugees, sending emis- ous dualities. A political economist who held an How Canadian saries south to spread stories of how hard life was appointment in my department at McGill, he was in the north, trying, largely in vain, to alter the by all accounts beloved by his students and, argu- prevalent myth of a promised land. In doing so, ably, the most-read English-language­ humorist of culture is they mimicked American slave owners who were his time. Lately, though, Leacock has come under known to spin similar tales to dissuade slaves from fire for too readily manifesting his era’s disparaging escaping in the first place. Moreover, Canadian beliefs on suffrage, Indigenous cultures, and black institutions often lagged behind the promise immigrants. Sitting in the Leacock Building, as I am restricted of our myth, well after the American Civil War. now, the challenge is to hold both these facts in Ontario and Nova Scotia both featured segregated mind at the same time. schools; Nova Scotia retained them for as long as by Canada’s Texas did. hose Americans who flee to Canada must Deverell stops short of delving into this history Tcome to terms with a similar duality: fully. But, in fact, legal slavery existed in Canada the national myth that draws them north has trade deals for much longer than we like to think. True, Upper ­blemishes. Their new country has a history, and Canada’s 1793 Act against Slavery declared, “It is as both American Refugees and Northern Passage unjust that a people who enjoy Freedom by Law remind us, a country’s history is rarely as rosy as should encourage the introduction of Slavery in one might wish. this Province.” But it also maintained that aboli- The hardest test of democratic liberalism is a tion should be done “without violating private nation’s willingness to probe the dark corners of property.” That meant anyone born a slave before its past. It is, in fact, a blind spot of liberalism itself. 1793 would legally remain one. This ambiguous It simply isn’t clear at what point the crisp liberal state of affairs endured until 1833, when slavery edicts of John Stuart Mill begin to apply: the appeal- was abolished in all the British colonies by an act ing principle by which the freedoms of one extend of Westminster. In other words, slavery was legally until they reach the rights of another presumes preserved in Canada years after it was formally some present moment devoid of any past. Yet that abolished in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and blank slate seldom exists. In most cases, the free- several other states — even as thousands of former doms of one have, in fact, been encroaching on slaves risked their lives trying to reach Canada. another’s rights for centuries. Liberalism assumes These things are simultaneously true. itself; it is ill equipped to work out how societies Similar contradictions come out of the Red ought to deal with illiberal pasts — hence the Scare of the 1950s. The hunt for Soviet agents by unease that liberal democracies face in recogniz- the House Un-­American Activities Committee and ing and coming to terms with historical blemishes. Senator Joseph McCarthy proved a convenient Formal apologies, restitution, lustration? Liberal way to target a host of bothersome individuals: theory provides no ready answer. trade unionists, African American civil rights lead- So here may be, finally, the best explanation ers, left-leaning­ Jews, social activists of all stripes. for Canada’s current call-it-what-you-will excep- McCarthyism went after scores of scholars, artists, tionalism. Deverell’s American Refugees explores and intellectuals, many of whom sought refuge in two sides of our national myth and testifies to our Canada. American authorities knew this and some- willingness to try that difficult trick of holding con- times took action to prevent the beleaguered from tradictory thoughts simultaneously. History books emigrating. The civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois and memoirs take on this task, as does literature: was one who embodied all that McCarthyism consider Days by Moonlight, the latest wild novel rejected. The U.S. State Department revoked his by André Alexis, the Trinidad-born­ Canadian An analysis of how passport in 1952, to keep him from attending a author, which skewers Canadian multiculti self-­ peace conference in Canada and to pre-empt any conceptions through the story of a road trip that trade deals have attempt to seek asylum. takes a turn toward the grotesque. affected Canadian Yet Canada was not itself wholly free of That such books are written and read speaks to McCarthy-­style paranoia. Here, too, the hunt for the Canadian willingness to grapple with reveal- culture, from one of Reds proved a convenient pretext for harassment. ing dualities. Which is also why Justin Trudeau’s The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and national apology for the firing of “sexually non-­ Canada’s key trade the National Film Board both purged suspected conforming” public servants, during the Red Scare, Communist sympathizers. The RCMP quietly seems relevant. The main effect of such apologies, advisers. investigated civil servants, university professors, beyond providing some closure to the handful of and union leaders across the country, seeking directly affected individuals still alive to benefit to eradicate political or sexual nonconformity. from it, is to challenge a society to look at itself, Canadian Culture in a Supposedly vulnerable to Soviet blackmail, public warts and all. servants outed as homosexuals were removed from The ultimate irony is that the willingness to Globalized World their posts. prod at a national myth ends up contributing to its By Garry Neil A decade later, during the Vietnam War, realization. Canada became the primary refuge for draft Such willingness does not come naturally. $24.95 paperback | ISBN 9781459413313 dodgers — and, to a fault, American Refugees In a throwback to the ’50s, those who would try describes sympathetic, welcoming border guards to perform this trick in the United States today who granted them landed status on the spot. But are branded “un-­American.” It’s no surprise Canada remained complicit in the war in other that the promise to “make America great again” ways. As one of the estimated 40,000 war resist- requires an uncomplicated view of what America ers who emigrated to Canada admits in the book, used to be — no room for prodding here. In fact, www.lorimer.ca she protested against Washington mightily for its a recurrent symptom of the illiberal bug cur- warmongering but took less notice of how Agent rently afflicting so many Western democracies Independent. Canadian. Since 1970.

Orange was being produced in the “lovely little is that those who look too closely at a country’s Made possible with the support of town of Elmira, Ontario.” Hey, isn’t that just down self-­conception are denounced as being not “of Ontario Creates. the road from Mariposa? the people.”

May 2019 5 It isn’t just our southern neighbour. My own ne last wrinkle. More than self-love prevents are. But so do many liberal Americans. In fact, homeland is another case in point. Along with Ous from recognizing the complications of our whenever I tell friends in the United States the Hungary, Poland is the European country that rosy self-view. Yes, the national myth of Canada is alternative explanation for the website crash, they has veered most sharply in a populist direction. self-­serving: it makes us feel warm inside. Just as look stricken, like children hearing there’s no Santa The party in power, Law and Justice, has been important, it serves others too, and this may be cen- Claus. Liberal Americans have never needed the busy, among other things, shutting down any aca- tral to its enduring quality. For American liberals, idea of Canada more than they do now. demic work on the Holocaust that would portray Canada plays a function; it is an often-­referenced Call it the Michael Moore Syndrome. The docu- Poles as anything but victims and heroes. These argument. A functioning society with free health mentary filmmaker has made a habit of leaning on efforts at historical distortion reached a peak in care? Affordable tuition? No crime? Americans rely Canada as a pliable rhetorical prop. With Bowling the adoption of legislation threatening prison for on the myth of Canada as much as we do. for Columbine, he pointed north as he denounced anyone who would challenge the official view. The You may recall a headline that went viral on American gun culture, talking up our peaceful invoked language is telling: those advocating for November 9, 2016, the morning after Trump’s nature and low crime rate, and spreading the the defence were “genuine Poles,” and efforts to election. As the Electoral College numbers were delightful notion that Canadians leave their doors undermine the national myth by providing a more coming in, the website for Immigration, Refugees unlocked. Canada offered a similar counterpoint complicated account of history were denounced and Citizenship Canada crashed, presumably in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore’s indictment of the War as engaging in a “pedagogy of shame.” The result under the load of desperate Americans looking to on Terror. And most recently, in Sicko, he held up is that history professors have started to fear their flee a country that had just sent a Mussolini-­esque Canada as a utopia of free and plentiful health care, work could land them in jail. You know, “To nie real estate tycoon to the Oval Office. In a much-­ a portrayal that anyone who has waited at the ER for Kanada.” But then Canada is quite unique in needed moment of hope — part comic relief, part hours (or for a specialist appointment for months) this respect. smugness — word of the crash spread across the may find bemusing. But that is what we are up Our true exceptionalism may thus lie in how Twitterverse like wildfire. Our government’s serv- against: our own self-love, but also the useful func- peculiarly difficult it is to dismiss people as not ers were not up to the task of shouldering the sheer tion that the myth of Canada plays for others. “real Canadians” because of their efforts to ques- weight of our greatness. A seed of truth often lies at the heart of national tion the self-­serving myth itself. And therein may Alas, it later came to light that pressure on myths, and our own is no exception. Although lie another clue to our resistance to the populist the department’s website had begun days before few of my American friends have made good on bug that has infected other liberal democracies. America’s election night and was more likely their quips to move to Canada (at first if Bush was One of the definitions of populism — a concept with fuelled by a November 10 deadline for foreign re-­elected, and then if Trump won), the number the notable shortcoming of having so many com- visitors to obtain an electronic travel authorization of asylum applications from the United States peting meanings — is the pitting of the genuine, before entering Canada. In other words, what we has, in fact, risen significantly since 2016. As “authentic people” against the rest (coastal elites, liked and retweeted as evidence of our alluring lib- Deverell’s American Refugees reminds us, migra- immigrants, sexual or ethnic minorities, skeptics). eralism and abiding openness was actually a reflec- tion is weighted toward those most likely to react To see such a move in action, look at Nigel Farage, tion of our bureaucracy — a hurdle imposed by our against oppression and tyranny. The arrival of such the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party, government on foreign visitors, indeed one that refugees might, little by little, push Canada toward who declared Brexit “a victory for real people.” It’s a caught thousands unaware in subsequent months. actual fulfillment of its myth. handy trope from the populist’s routine that doesn’t Most Canadians happily remember the first We may yet become what others believe us quite work in this country. version of the story, the one about how great we to be.

6 Literary Review of Canada Taking Refuge Nineteenth-century Americans look north Michael Taube

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom David W. Blight Simon & Schuster 912 pages, hardcover, softcover, ebook, and audiobook

Uncle Tom’s Journey from Maryland to Canada: The Life of Josiah Henson Edna M. Troiano The History Press 176 pages, softcover

When the Irish Invaded Canada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom Christopher Klein Doubleday 384 pages, hardcover, softcover, ebook, and audiobook

n August 1840, Ellis Gray Loring, an anti-­ slavery lawyer in Boston, sent a letter to his Ifriend Reverend Hiram Wilson, of Toronto. He mentioned a lecturer named Fred, an ex-slave who In 1877, the former slave Frederick Douglass became U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia. had escaped “two years ago” from his owner, Thomas Auld. Loring suggested this lecturer’s powerful ora- avid W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet for history, details how Douglass’s sermons to “fugi- torial abilities could “produce great effect,” and that Dof Freedom is a fine examination of a remark- tive slaves and free blacks” brought him acclaim for Wilson should consider buying his freedom. able man who escaped the painful shackles of his his diction and presence and helped him establish “Fred,” as it turned out, was the leading abo- early life to become a leading advocate of free- contacts with white abolitionists like Loring “earlier litionist Frederick Douglass. While nothing ever dom. With the publication of Narrative, in 1845, than scholars have previously known.” came of Loring’s proposal, just think how close Douglass became one of America’s most influential Douglass was a Republican by political persua- we came to having the great statesman and social ­writers and orators. Before and after the Civil War, sion, although he would certainly have been on reformer writing his best-­selling autobiography, he fought for equality and changed the hearts and the radical side of the party faithful. What would Narrative of a Life of Frederick Douglass: An minds of many around the world. become the Grand Old Party was relatively new, American Slave, in Canada. Douglass grew up a slave of mixed-­race back- having been established only in 1854. His reactions Douglass, like others who face personal hard- ground. As a child, he secretly learned how to read often “ranged from vehement opposition to cau- ship and turmoil, understood that freedom was and write, with the help of Sophia Auld, his owner’s tious support,” although he did “his best to uphold a cherished value in a democratic society. Their wife. As he described it in Narrative, the discovery the Radical Abolition platform within the ranks of stories remind us that the ability to speak, think, of knowledge and education was revelatory and the Republicans.” This allegiance has been touted practise, protest, achieve, and accomplish one’s made him aware of “the pathway from slavery to by modern Republican adherents like Donald goals — without fear of restriction, retribution, or freedom.” Trump (although remarks the president made limitation — is something we should never take In 1838, Douglass escaped from slavery and in 2017 indicate a serious misunderstanding of for granted. tasted freedom for the first time. He married his Douglass’s most basic biography). What about those who aren’t free? For such indi- first wife, Anna Murray, a free black woman from The former slave was awestruck by Abraham viduals and groups, the thirst to acquire personal, Baltimore, and began to take account of the “sharp Lincoln during their first meeting in August 1863. political, and economic freedom is unquenchable. distinctions between a Southern slave society and He firmly believed he had found in the president Whether they’re escaping repressive societies in a Northern free-labor­ society.” Settling in the whal- “the ultimate counterpart actor — at least in the Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or joining a migrant ing community of New Bedford, Massachusetts, power the other character represented.” There caravan in Central America, hoping to reach the he encountered racism but found opportunities to were issues on which they passionately disagreed, Mexico-­U.S. border, they do everything in their earn money at odd jobs, such as shovelling coal and including how quickly to eliminate slavery and power to live open, unrestricted, and fulfilling lives. cleaning chimneys for wealthy white families. He Lincoln’s short-­lived flirtation with the American Three recent books take up the long, winding road joined the small African Methodist Episcopal Zion Colonization Society, the controversial group that to freedom that’s familiar to so many today by look- Church and became a faith leader. Blight’s sweep- advocated sending free African Americans back

ril 7, 1877) ( Ap ril 7, N ewspaper Frank Les l ie’s Ill ustrated from I llustration ing back on the nineteenth century. ing biography, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize to Africa (a movement that ultimately led to the

May 2019 7 ­creation of Liberia). Nevertheless, Douglass “heard ­sharp-edged­ piece of abolitionism, but also dna M. Troiano’s Uncle Tom’s Journey from echoes of his own jeremiads and his relentless war Douglass’s earliest effort to help build the majestic EMaryland to Canada is a short albeit intriguing propaganda” during the president’s second inaug- cross of John Brown’s martyrdom.” He would also examination of another heroic individual, Josiah ural address, in March 1865. He was thrilled when travel to Toronto, sail down the St. Lawrence River Henson. Born in 1789, in Maryland, Henson was the Lincoln called him “friend” and treasured Lincoln’s on the Nova Scotia, en route to Liverpool, and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s primary inspir- words of praise: “There is no man in the country write in amusement about, among other things, ation for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel Lincoln sup- whose opinion I value more than yours.” “the Frenchness of Montreal.” posedly credited with starting “this great war.” (This Blight’s analysis is largely devoted to Douglass’s Strangely, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of was long before the phrase “Uncle Tom” became travels, meetings, and speeches throughout the Freedom does not mention Douglass’s appearance something of a derogatory term for a black man United States. He spends less time exploring at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Hall, in 1851. A featured considered overly subservient.) After escaping a life the vivid connections to Canada, aside from the speaker at the North American Convention of of slavery, Henson became a minister, abolitionist, Loring-­Wilson letter, but such connections will Colored Freemen, he discussed the resettlement and author in Canada, and he was active in helping ­certainly intrigue Canadian readers. of U.S. slaves with Henry Bibb, a black abolitionist others escape through the Underground Railroad. Douglass, of course, was well aware of the and the convention’s organizer. (Another notable His father was enslaved to one man, Francis Underground Railroad and of the thousands of attendee, Mary Ann Shadd, would become North Newman; Josiah, his mother, and his siblings black slaves who sought freedom in the Maritimes America’s first black female publisher when she belonged to another, Josiah McPherson. The lat- and southern Ontario. He made sure copies of his started the Provincial Freeman, just down King ter was a relatively friendly, kind, and liberal slave anti-­slavery weekly newspaper, the North Star, Street from St. Lawrence Hall, in 1853.) It’s surpris- owner; McPherson was “obviously fond” of the boy, which ran from 1847 to 1851, circulated north of the ing that Blight, who directs the Gilder Lehrman Troiano writes, since he “named him Josiah after border. And Canadian delegates attended an 1855 Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and himself and added the name Henson for one of conference of the Radical Abolition Party, to which Abolition at Yale University, fails to refer to this his uncles who was an officer in the Revolutionary Douglass acknowledged being a “devotee.” They important gathering. War.” McPherson’s life ended tragically due to an would go on to pass “a resolution affirming the use The omission doesn’t take away from an accidental drowning, and Henson would write in of violence to overthrow slavery.” impressive tome, however. In astonishing detail, his autobiography that life before the accident was In 1859, following the radical abolitionist we see the various stages of freedom that Douglass “a bright spot in [his] childhood.” John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, an attempt experienced throughout his seventy-­seven years: Henson remained a slave for more than forty to arm a slave revolt in Virginia, Douglass fled to personal, educational, political, and spiritual. In years. With his intelligence and ability, he estab- Canada and stayed briefly. Although he disagreed 1872, without his knowledge, Douglass became lished a good relationship with Isaac Riley, another with Brown’s tactics, he feared being labelled a the first African American nominated for vice slave owner. When Riley’s debts became too great, co-­conspirator nonetheless. Blight notes that he president. In 1884, following the death of Anna he sent Henson, his wife, Charlotte, their two stayed at a tavern in Clifton (now Niagara Falls) Murray, Douglass would marry again — to Helen sons, and eighteen other slaves to a plantation in and “hated his current exile and worried about Pitts, a white abolitionist twenty years his junior. Kentucky, owned by his brother Amos. As Troiano the possible confiscation of his property if his And five years after that, he would travel to Haiti, explains, this involved Henson leading the large indictment held.” He continued to publish col- where he served as the U.S. ambassador until 1891. group “on a journey of one thousand miles through umns, such as “Capt. John Brown Not Insane,” Throughout it all, he continued to write, teach, and unfamiliar territory and over mountains on foot in which Blight describes as “not only a vintage, inspire people. the dead of winter.”

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8 Literary Review of Canada Even though Henson served the Riley broth- ers faithfully for years, they still cheated him when it came to buying his freedom. Troiano’s research reveals a set of original manumission Interior with Sudden Joy papers — documenting the promise of free- dom — that priced Henson’s release from slavery at After Dorothea Tanning one dollar. He actually arranged to make a payment of $450 to pay off all the debts related to him and Maddening, the scent of the onlooker his family. Behind his back, however, Isaac Riley The foul gut-stench of the voyeur “had added three zeroes” — creating an impossible A worm-cloud with pointe shoes and amount for Henson to raise. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever Henson had had enough. He knew friendly abo- Stand up straight. I am limbs without litionists in Ohio, who “convinced him that Canada Reason. My skeleton is a tree was the only place where he could be confident of remaining free.” He gathered the family together, committing twelve kinds of treason. and they made their way to Cincinnati, where he I have an internal wind, “felt relatively secure.” American Indians helped a scoliosis carnival inside my them part of the way, providing food and shelter. Skin-sack, my petticoat. A poor ship’s captain named Burnham then took I suspect a leave-taking, my pelvis them to Buffalo, gave Henson a dollar, and asked a Is stretched over my toes and if I ferryman to complete their journey to Canada. His Close my eyes he will still be there only request was that Henson “be a good fellow,” In the doorway with a Gordian knot Troiano writes, to which Henson replied, “I’ll use In his hands he will say it’s an apology my freedom well; I’ll give my soul to God.” But I know that it is made of the scraps It was a promise he kept. Of our old life, the ones unfit for The family established the Dawn Settlement for Forming into something beautiful fugitive slaves, near modern-­day Dresden, Ontario, and made a good life for themselves. Henson The ones balled together and tossed became a beloved preacher, renowned for inspira- In the kiln as an afterthought. tional sermons. He began to learn how to read and He looks on at me in my ruby slippers write from his son Tom, but he never “became adept And my conical gown, and his shadow at either,” Troiano writes. Instead, the preacher had Is a cloud of regret around my to “depend on others to write his letters, documents, Broken ankles. and autobiographies.” He would build a sawmill and a gristmill, aided by thousands of dollars raised by Erin Emily Ann Vance wealthy American philanthropists. He even became friends with Hiram Wilson — the same man who could have helped to free Douglass — and together Erin Emily Ann Vance wrote The Sorceress Who Left Too Soon: Poems after Remedios Varo, they built the British-­American Institute and other a chapbook. Her novel, Advice for Taxidermists and Amateur Beekeepers, is due out this fall. schools. Henson also spoke to American and British audiences about slavery and came into contact with prominent individuals like the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He died in Dresden, in fact, Irish soldiers suffered disproportionate losses, help give the long-­suffering Irish a measure of the 1883, at the age of ninety-three.­ because so many were “placed on the front lines to freedom they had long desired. serve often as little more than cannon fodder.”­ It was not to be. The Fenians lost most of their hristopher Klein’s When the Irish Invaded In April 1866, one year after the Civil War’s con- raids at locations like Pigeon Hill, Eccles Hill, and CCanada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil clusion, in May 1865, the first Fenian raid occurred Trout River. Several newspapers described their War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom at Campobello Island, New Brunswick. U.S. attempted invasions of Canada with the igno- examines another astonishing episode in the quest president Andrew Johnson supported the move, minious phrasing “the Fenian fiasco.” Moreover, for deliverance: the Fenian raids. These battles even though he didn’t necessarily trust the Irish O’Neill’s once-glowing­ reputation was sullied occurred between 1866 and 1871, when Irish-­ republicans. Bernard Doran Killian, treasurer of when he tried to join forces with the Métis leader born veterans who had fought on both sides of the the Fenian Brotherhood, led 500 to 600 men toward Louis Riel. Not only did this alliance never take American Civil War joined forces in hopes of secur- the island in what they hoped would be the first place — Riel was wary of the Fenians — but O’Neill ing freedom for Ireland. And it all happened on step toward independence. The New York World couldn’t even figure out where to attack the British Canadian soil. romanticized the subsequent battle, suggesting in Manitoba. As Klein explains, “Not only had he The word “Fenian” refers to two fraternal organ- “the Fenians would establish a provisional govern- failed to invade Canada” during this 1871 battle, izations, created in 1858, that championed an ment on the island, elect O’Mahony president, and but due to his poor sense of geography, “he had independent republic. On one side was the Irish use it as a base to launch an army of twenty-­five failed to enter Canada — at least in the eyes of the Republican Brotherhood, founded in Ireland by thousand men to conquer New Brunswick and U.S. government.” This bizarre piece of history James Stephens; on the other side was the Fenian rechristen it the ‘Republic of Emmetta’ in honor of has led some to suggest his short-lived­ victory at Brotherhood, founded in the United States by the Irish patriot Robert Emmet.” They didn’t come Ridgeway was nothing more than a “fluke in the John O’Mahony. The former attempted to branch close to accomplishing their lofty goal, however, as general’s record.” out in the U.S., but the latter was too strong and the British sent in warships and pushed them back. Ironically, the country that truly gained a overwhelmed it. Stephens opposed raids on The Irish republicans did have one significant ­measure of freedom and confidence was not Canada — still a British outpost — while the more success two months later, during the Battle of Ireland but Canada. Klein suggests we “might not dominating O’Mahony salivated for opportunities Ridgeway, near Fort Erie. Under the leadership of have been a nation at all without the Fenians.” to strike. John Charles O’Neill, they were able to defeat the Why? “The subsequent Fenian raids into Ontario During the four-­year Civil War, some 20,000 Irish inexperienced Canadians, who lost seven members and Quebec and the enduring threat of another Americans fought for the Confederacy, and up to of the Queen’s Own Rifles. It was a historic victory, attack alarmed many residents along the American 200,000 fought for the Union. “To many Fenians Klein notes, and the first time since 1845 that “an border,” he writes. That helped delegates to the and Irish republicans,” writes Klein, “enlistment Irish army had emerged victorious against forces Charlottetown Conference, like Thomas D’Arcy offered the opportunity to gain valuable training of the British Empire.” Newspapers in Toronto, McGee, convince people in the Province of Canada for the eventual revolution they planned to launch Boston, Detroit, and Dublin took note. Some even that “a union was necessary in order to protect their in Ireland.” The price of such training was high: they started to believe that a slew of Fenian Brotherhood families and property.” Confederation would hap- “didn’t expect to have to die in such numbers.” In victories on the battlefield of a British colony could pen just over a year after the first raid.

May 2019 9 The City That Could Have Been Vancouver didn’t just happen Spencer Morrison

Vancouverism Larry Beasley On Point Press 424 pages, softcover

At the Wilderness Edge: The Rise of the Antidevelopment Movement on Canada’s West Coast J. I. Little McGill-Queen’s University Press 216 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook

hen I run past Coal Harbour or drive along its Dunsmuir Viaduct, I experi- W ence the results of what’s arguably the most consequential policy choice in Vancouver’s history. In February 1973, the city’s eleven-­member council voted overwhelmingly against constructing a freeway through the downtown core. The deci- sion arose from powerful forces beyond municipal institutions: namely, local opposition that impelled the Pierre Trudeau government to withdraw federal support for the project. However, it also signalled a tidal shift within those institutions. Public antipathy toward the highway proposal had helped fuel the election, in 1972, of a new, more progressive political party, The Electors’ Action Movement, known as TEAM, which routed the long-­standing pro-­development, pro-­freeway Non-Partisan­ Association. The new mayor, Art Phillips, brought to city hall a keen attention to the daily experience of city life. In an era of intense highway construction across North America, he Vancouver could easily have become an unenticing place to live. helped swerve Vancouver onto an unusual back road of urban development — one that prioritized North American fashion. Its downtown, rather stem the suburban tide? Why did it turn out so urban serenity over the car as king. To this day, atypically, held the city’s largest concentration of differently?­ British Columbia’s largest city remains the contin- workplaces. A new form of connecting home and Vancouver’s unique geography offers part of ent’s only major urban centre without a freeway work — indeed, a new form of urbanism­ — had to the answer. Hemmed in by mountains and water, feeding its core. be imagined. its downtown sits on a peninsula that constrains Like Toronto’s partially elevated Gardiner Larry Beasley’s Vancouverism documents that growth. History matters too. Located on the penin- Expressway, completed in 1966, Vancouver’s imagining. Prefaced by an illuminating essay from sula, right between the central business district and ­proposed freeway would have severed its down- the journalist Frances Bula, which surveys the city’s the magnificent Stanley Park, the neighbourhood town from its waterfront. (The proposal’s only vis- history until the mid-1980s, where Beasley picks up, known as the West End set precedents in urban ible remnants are sections built before the 1973 the book charts a remarkable development: down- density and architectural style that fuelled the later decision, the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, town Vancouver’s transformation from a zone beset developments throughout the downtown. Despite located in northeast False Creek, near BC Place.) by suburban flight to a space of densified — and earning a reputation for seediness by the 1970s, the Quashing construction was good for lively street life largely convivial — community life. As Bula notes, West End was in earlier decades a coveted home for and lovely vistas, but it produced a new problem. Vancouver developed in ways that set it apart affluent apartment dwellers, who sought proximity Without a highway, how would people travel en from such western cities as Calgary, Edmonton, to both Stanley Park and their offices. The notion of masse from their homes to downtown? The daily Winnipeg, and Los Angeles. These places, unlike a livable core studded with slender apartment tow- commute is a prime consideration for planners New York, Montreal, and other constrained eastern ers has long existed in the city’s civic imagination. everywhere, but in post-1973 Vancouver, it assumed cities, sprawled from their earliest years across the But circumstances of geography and history do special importance. At the time, and well into the west’s open spaces in ways still reflected in their not fully explain Vancouver’s distinct urban form.

1980s, Vancouver was suburbanizing in the typical urban forms. How, then, did Vancouver alone Make no mistake: specific policy interventions by c hristy L undy I llustration

10 Literary Review of Canada were essential to its transformation sidewalk design will encourage more from the 1980s onwards. Beasley, pedestrian trips. formerly Vancouver’s chief planner Vancouver’s strictly regulated, and now a professor at the University Aluminum deliberately planned downtown pos- of British Columbia, played a cen- sesses an understated beauty that tral role in hatching these policies. A wet flag sliding up its pole belies criticisms of glassy uniformity. Vancouverism, then, reads as part like a hunk of bread backwashed up a straw Yet anyone familiar with Vancouver memoir of a remarkable career, part is one way of saying everything knows that the city is not with- lucid primer on planning principles is disgusting if looked at a certain way. out blemishes — some severe. For that work. Take the town you grew one thing, the Downtown Eastside exposes Vancouverism’s failure to Today, “Vancouverism” is widely up in, its three traffic lights used by urbanists to describe that produce meaningful social and eco- and skunk stench oozing up special brand of urban density, liv- nomic equity. Skyrocketing housing from the gullies. Try to look at it ability, and sustainability. The term costs, meanwhile, degrade quality of has no known origin or fixed defin- differently. Tell me the salmon sexing life for all but the wealthy. ition, however. Beasley’s definition is to death in the Skeena are beautiful To his credit, Beasley addresses expansive, encompassing deliberate in their pursuit of home, their black these failures head‑on, grasping at policy choices for producing efficient spots just instinct’s amorous fingerprints; solutions. On the issue of afford- land use; a socially diverse popula- that the man three beers deep ability, he is especially imaginative, tion; and an inviting, elegant physical running his dog alongside his pickup proposing solutions not often heard design for urban living. His concep- on gravel roads is really in mainstream housing debates. Most tion also embraces a spirit of col- Walt Whitman and the salmon discussions are fixated on an either/ laboration among private real estate are his silver beard dotted with pipe ash or: either buy property or rent it. But perhaps alternatives exist. Might developers and the general public, and nostalgia. If you can tell me this whose experience of the city interests co-­housing and space-­sharing con- you’re no longer looking Beasley the most. cepts developed in Nordic countries, at Kitimat, but at a painting for example, work here? How about n Beasley’s hands, Vancouverism’s hanging above your mother alternative forms of financing and Iseemingly disparate parts emerge in the German restaurant where you ate development? Could buyers purchase as a cohesive whole. Take the quan- schnitzel and buttered rolls, avoiding a home without having access to cap- dary produced by the rejected free- a discussion of your future. ital gains, so that they build equity way: How do you transport people Try not to notice how grey she’s gone while starting from a lower price? from home to work? At first glance, in this decade since you’ve lived with her, Could the finance industry support this might appear an isolated issue her hair so many spawning salmon. new forms of shared ownership? of transportation policy. Probe more Look down at the parking lot; admire Prompted by Beasley, we can begin closely, though, and it encapsulates Dairy Queen’s most recent facelift, to imagine an affordability program far more expansive than anything on an entire ethos of city life. Lacking a row of buildings for lease. a freeway, planners were forced to offer from mainstream politicians. If the flag could dry enough to flap up devise a new strategy for expediting Peculiarly, however, Beasley skirts off its pole you’d see the snowflake logo the daily commute. Their solution a major theme in Vancouver’s hous- was not to find some alternative at its centre and a childhood feeling ing debate, one given prominence transportation artery. Instead — and of ok might spread like butter across you. by much recent research, includ- ingeniously — they decided to move Look! There’s Whitman strapping ing from Simon Fraser University’s homes closer to workplaces, thereby his little boat to the roof of his truck, City Program director Andy Yan, dramatically reducing the need for his feet swimming in brown rain and by reporting by the real estate car trips at all. Downtown, they boots. He is rearranging his fishing journalist Kerry Gold and others. decided, must be densified. tackle, readying to row off That theme is the effects of foreign In an era when public conscious- onto the godawful water. investment. Of course, Beasley need ness remained enchanted by the not endorse or rebut the wide- dream of home ownership and spread claim that foreign speculation large plots of land, an era when has profoundly altered Vancouver’s many Vancouverites yearned for Kayla Czaga housing market. Some prominent the local analogue to Calgary tract figures — ­especially those in the housing or Mississauga bungalows, real estate and development indus- Beasley’s team decided to market a Kayla Czaga is the author of two poetry collections, For Your tries — contest it. However, by not wildly different bill of goods. To sell Safety Please Hold On and Dunk Tank . She lives in Victoria. meaningfully engaging the claim at Vancouverites on downtown living, all, his discussion of housing remains they had to render it unprecedentedly incomplete. enticing. This in turn required beauti- fying densely populated zones through high-end town vista, Beasley’s team began to study its overall hat Vancouverism evokes is the trajector- urban design and the deliberate nurturing of a rich profile. The resulting skyline now contains sculpted Wies the city could have followed but didn’t: community life. Very quickly, a question of mere modulations: strategically placed taller build- possible but bygone futures latent in the Vancouver transportation policy has become a web of wide-­ ings enlivening the scene. According to Beasley, of the 1970s and ’80s. The Georgia and Dunsmuir ranging policy considerations. Vancouver is the only city to shape its skyline so Viaducts, seedlings of an unbuilt highway that are And all these varied considerations themselves deliberately. now slated for demolition, stand as monuments to required bureaucratic engineering. Vancouverites Perhaps the most astonishingly granular inter- such futures past. Indeed, the detailed techniques not trained as planners might be unaware of the ventions occur at the level of individual buildings. of urban engineering that Beasley describes allow extent to which their everyday experience is cali- Planners work with developers and designers to us to imagine a city less consciously designed brated from on high. When you catch a glimpse of ensure daylight reaches every window of a new and regulated. This alternative Vancouver is one the North Shore mountains through the mass of structure, and they see to it that the windows in which mid-­century trends of suburbanization downtown towers, you encounter a view corridor themselves are distanced from or angled to those of go unchecked and development proceeds helter-­ designed with the utmost deliberation at city hall. nearby buildings. They consider the acoustic effects skelter, producing a fearsomely different experi- Even the towers themselves, viewed from afar, are of open space. Where possible, the primary living ence — and one unenticing as a place for living. a work of bureaucratic artistry. Following public space in new residential units is distanced from Yet even more spectacularly worrying alternative complaints about the flatness of Vancouver’s down- public walkways. Beasley even muses that statelier futures existed than those Vancouverism implies.

May 2019 11 Can you imagine a Vancouver whose West End has, these groups sought after the Second World War Vancouverites I’ve encountered have claimed, through breakneck development, become a West was not nature’s conservation, a concept associ- channelling Jessica Barrett’s much-read 2017 essay Coast Manhattan, complete with overcrowded side- ated with more efficient resource use, but its pres- in The Tyee, that the city has lost its soul. walks, shadowy canyons, and scant nature? What ervation. By identifying spaces of wilderness upon A common refrain among politicians, develop- about one whose skyline is framed not by today’s which development must not encroach, ordinary ers, and boosters is that Vancouver has become verdant North Shore mountains but by clear-cut middle-­class British Columbians asserted limits to a world-class city. And yet I wonder: Do most peaks or sprawling, Aspen-­style ski resorts? This growth and boundaries to city life. Their protests, Vancouverites want to live in a world-class city? alternative Vancouver — Manhattanized and set as Little suggests, reveal how urban life to some I think of friends and family who have stayed or against denuded, treeless mountains — would extent depends upon the nearby presence of the moved back. One gave up a thriving business career have a densely populated suburb, complete with non-­urban — a space imagined by self-­interested in a financial hub for much less certain prospects, row houses and a rapid-ferry­ commute, on nearby urbanites as revivifying. all because he missed the sailing, skiing, and hik- Bowen Island. Gambier Island, meanwhile, would ing. Others embraced the area decades ago as be not the idyllic place it is today but the site of he city that Beasley and his fellow planners a retreat from the unbridled urbanism of larger a mining operation worth billions. Tdesigned, and that ordinary citizens fought places; some of these people feel that the city that These scenarios are not just revisionist fantasy. to shape through political engagement, is a mar- has grown around them is no longer what they J. I. Little’s At the Wilderness Edge: The Rise of the vel of North American urbanism. Born and raised sought in the first place. Antidevelopment Movement on Canada’s West in Vancouver, I left for university and came to Perhaps a better question, and one addressed Coast shows developers and financiers advancing appreciate how rare it is to find my hometown’s only obliquely by these two books: What kind of these visions for the city’s future, with varying combination of abundant greenery, natural beauty, classiness best suits Vancouver? Should Vancouver degrees of plausibility, from the 1930s through densified living, and serene pace of life. With most aspire to be world-class in the same way as London, the 1980s. Each vision faced stern resistance from of my family still there, I visit regularly and wonder Tokyo, and Manhattan? To me — and, I believe, Little’s main subject: a series of local and largely why I ever left. many others — what distinguishes the city is the unconnected anti-development­ campaigns that But then I check housing prices. In January, the elements that can’t be fully captured by the impera- bear an uncanny resemblance to contemporary urban policy consultancy Demographia ranked the tives of policy making (“grow the economy,” “drive environmental movements — reminiscent, but not housing market second among the world’s least innovation”). Rather, it’s the vibrant community quite identical. From Squamish to Gambier Island, affordable. When I encounter fellow displaced life, natural beauty, multiculturalism, and lifestyle from Bowen Island to Hollyburn Ridge, and even Vancouverites, our common talking points have opportunities that Vancouver offers. in downtown Vancouver, natural spaces slated for changed from ten or fifteen years ago. Back then, The phrase “world-class” is often applied gen- residential and industrial development galvanized we would perform the smugness for which our ilk erically and ubiquitously, its meaning unchanged protesters whose identities and motivations defy is known, comparing wherever we were unfavour- from place to place. Can Vancouver wrest “world- stereotypes we often associate with ’60s and ’70s ably with our cherished city. Now, the tone, affect, class” from this unchanging definition, redefine it environmentalism. and subject matter have shifted. There’s a wistful- in the interests of its populace, submit the term’s Like British Columbians who protest against the ness for what Vancouver was before galloping meaning to democratic deliberation? Beasley’s Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion today, these price escalation, a resentment of its arrival, and an book gives me hope that it can. Vancouver has, for mid-century­ groups fought to save nature from grudgingly implied acknowledgement of the city’s decades, forged its own singular style of urbanism. despoliation. However, their motives for environ- beauty, as if vocalizing it would expose our sadness Little’s book, meanwhile, reveals a deep-­seated mentalism appear quaintly anthropocentric today. at having left. Many of the more recently displaced civic will to ensure the city comes out on top. Ecological concerns of wildlife habitat and bio- diversity were peripheral in their minds. Rather, these groups sought to protect natural spaces as BEGINS MAY 18 zones for leisure activities, such as fishing or ski- ing. In an era of rising affluence and greater leisure time, one that birthed the term “lifestyle,” nature’s value lay above all in its benefits to psychological well-being. These older campaigns for nature, then, AUGUST: sit at an oblique angle to those of today. Even so, they nourished an ecological awareness that gave OSAGE COUNTY rise to contemporary environmentalism. Some cultural historians treat resistance as a ter- TRACY LETTS minus to analysis, rather than a spur to new ques- tions: that Group X or Text Y resisted entrenched A fiercely funny power is noteworthy in and of itself, irrespective and bitingly brutal of whether (and why) the resistance succeeded or family saga. failed to effect real-world change. Little is no such historian. He charts the why, how, and who of these movements. Somewhat surprisingly, mid-century­ anti-­development protesters were largely middle-­ class and upper-­middle-­class professionals; what we think of as major environmental groups, such as Greenpeace (founded in Vancouver) and the Sierra Club, did not participate in their cam- paigns. Indeed, anti-development­ leaders were not inspired by or compelled to cooperate with the New Left countercultural activism that arose in the ’60s. And many of them were women — a notable fact given the limited opportunities for female political participation at the time. They succeeded in part through appeals to technical-­scientific reports on the effects of development, through vociferous protests at local town halls, and through legal challenges. Their campaigns, that is, occurred within and alongside ILLUsTraTIon: marIE LaFranCE m ajor prodUCTIon the very bureaucratic institutions scorned by the sponsor sponsor era’s youth counterculture. Unlike earlier anti-­ SOULPEPPER.CA 416 866 8666 AT THE YOUNG CENTRE FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS - IN THE HISTORIC DISTILLERY DISTRICT development campaigners in the province, what

12 Literary Review of Canada GAME CHANGERS

Revealing how Canada’s first prime minister used a policy of starvation against Indigenous people to clear the way for settlement, the multiple- award-winning Clearing the Plains sparked widespread debate about genocide in Canada.

“Sheldon Krasowski rightly shows Indigenous peoples in No Surrender to be intelligent negotiators of mutually beneficial treaties, instead of the dupes we have been portrayed to be.” Harold Johnson, author of Clifford and Firewater

Participation made possible through Creative Saskatchewan’s Market and Export Development Grant Program. UofRPress.ca

MayLRC 2019 AD CTP and NS U of R Press.indd 1 2019-04-15 3:36 PM13 State of the Unions The birth and promise of Unifor John Baglow

he outlines what transpired after that A New Kind of Union: year’s CLC gathering. He describes it Unifor and the Birth of the as an unprecedented exercise in back- Modern Canadian Union to-basics institutional engineering, Fred Wilson “fuelled by idealism and adrenalin.” James Lorimer & Company Neither Lewenza nor Coles was a 256 pages, softcover and ebook starry-­eyed newcomer to the scene: they were tough, savvy leaders with years of experience under their belts. t’s hardly news that the Their unions, themselves the prod- economic climate has grown ucts of numerous mergers, were large Iincreasingly harsh for working and powerful, representing approxi- Canadians. In recent years, they have mately 300,000 members from coast faced stagnating wages and a steady to coast to coast. But Lewenza and attrition of secure, well-­paying jobs Coles were not about to embark with decent retirement benefits. on just another merger. The whole There has been a stunning growth enterprise, in their view, needed to be in precarious employment: short- reconceived. term, often part-time positions with The first step in the eventual little security and few if any benefits. New Union Project was a discus- In Hamilton, once the proud Steel sion paper, co-authored­ by the CAW Capital of Canada, such employment labour economist Jim Stanford and now accounts for 60 percent of all The new model of Canadian labour? Unifor was born on August 31, 2013. Wilson himself. “A Moment of Truth jobs. And across the country, mil- for Canadian Unions” offered a his- lennials have been particularly hard hit. Liberal the form of back-to-work legislation, had become torical and cultural survey: years of reverses and finance minister Bill Morneau advises them to get commonplace at the provincial level; anti-­labour defeats; the dysfunction, even paralysis, of some used to it. legislation had been implemented in Alberta, central labour bodies; and an alleged public hos- Organized labour is a historically formidable British Columbia, and Saskatchewan. In Ontario, tility toward unions. (The latter seems somewhat force, one that shortened the work week, helped the opposition Progressive Conservatives were overblown, incidentally. Recent polls show strong win the minimum wage, and advocated for work- campaigning for a full-blown right-to-work regime, public support for unions in both Canada and the place health and safety legislation, unemployment where workers would no longer have to pay union United States.) insurance, and public health care. But, so far, it has dues but could still enjoy the benefits of a union-­ Merely tinkering with the status quo would proven itself unable to reverse the latest trends. won contract — if such a thing continued to exist. not do, yet the pitfalls and vertical climbs ahead Rapid change in the labour landscape, inimical to Now similar obstacles appeared on the horizon at were daunting. Unions are democratic organiza- traditional union organizing, plays a frustrating the federal level. tions, and any fundamental rearrangement of their role. Institutional lethargy — along with a failure of A few days after Harper’s electoral victory, structure and function requires massive grassroots nerve, vision, and imagination — is also a big part the Canadian Labour Congress held its triennial buy‑in. Many unionists are wary of making changes of the problem. convention in Vancouver. The CLC’s response to without nuts-and-bolts detail; they demand more Until recently, the share of workers belonging to the growing labour crisis was yet another of those than broad-strokes proposals before committing. unions in the private sector was in steady decline. flabby “action plans,” all too familiar to union activ- Moreover, union roots run deep, and dramatic While it appears to have stabilized, membership ists, coupled with a multi-­million-­dollar PR exer- change can mean culture shock. is not increasing. The rise of so-called fissured cise to convince the public that unions are a good What’s more, CAW and CEP had considerable, workplaces — corporate networks of middleman thing. The “plan” wasn’t even debated. long-­standing political differences, particularly contractors, franchises, and outsourced produc- For Ken Lewenza, president of the Canadian in Ontario. Bob Rae’s NDP government, elected tion — has presented formidable challenges to Auto Workers (CAW), and Dave Coles, president in 1990, introduced an anti-­scab law and made effective organizing. So too has the fragmented ser- of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers other bold moves to support labour in the face of vice sector, with its small workplaces, high turnover, of Canada (CEP), enough was enough. “We have an unrelenting corporate onslaught — in which and the ever-­present threat of parent companies to be able to do better than this,” Coles said at the the media gleefully took part. But Rae imposed cD onald / F li c kr shutting down stores when unions do gain a foot- time. If organized labour were to survive the chal- salary cuts on provincial public employees — in hold (in the early 2000s, McDonald’s closed two lenges ahead, they agreed, something fundamen- the form of unpaid “Rae Days” — and split the Quebec restaurants that organized). tally different was needed. By joining their unions province’s labour movement by so doing. CAW Things couldn’t have looked bleaker for labour together, they could set a new course for labour in stood with the public servants, CEP unswervingly after Stephen Harper won his majority govern- this country. with the NDP. ment in May 2011. Besides the practical obstacles Structurally, too, the two unions were rad- to effective organizing, the political norms were red Wilson was CEP’s director of strategic plan- ically dissimilar. CEP’s membership was spread shifting. Interference in collective bargaining, in Fning in 2011, and in A New Kind of Union, across the country, in relatively small locals; p h by John M a Photogra

14 Literary Review of Canada CAW’s ­members were concentrated in Quebec Ultimately, it was approved by 96 percent of The allied issue of Unifor’s support for “strategic and Ontario, in fairly large locals. Even as things convention voters — a remarkable margin given voting” for Liberals, in order to beat Conservatives were reshaped at the national level, change at the the focus groups, activists, and tens of thousands of where the NDP seems weak, is still a vexed ques- local level posed significant risk. Pressed by a tight members involved. tion in the movement. It’s really not a strategy at deadline, the parties decided to kick that can down The near-miraculous­ triumph of forming Unifor all, only a tactic, and for many it’s a short-­sighted the road: “Local unions would remain intact, with and bringing it to life, in a mere two years, cannot one. The Trudeau government changed its mind no forced mergers,” Wilson explains. “The broader be exaggerated. It was realized by a combination of on proposed federal-­sector anti-scab legislation in issues of local union structures would be referred careful, step-by-step planning, skillful facilitation, fall 2016, and just a few months ago it legislated to as a ‘local union task force’ to be carried out by ceaseless information flows and communications, postal workers back to work. The Ontario Liberals the new union.” broad member involvement, and an enormous undertook an explicitly anti-labour­ campaign To build that new union — and to ensure amount of good will, with fiercely held differences during their government’s last few days in 2018. the larger CAW would not swamp the smaller put aside in pursuit of a common goal. Pragmatism, as it turns out, cuts both ways. CEP — a bipartite proposal committee would go But what of the aftermath? Here things get a little What about effective bargaining and organizing right back to first principles. If the new membership tricky — both on the ground and in the book. by the new union? At the outset, Unifor committed would be defined by “what we think and what we 10 percent of its budget to organizing, and it has do,” rather than “who we are,” what would its values ilson clearly and logically lays out the gained more than 20,000 new members over the be? How would the interests of all members be pro- Wtowering obstacles Unifor faced, and the six years since, but not all of them were unorgan- tected, and what were those interests? Who could manner in which they were overcome, one by one. ized. Contracts with the profitable auto industry be a member? What could the union offer, by way Although it feels like inside baseball at times, A New still contain a two-tier wage structure, where new of charting a new course, within organized labour Kind of Union will be of considerable interest to hires work for less than the previous starting wage; and the wider community? labour historians, institutional theorists, and, of and GM and Chrysler are busy shutting down their Structure was an immediate, key issue. Mergers course, leaders, staff, and rank-and-file activists. Canadian operations. are not known for streamlined efficiency, and there Where it falters, however, is in its concluding sec- Unifor’s decision to leave the CLC in January tend to be winners and losers. Institutional iner- tions, which strictly observe the party line and leave 2018 has left many of its grassroots activists high tia can quickly become resistance. Despite tense, a lot out. and dry, no longer able to remain involved in CLC-­ almost deal-breaking­ moments, the fundamental Take, for example, the new entity’s push for a affiliated local labour councils across the country questions — representative elected leadership, the different kind of politics, one that would not tie or to take part in their campaigns. Unifor’s raiding distinct status of Quebec, and the various roles of the union to the NDP, the traditional labour party. of other unions — the bone of contention with the local, regional, equity-­seeking, retiree, and sectoral “There is a great need for a new politics that advan- CLC — hasn’t even been effective: support among bodies — somehow got resolved. ces the interests of workers,” Unifor states in one Allied Transit Union members fizzled, and most The proposals were put through a wind tunnel policy document, “but there are no easy answers for of UNITE HERE’s hotel workers in Toronto have of input and critique from thousands of activ- a ‘worker politics’ that will accomplish this. . . . Our elected to stay put. Certainly, Unifor has proven ists and rank-and-file members. Separate union Project cannot be described simply by the goal of “disruptive,” to use Wilson’s favoured term, but conventions in 2012 unanimously agreed that a electing a particular government or by ideological it has isolated itself from the mainstream labour model would be brought to a special convention in pronouncements about a future society.” movement, which, for all its faults, is where most fall 2013; six working groups were struck to assem- This seems a little disingenuous. Buzz Hargrove, unionized workers are still to be found. ble it. Another round of national consultations was a former CAW head, was embracing the Liberals as Wilson describes a visionary, community-­based held, as was a union staff conference. early as 2006. Certainly, by drifting to the centre, aspect of the “new kind of union.” While Unifor has Complete with a new slogan — “A union for the NDP no longer presented a genuine alterna- put serious money and commitment behind social everyone” — the finished product included a rad- tive, many working people thought; in fact, the justice issues, president Jerry Dias’s scathing criti- ical notion of membership: it would be open to Liberals managed to outflank the NDP on the left cism of the pro-­environment Leap Manifesto, on unorganized workers, who could join community in Ontario’s 2014 election, as well as in the 2015 behalf of fossil-fuel­ workers, seems a tad old school. chapters. The related issue of their potential involve- federal election. Without some kind of strategic (“You need to think a little bit, periodically. It would ment in collective bargaining was considered, if ideological focus, the “new politics” really comes be helpful,” he has snorted.) not resolved. On one hand, workplace-­centred down to short-term pragmatism: What can the par- Jim Stanford’s afterword to A New Kind of “Wagner Act” bargaining could not accommodate ties offer in return for Unifor’s electoral support? Union celebrates Unifor’s contribution to a recent the unorganized; on the other, sectoral and other And there is nothing particularly new about such a improvement in Canadian union fortunes. But bargaining approaches could include their voices. political quid pro quo. that puts too shiny a polish on it. The Progressive (More than five years after Unifor was Conservative right-to-work agenda in founded, there are only two com- Ontario was decisively beaten back munity chapters in operation. The full without Unifor, and Harper’s legisla- potential of “everyone” remains far tion targeting unions was repealed by from realized.) Theseus Trudeau’s Liberals. Union participa- It was only toward the end of the tion has stabilized for the moment, process, before the founding con- Only when the bundled clew and labour’s share of the GDP has vention in 2013, that a name was began to squall I realized you improved somewhat, after years of chosen: Unifor. The portmanteau did had pulled a bait-and-switch and sent decline. As even Stanford concedes, not mention specific industries (and me deep into the labyrinth many factors were at play in all this, as hence saved considerable length), with this, a child, whose caterwauling’s were many players other than Unifor. and it signified a new way of doing sure to bring the minotaur. There is no doubt, however, that things. The union’s creation on Now I lullaby my way a 315,000-­member union has major August 31, writes Wilson, along the passages and say clout and potential, and it may yet to this encumbrance, Trust your father: steer Canada’s labour movement, was emotional and laced with and Canadian workers in general, we’ll get out of this together. anxious moments and momen- toward a viable alternative to busi- tous decisions. It revealed a ness as usual, as conducted either by tension between the new union’s austerity-­prone governments or by careful construction and mission ossified labour institutions. It may be and its commitment to rank- Amanda Jernigan a trifle premature, however, to refer to and-file democracy and dissent. its creation as “the birth of the modern These aspects of the first day put Canadian union.” A bright new vessel, a stamp on the new union and Amanda Jernigan wrote Years, Months, and Days, a lyric painstakingly constructed, Unifor is established the characteristics of ­collection the New York Times named a Best Poetry Book of 2018. presently sailing uncharted waters. union culture and democracy that It’s just too early to tell whether it will would stay a part of Unifor. founder or prosper.

May 2019 15 Blind Spotting The CBC’s narrow take on Canadian history Matthew J. Bellamy

Recasting History: How CBC Television Has Shaped Canada’s Past Monica MacDonald McGill-Queen’s University Press 256 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook

n the aftermath of the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, the Canadian IBroadcasting Corporation went to work on its most ambitious historical docudrama, Canada: A People’s History. Eager to fulfill its mandate as a promoter of national unity and identity, the Mother Corp — as insiders often describe Canada’s oldest operating broadcaster — sought to make a series that would boost morale and instill in Canadians a sense of pride and security. At a time when the neoliberalist tide was running high, the Crown corporation also hoped such a series would be a blockbuster hit, generating much-­needed rev- enue and proving its economic and cultural value to the nation. The seventeen-­episode, thirty-­two-hour ser- ies first aired in October 2000, and it ran until November 2001. Narrated by Maggie Huculak and starring the likes of Lorne Cardinal, Eric Peterson, and Graham Greene, Canada: A People’s History was extravagant and expensive. The full run was produced in English and French. The level of atten- tion paid to cinematography was unprecedented for a Canadian documentary. Thus, there was a sense of satisfaction, as well as relief, when the ­ratings showed that three million Canadians tuned in to Onscreen Canadian history, as the CBC would have it, is overwhelmingly the story of great white men. watch the first episode. Just as gratifying were the reviews that described A People’s History as “gold,” worse, the onscreen presentation gave no indica- our years after the launch of CBC Television in an “epic docudrama,” and a “remarkable story.” tion that other interpretations of our collective past F1952, Canada’s national broadcaster created CBC executives felt they now had the proof were possible. In fact, the Mother Corp had been a new educational series. Low-cost, experimental, needed to silence those who had been question- making these mistakes for decades. and anthropological, Explorations featured docu- ing the need for a national public service broad- Indeed, since the late 1960s, the CBC had mentary, docudramas, and dramas on a wide caster in the first place, particularly Conservative fallen behind the professional historical disci- variety of subjects, including the past. The series politicians and other free marketers who had pline, which had begun to move away from provided regional offices with a vehicle to engage criticized the state-run network. For those on grand narratives and tidy storylines — with their national audiences; it was also the CBC’s first the political right, the Communist Broadcasting celebration of white business tycoons and pol- attempt at a sustained schedule of history TV. Its Corporation — as they disparagingly termed it — itical heavyweights — to focus on a diversity of driving force was Eric Koch, a German-­Jewish refu- had a left-wing bias and cost taxpayers a great ordinary experiences. MacDonald’s fascinating gee who had been deported to Canada from Britain deal of money. The success of Canada: A People’s study, Recasting History, reveals the broadcaster’s during the Second World War. Having studied History demonstrated that the CBC was, in fact, an behind-the-scenes­ manoeuvrings, from 1950s economics and law at the University of Cambridge, asset, essential to promoting Canadian culture and documentaries and docudramas to Canada: Koch resumed his education at the University of national unity. A People’s History at the dawn of the new mil- Toronto, after the Canadian government recog- But according to Monica MacDonald, a special- lennium. A long line of CBC producers struggled nized him, in 1942, as a “victim of Nazi aggression” ist in public history who holds a PhD in communi- to represent the nation’s past within a rapidly and released him from internment. cations and culture from York University, the series changing commercial, regulatory, and informa- After graduating from U of T, Koch went to work was actually little more than “conventional fare.” tional environment, while reinforcing a flawed at CBC Radio as part of Canada’s psychological It focused on the same tired themes and historical impression of Canadian history for audiences warfare campaign, and subsequently in efforts to

figures as previous productions. To make matters at home. educate Germans in democracy. In the early 1950s, by c hristy L undy I llustration

16 Literary Review of Canada he made the switch from radio to TV and became full scope of Canadian history, and it reflected the As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the CBC the program organizer of Explorations. changing demands of Ottawa. A few years before, increasingly turned to independent producers who Television and history were uncharted territor- in 1968, the Liberal government of Pierre Elliott made or co-­produced larger and larger chunks of ies for Koch, and he went looking for help among Trudeau had passed the Broadcasting Act, which programming. Such was the case with The Valour professional historians. Highly educated himself, finally made official the nation-­building role of and the Horror, a docudrama miniseries on the he felt comfortable among those from academe. the CBC. The government was moved to act when Second World War and a co-­production of the Like a number of others at the CBC, Koch con- it became difficult to reconcile the relative lack CBC, the National Film Board, and independent sidered historical expertise an essential ingredient of Canadian programming on the network with a producers. The key players were two journalists, in educational programming. As a result, he lined patriotic mood — still running high in the wake of the brothers Brian and Terence McKenna, who up giants as advisers, including Donald Creighton, Expo 67. The act also included requirements for sought to challenge existing narratives surround- Arthur Lower, William Morton, and C. P. Stacey. All regional programming and stated for the first time ing the war. Among other things, their polemical of these somewhat cranky jingoists were committed that the CBC had an obligation to serve the “spe- documentary aimed to make the case that RAF to popularizing Canadian history through whatever cial needs of geographic regions.” The question for Bomber Command “deliberately hid the truth” means available. They also believed that import- executives in Toronto, including Knowlton Nash, about bomber crew survival rates, concealed plans ant events shared military, economic, and political who had recently stepped away from an illustrious about purposely annihilating German civilians, and dimensions. Thus they focused on such defining reporting career to become director of informa- betrayed the trust of Canadian airmen. “The histor- moments as Confederation, the construction of tion programming, was how to tell a national story ians screwed up in telling us about the war,” stated the Canadian Pacific Railway, the conflict and rec- in ways that would not alienate the regions. The Brian McKenna. “If you fail to tell the whole story, onciliation between the English and the French, answer was Whitecomers, a five-part production then you’re lying.” the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, the that paid homage to regional history. McKenna’s statement, combined with The War of 1812, and the two world wars. Not surpris- In subtle ways, these early CBC documen- Valour and the Horror itself, ignited a highly ingly, their significant figures of the past were over- taries and docudramas suggested that his- charged and polarizing debate that brought forth whelmingly great white men. tory was an incomplete or contested form an avalanche of commentary from all corners of When Explorations aired, it reflected the biases of ­knowledge — not just a straightforward Canada. According to MacDonald, although the of Koch’s advisers, and it kicked off a fruitful period ­narrative — and the first generation of producers brothers promoted their work as a journalistic of collaboration between CBC Television producers made a concerted effort to inform audiences about product, rather than a scholarly one, it fell short as and professional historians. “It was based on their the nuanced nature of what was being seen and both journalism and history. joint desire to educate Canadians,” MacDonald said. But this began to change in the mid-1970s, writes, “and to build good citizens through know- when the CBC experienced a huge commercial suc- n analyzing fifty years of history on Canadian ledge of a common national history.” Explorations cess with The National Dream. Itelevision sets, Recasting History discerns a pat- also initiated a pattern of themes, subject matter, Based on the book of the same name by the tern in CBC documentaries and docudramas. Since and interpretations, and introduced a variety of prolific author and journalist Pierre Berton, The Explorations, these programs have aimed to define conventions that continued for years. Canada as a unified nation, despite some episodic tension between s part of Canada’s 1967 cen- The CBC’s attempts at history the French and English; a nation Atennial celebrations, the CBC that’s unique and separate from the sought to legitimize its claim as an have been consistently at odds United States; a nation built on the essential national service provider. accomplishments of male explorers, Plans were well under way in 1963 with developments within the military leaders, captains of indus- when production of the eclectic try, and dignified politicians. They Explorations came to an end. At the historical profession. have focused primarily on central time, the Mother Corp was feeling the Canada and the march of progress pressure from the “next gen” of broad- from colony to Confederation. The casters on the Canadian scene. The CTV Television National Dream told the unequivocally epic story Mother Corp promoted them, from Newfoundland Network, for example, launched in 1961, and after of the Canadian Pacific Railway, built in the early to British Columbia, as something important to teetering on the edge of bankruptcy around 1965, it 1880s. Indeed, Berton was a transitional figure in watch, and offered them up as proof that it was had found its feet and was aggressively expanding the history of history at the CBC. He represented fulfilling its public policy mandate. But, in the end, across the country. When CTV started broadcast- what MacDonald considers a lamentable shift: the they were dangerously out of step. ing in colour, in 1966, many questioned if a Crown institution turning away from professional histor- The CBC’s attempts at history, MacDonald corporation could ever compete as a source of ians in the researching, writing, and presenting argues, have been consistently at odds with innovation against private broadcasters. Within the of material. developments within the historical profession, increasingly competitive environment, the brain Ironically, Berton was as obsessed about get- which since the 1960s has been increasingly trust at the CBC sought to regain the advantage by ting the facts right as any traditional scholar. For interested in previously unheard voices: those of recasting the past. example, when the young scriptwriter Timothy women, working-­class men, immigrants and eth- Well before Koch, history had been seen as Findley (who would later pen a long list of nic minorities, Indigenous people, and other mar- the backbone of nationalism. Stories about the acclaimed novels, including the award-­winning ginalized groups. Under commercial and political achievements of great leaders and the inspirational The Wars) had historical personalities use phrases pressure to produce “good television,” CBC execu- arc of national progress helped to define shared and do things that were out of character, Berton tives prioritized entertainment over education, identity, and it was this shared identity that pro- took him to task. Findley was fond of highly and historical programming became something ducers wanted to tap into. So the CBC formed a improbable scenes, Berton complained, with no other than history. What makes this so dangerous special committee for history programming and basis in historical fact. “It makes for good theatre,” is that — as MacDonald explains — television does appointed Bert Powley as special programs officer. he said of Findley’s work, “but bad history.” more than mirror the society in which it operates. It Having distinguished himself as a front-line CBC Still, Berton had a journalist’s appetite for also helps to shape it. Thus, “the CBC has helped to reporter during the Second World War, Powley galloping plots, dramatic scenes, and grand nar- shape how and what we know, as well as how and put forward some big ideas but stressed that he ratives. The National Dream was full of colourful what we do not know, about the Canadian past.” did not want a “dogged, school-masterish­ attempt characters, rising action, and climax. He also had a It seems this trend will only continue, at least to teach history.” Rather, he wanted to “search for nationalist’s yearning for myths, heroes, songs, and until ratings and market share stop being the highlights that will make good story-telling.”­ Like a sense of shared identity. At the CBC, there was a yardsticks by which we measure the value of a TV those before him, Powley sought the assistance of growing belief that professional journalists — and show. The neoliberal world in which we live has professional historians and asked Koch for a list of not professional historians — were best equipped collapsed the epistemological distinction between names. Powley’s centennial programming included to tell these stories to the masses. The National economy and society. The market is everywhere, a number of one-off historical dramas and docu- Dream was thus an important demarcation point and networks are under tremendous pressure to mentaries, but none proved to be a lasting vehicle. in the evolution of Canadian history programming: produce entertainment that will attract audiences Images of Canada, which aired in 1972, was the transfer of content authority from professional and advertising dollars. But culturally — and, yes, the Mother Corp’s first attempt at covering the historians to professional journalists. historically — we are the poorer for it.

May 2019 17 Defence Mechanism Questioning the Kosovo War, twenty years later Geoff White

Scattering Chaff: Canadian Air Power and Censorship during the Kosovo War Bob Bergen University of Calgary Press 448 pages, softcover and ebook

wenty years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization saw fit to violate the T supposed sanctity of international bor- ders, through a bombing campaign to protect the endangered Albanian-­speaking minority popula- tion in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Across the alliance, pundits claimed NATO had successfully applied the emerging “responsibility to protect” doctrine. Perhaps the earlier air bombardment During the Kosovo War, journalists clamoured for details that military officials were reluctant to share. of the Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloševi , which brought Serbia to the table to sign the peace, critics condemned it as a thinly veiled excuse people’s beliefs,” another veteran tells Bergen. “It Dayton Accord in 1995, was a precursor. But the for “neoliberal, imperialist” interventions. Such was that versus the spirit of unification that was 1999 Kosovo War was the first time NATO lead- charges may be facile, but they do weigh heavily on going on in Europe at the time and compassion and ers alluded to R2P, a concept still in development, an idea whose time evidently has not come. understanding and co-­operation. When I looked at to justify their actions. Bob Bergen, a former staff writer with the it like that, it became very clear to me that this was Serbian troops, apparently not deterred by the Albertan and the Calgary Herald , is an adjunct the right thing to do.” lessons of the Yugoslav civil war, began to round up professor with the University of Calgary’s Centre The opening chapter of Scattering Chaff offers Kosovars in 1998. The failure of the international for Military and Strategic Studies. With Scattering a riveting cockpit view of the sorties Canadian community to save Rwandans or Bosnians from Chaff, he takes an in-depth look at Canada’s involve- CF‑18s flew over Serbia: “Managing that many genocide in the early ’90s plagued the international ment in the Kosovo War, which ended in June 1999 warplanes in a confined airspace before, during, conscience, and an intervention in Kosovo was an after fifteen months. Rather than dwelling on the and after combat missions is a science and a highly opportunity to do something different. role of R2P, he focuses on the Canadian military’s choreographed art of war.” Bergen explains how For Lloyd Axworthy, Jean Chrétien’s foreign campaign — waged mostly from the air — and the such choreography played out in Kosovo, inviting minister in 1999, R2P was a logical extension of his challenges it posed for the media. (Bergen and I are readers to imagine “human security agenda.” Fostering the domestic former colleagues. Our journalistic careers over­ well-being­ of citizens worldwide ought to be a funda- lapped at the Calgary Herald between 1980 and battle space management as a ladder super- mental objective of international relations, Axworthy 1990, though our paths have not crossed since.) imposed lengthwise over a map of the Adriatic argued, most famously in a keynote speech at McGill Ensuring that air force personnel knew the war’s Sea, with its rungs forming six individual University in 1997. In shaping his doctrine, he sought aims, Bergen points out, was vital to the effort. “boxes” or areas of responsibility at precisely to create a paradigm that put individuals and their When they arrived in the European theatre, pilots designated Global Positioning System (GPS) safety at the heart of foreign policy. were briefed thoroughly. He interviews many for locations. The long left rail of the ladder down In retrospect, the Kosovo War represented R2P’s the book. “I used an audio-­visual presentation to the Adriatic close to the eastern coast of Italy zenith. By justifying the protection of a civilian brief my folks. I used pictures of all the folks and behind those individual AORs was an air tran- population from the murderous intentions of its all the — we call them atrocities but they were fairly sit route code named Backstreet. Inside each own government, NATO ignored national sover- close to that — ­happening to the civilian population AOR in the ladder were air-to-air refuelling eignty. Despite the concept’s apparent success, no in Kosovo,” one veteran explains. “They looked at tankers like flying gas stations. De f e n ce e nt of N ational artm one rushed to use it again. It was not called upon in that job you can do to help these people and they Afghanistan in 2001, for example, where the prime fairly quickly realized why we were there.” He continues in this manner, layering oper- objective was to root out a terrorist base threatening Extensive interviews offer a vivid oral history, ational detail on top of detail: “Each formation the West. Nor was it invoked in Iraq in 2003, where, in the vein of Barry Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years, would leave their marshal point to hit their timing ostensibly, the eradication of weapons of mass Six War Years, and Next-Year Country. Through reference point at an exact time that would allow destruction served to justify ­invasion. A “coalition them, Bergen places Canadian men and women them to fly into the target area and deliver their of the willing” did draw upon R2P in Libya, as a self-­ squarely at the heart of the action. “It just kind of weapons.” What emerges is a wholly fleshed-­out validating motive for the aerial attack on Moammar clicked into place that the war or Allied Force — the portrait of Canadian fighter-bombers­ in action. Gadhafi in 2011. But once that North African coun- NATO action to stop the war in Kosovo — was a Such descriptions give Bergen’s work a drama try plunged into unforeseen chaos, the doctrine lost war against old European nationalism and hate and verisimilitude appropriate to the subject. But

any allure it still had. On top of its failure to bring and lack of understanding of other religions and the compelling narrative is only a vehicle for the th e Dep e sy of p h c ourt p hotogra

18 Literary Review of Canada book’s two-­pronged critique of Canadian military the corresponding dashboard improvements that stress the paramount objective — to protect a vul- management: first, a public affairs approach marked would assist their nighttime sorties. Without the gog- nerable population — and underline all the diplo- by inherent secrecy, lack of cohesion, and timidity; gles, they had to rely on radar for their “eyes.” Flying matic and aid-related actions necessary to achieve and, second, a procurement system that hampered in single file, each plane beaming its radar directly at it. In this regard, transparency paid off. The public Canada’s ability to deliver on its commitments. the one in front of it, improved their nighttime sight stayed on side, throughout the war, with about These two areas are intimately related. Indeed, but also made their movements more predictable for 70 percent of Canadians supporting the effort. part of the secrecy surrounding the Department of anti-aircraft­ guns on the ground. Even at DND, as Bergen points out, there were National Defence’s communications was related Each of these shortcomings, and many more, those who did try to help journalists. He credits, to shortcomings in battle readiness. In this regard, became the subject of obfuscatory stories dis- for instance, the work of Lieutenant-­Commander Bergen uncloaks a web of lies and evasions offered pensed by spokespersons during media briefings. John Larsen, who worked with reporters at Aviano, by high military staff and Art Eggleton, then minis- On numerous points, Bergen quotes military state- Italy, where the NATO squadrons were based. At ter for DND. This is where Bergen derives his title, ments and explicitly says “that was not the truth.” one point, he even tossed a video package of CF‑18 likening this strategy to scattering chaff — emitting To cite just one example, he notes the official line takeoffs and landings over the base fence, when random electronic signals to confuse adversaries. that all pilots had access to the laser-­guided FLIR U.S. troops were inexplicably closing the gates. In truth, Bergen’s evisceration of Canada’s pub- kits. In fact, in addition to their being stale-­dated, Such efforts notwithstanding, DND’s communica- lic affairs program on Kosovo stings a little. In 1999, there was a limited supply that “was stretching pilot tions stance was more closed than open. I was a communications adviser at the Department training to the limit.” Ultimately, for Bergen, the Canadian military’s of Foreign Affairs and International Trade on the secrecy in Kosovo was unnecessary and a violation interdepartmental task force organized to manage rom the war’s outset, DND officials decided they of democratic norms: the Kosovo file. There I provided information and Fwould not disclose concrete details. Briefings analysis about diplomatic initiatives, as well as the would update reporters on the number of raids and If there is to be censorship in future wars, the supporting theory behind Canada’s participation, the general category of targets, but these were never censorship and operational security issues to help keep the media informed at daily briefings fleshed out. Indeed, this was not just policy out of raised in this book on the Kosovo air war at the modernist and austere National Defence Ottawa; NATO planners had decided that individual should be debated in the House of Commons Headquarters, overlooking the Rideau Canal. Jim countries would not be identified with particular by parliamentarians. They could, in their Wright, senior spokesperson at Foreign Affairs and attacks. Canada went further, however. wisdom, exercise leadership in legislating director-­general of the east, central, and southern Military leaders decided to withhold from repor- censorship if they find it necessary. They Europe bureau, was the foreign policy expert at ters the names of pilots and their hometowns. This should not leave it to the military to impose these briefings, usually sharing the podium with proscription drew on experience in the 1991 Persian its own restrictions, which this work has Lieutenant-Colonel­ Raymond Hénault, who was Gulf War, when stories circulated about protesters shown it is more than ready, willing, and then deputy chief of the defence staff. dropping military-­issue body bags on military fam- able to do in policy and in practice. Each day, Wright would discuss Canadian initiatives helping Kosovar I largely endorse Bergen’s view, refugees and Canada’s determina- Several supply issues materially though I’m skeptical that such a tion to see Miloševi brought before debate could get far in Ottawa. At the the International Criminal Court. But affected the ability of Canadian same time, any government policy the media clamoured for military regarding public disclosure will only details, especially since this was the CF‑18 pilots to carry out their go part of the way to providing the first action since the Korean War in public with the ability to know, under- which we had an explicit and aggres- Kosovo mission. stand, and assess military actions. sive fighting stance. (During the 1991 There will never be a substitute Persian Gulf War, we primarily offered defensive ilies’ lawns. These stories, which Bergen analyzes for the journalist who pursues his or her story into support.) Reporters were usually left unsatisfied, in depth, were more myth than reality. Yet they the same literally risky territory as the soldiers. Bergen recounts, since Hénault and other military provided the foundation for a restrictive media-­ That’s what the CBC’s Paul Workman did when he officials held back details — details that could have relations stance that generally denied access to positioned himself at the Albania-­Kosovo border painted a basic picture of Canadian activities in the personnel in the name of protecting them and and described troop movements in the wake of the skies over Serbia. The task force was aware of media their families. A pilot flying over Kosovo might give bombing. And newsworthy stories that go beyond restiveness (I know I was), but DND jealously an occasional interview in the field, back turned real-time accounts (or government press brief- guarded its prerogative to withhold or dispense toward the camera, but such appearances added ings) almost always come from independent dig- information as it saw fit. little to the popular understanding of the campaign. ging. During the war in Afghanistan, for example, Fumbled military procurement policies, In modern warfare, dating back to at least the Graeme Smith’s work for the Globe and Mail, Bergen’s second main target, are unfortunately Second World War, reporters have been attached to on the maltreatment of combatants detained by a recurring motif for Canadian governments of all military units, and they have filed dispatches under Canadian soldiers and turned over to local govern- stripes. The interminable saga of the ‑F 35 stealth varying degrees of censorship. Starting with the ment authorities, was a signal piece of reportage. bomber, which was (and possibly still is) being 2003 war in Iraq, reporters were “embedded” with Investigative reporting will always be the source considered as a replacement for our aging CF‑18s, troops. Closer access to the action, however, meant of news that matters. And, indeed, Bergen’s many is an example of such fecklessness. The current pol- a more restricted capacity to describe the events, revelations in Scattering Chaff would have made for itically charged trial of Vice-­Admiral Mark Norman, lest they disclose too much. And in Kosovo — a war good scoops during the Kosovo War. over alleged security breaches in a naval supply waged by pilots in single-­seat aircraft — such access vessel procurement, is just the latest blemish. was impossible anyway. How then to tell the story? self-congratulatory mood is not uncommon Bergen exposes several supply issues that mater- Bergen contends, with the solid conviction of a Ain the halls of government upon completion ially affected the ability of Canadian pilots to carry journalist, that in a democracy the public deserves of major initiatives, and there was no exception at out their Kosovo mission. Canada did not possess to know what the government is doing in its name. Foreign Affairs at the end of the Kosovo War in June tanker aircraft that could refuel CF‑18s at efficient And this applies to fighting wars. Canadians should 1999. But such moods never last. altitudes, for instance. And bombs, especially those have known, he argues, that air crews were short of Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia that could be guided electronically to their targets, bombs and had to get them from their American in 2008, a declaration recognized by Canada shortly were in short supply. In both cases, we had to rely counterparts. But would it have been reasonable for thereafter. However, today there are tensions on materiel from the United States. More critically, the military to acknowledge a lack of infrared gog- between the Kosovar majority and the Serbs, now the Canadian forces had only begun to equip the CF‑18s, gles? Or that sorties were flown in risky single file? minority. A small country with a small and struggling which had entered service twenty years previously, All governments prefer to withhold rather than economy next to a hostile neighbour, Kosovo is chal- with forward-looking­ infrared pods, to deliver laser-­ publicize. Communications advisers must always lenged as it aspires to a closer relationship with the guided bombs. But the FLIR equipment was already fight the tendency of operational and policy man- rest of Europe. Perhaps the 1999 war was a success- a generation behind the GPS-­equipped precision-­ agers to guard and suppress information. Lloyd ful application of R2P, but no one wants to proclaim guided weapons used by our allies. Finally, Canadian Axworthy encouraged open communications about that assessment too loudly. R2P is unlikely to be pilots were not provided with infrared goggles and Canada’s foreign policy initiatives. Jim Wright could invoked anywhere else soon — or ever again.

May 2019 19 The Soap Myth A Holocaust artifact in a post-truth era Daniel Panneton

umours that Germany corpses, there is no evidence of exploited human remains human soap production on an indus- R for wartime industrial pro- trial scale. Furthermore, in 1990, duction date back to 1915. During the Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust First World War, Allied nations spread Remembrance Center in Israel, had stories of the kaiser using corpses to several soap samples tested, and the produce nitroglycerine at munition results revealed no human DNA. The factories. This propagandistic atrocity organization reiterated the findings in tale was one of many designed 2005, and they were verified by separ- to incite anti-­German sentiment. ate tests in Montreal five years later. Although many of these stories were Still, the myth endures — and eventually discredited, tales of the there are two reasons why. corpse factories endured. They found First, the story is plausible. The new life during the Second World Nazis did use human hair, skeletons, War, when Nazi concentration camp and ashes for industrial purposes. The guards told prisoners that the soap assumption that human fat was used being distributed to them was made does not require much suspension of of fat rendered from their murdered disbelief. Given that experiments had relatives. been run, it’s conceivable that soap The soap stories reached North production could have begun in earn- America as early as November 1942. est if the Holocaust had continued The New York Times quoted Rabbi The world heard about human soap — but maybe not the whole story. beyond 1945. Stephen Wise, who related that the Second, the soap myth affirms Nazis had already killed two million Jews and were title suggests — around the world, to concentra- a common dualistic perception. For many of us processing the bodies “into such war-­vital com- tion camps, museums, and the offices of many an today, Nazism blends the modern order of utilitar- modities as soap, fats and fertilizer.” Three years expert. Even in his home borough of Queens, he ianism with the terror of human barbarism. later, at the Nuremberg Trials, Douglas T. Frost, says, “we all knew about the soap.” Some critics, such as Max Horkheimer and a former British prisoner of war, testified that Theodor Adorno, suggest the extreme violence of German civilians had taunted him about how he’d he Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust the Holocaust was a deviation from civilization and be “made into soap.” Similar testimony given to TEducation Centre, in Toronto’s North York modernity. This assumption was integral to post- Holocaust memory organizations by survivors like neighbourhood, opened in 1985, the product of war justice. To underscore the barbarism of Nazi Leo Fettman, imprisoned at Auschwitz, and Hanna commemorative activities of a group of surviv- crimes and contrast them with the Allies’ compara- Mishna, who lived in the Cz stochowa ghetto, ors who made up the Holocaust Remembrance tively honourable wartime conduct, human lamp- attested to the rumours’ omnipresence. Committee of the Toronto Jewish Congress. The shades and shrunken heads were used as evidence Jews in Canada, Israel, Poland, Brazil, Bulgaria, Neuberger offers Holocaust education and in-­ at the Nuremberg Trials. and Romania held post-war ceremonies to memor- person survivor testimony to visiting school and The Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman ialize and bury significant quantities of soap. The community groups, along with public program- rejected this view, arguing that the Holocaust was Mauthausen-Gusen­ survivor Jean Cayrol, in his ming throughout the year, culminating in an annual not a departure from civilization but rather “an event narration of the 1956 documentary Night and Fog, Holocaust Education Week, each November. which disclosed the weakness and fragility of human relates that Nazis used human corpses to “make I manage daily operations at the museum, nature” before modernity. Juxtaposing “civilized” s o a p.” Cast a Giant Shadow, released a decade later, a role that includes developing exhibits and deliv- modernity with Nazi conduct “diverted attention features Kirk Douglas telling John Wayne that his ering programming. Last autumn, while search- from the permanence of the alternative, destructive soldiers have been “knocking off a lot of guys who’d ing for content to use in an exhibit for Holocaust potential” inherent in the “civilizing process.” been making soap out of my relatives.” In 2010, a Education Week, I committed a cardinal museo- The alleged manufacture of human soap, Montreal shopkeeper was subjected to a criminal logical sin. I dropped an artifact — one stored in an which would be a mass-scale, calculated act of investigation after attempting to sell a bar of soap envelope marked “1 Bar Soap of Human Fat.” irrational, destructive violence, is a marriage of he claimed came from the war — a controversy While I was regaining my composure and sur- these interpretations. It’s representative of what replicated in 2015, when a Dutch vendor tried the veying for potential damage, several questions the Holocaust scholar and Dan Stone describes same on eBay. rushed to my mind. Wasn’t soap made from the fat as “violence within modernity,” affirming the pos-

While the tales have persisted, so too have the of Holocaust victims supposed to be a myth? Where sibility of unrestrained, appalling barbarism inside e ton ani e l Pann unanswered questions. Mark Jacobson, of New York did this bar come from, and why did the Neuberger productive and civilized society. For this reason, magazine, detailed in 2010 his attempt to verify the have it? Most pressingly: Was it real? the rumour persists, nestled comfortably within authenticity of a lampshade supposedly made In the eyes of Holocaust historians, the question public interpretation. from a Holocaust victim’s skin in The Lampshade: has been settled. Although the Danzig Anatomical A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to Institute conducted small-scale wartime experi- srael Kopyto, a secular Jewish activist, donated

New Orleans. In his quest, he travels — as the book ments in producing soap-like substances from Ithe bar of soap that I dropped. Kopyto and his p h by D Photogra

20 Literary Review of Canada wife, Frieda, fled Poland three months before the 1939 Nazi invasion, landing in the Soviet Union. A master tailor, he produced uniforms for the Red Army during the war. Later, the couple spent four The Girl Who Turns to Bone years in a displaced persons’ camp, followed by five years in Israel, before emigrating to Toronto. In her second skeleton, In 1976, Kopyto made a pilgrimage back to her new bones fuse to the old: Poland to reconnect with his heritage. During this she’s developed a tolerance tour, he acquired a number of relics, including for cramping in her shoes and the soap. White, rectangular, and chipped around lumps of sugar in her tea the edges, the bar is nondescript, except for one and capaciousness in her chest. detail: it’s stamped with “RIF.” The letters stand When she spills through her ribs, for Reichsstelle für Industrielle Fettversorgung (National Centre for Industrial Fat Provisioning), she mops herself up but it’s widely believed among survivors that they and births a second sternum. signify Reine Juden Fett (pure Jewish fat) or Reichs When she bites down on a fork, Juden Fett (state Jewish fat). she fastens a leftover mandible to her chin. Kopyto was interviewed by the Canadian Jewish When she lights her spiced candle News upon his return to Toronto. TheCJN took from the space between her hips, particular interest in the soap, writing that “one she stitches a third bone only begins to understand the profundities of the with bits of wire and hair World War II experience after one has seen this to the underside of her mattress. specimen of Nazi brutality.” In 1991, he entrusted Like clotted cream, she thickens the bar, along with the other items from his trip, to through cartilage and persiflage our museum, then just six years old. Kopyto passed until she turns to stone. away in 2011, three days before his ninety-­sixth birthday. I recently interviewed Israel’s son, Harry, about his father’s life and legacy. Harry doesn’t know if his father knew the truth about the soap, but he believes that if Israel did, he kept the bar to represent the real, historical suffering that the Jews endured. Amy LeBlanc The soap myth has become a favoured talking point among Holocaust deniers, who will appro- Amy LeBlanc is non-fiction editor at Filling Station magazine, in Calgary. Her debut poetry priate any piece of erroneous information in an collection, I Know Something You Don’t Know, comes out next spring. attempt to deny the truth of the entire tragedy. Because it is so popular, the soap myth is par- ticularly vulnerable to this treatment. Notably, in closing remarks at his unsuccessful suit against organizations, and mainstream movies, like Adam Jones describes, the “final stage of geno- the history professor Deborah Lipstadt, of Emory Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The passage of cide.” And denialism is not confined to the Nazi University in Atlanta, David Irving tried to use the living memory is coinciding with the emergence Holocaust. Indeed, skepticism and constructed lore as evidence of wider fraud. of the alt-right, which co-opts meme humour to ignorance call the legitimacy and legacy of all Deniers’ zeal for the myth causes skittish- desensitize and radicalize, along with the spread genocides into question. State-­sanctioned denial ness among historians and museum profes- of social media, which provides deniers a public is the most egregious example of this behaviour. sionals. Cognizant that the deniers regularly platform. Holocaust memory is under siege, and Consider the Armenian and Rwandan cases. The deploy bad faith arguments, many scholars are this threat will only intensify in the post-truth era Turkish government uses the internet to push its reluctant to discuss myths and misconceptions, as fewer and fewer survivors remain to give direct narrative, promoting a “Let History Decide” social lest their words be twisted. While researching testimony. media campaign and providing material support The Lampshade, Jacobson found that many edu- Soap wasn’t made from Holocaust victims, for diasporic Turkish organizations willing to take cators would not admit even the possibility that but it’s conceivable that it could have been. It’s up the banner. And although denying the Rwandan the titular object could be made from human skin. not surprising that concentration camp prison- genocide is illegal in that country, legalities haven’t The educators argued that since it could not “be ers believed what they were told. Rabbi Murray J. stopped Hutu perpetrators and their supporters proved to legitimately be part of the Holocaust, Kohn, a survivor of Auschwitz-­Birkenau, reminds from minimizing the atrocities. Local laws don’t [they could not] treat it as such.” As it turned out, us that “the testimonies of survivors present limit international support, either, and these Hutu DNA testing later revealed the lampshade was us with personal experiences that reflect the have found external allies like François Mitterrand, made from cow skin. unspeakable suffering and anguish that defined the former French president whose government, Because Holocaust denial is rooted in, as the the Holocaust.” Teaching the soap myth presents ironically, prosecuted the Holocaust denier Robert author Lawrence N. Powell notes, “refurbished an opportunity for scholars and survivors to Faurisson in the 1990s. conspiratorial anti-­Semitism,” it cannot be ignored. unite — to acknowledge that the trauma inflicted In an era of post-truth, what is any museum Anti-­Semitism affects all communities, as it is often by the soap myth is real, even if the soap wasn’t to do when it finds a myth among its collection? the linchpin of world views hostile to a plethora of actually made from murdered human beings. The reconciliation of legitimate, albeit ahistorical, demographic groups, viewpoints, and identities. Refusing to dissect the intrinsic meaning and psychological and emotional experiences with the Anti-­Semitic biases have no place in historical widespread impact of Holocaust myths gives historical record is fraught. Pretending that curious discourse — or, for that matter, in our liberal dem- deniers — who appropriate narratives for their own individuals won’t encounter myths, online or other- ocracy. Proponents of Holocaust denial must be malevolent purposes, while framing themselves as wise, isn’t the answer; nor is assuming they won’t be combatted, particularly at a time when our very truth seekers — the ability to control the narrative. seduced by the exploitation of deniers. Ultimately, notions of truth are being undermined. Deniers use manipulated facts to divert attention we mustn’t be afraid to address pervasive myths from historical debates. Their lies thrive on the while teaching history. And we can recognize, and he post-truth era is marked by an on- anti-­establishment suspicion driving far-right pol- emphasize, the legitimacy of psychological memory Tgoing assault on once-trusted­ institutions. itical movements, and will only be exacerbated as while asserting its clash with documented reality. Holocaust education is one institution that, as liv- public trust in institutions, archives, and records is In this way, the soap itself and artifacts like it act as ing memory passes, is entering a critical moment. eroded by the desensitization and misinformation apocryphal texts, containing lessons within their The 1990s and early 2000s were a peak period campaigns that mark the post-truth era. questionable origins. Genocide education’s best of Holocaust education, facilitated by relatively Denial is not simply an exercise in histor- chance against denial in a post-truth age is to teach numerous survivors, well-­funded memorial ical mythmaking; it is, as the political scientist complete histories­ — myths and all.

May 2019 21 Positively Shady The glamorous activism of M.A.C Cosmetics Elspeth Brown

Viva M.A.C: AIDS, Fashion, and the Philanthropic Practices of M.A.C Cosmetics Andrea Benoit University of Toronto Press 304 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook

nce upon a time, gay liberation meant anti-­capitalist, anti-­racist, anti-­ O police, anti-colonial­ rage. The bad boy (and some bad girl) heroes of the Stonewall Riots, fifty years ago this summer, linked gay visibility to global anti-­colonial struggles. The Gay Liberation Front sought the abolishment of existing social institutions, including capitalism, militarism, racism, and the nuclear family. The term “lib- eration” tied the GLF to other radical social move- ments of the late 1960s, including Black Power, women’s liberation, and such anti-colonial­ forces as Ho Chi Minh’s National Liberation Front in Vietnam. In Canada, gay activists marched on Ottawa in 1971, demanding workplace equality and changes in the Criminal Code, divorce law, and so on. Toronto activists founded the gay lib- eration newspaper the Body Politic that same year. Oh, those were the days! It was a time when queer people cared about social justice and capitalist exploitation, a time before (white) gay men and lesbians sold out and went shopping. M.A.C brought its queer, club-scene roots directly into its business plan to confront the AIDS crisis. This is a familiar lament in gay and lesbian history. It’s the declension narrative of so many history of capitalism. Fortunately, this is beginning economy where they could both be out and pay studies that move from a pure, anti-­market to change. Andrea Benoit’s excellent Viva M.A.C: the bills. By founding bookstores, restaurants, and and anti-­capitalist gay left to a homonormative AIDS, Fashion, and the Philanthropic Practices of bathhouses, business owners did their best to present marked by matching tuxedos and reno- M.A.C Cosmetics provides the first history of the make money while making good and supporting vated Cabbagetown Victorians. While I share this global cosmetics brand founded by a gay Italian-­ the “community.” These newly out entrepreneurs critique of contemporary single-issue­ politics, Canadian couple — both named Frank — in 1981. joined an older queer tradition of gay men, in par- I question the historical narrative on which it’s Benoit situates their business in relation to several ticular, working in the velvet underground of the built. The market has always been intertwined with overlapping fields, all of which have been in dire aesthetic industries — fashion, hair salons, interior gay and lesbian history; in fact, some historians need of analysis, including the Toronto fashion decorating — where being gay was tolerated, so are now suggesting that twentieth-­century com- scene in the 1980s, cause marketing, and HIV/AIDS long as no one spoke about it publicly. mercial culture made gay social activism possible. in Canada. Given how much ink has been spilled This “don’t ask, don’t tell” business culture George Hislop, an important activist and politician on other cosmetics empires — from Max Factor began to shift in the 1980s, in the wake of both who co-organized­ the 1971 We Demand protest, to Revlon — it’s a head-­scratcher that no one has gay liberation and the AIDS crisis. A spectacular co-­owned Toronto’s Spa Excess bathhouse. Jearld written this history before. Thanks to extensive oral example, M.A.C Cosmetics was founded by two Moldenhauer, founder of Canada’s first gay stu- histories by most of M.A.C’s key figures, as well as lovers, Frank Toskan and Frank Angelo, in 1984. dent group, as well as a founding member of the with journalists, makeup artists, fashion promoters, Toskan, born in Italy, grew up in Toronto; Angelo, Body Politic, owned Glad Day Bookshop, a gay and other important Toronto scenesters, this lively born in Montreal, moved to Toronto in 1969 and haunt located in Toronto and, for a time, Boston. narrative is a unicorn of a book: well researched soon established the city’s first chain of unisex sal- These folks may have been “reluctant capitalists,” and readable, with an compelling narrative arc. ons, the Haircutting Place, with thirty-­seven prime to quote Moldenhauer, but they were nonetheless locations in Yorkville and elsewhere. The Franks entrepreneurs whose businesses bankrolled social ow a ubiquitous fixture in high-end shopping met at one of Toronto’s storied clubs, the Manatee, and political change. Nmalls and consumer-­friendly airport termin- in 1969. Toskan, a photographer at the time, Our reluctance to consider social movements als around the world, M.A.C Cosmetics emerged opened a salon service to launder Angelo’s hair in relation to the market has created a situation from Toronto’s queer entrepreneurial past. In the towels, while also photographing models, strippers,

where we know very little indeed about the queer 1970s, young gay people created a parallel ­lavender and drag queens in his beautiful launderette. With Wikim e dia c ommons R hod e s / e y M urray p h by Courtn Photogra

22 Literary Review of Canada his creative and entrepreneurial eye, Toskan had tones. His queer roots had also given him an appre- AIDS Committee of Toronto in 1983; Casey House, noticed an Italian cosmetics line called Il‑Makiage, ciation for outrageous colour combinations and Canada’s first free-­standing AIDS hospice, opened distinctive for its strong pigmentation and bright dense pigments, capable of covering drag queen in 1986. During these years, as Benoit describes, colours. Toskan opened a rented space on the stubble. When Toskan and Casale developed a new provincial and federal support was nowhere to be second floor of the Simpsons department store, shade, like Russian Red in 1985, they would send found; even acknowledging the illness would be on Queen Street West, and incorporated Make‑up it to professional makeup artists, such as Frances political suicide at a time when mainstream dis- Art (Cosmetics) Limited in 1981. Around the same Hathaway, for feedback. course pathologized queerness and conservative time, Toskan’s sister Julie was dating a first-year As Toskan and Casale hand-­pressed eye- commentators considered death to be just deserts chemistry student at the University of Toronto, shadows with electric, offbeat colours, Toronto’s for depraved gay lifestyles. Jack Epp, the federal Victor Casale, who began experimenting with new fashion scene ignited. Together, designers, promot- health minister from 1984 to 1989, did all he could salon formulas and, eventually, new cosmetic prod- ers, journalists, makeup artists, and models created to avoid actually saying the word “AIDS,” while in ucts. M.A.C was born. a unique moment in the city’s history. The fashion the U.S., president Ronald Reagan simply ignored M.A.C brought its queer, club-scene roots dir- designer Albert Sung partnered with the local the epidemic. Radical groups such as New York’s ectly into the company’s business plan. The Franks garment manufacturers Joe and Saul Mimran in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and didn’t advertise in fashion publications, because 1981. They opened their first Club Monaco loca- Toronto’s AIDS Action Now (AAN!) pressured gov- Toskan was repelled by normative cosmetics mar- tion — selling classic, casual clothing — on Queen ernment to commit funds to support individuals keting and advertising, including the industry’s Street West four years later. The twins Dean and and medical research. reliance on white, glamorous cover girls as brand Dan Caten, now known as Dsquared2, debuted Devastated by deaths among designers, stylists, spokespeople. As a result, fashion editors refused to their first collection at Toronto’s Diamond Club makeup artists, and others, the fashion industry credit M.A.C when stylists used the brand — a ser- that same year. Journalists such as Bernadette rallied to raise funds for research and advocacy, ious hit to M.A.C’s bottom line. Morra and David Livingston covered fashion in with M.A.C Cosmetics playing a leading role. So the Franks took a different approach and the Toronto Star, Flare, and CityTV’s long-­running In London, the fashion publicist Lynne Franks marketed the company’s edgy products through FashionTelevision, hosted by Jeanne Beker for organized the first major AIDS fashion fundraiser, a word-of-mouth network dependent on fashion twenty-­seven years. Steven Levy, founder of the Fashion Cares. The following year, Calvin Klein and insiders, who received a 40 percent discount. twice-­yearly One of a Kind Show, launched the Elizabeth Taylor co-hosted,­ in New York, a glittering M.A.C’s salespeople were a far cry from the depart- Festival of Canadian Fashion in 1985, as a way to fundraiser for the American Foundation for AIDS ment store perfume-­spritzing counter girl: they promote homegrown design. And Hathaway, who Research, with the theme “To Care Is to Cure.” came from Toronto’s gritty Queen West fashion, began her makeup career in Toronto in 1981, went In Toronto, the fashion wholesaler Syd Beder, music, and arts scenes. These creative, queer, on to use M.A.C Cosmetics on the model Jerry Hall, the so-­called Pope of Queen Street, paired up with pierced, and tattooed representatives shared Princess Diana, and others. the designer Rick Mugford to organize an industry M.A.C’s offbeat sensibility, and Toskan cultivated These heady years coincided with the AIDS epi- fundraiser. The result was Fashion Cares, an annual their individuality as part of the brand. demic, which devastated the gay community — and event for the AIDS Committee of Toronto that Because of his makeup work with Gladys Knight, by extension the fashion community. Most of lasted a quarter century. The first show, in 1987, the American singer who was a friend, Toskan Canada’s AIDS cases were in Toronto, and the city’s featured a black rubber long-­sleeved, short-­skirted knew that women of colour had difficulty finding gay community organized quickly. The activists “safe sex dress” created by Dean and Dan Caten — quality cosmetics that worked with various skin Michael Lynch and Ed Jackson co-­founded the this at a time when the word “AIDS” was so scary

May 2019 23 that it was not even printed on the fundraising Famously, RuPaul and eventually k. d. lang were the As a result, Toskan played no role in settling his event’s promotional literature. M.A.C Cosmetics lipstick’s spokespeople. It’s hard to describe how partner’s affairs, even though they had been donated all the cosmetics, and the Franks, along outrageous it was at the time to feature a black drag together for twenty-five­ years. Toskan went on to with a small M.A.C team, applied all the makeup queen and an out butch lesbian as cosmetic brand open several other businesses, including a cloth- for the show’s thirty models. They also did many of representatives. More than twenty-­five years later, ing shop and, more recently, Impact Kitchen, a the models’ science fiction hairstyles, crafted from the M.A.C AIDS Fund continues to raise millions trendy fitness-­minded restaurant on Toronto’s King mud and glass shards. of dollars annually, through the sale of Viva Glam Street East. products. Yes, M.A.C may be a neoliberal brand harness- ommercially, M.A.C Cosmetics took off in Benoit, who has a PhD in media studies from ing celebrity culture, but, at the same time, it is a Cthe early 1990s. People magazine published Western University, situates M.A.C’s AIDS fundrais- site of subcultural authenticity and AIDS activism. a photograph of Madonna wearing one of M.A.C’s ing in the context of cause marketing, a key aspect It’s a hip brand that sells queer consumerism, Cruelty Free Beauty T‑shirts. The model Linda of corporate social responsibility. It’s an ethos that sometimes for a good cause: collecting nearly Evangelista, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, Cher, says businesses should satisfy social needs, not just $500 million for AIDS research and advocacy over and other celebrities actively associated themselves earn a profit. As she points out, scholars like herself the past twenty-five­ years is a good cause. with the brand. have critiqued campaigns such as Product (Red) for Viva M.A.C reminds us that we live in neo­ The Franks opened their first stand-­alone bou- harnessing consumerism and celebrity culture to liberal times, when funds for AIDS research come tique in the United States on Christopher Street social issues, legitimating capitalism and increasing from the private sector in the form of lipstick sales in Greenwich Village, ground zero for gay libera- the sales that drive company profits. Benoit cites rather than from sufficient government funding. tion. The drag icons RuPaul and Lady Bunny were criticism of Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, levelled Personally, I don’t see a lot of difference between “doormen.” Kevyn Aucoin, a renowned makeup by the University of Toronto sociologists Judith Dove’s Real Beauty and Estée Lauder’s Viva Glam artist, told Maclean’s that “everyone in the business Taylor and Josée Johnston, as “feminist consumer- campaigns. One traffics in feminist consumerism, considers M.A.C to be the cutting edge.” All the ism.” In contrast, she argues, M.A.C’s fundraising the other in queer consumerism. Both promote a while, the Franks raised money for AIDS research has always been driven by non-commercial­ goals. corporate image of responsible advertising prac- and advocacy. Nonetheless, in 1994, the Franks sold 51 per- tices that critique normative beauty while sell- In 1991, they introduced a T‑shirt with gay, cent of their company to the cosmetics giant Estée ing products that promise beauty. I’m drawn to straight, and lesbian couples kissing, along with Lauder for $38 million. They sold their remaining M.A.C’s knowing wink at the absurdities of norm­ the slogan “Make up, make out, play safe.” They stake five years later. Many M.A.C employees saw core beauty regimes; its queer and trans-­positive donated the proceeds to the Canadian AIDS Society this as betrayal. As one remembered, “I felt almost salespeople succeed in making me feel a bit more and to the Design Industries Foundation Fighting like a bullet was put through my heart.” But even welcome, if not beautiful. Somehow, probably AIDS. In 1992, the same year the designer Oliviero before Toskan and Angelo sold the company to because I am queer, M.A.C’s neoliberal brand logic Toscani introduced his controversial Benetton ad Lauder, M.A.C wasn’t a non-­profit; rather, it was seems more innocuous than Dove’s, even though featuring David Kirby, an emaciated AIDS victim, from the start a for-­profit business founded by two of course it’s not. To paraphrase RuPaul, Viva on his deathbed, M.A.C Cosmetics created a deep- entrepreneurs who happened to be gay. In 1997, Glam’s inaugural spokesmodel, in her 1993 break- red lipstick called Viva Glam. The Franks donated Angelo died suddenly, at forty-­nine, of complica- out hit song, “Supermodel of the World,” it doesn’t 100 percent of the lipstick’s retail price — not tions arising from routine surgery. He had never matter what you do, because everything looks good just the profit margin — to AIDS organizations. come out to his family and did not leave a will. on you.

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24 Literary Review of Canada Reading with Mental Illness For us, the finish line is a mirage Leanne Toshiko Simpson

The Ghost Garden: Inside the Lives of Schizophrenia’s Feared and Forgotten Susan Doherty Penguin Random House 360 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook

Ghosts Within: Journeying through PTSD Garry Leech Fernwood Publishing 148 pages, softcover

he setting could be anywhere — exam hall, darkened bedroom, office cubicle, T fluorescent ward hallway, family dinner, warm subway grate — but the feeling remains the same. All your physical, mental, and emotional energies have been spent trying to contain some- thing you don’t fully understand, yet somehow you have been confronted by One More Challenge. It may, on the surface, appear to be a minor event — the startling wail of an ambulance, a mis- sing item on your grocery list, an out-of-place encounter with someone you used to know — but it’s enough to tip the scales. Your mask slips, and you transform from being systemically invis- ible to performing under a spotlight. Bystanders watch you out of the corners of their eyes. The police — well, they were watching you this whole time, weren’t they? Suddenly, the threat isn’t just inside you. It has leaked out and revealed an ugly truth. To those around you, you are the threat. Stories of linear recovery can create unrealistic expectations around chronic mental illness. Such are the moments when people really start to think about mental illness, when interior coffee dates, phone calls, shopping trips, and together a gripping story that contrasts the tragedy struggles manifest themselves in the exterior world an unofficial­ wedding ring exchange at the local of her friend’s delusions with the unwavering love and touch the lives of others. It’s a human exchange Super C. The Ghost Garden is at once a love letter to and responsibility she feels for her family. that is all too often dictated by fear, not empathy. the friendships she has built and a call to redefine Doherty begins the story in medias res, a classic Even in the stories we tell about mental illness, fear the medical and family structures that attempt to but problematic structural choice. Listening to the pushes us toward narrative catharsis, a satisfying contain and conceal mental illness. voices in her head, Evans pours boiling water into and definitive conclusion. They are narratives mar- Doherty hopes the book can help family mem- the ear of her sleeping roommate. From there, we keted through the promise of hope, as if there is a bers identify and understand the signs of schizo- trace backwards and see her graduate from high finish line for recovery. phrenia. “So often we see the severely mentally ill school, get married, leap into motherhood — all the As someone who lives with a cyclical psychiatric as less than fully formed human beings,” she writes, while knowing that she will ultimately lose agency illness, however, I know the finish line is a mirage. “as ghosts of their ‘normal’ selves. As ghosts, they over her own life. This non-­linear loss of person- I’m not looking for cathartic hope. What I’m look- can appear to be inanimate, unreachable, and hood is signalled through changes in setting: She ing for is understanding. frightening, but they, like all of us, tend an interior moves from a family house with a child’s red swing garden that is lushly alive.” set to a tiny apartment after her separation. In a usan Doherty, formerly a Maclean’s writer, The Ghost Garden is, in many ways, the story hopeful transition, she finds a place with extra bed- Shas spent the past decade getting to know in-­ of Caroline Evans, a fictive name for a real friend rooms for her two sons but then, frantically, ends patients at the Douglas Mental Health University Doherty has known since 1967. Since the age of up in a psychiatric wing. Living with mental illness Institute, a hospital affiliated with McGill University. twenty-one,­ Evans has cycled through wards and often means occupying an uncomfortable space, After researching the Douglas Institute’s troubling group homes, her journey the result of repeatedly both for you and for the people around you, but past as an insane asylum, Doherty was compelled misdiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. Combining Evans attempts to reclaim her spaces and continue to volunteer. In her weekly visits, she has wit- Evans’s own memories, interviews with her family, caring for her loved ones, even as they struggle to

llustration by c hristy L undy I llustration nessed the spectrum of schizophrenia through and medical and court records, Doherty weaves understand her illness.

May 2019 25 The Ghost Garden probes human connections complex relationship between his privilege, his that I’d be my regular self soon, as if my mental and empathy toward experiences society has cast as masculinity, and his own perception of mental ill- illness was some sort of temporary body snatcher. otherworldly. Doherty punctuates the larger narra- ness. Unflinchingly, he describes the toxic environ- What I wanted to promise them was that I could tive with eighteen explosive vignettes about others ment he created for his family when he refused to possibly return — but maybe return to less. What I at the Douglas Institute, many of whom do not have see a doctor — especially a male one. If other men wanted to promise myself was that I would finally supportive networks like Evans. Instead, they find are to survive their own struggles, he pleads, they recognize this as progress. community through friendships, late-night phone need to accept help. Mental health narratives have long been calls, and unspoken agreements with a psychiatric Leech speaks directly to those who have experi- important for understanding and accepting men- system that doesn’t have them figured out just yet. enced PTSD — including veterans, survivors of tal illness — among those who are afflicted and One shares with Doherty the existence of the titular sexual assault, and Indigenous peoples — through those who are not. They are essential gateways. ghost garden, an ethereal place where he can meet italicized memories that break up the main The thing about traditional recovery narratives, the souls of those he loves. The metaphor links the storyline. The result is immersive but compart- however, is that they celebrate getting back to book’s short sections, where we glimpse the many mentalized, an approach that allows readers to normal or, somehow, getting to a better version pathways that people with schizophrenia walk. skim or skip past potentially triggering scenes. of oneself. Leech writes about a heightened sense At one point, Doherty asks a young man what And though he addresses such readers dir- of compassion and empathy, a feeling of purpose schizophrenia means to him. His answer captures ectly, he doesn’t offer themsolutions ­ — another and responsibility that I understand all too well. the essence of her book: “I’m a searchlight for compartmentalization.­ Meanwhile, Doherty notes that “a winner’s tale is a friend.” While Leech recognizes the advantages that usually an easier sell, especially to oneself.” afford him private therapy, which ultimately gives The truth is that stories of linear recovery are arry Leech’s Ghosts Within also speaks of him his life back, he doesn’t fully resolve what damaging and create unrealistic expectations for Gsearching, but of a different kind. A piercing he calls the “secondary trauma” experienced by those with chronic mental illness. It’s all too com- combination of his own experience with post-­ his family, particularly his wife and abandoned mon to write about mental illness as something traumatic stress disorder and clinical research, the daughter, Johan, who “had forgiven me, so it was unearthly, something outside the norm, some- slim volume reads like a survival guide written by a time to forgive myself.” The absence of their per- thing to get beyond. Something that concludes close confidant. spectives represents a missed learning opportun- with catharsis. While Doherty assures Caroline Leech previously wrote about his time as an ity, especially for those dealing with the guilt and Evans that her story is not yet over, Leech hopes independent war correspondent, from 1999 to aftermath of illness. If Ghosts Within is a sort of that his can help others with PTSD to “exorcise 2012, in Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War PTSD survival guide, it’s one that is perhaps too the ghosts that haunt them.” What if instead we Journalist in Colombia. With his latest, he takes up rooted in its own success. approach mental illness not as a ghost, but an the enduring psychological costs of that experi- alternative mode that need not be othered or ence by delving into his traumatic memories and eech does talk of “lower[ing] the water level ­finished — just better understood? To do so, we what followed his PTSD diagnosis in 2016, while Lin my bucket.” It’s how he deals with the daily must ­recognize — and tell — the unconventional still in South America. Writing from Cape Breton, challenges of mental illness, and it’s a mantra I stories of people with lived experience in uncon- he recalls, for example, witnessing a rape while adopted as I read these books — reading that I did ventional ways. Only then can we truly support, imprisoned in El Salvador and discovering a long- on mental health leave from my work. Still, I found accommodate, and empathize with them. Only lost daughter in Panama, and he acknowledges the myself falling into old traps, promising co-­workers then can we fully reframe our hardships.

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In vivid detail, Joel Struthers chronicles the Beauty in a Box uses an interdisciplinary In the context of the environmental French Foreign Legion’s storied history, framework, engaging with African American humanities, this book focuses on agency including the rigorous discipline it instills history, critical race and cultural theory, and time, revealed in fourteen essays and in its recruits, as part of his six years as a consumer culture theory, media studies, a photo album that cover topics such as professional solider, from the unrelenting diasporic art history, black feminism, visual temporal literacy, graphic novels, ecocinema, operational training in France to face-to- culture, fi lm studies, and political economy eco-musicology, animal studies, Indigeneity, face combat in Africa. to explore the history of black beauty culture wolf reintroduction, environmental history, in both Canada and the United States. green conservatism, and environmental policy.

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26 Literary Review of Canada The Cherokee Scot A new edition of a wartime memoir Donald B. Smith

ment in 1785. He deserted two years later and was provide additional information, such as this vivid A Mohawk Memoir from the War of 1812 discharged in 1788. Norton taught school for a year description of the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, near John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen) at Tyendinaga, a Mohawk community on the north- Niagara Falls, in 1814: “Normally, it was not difficult Introduced, annotated, and edited by Carl Benn eastern shore of Lake Ontario, but grew restless and to distinguish British from American regular infan- University of Toronto Press moved west into the Ohio Country, claimed by the try in daylight, but in the dark, the colours of their 416 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook fledgling United States but largely controlled by coats were indistinct, a problem made worse by the Indigenous peoples until the end of the Ohio War, fact that the tailoring, accoutrements, and other in 1795. features of their uniforms were similar.” n early nineteenth-­century Upper Canada, Joseph Brant encountered the Cherokee Scot The book also describes the pivotal battle of what today is Ontario, John Norton was an in the early 1790s, trading furs among the First Queenston Heights, at the war’s outset. “Much of the Iimportant if largely forgotten link between Nations south of Detroit, and subsequently gave success in the battle,” Benn writes, “stemmed from the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, or him a position among the Iroquois peoples of the the contributions of the Six Nations (and the troops Iroquois, and the British. Known in Mohawk as Grand River, a community of approximately 2,000 below the heights), who prevented the Americans Teyoninhokarawen, he was born across the ocean near present-day Brantford, Ontario (the Mohawks from consolidating their position and then wore in 1770, of Cherokee and Scottish descent, and is constituted one-quarter of the population). In down the invaders until Roger Sheaffe brought his a testament to the dynamic relationships among effect, Norton became the war chief’s secretary, a forces together in strength for the final portion of Indigenous and European peoples of the period. post he held until Brant’s death in 1807. the fighting.” After the battle, the British named Lesser known than other figures — including the Sometime around 1797, Brant adopted Norton Norton “Captain of the Confederate Indians.” Such Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant and his sister, as his nephew, creating a powerful cultural bridge. recognition, however, caused at least one important the clan mother Molly Brant — Norton left behind Several years later, the Six Nations Council adopted Mohawk to object. Henry Tekarihogen, a ranking a rich literary legacy in the form of Journal of a him as Mohawk, naming him Teyoninhokarawen sachem, said of the appointment: “We will never Voyage of a Thousand Miles Down the Country of (meaning “it keeps the door open”). The Iroquois consent that he shall again have a right to interfere the Cherokees: Through the States of Kentucky and badly needed someone with an in-depth knowledge in our affairs. We know nothing of him. He has Tennessee. Completed in 1816, but not published of English, as well as competence in Indigenous no Indian blood in him. He is a bad man, and we for another 150 years, the memoir describes, languages. Norton’s military background also cannot help fearing that he will injure us.” Brant’s among other things, his trip to the American was an asset, but his adoption antagonized the esteem for Norton was not unanimously shared; Southeast, where he tried to connect with his British: “With deep distrust afflicting Anglo– despite all of his prestige and capabilities, Brant father’s family. Haudenosaunee relations when John Norton left (like most leaders) was not followed blindly by With A Mohawk Memoir from the War of 1812, the Indian Department to become an adopted his nation. the Ryerson University history professor Carl Benn Mohawk at the heart of Brant’s circle,” Benn writes, Throughout the book, Benn complements presents a full scholarly edition of the War of 1812 “it is not surprising that the colonial establishment Norton’s contemporary account with historical section of Norton’s journal, including a compre- regarded him with suspicion. Consequently, they analysis. And with his epilogue, he takes the hensive introduction, valuable annotations, and tried to undermine Norton’s attempts to serve as a Cherokee Scot’s story beyond the War of 1812. comprehensive bibliography. Benn, the author leader.” Benn unpacks a complex geopolitical situa- Norton’s final year on the Grand River, 1823, proved of The Iroquois in the War of 1812 and Native tion with great clarity, while effectively refuting the tragic. He was found guilty of manslaughter after a Memoirs from the War of 1812: Black Hawk and charge, levelled by several suspicious officials, that fatal confrontation with a Six Nations warrior, with William Apess, considers the text to be “one of the Norton was hardly Indigenous. whom he suspected his young wife, Catherine, was most extensive, absorbing, and historically useful After joining the Mohawk Nation, Norton made having an affair. With his customary balance, Benn autobiographies from the War of 1812 by any of two trips back to Britain — the first on behalf of writes, “Surviving documents tend to be mixed its participants, regardless of ethnicity or status.” Brant in 1804–05, and the second in 1815–16 to about Catherine’s conduct but sympathetic toward By carefully authenticating the manuscript, Benn fight for greater autonomy for the Grand River her husband; yet it is nearly impossible to under- reveals even more about the vital role Indigenous Iroquois. In England, he left behind a manuscript stand the intricacies of a marriage after the passing groups and individuals played in saving Upper with Brant’s friend the Duke of Northumberland; it of two centuries.” Canada from American conquest in the first year rested unknown for a century and a half in Alnwick Shortly after paying a twenty-­five-­pound fine, of the war. Castle. That’s when the literary scholar Carl Klinck, Norton left his family and departed for the United Benn confirms, among other things, key with the assistance of the historian James J. Talman, States, vanishing into the interior. He died some- biographical details. John Norton was born in published The Journal of John Norton, 1816, in time in 1827. Scotland. His Indigenous father, also known as 1970. (Reissued in 2011, by the Publications of the This consummately presented volume paints John Norton, was captured as a young boy dur- Champlain Society, the full text is available online, the picture of the Cherokee Scot in the most detail ing a British raid on the Lower Cherokee town of with an introduction by Benn.) yet, though Benn concludes that “much remains Kuwoki, South Carolina. He was taken to Great to explore, evaluate, and say about this fascinat- Britain, where he eventually joined the army. In ith A Mohawk Memoir, Benn focuses on ing individual.” Indeed, John Norton’s incredible 1770, he fathered John Jr., with his Scottish wife, WNorton’s War of 1812 reminiscences and life, straddling two nineteenth-­century societies, Christian Anderson. In Scotland, the younger John does not include his travelogue of Cherokee coun- is of great interest and relevance to a twenty-first-­ ­ obtained a good basic education before his own try. Each of the eight sections begins with a helpful century nation that continues to grapple with com- enlistment, and he left for Canada with his regi- review of the military context. In-depth footnotes plex identity formations and ­reconciliation.

May 2019 27 Well Versed How poets describe the indescribable Bardia Sinaee

entire literary movements in a few sentences. It’s be part of the pleasure of a poem? . . . If we can’t How a Poem Moves not that he doesn’t want readers to know more decide, or if we can live with both explanations, Adam Sol about who the confessional poets were or what a then the image is beautiful twice .” ECW Press caesura is. He just argues that knowing these things 216 pages, softcover and ebook isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying verse. o me, as both a poet and a reader, poetry is an Sol has geared his essays toward lay readers, Tattempt to evoke the indescribable experience those, he says in his introduction, “who are afraid of being alive — an attempt destined to fall short. As used to be obsessed with John Ashbery’s of poetry.” Reading them is like taking an introduc- John Ashbery once put it, “The poem is sad because poetry. In “The Ecclesiast,” a typically ambigu- tory class, and at times it’s as if the author is trying it wants to be yours, and cannot.” The vicinity I ous early poem, the Pulitzer Prize winner not to scare us into dropping the course altogether. between authorial intention and our experience of begins one stanza with what could be a banal He advises, “Don’t worry at first about what a the lines is a deeply personal space, the exploration observation or homespun proverb —“For the shoe poem means. . . . Instead ask, ‘What does the poem of which is how those lines come to mean differ- pinches, even though it fits perfectly” — and ends do ?’ This allows us to start off with some simple ent things to different readers. The most generous with a sentimental plea: “My dearest I am as a answers. . . . We don’t watch an accomplished gesture of How a Poem Moves is its preservation of galleon on salt billows. / Perfume my head with dancer and ask ourselves, ‘What does this dance that distance. forgetting all about me.” Reading him is at once mean?’ ” As an occasional facilitator of poetry workshops, exasperating and hypnotic, like watching some- Each time a chapter opens with a seemingly I found Sol’s approach instructive. His method of one flip through TV channels. I can’t recommend impenetrable poem, we wonder how Sol is going addressing basic questions about the world of the it enough. to handle this one. But the difficulty only energizes poem before delving into analysis is often over- At the height of my enthusiasm, I made the mis- him: he’s like a street juggler picking up sword after looked by people teaching the genre outside of aca- take of picking up a pair of books about Ashbery. flaming sword. For the most part, Sol asks questions demic settings. However, I was at times frustrated I didn’t want to study the significance of his writing. and points things out: Does the speaker of this poem by the brevity of Sol’s essays. He intentionally stops I suppose I was looking to share my bewilderment sound like she trusts the people in her neighbour- short of reading too closely, which left me feeling with someone. But the books, loaded with theory hood? Notice how the poem shifts here from really like the overeager kid in class, jabbing a hand into and academic jargon, were more opaque than the short sentences to longer ones. All these percussive the air to point out some overlooked allusion. poems themselves. I suddenly felt alienated from s’s, p’s, and k’s are fun to read out loud. Sometimes Others might also criticize this book, and not the work: it seemed I was missing the point entirely. he offers answers and explanations. Often he unfairly so, for a lack of variety in the examples When it isn’t overcomplicating things, writing doesn’t. But each question opens a door into the chosen. The majority of these are lyric poems, a about poetry can dispel its pleasures by reading once inaccessible text. genre that tends to dominate North American liter- poems for us, instead of with us. There are count- Here, for example, is the somewhat aloof open- ary publications and prizes, and that encompasses less deconstructive essays that approach, say, ing of the poem “Flower That Drops Its Petals” everything from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Rupi Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” more as a mechan- by Natalie Toledo (translated from the Spanish Kaur’s Instagram posts and much of Sol’s own verse. ical toy than as a work of art. Consider Jonathan by Clare Sullivan): “I will not die from absence. / That being said, it would be an entirely differ- Sircy’s approach in the aptly titled journal The A hummingbird pinched the eye of my flower / my ent undertaking to write such brisk and accessible Explicator : “[Bishop] eradicates — or seeks to heart mourns and shivers / and does not breathe.” essays about radically experimental poetry. It’s eradicate — ­discrepancies through an exercise of Sol doesn’t immediately decipher the imagery, sad but undeniable that, for many, avant-garde emotional ­mathematics . . . Bishop even posits a nor does he spend too much time situating the work poetry operates behind a veil of theory and tech- teleological justification for losing not being a dis- within a broader literary tradition. He simply begins nical jargon. Ryan Fitzpatrick and Jonathan Ball’s aster, invoking a priori ‘intent’ on the part of the with the pleasure of reading it: “One of the things 2014 anthology, Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of ‘things’ to be lost, thus freeing the object’s loser I love about this poem is the mix of the strange Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry, reneges from culpability.” and the familiar.” Eventually, he concedes, “I’m not on the popular appeal of its title by discussing All of which is why I began Adam Sol’s How a exactly sure what ‘the eye of my flower’ is either, but psychoanalytic theory, the Russian Formalist Victor Poem Moves with apprehension. It’s not the author’s with ‘my heart’ in the next line, I can make an edu- Shklovsky, and “Situationist détournement ” in its fault — I like Sol. The American-born, Toronto- cated guess. Or to be more exact, I’m comfortable introduction. based poet and educator has published four collec- being in the vicinity of knowing what she means.” Paradoxically, How a Poem Moves could sell tions, a couple of which were formative for me when “The vicinity of knowing” is where we find more copies than all of Sol’s poetry collections I was starting out as a poet. His new book consists of ourselves at the end of Yusef Komunyakaa’s combined, which reflects the status of poetry thirty-five very brief essays, each about a different “Yellowjackets,” in which a horse-drawn plow today. Despite an unprecedented amount of work he encountered while judging the 2016 Griffin strikes a hornet’s nest. After the plowman runs off, poetry-adjacent content — the must-read listicles, Poetry Prize, an endeavour that required him to the poem closes with the image of the idle horse at CBC interviews, retro-filtered social media photos read more than 630 collections in five months. dusk, before “the whole / Beautiful, blue-black sky / of books beside lattes, a non-fiction book such With each entry, Sol has reproduced a poem in Fell on his back.” We’re left wondering if the “blue- as this — space for in-depth poetry criticism is its entirety, or excerpted it if it exceeds thirty lines. black sky” describes a deadly swarm or simply shrinking. It makes me wonder how much of this After a bit of preamble, he undertakes a sort of the dark of night — that is, whether the horse was enthusiasm is performative, and I hope more read- reading out loud, but in writing. He has a likeable killed — but Sol asks, “Can’t we hold both possibil- ers channel their enjoyment of poetry into reading professor’s skill for outlining complex theories and ities in our minds simultaneously? Might that even actual poems.

28 Literary Review of Canada Cautionary Tale A woman shouldn’t have to explain herself Rose Hendrie

This is what Schofield seems to enjoy most: Carry on with burdensome people only if Bina: A Novel in Warnings turning things over and onto their head. She excels you enjoy having something to moan about. Anakana Schofield at interlacing seemingly contrary conditions — the Otherwise hammer your expectation Penguin Random House Canada sinister and the compassionate, for example, or towards the tin can of inevitable failure. 336 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook love and violence, the intimate and the darkly Tin is tin. comic. A collar-gripping­ urgency runs beneath the Tin’s din. surface, with Bina frequently addressing the reader Let din in and he’ll only give you more tin. ina is a busy woman. She is a ­practical in the second person. Interrogate the nature of woman. An older woman. Bina is “a mod- control and justice, she seems to invite us. Question The writing often descends into frantic bursts of Bern woman with modern thoughts on who is expected to speak and who is expected to stacked lines and staccato sentences as Bina, we are modern things,” and she is tired of not being heard. listen. Who is active and who is passive. Of course, led to understand, scribbles her story on the backs That’s “Bye‑na,” not “Bee‑na,” she’ll have you know. the scales are not balanced. We all know it. Bina of receipts and scraps of paper, somewhat clandes- “Beena” is some other woman off living some knows it. tinely; it’s as if we are reading an unfinished closet happy life, and “Bye‑na” has little time for such drama. Very occasionally, and for no apparent simple, rosy outcomes. In fact, there’s very little chofield, who moved to Vancouver in 1999 and reason, paragraphs end in a couplet. Is it a part of that’s straightforward in Bina, the third novel from Searned a Giller Prize nod in 2015, has not writ- our modern condition to be so delightfully tempted the Irish-Canadian writer Anakana Schofield. So, ten a plot-­driven novel. She has given us instead a by such small arrangements of words, like pieces reader, you have been warned. Bina-­driven novel, one that progresses in stops and of literary sushi? The style won’t be for everyone, For this is a cyclical collection much in the way not everyone enjoys of warnings, of insular musings, of raw fish. But then you can’t please ’em do nots and watch out fors. It is a all, Bina might shrug. contemporary story of an ordinary-­ We might characterize Bina as a At one point, Bina claims she is extraordinary older Irish woman who getting older and that her memory is lives in a village outside Castlebar (not collection of succinct ramblings. But going, but this smacks of the excuses in Castlebar, which Bina hates: “They they’re ramblings worth hearing. women so often give. There is more think they are Milan in Castlebar”). at stake here than the usual tension But setting is hardly important here. derived from an unreliable narrator. Bina is a woman who has simply Rather, the circular, winding form had enough. starts, in a jumbled overlapping of past and present. becomes a celebration of being heard, of pushing The novel is a monologue-memoir­ of sorts, a We might characterize it as succinct ramblings. But a point or a warning — in whatever raw shape that stream of consciousness merry-­go-round, in which they’re ramblings worth hearing: takes. Say it loud and say it proud. Because why not? the protagonist tells the story of the two men who However, spending time in the company of have upended and possibly (probably) ruined her Does it matter whether it’s a warning or a a talkative narrator can become a little wearing, life. One of them is Eddie, her “sorta son,” a man she remarking at this stage? as it can be with any chatty person. Few detailed found lying in the ditch beside her house. (“Drive Would warnings prevent remarking? descriptions of place or situation break up Bina’s straight past them,” she warns, if you ever come I have no idea. frantic discourse, but we get a sense of setting across a person lying in a ditch.) The other, referred That’s up to ye. through the rhythm, sound, and form of her voice. to only as the Tall Man, comes to her door and into Then there’s the problem of Eddie, who is so one- her life, bringing with him “a whole pile of trouble.” While Bina throws out questions in abundance, note bad. We’re left wanting to understand why Both men are dangerous — one in his stupidity, the she offers few, if any, answers. And in a way, she he is just so vile (not to excuse him, but to explain other in his cunning — and Bina is caught between encourages us to do the same. Why should it be up him). Some people are just bad, Bina might say, and the brutishness of one and the violence of the other. to the woman to explain, or to defend her right to perhaps she’s right. But why? Especially in this tur- Male violence, the status of the female voice, say her piece and get on with her life? Bina is not bulent, isolationist, us-and-them political climate, the nature of moral courage, the right to decide, a voice for all women, nor should she be held up we crave more nuance from our fictional bad guys, accountability and blame, the problems of truth and as one, but she is a woman with a voice, one who just as we do from the political ones. sensationalist culture — these are all timely themes should not be dismissed or discounted out of hand. No one reading Bina will question Schofield’s that know no national boundaries. Schofield is This is whatBina does: it projects outwardly and rich creativity. It is a story that is much bigger exacting and fearless in how she weighs them, and remains notably self-­aware. Schofield is skilled at than Bina herself, to put it crudely. Even without refreshingly free of self-righteousness.­ “Sacrifice causing her reader to pause, raise an eyebrow, think nuanced Eddies, the novel is intriguing, perplexing. is a stupid thing that women do. Don’t do it. The a minute, and then read hurriedly on. It is complicated and entirely human. Schofield has men don’t notice,” Bina says, matter-of-­ ­factly. “If I Bina is in a hurry to tell her tale, and we are in a wonderful way of making parts seem frivolous, do nothing else in these warnings, I will train you a hurry to follow along. It is a quick and vibrant and then hitting us where it hurts. The real warning to say no.” This book had me — a young woman novel — playful and mischievous. The language is should be to not judge too quickly. Except when who has also had enough — boiling with anger one compact and physical, frequently more like poetry things can be judged only one way — and then moment and laughing the next. Again, nothing is than prose, to which the Irish cadence lends itself judge them quick and judge them hard. As Bina her- ever straightforward. beautifully: self says, “I’m roundabouting again, amn’t I.”

May 2019 29 Blurred Borders The human stories behind immigration David Wallace

the two families, both men share a kind of fraternal the conflicts and tensions of the past — the worlds Immigrant City understanding felt by all immigrants, however of his father and grandfather. In spite of his inten- David Bezmozgis fleetingly. In an immigrant city — one “of innumer- tions to keep a distance, he ultimately realizes the HarperCollins Publishers able struggles and ambitions” — the seemingly extent to which he has become as obsessive as 224 pages, hardcover and ebook incongruous image of a white man with a car door his father. and a child wearing a blue hijab is scarcely noticed on the bus or subway. When the father asks the girl ezmozgis writes in the tradition of Isaac Babel, erhaps no issue has commanded our whether to go home or keep going, she replies, “Go Bwhere the residues of oral cultures can still be attention in recent years more than immi- home and keep going.” found. The unfamiliar becomes transformed into P gration. Images of migrants from Africa, In “The Russian Riviera,” the volume’s conclud- the familiar as if it is being remembered and retold, the Middle East, and Central America, in search ing story, the reader is transported into the world whether in the descriptions of Somali apartments, of better lives in Europe and North America, have of Kostya, once a boxing champion in Western the street scenes of Riga, or the fight scenes in “The dominated the media for over a decade. Not all Siberia and currently a doorman at a Russian Russian Riviera.” The author’s commitment to nar- viewers, however, have responded sympathetically. restaurant and cabaret in New Jersey. Like many rative itself, especially dramatic tensions, belongs to The fear that migrants fleeing desperate circum- illegal immigrants, Kostya lives on the margins, this tradition. In “Roman’s Song,” Roman Berman is stances would undermine the fabric of Western within a community of Russians, who, like his boss caught within a force field of pressures emanating societies has been effectively fanned by right-wing and his girlfriend’s family, have gradually settled, from the interlocking relationships of family and ideologues. This fear is scarcely novel. It frequently although their world is one where the boundaries community. In contrast to his father, who had been accompanied the influx of newcomers into Canada between the criminal and the legal are blurred. a speculator and operated on the legal margins in and the United States throughout the twentieth Kostya has few skills other than what his training Riga, Roman spends seven years building a pro- century. One need only recall the forced intern- as a boxer has provided; his job as a bouncer offers fession as a massage therapist. He must resist the ments of Ukrainians, Japanese, and Italians. And few options. With a pragmatism reminiscent of proposition from Kopman, a friend of his wife, to yet these same societies, from their beginnings many of the protagonists, he prefers “to risk the provide a licence for a massage parlour in exchange as settler cultures, have always been defined by possibility of gangsters against the certainty of for money if he is to preserve his reputation. At the immigrant communities as newcomers become unemployment.” same time, he agrees to sell his car to Svirsky, the settled and integrated into a changing brother-­in-law of a client and a recent body politic. immigrant. The agreement is com- For Canada, multi­culturalism as With his latest, Immigrant City, plicated by Svirsky’s inability to pay an official and often contested policy the full amount, as well as Roman’s has permitted and encouraged the David Bezmozgis has expanded the association of the car with a time in sometimes problematical voices of his life when he was close to his son. immigrants. And through his fiction scope of the newcomer’s experience. As Svirsky sits in the car, Roman is and films, David Bezmozgis has told reminded of when he drove his son the stories of Latvian and Russian to school: “To see his small face, with Jews as they become part of North its compact intelligence, a source American society. In his latest, Immigrant City, he If these two stories contrast a settled immigrant of wonder and pride. And to watch him turn the continues and deepens this larger narrative project. community to one in the process of becoming radio dial and mouth the words to what seemed to Although these seven stories certainly draw on his settled, other stories explore how a family’s past Roman like one long, continuous song.” personal experiences as an immigrant, they also continues to maintain a hold on the present. In The endings of most of the stories remind us explore more general issues of history and identity. “Little Rooster,” the protagonist traces the life of of the psychology of the immigrant as survivor, What is striking about the collection is how his late grandfather, who had lived in Canada for the individual who must continue to live without Bezmozgis has expanded the scope of the immi- twenty years without learning English. His life is overcoming his self-doubts, fears, or inadequa- grant experience. In his earlier Natasha and Other initially explored through letters, but gradually the cies. This reminder anchors these narratives. Stories (2004), the neighbourhood as a unifying story focuses on an affair and a child, thereby alter- Notwithstanding Bezmozgis’s talents at story­ principle permits contrasts between generations ing the narrator’s understanding of his grandfather. telling, at guiding his reader into the unfamiliar, and between relatively settled families and recent What matters more than anything is a secret that’s the strength of Immigrant City lies in his ability to immigrants. In Immigrant City, the unity lies been uncovered but is preserved in a present that expose the fragility of the vulnerable ego as a human elsewhere: in the daily challenges of the relatively cannot be shared. In “A New Gravestone for an Old condition. In the closing scene of “Little Rooster,” settled protagonists who, to a greater or lesser Grave,” an aging father, now blind due to diabetes, the ambivalence of a human connection is broken extent, carry with them the baggage of their pasts. wants his son to redeem the family by replacing by the noise of a screaming child. Bezmozgis ends In “Immigrant City,” for example, the narrator takes the grandfather’s original gravestone, described as the story: “The sincerity of the feeling gripped us his daughter to find a replacement for a damaged “the size of a shoebox,” with a new one. If in “Little and then released as the girl’s shriek spiralled into car door from a Somali who lives in an apartment Rooster,” a man rediscovers his grandfather’s past laughter.” Here, as elsewhere, Bezmozgis reminds with his extended family. While the two men nego- imaginatively through letters and conversations in us of the connection we share as human beings in tiate the exchange of the door, the daughter is given Canada, the son in “A New Gravestone for an Old our search for meaning beyond survival, beyond the gift of a blue hijab. In spite of the differences of Grave” must return to Riga in order to experience our differences.

30 Literary Review of Canada The Horizons Beyond Living with albinism in a dark world Emily Urquhart

potions that purportedly bring good luck in life, lbinism is globally misunderstood, and in Children of the Moon love, and business. ANorth America this generally materializes in Anthony De Sa As Pó tells her story to Serafim, a visiting repor- literature and films portraying people with this gen- Doubleday Canada ter from Brazil, she is adamant that he record etic condition as evil, as having supernatural pow- 256 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook everything about her life, and in her words: “You ers, or simply as strange. For this reason, I held my say you come here to write of me, but all scribblers breath while diving into the first pages of Children hope they will find the magic that everyone speaks of the Moon, but it was soon clear that I hadn’t rom nearly every vantage in Lisbon, you of, that we albinos carry in us. You must listen to my needed to worry. can see water. If you can’t see the ocean, you words. You must promise to tell my story the way I Pó is a fully formed character. Her disability is Fcan smell its brine or hear it in the cries of have shared it with you.” Pó’s determination is writ- not glossed over, nor is it the only facet of her being. seagulls overhead. It is a city steep with hills, and ten into the structure of the book, as we hear her Thankfully, she is not cast as a disabled woman these can be exhausting if you have your two small voice in the recordings that Serafim occasionally whose role is that of a metaphor, or as a means of children in tow, as I did when visiting Portugal this listens to alone in his hotel room. reflecting growth in some other non-disabled­ char- spring. However, each climb offers the promise of a Pó chooses Serafim as her medium because she acter, or even, God forbid, as a way of teaching the view, and the higher you ascend, presumably, the believes he is a man who cares about the world. She others some treacly lesson about acceptance. No: farther you can see. Except that’s not how horizons notices him putting his cigarette butt in his pocket Pó is complex, strong, long-­suffering, and broken, work. We saw only varying shades of blue, where rather than leaving it in her hallway. She may live but she’s also a survivor and a healer, in the truest the dark ocean met the light sky at some blurred precariously, a squatter in a multi-­unit hotel that has sense of the word. She tells her story, in her own and distant point. What lay beyond that shimmer? no other means of garbage disposal but the elevator words. She has agency. The desire to find out fuelled centuries of explor- shaft (where, horrifyingly, children occasionally fall The third voice in these interwoven narra- ation as Portuguese sailors opened trade routes and and are lost), but this is her home. He respects that. tives is Ezequiel. Born to a Makonde mother and colonized existing nations, leaving few parts of the Serafim may seem to care about the world, but Portuguese father, but adopted by white mission- world untouched. On one side is a romantic hist­ he has recently reported on an uncontacted tribe aries, Ezequiel is wrenched into conflicting worlds. ory of leaving — as witnessed in the monuments, in the Amazon, irrevocably changing the lives of His adoptive mother longs to return home to squares, and streets named for explorers. On the its members. He seeks atonement by allowing Pó Holland, his adoptive father’s Portuguese ancestors other side are scarred nations, continuing to strug- to tell her story, with his byline — and ego — taking have been in the country for centuries, and he con- gle with their colonial pasts. This is where we find a back seat. (I have to say I’m not convinced that a siders himself Mozambican. Ezequiel’s allegiances the characters featured in Anthony De Sa’s poetic person who knowingly exposes a vulnerable group are further brutalized when he is abducted, first by and moving second novel, Children of the Moon. to disease and world scrutiny could muster that guerrilla fighters of a fringe nationalist group that They live in the present but exist in an aftermath level of remorse.) declares allegiance with the anti-colonialist­ libera- that is both global and personal. Other journalists came to the Grande Hotel tion front, and then by the Portuguese secret police. The novel’s three connecting stories take place before Serafim, convincing Pó that her story would It is in Ezequiel’s life struggle that we see the in Tanzania and Mozambique (and occasionally in spur change. In return for access, they brought worst, longest-lasting,­ and deepest scars of coloni- Canada) and span sixty years, from the mid‑1950s school supplies and toys for the children. For me, this alism. He belongs nowhere, to no one. He has no to the present day. First, we meet Pó, a Maasai was familiar territory. In 2013, I travelled to Tanzania homeland. In Canada, where we first find him, liv- woman with albinism, which is a recessive genetic to meet with and record the stories of people with ing alone, suffering from dementia, he still cannot condition that results in little to no pigment in albinism living under threat. I also brought school escape the memories of violence. His doctors want the hair, skin, and eyes and is associated with low supplies and toys — as well as a bag of sun hats. to know if he has any questions, and he asks, “Why vision. Pó lives among thousands of squatters in the And I believed, or at least hoped, that reporting are my veins turning into electric wires? How come dilapidated Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, on the heinous crimes against these people could my dreams are flooded with colour? Why do impos- which had once been an opulent paradise but was stir global interest. Unlike those others, however, ters chase me every night?” The physicians have no abandoned after the last of the Portuguese soldiers my mission was personal: my daughter has albin- response. There are no answers. left in the mid‑1970s. In her block of the hotel, ism. In the early weeks of her life, as I struggled to History is tightly woven in Children of the Moon, others with albinism, particularly children, have understand what this meant, I turned to the internet. and it illuminates Mozambique’s road to independ- gathered for safety, and Pó oversees their education There, along with some basic medical information, ence. Learning is the wonderful bycatch of fiction, and well-being.­ I discovered devastating stories about the brutalities but possibly a more important side benefit is that That Pó has albinism and lives in East faced by East Africans living with albinism. I couldn’t reading novels builds empathy. Pó instinctively Africa means she has spent a lifetime under turn away. Three years later, I flew to Tanzania. understands the transformative experience of threat — from violence, from exclusion, and from During my visit, I mostly met children. Several an immersive narrative, and how it can motivate the sun that burns her fair skin, now covered in of them had been attacked and were missing body people in ways that news reports cannot. Readers cancerous lesions. From the beginning, she has parts. Many of them lived together at well-­guarded come to care about characters like Pó, and by exten- been ostracized from her tribe; in her later years, schools in the west and east of the country, not sion others who have faced similar oppression. she lives in fear of poachers. These are men who unlike the children under Pó’s care in De Sa’s novel. Once they are invested in a tale like hers, they see attack, maim, and dismember people with albin- Some of them had been left at the gates, their parents beyond a headline. To put it another way, a story ism, selling their body parts on a gruesome black fearing for their children’s lives or, worse, wanting to well told allows us to see, or at least imagine, what market to quack healers, who use the remains in rid themselves of children they’d viewed as burdens. lies beyond the horizon.

May 2019 31 Classical Accompaniment The arrangement that shapes my characters Adam Foulds

decade ago, while I was struggling will be all right if this one thing happens, we too world. When it became very much Henry’s music, to write my second novel, when the work are indulging in a private mysticism, one that our I could listen to it and find him in there. A felt urgent and impossible, when I was culture of self-actualization­ and self-care, of horo- The title …explosante-­fixe… is taken from André too far in to turn back, when it was all moving too scopes and sun salutes, of superfoods and spiritual Breton. It is characteristic of what he calls “convul- quickly and unpredictably but when I was also growth actively encourages. sive beauty,” and might be translated as “exploding-­ stuck with a boulder I couldn’t lift, I was reassured As I developed Kristin, I was listening to Oliver static.” A long piece for chamber orchestra and solo by the voice of Margaret Atwood on the radio. Knussen’s Choral, a piece imbued with mysticism. flute with electronics, it is a dazzling display of Asked by a BBC interviewer whether she found It quotes the harmonies — the so-called mystic invention and changeability, with a kind of prodi- writing had become easier with time and experi- chord — of the late-Romantic­ Russian composer gal, aimless profusion that baffles some listeners. It ence (her biblio­graphy reveals she must have been Alexander Scriabin; its slow, ominous, highly col- is deeply seductive, sometimes overwhelming, and about twelve novels in at this point), she replied oured music builds to a violent climax that gives sometimes anxiety inducing. It is the flashy, fluid, that no, it hadn’t. In fact, the only thing she had way to repercussions and ramifications. Scriabin’s panicky, gorgeous medium in which my Henry been able to learn producing all those thousands of own beliefs were heavily influenced by theosophy. moves — an actor suffering from his lonely, insati- pages of fiction was that it was incredibly difficult Exactly what they were is hard to specify: it’s prob- able ambition and besotted with cinema and the each time and, unfortunately, each book was dif- ably enough to know that his notebooks include idea of a transcendent fame. In …explosante-­fixe…, ficult in an entirely new way. I breathed a sigh of the outburst “I am God!” and that he thought Boulez extends the acoustic timbres of traditional relief and returned to the long battle with my own his chord would “afford instant apprehension instruments with electronic sounds and effects, incompetence. of . . . what was in essence beyond the mind of processed playback, and the like. The relationship I’m now working on my sixth book, my fifth man to conceptualize.” The colours of Knussen’s between the two seems to me like that between our has just been published, and Atwood’s observa- Choral remind me of Kristin’s world also. She has a organic bodies and our devices, our small-screen tion still holds true. Writing is still a prostheses, our cars and escalators. It state of emergency. I have, however, felt very apt for Henry, a person who found that I’ve developed one habit wants to flourish through the media, that helps keep the process centred, I have found that I’ve developed one to see his own image proliferating on the characters present and avail- screens. He wants to be recorded and able. I listen to a lot of music, and habit that helps keep the process reproduced and thereby assumed as I’m writing, I find certain pieces into a realm that is better than nature. match the inner lives and dramatic, centred, the characters present and I found in Boulez’s music this emotional climates of particular available. I listen to a lot of music. sense of enhanced experience, the characters or the plot at hand. In the familiar attenuated sheen of con- past, it has been a certain Radiohead temporary consumerist spaces, the album, some folk songs, a classical bright, reliable, insubstantial pleas- concerto. With my most recent novel, Dream ­saturated vision, a profound sense of the beauty of ures and aimless circulation, together with the Sequence, two pieces of contemporary classical things and of immanent meaning. Both attempt to spectral poverty that haunts Henry’s world. It music started to remind me of my two main reveal what is invisible and more deeply true than reminded me of the multiplying glass and steel characters and, in turn, surrounded and nurtured the surface of our lives. I like that in them — beauty surfaces of new apartment buildings, of a housing their development. (They’re both quite easily becoming dangerous, deranging. market inflated by international capital, whether available on YouTube or Spotify, if you’d like to Then there’s the French composer Pierre Boulez, in Toronto or London or many of the other places hear them.) a much ­misunderstood figure in contemporary I’ve been. Boulez’s lengthy composition has an I experienced a breakthrough of sorts when music. He certainly shares part of the blame for his imposing sense of scale, but it is made of tiny I realized that I was essentially working on a ver- reputation. For a long time in writings and public units, phrases, and ideas rather than melodies, sion of the Echo and Narcissus story. Kristin is my statements, he projected a dry, dogmatic, aggressive in a way that brings to mind our shrinking living Echo. She’s a young American woman, living in intellectualism that belied the beauty and delicacy spaces, tiny new condos and subdivided proper- Philadelphia, richly divorced but alone and at a of his music. ties, in cities that keep on expanding. loss. She once met her Narcissus, Henry, a success- For a while, I became quite addicted to one of We inhabit now a strange world in which our ful young British actor, in an airport and had in that Boulez’s pieces. I needed to listen to it, and for more pleasure and our despair converge, along with moment an overwhelming experience of love and than a month I did so every day, often several times. our delight and our destruction. We enjoy our connection. She is convinced that they are twin It felt like an addiction. I had the sensation that lives while they become less and less affordable, souls, destined to be together, and her trajectory there was something in it I needed, some unique in consumer and property debt to the few who through the novel is her attempt to bring that about, compound that delivered a rush of stimulation own everything. We binge on our entertainments, in accordance with what the universe wants. She and relief I couldn’t get elsewhere. I suspect that while the climate breaks down. We are seduced is a magical thinker, ruled by fantasy, but we’re all this may be literally true, that music of a certain and dejected. I attempted in Dream Sequence to susceptible to her kind of elaborated desire. Kristin complexity induces a quantity of synaptic activity be as eloquent about this as Boulez is in his music, is at the far end of a continuum on which most of us that changes brain chemistry. But more than this to show Henry and Kristin, desperate and elated, exist. Whenever we think of someone as “the one,” sensory thrill, …explosante-­fixe… seemed arrest- ­circulating in our own hopes and fears, on the or something as meant to be, or that everything ingly meaningful and articulate about the modern verge of something — something.

32 Literary Review of Canada Braiding Legal Orders Implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples John Borrows, Larry Chartrand, Oonagh E. Fitzgerald and Risa Schwartz, Editors June 2019

Implementation in Canada of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is a pivotal opportunity to explore the relationship between international law, Indigenous peoples’ own laws and Canada’s constitutional narratives.

Media and Mass Atrocity At a Crossroads Complexity’s Embrace The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond Russia in the Global Economy The International Law Foreword by Roméo Dallaire Sergey Kulik, Nikita Maslennikov Implications of Brexit Edited by Allan Thompson and Igor Yurgens Oonagh E.Fitzgerald and Eva Lein, Editors April 2019 January 2019 May 2018

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

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