A riveting history of tax rage (seriously) PAGE 3

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EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarmishta Subramanian [email protected] 3 Tax and the Canadian Psyche 26 Peak Twins ASSISTANT EDITOR Elsbeth Heaman in conversation with Doppelgängers, hauntings, and the rise of Bardia Sinaee Shirley Tillotson the neuro-fantastic ASSOCIATE EDITOR 5 The Empathy Paradox John Semley Beth Haddon What even a post-Weinstein conversation is 27 Untitled POETRY EDITOR Moira MacDougall missing about sexual assault Anna Yin COPY EDITOR Carly Lewis 28 Primus extra pares Patricia Treble 7 Misreckoning Power and the evolution of the PMO CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Alison Strumberger and Gillian Sze Mel Cappe Mohamed Huque, Andy Lamey, Molly Peacock, Robin Roger, Judy Stoffman 8 Calling the Lobster Telephone 29 Entomology and Sun-stains PROOFREADERS What surrealism can teach social scientists Anny Tang Tyler Willis, Heather Schultz Joshua Nichols 30 A Long Way from Home DESIGN Mark Goldstein, for the last time The Kurdish struggle has the world’s attention, 12 Northern Shadows ADVERTISING/SALES briefly, but still not its sympathy CanLit in an era of Truth and Reconciliation Michael Wile and ‘peak’ diversity Ava Homa [email protected] Stephen Marche 32 Letters ADMINISTRATOR 20 What Joni Allows Erna Paris, Janet Hudgins Christian Sharpe PUBLISHER The beautifully opaque life, and work, of Joni Mark Lovewell Mitchell [email protected] Alexandra Molotkow BOARD OF DIRECTORS 22 The March of the Cheezie George Bass, Q.C., Don McCutchan, Trina McQueen, O.C., Jack Mintz, C.M., Our snacks as a history of ourselves Jaime Watt Christine Sismondo CORPORATE SECRETARY 24 Love and Lucre Vali Bennett Our odd, abiding affair with bookstores ADVISORY COUNCIL Grant Munroe Michael Adams, Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Grant Reuber, O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard Schiff POETRY SUBMISSIONS For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK Founded in 1991 by P.A. Dutil The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization.

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November 2017 reviewcanada.ca BETWEEN In 2008, if a company like Bear Stearns could have avoided global meltdown by saying, Well, French Canadians aren’t very patriotic, it would have been highly HISTORYmotivated to do so.

AND MYTHRonald Wright

A Hero for the Americas: The Legend of Gonzalo Guerrero by Robert Calder

“The extraordinary tale of Gonzalo Guerrero, a Spaniard shipwrecked in Yucatán who went over to the Maya and helped them fight off his fellow conquistadors, has long cried out for a good retelling in English. In this lively and well written book, Robert Calder steers deftly between history and myth, following the story through to its cultural implications today.” —Ronald Wright, author of Time Among the Maya and The Gold Eaters

“A fascinating, little-known piece of the history of Spanish colonization in Central America.” —Publishers Weekly

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

2 LRC HERO ad U of R Press.indd 1 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review2017-10-17 of Canada 2:24 PM INTERVIEW Tax and the Canadian Psyche Elsbeth Heaman in conversation with Shirley Tillotson

ax rage has been in the spotlight this changed my mind about how to understand the around what was then considered a racialized view fall ever since the federal government first First World War and income tax was a book on of French Canadians. Tproposed tax reforms relating to corpora- taxation in Russia by a Canadian, Yanni Kotsonis, EH: And all the years in between as well. In tions. Before long, the debate had gone from how which shows that Russia was way behind the rest Canada tax questions are always identity questions: the changes would affect farmers and convenience- of Europe. Who is transferring money to whom? The debates store owners to whether Finance Minister Bill ST: So you got into thinking about fairness in in B.C. regarding the Chinese are very similar. The Morneau stood to benefit personally and had acted taxation in Canada because of reading about what tax resentments in Canada reflect racialized ani- appropriately, to whether the ethics commissioner was unfair in czarist Russia? mosity; you can see this in B.C., you can see this in had done her job. And that was before the Paradise EH: Yes. Czarist Russia taxed more fairly than the French-English story— Papers surfaced. Canada on the eve of the First World War! It had a ST: —and the Indigenous— It was ever thus, according a group of historians higher ratio of direct taxation—meaning that the EH: And the Indigenous. What is the relation- who specialize in the arcane business of taxation. government was trying to tax according to abil- ship between where the money is coming from and Indeed, tax and tax revolts tell a dramatic story of ity to pay, so that the wealthy pay more than the where it’s ending up? That’s why 1917 is a water- our nation often missed in other, more conven- poor. Russia was the least modern taxing country shed: because you have new ways of talking about tional narratives. For fights about taxes are, at heart, in Europe—it taxed about 20 percent directly. The wealth. less about obscure financial loopholes than about United States also had a progressive income tax by So Borden’s Conservative government is lead- how people live, and about the rich and poor of a this point. But Canada has zero progressive federal ing the war effort, and Wilfrid Laurier, the head of nation, and who gets what. taxation until 1917. the Liberal party, is saying, Hey, you guys are taxing Elsbeth Heaman is associate professor of his- And this has made me reconsider Confederation. in a very conservative, backwards way. You should tory and classical studies at McGill University and We often see 1917—this terrible, traumatic fix your taxes. And he’s backed by farmers, social- the interim director of the McGill ist, feminist groups. But Borden’s Institute for the Study of Canada. party is able to say to Laurier, in Her book Tax, Order and Good In 2008, if a company like Bear Stearns reaction, Oh, you’re just French Government: A New Political could have avoided global meltdown by Canadian, that’s your problem. History of Canada (1867-1917) You’re just not manning up to was published this year by McGill- saying, Well, French Canadians aren’t the war effort. Borden’s message Queens University Press. was that this was about fighting a Shirley Tillotson is an Inglis very patriotic, it would have been highly patriotic war, and French Canada professor at University of King’s was not as interested in leaping to College and an adjunct member motivated to do so. Europe’s defence. of Dalhousie University’s depart- ST: So the critics can be identi- ment of history. She is the author of Give and Take: moment—as a deviation from what happened in fied as French Canadian? The Liberal party is iden- The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian 1867, when everybody decided to come together tified as French Canadian because Wilfrid Laurier Democracy, out this month from UBC Press. and build a great transcontinental nation. I realized is leading it? They spoke in Montreal. that the language of 1917 is actually not a deviation EH: Yes, and hostility toward French Canadians from that of 1867; it’s what George Brown thought rises to a crescendo in 1917. The Liberal party says ST: Everyone has been talking about tax recently, would happen in Confederation. you’re really hitting the poor hard because you’re and there has been a lot of political noise, and “Quebec must not rule the rest of Canada” is funding the war with taxes on consumption and often catastrophizing language. One of the things the language of George Brown and the slogan with borrowing. Both these things are inflationary that we bring as historians to tax conversations is a used by the Unionist supporters of Robert Borden. and tend to put the war burden on the poor. This is long view. We can judge better whether a particular Confederation was about the supposed transfer of ordinary partisan politics, but it’s remarkable that tax upset is a kerfuffle, a tempest in a teapot, or resources from English Canada to French Canada. the historians have taken the Borden point of view. whether it’s a pivot, a turning point, like 1917, the That’s what George Brown was protesting. We hear ST: That is to say, historians have bought the year of the first federal income tax. it always as a story of “rep by pop,” or representa- Conservative line that this is a classic refusal on the EH: Yes, 1917 was one of the most formative tion by population, but it was also representation by part of French Canada to get with the project. years in Canadian history. We’re not just marking property. The fact that the poor were governing the EH: Yes, and in April of 1917, the minister of the sesquicentennial of Confederation this year; rich seemed to Brown completely un-British, com- finance is still refusing to introduce income tax we’re also marking the centenary of income tax. pletely different from all political standards that he despite tremendous pressure for it. Then suddenly 1917 saw our most divisive election, and a bitter understood as successful. he does an about-turn. The key factor is that his debate over military conscription, which was tied to ST: Right. Brown saw the shivering settlers of the government introduces conscription, and all the the conscription of wealth. I see 1917 as a tax revolt. Saguenay, his idea of French-Canadian consumers, progressive-leaning Liberals say we’re going to fight ST: Maybe. Adding an income tax was certainly as the poor. He was saying, These poor people have this unless you also give us conscription of wealth. a big move. The federal government was used to get- too much political weight, but if we organize this So Borden introduces largely nominal conscription ting its revenue quietly, from taxing consumption, Confederation right, we in Ontario, who are devel- of wealth in order to get support for his war effort, via customs duties, the tariff. The tariff was -sup oping the wealth that really will move the country to win over the progressive English-Canadian posed to be about protecting infant industries, but forward—we will be free of domination from these Liberals. He still can’t get French-Canadian in fact it raised the price of goods in everyday life. poor people in Lower Canada. I think that’s right. Liberals. And then the whole thing blows up in the EH: Exactly. Canada wasn’t taxing fairly. What There is a real continuity between 1867 and 1917 khaki election of December 2017.

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 3 ST: I totally buy your narrative that there is a rebels of the English Civil War or the Boston Tea tive knowledge, power, and reach of the state. His tax revolt here from the left, though I emphasize Party—and as soon as you mention the Tea Party successors, Laurier and Borden, carry that on. But conscription a bit less in my narrative, and I note you get into contemporary American politics, meanwhile, economists are pushing back, profes- that there’s a treat for big wealth in the income tax and Tea Party-ism as a kind of unrelenting and sionalizing in the university. It’s actually new eco- of 1917 because the Victory Loans of 1917 were sold unthinking tax resistance. So in celebrating justice nomic theory that makes income tax irresistible. as giving bondholders tax-free income. It’s going to for small earners and small businesses, and the ST: And not just economic theory, but facts, be, in the long term, pivotal because it generates resistance of the poor to unjust taxation, we’re also the kind of empirical data that economists collect. a fiscal tool that can grow and change to do more giving a history to anti-statist tax resistance that In 1917, we didn’t have a national bureau of statis- of the work it was intended to do. But in the short aids and comforts some political projects that I tics; it was founded during the war, but there was term, the 1917 tax was actually pretty gentle to the don’t share. still great privacy for wealth. We didn’t tax capital truly wealthy. EH: Yes, but taxes traditionally have been the in Canada during the interwar years. The United EH: So you have a government that has extra- best way, especially within in a British parliament- States did, so their tax statistics tracked capital. The ordinary success at borrowing, internationally ary system, by which people discipline the state. Canadian government didn’t need to collect data and domestically, and extraordinarily backwards- The historian Donald Creighton founded his early on wealth, and, as you suggest, it kind of didn’t looking tax laws that still meet popu- want to know. In the 1960s, we lar grassroots resistance. And they’ve begin to get better tax debate got to have an election in the middle The worry is about releasing the demons because better data gave us a of the war. This means the govern- bigger picture, beyond our own ment might change hands, to people of anti-statism. In celebrating justice the narrow interests. Studying tax who don’t have the same vested is really a good way of tracking interests. The grassroots resistance resistance of the poor to unjust taxation, the state of democratic engage- is organizing new political parties ment, and what it’s based on. almost daily—united farmers par- we’re also giving a history to anti-statist, EH: How do we deal with ties, a labour party. Borden’s finance Tea Party-ist tax resistance. the boredom question? minister, Thomas White, is a Toronto ST: Yes, are taxes really financier. That the state might land inevitably boring? This is ser- in the hands of tax radicals is more than White can career on the complaint that French Canadians ious stuff, but it’s not just narrowly economic or bear. The metaphor that I would give here is that in 1820s Lower Canada don’t want to pay their political; we’re both in some ways social histor- in 2008, if a company like Bear Stearns could have taxes—Don’t they understand the demands of mod- ians… avoided global meltdown by saying, Well, French ernity? They refuse to vote taxes! In fact they were EH: Well, I have three chapters on municipal Canadians aren’t very patriotic, it would have been showing they had completely mastered the British taxation. Could there be anything more boring highly, highly motivated to do so. And White, who parliamentary system. What is the ur-moment of than that? But I had this moment in the municipal has spent much of his career rejecting conscription, that system? It’s the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta archives in Montreal, reading letters by people, and rejecting anti-French arguments, finally does say, represents a tax revolt where the king has to say, there was one in particular that was really founda- This is what we have to do. Okay, okay, I’m going to have to respond in some tional for me, somebody writing in to say: I can’t pay ST: In the current issue around tax, people talk way to some of your demands. my municipal water tax. We are in a terrible way. a lot about the class questions in tax, the disrespect Now, the people that meet in that field in 1215 We don’t have work. People are dying here. And if for small businesses. There seemed to be a kind really are not the “people” of England. It’s a very you withhold our water, if you force us to pay, then of emotional or class-cultural dimension to this small, very powerful, elite group. But there’s a way it will kill us. I found this an extraordinary moment conflict. Certainly there has been an intensity that in which that gets generalized over time. I’ve been —this invisible little whisper, a desperate plea only comes from people bringing their identity as small reading David Hume’s history of England. He says visible in the archives. I decided this is what the business people to the table and saying not only, something really new happens at that moment so story is about. You’re affecting how much money I can earn and that you begin to see some sense of the modern ST: Yeah, you might think that studying taxes keep—because everyone always talks about that in public, a larger interest at stake than a few rob- would be boring because it involves endless hours tax—but also, You have privileges as rich people, Bill ber barons trying to make their claims. There’s an of reading tax registers and reports by economists. Morneau and Justin Trudeau, that I don’t have as a enlarging process to tax protests. And the ones we But taxes actually touch pretty intimately on small entrepreneur, and that means that you’re not see today could go either way. Some tax revolts people’s lives. I’m reminded of a moment when the only not making economically sound proposals but do broaden, and some look a lot more like rich finance minister in 1920, Sir Henry Drayton, was you don’t deserve to be my government because you people’s tax revolts. going around the country asking people about tax don’t respect me and my way of life. That emotional ST: One of the ways I came to terms with the reform and one hot topic was a new tax on luxury intensity is part of what makes tax revolts a bit risk I mention is to consider that democracy con- goods. But what counts as a luxury? Silk as clothing, scary. They are disruptive. sists both in constraining the state—the governed for instance, would be taxed as a luxury but silk as EH: What are you thinking of? being able to resist what the government wants underwear would not. ST: Here we are, in our books, telling stories to do—and enabling the state: paying your taxes, A merchant tries to explain this to Sir Henry. about people resisting government and rejecting signing up for the militia. Now, the welfare state Take a silk camisole, for example, he says. Sir Henry the levying of taxes. Many people like the story of programs that follow the Second World War come is puzzled. I confess I don’t know what that is, he Canada as a peaceable nation where there isn’t about because the new income taxpayers who are says. Turns out that, even when the merchant very much of this kind of conflict around taxes. Your summoned into existence by the 1942 war income describes it as one of those very pretty silk affairs book ends with a successful tax revolt, one that does tax are low-income people. That tax hits subsist- that your wife wears over her corset, Drayton had to good work and is a fight for fairness. But the 1917 ence-level incomes, and there’s resistance. It can’t admit he still didn’t know! Sometimes the encoun- election is really pretty ugly. That kind of conflict be simply collected by force. There aren’t enough ter between an individual and the state is like that, carries real risks, doesn’t it? tax staff during the war to investigate every little tax a very human interaction. EH: Well, when you think of risk, what evasion. So the government really has to recruit a EH: For me the great discovery is that this everybody had in mind in 1917 was the Russian new body of consenting taxpayers, because of that material is telling a story about wealth and poverty Revolution. A huge overturning of the state. Is that British tradition of answerability to the electorate. in Canada. I don’t think people quite figured out what you’re talking about? Those new taxpayers want an active state in return how to talk about Confederation because it’s long ST: Yes. Maybe people on the left are used to for their taxes. been seen as dealing with railways and the like. thinking of 1917 as a wonderful expression of a EH: One reason we both like reading tax history But I see Confederation as an attempt by people challenge to property, of which our income tax is that public opinion really forcefully expresses like Macdonald and Brown to negotiate how you is a small echo and the Russian Revolution was itself, people taking to the streets. But the other govern wealth and poverty. It is not remote from this dramatic moment. But there were dire con- side to it, one of the reasons 1917 is a watershed, the real meat of society. It is the place where the sequences in Russia later on. And it’s not entirely is expertise and knowledge. Until 1917 the fed- state figures out what it’s going to do about wealth the question of unleashing the demons of revolu- eral government has the momentum of John A. and poverty. And I think we bring something really tion that worries me. The worry is about releasing Macdonald, who liked to protect the privacy of quite new to the story of Canada in that respect. the demons of anti-statism. We talk about the tax individuals and businesses against the administra-

4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Empathy Paradox What even a post-Weinstein conversation is missing about sexual assault Carly Lewis

from women. It’s that we’ve hidden Unwanted Advances: Sexual the truth about rape from everyone Paranoia else. Comes To Campus Laura Kipnis t seems almost anachronistic to HarperCollins Iuse the word “rape” now. In pop 256 pages, hardcover culture, especially in comedy, the ISBN 9780062657886 word has currency. With jokes about rape, comedians like Sarah Silverman Sexual Violence at Canadian and Will Ferrell push against the Universities: Activism, Institutional edges of what can be said—it’s Responses, and Strategies for always “rape” in comedy, never sex- Change ual assault. The comedian Hannibal Edited by Elizabeth Quinlan, Andrea Buress harnessed the word’s incendi- Quinlan, Curtis Fogel, and Gail ary power in a different way in 2014. Taylor “But you rape women, Bill Cosby,” Wilfrid Laurier University Press he said onstage, in what launched 349 pages, softcover the destruction of Cosby’s reputa- ISBN 9781771122832 tion. By using the word “rape,” he left no doubt about what he meant. He n a now-infamous 1991 Newsday allowed—forced—us to talk about it. essay, Camille Paglia wrote that In much of the public discourse, Ifeminism “has put young women of those who have come forward about their experi- though, out of compassion and in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them.” ences, all seem to suggest progress. And there is respect for privacy, we allow a wide linguistic berth “In dramatizing the pervasiveness of rape,” Paglia an undeniable momentum. Following the recent when talking about sexual assault. In the vastness argued, “feminists have told young women that #MeToo campaign, which encouraged people to of this room, specificity is lost, and so too is our before they have sex with a man, they must give use the hashtag to indicate they’d experienced potential for real understanding. The ambiguity consent as explicit as a legal contract’s. In this way, sexual harassment or assault, jewellery designer of the current conversation means we lack a com- young women have been convinced that they have Moran Amir peddled a $56 necklace with letters prehension of what sexual assault looks and feels been the victims of rape.” (“Convinced.” It’s a potent spelling “Me too” dangling from a chain. (Proceeds and sounds like, how, where and when it happens, idea, regularly employed to insinuate a passive were donated to RAINN, the Rape Abuse Incest who its perpetrators are, and how the aftermath misconception of consent, evidence that the victim National Network.) Music-streaming platform unfolds. Difficult as it may be, we need to talk, and wasn’t really raped, just persuaded.) Spotify launched a #MeToo playlist featuring songs write, about it more vigorously. That means more Paglia did not stop there, of course. “Every about abuse. The Wing, a network of members- explicitly. woman must take personal responsibility for her only co-working spaces for women in New York Take note of how many were stunned by the sexuality, which is nature’s red flame,” she wrote. City, sells hats and t-shirts bearing the words “Girls audio proof of Harvey Weinstein attempting to “She must be prudent and cautious about where doing whatever the fuck they want in 2017.” coerce the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez into she goes and with whom. When she makes a But what is not being said in these empowering- his hotel room, or by the recording of Donald mistake, she must accept the consequences and, sounding yet ultimately nebulous slogans deserves Trump saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do through self-criticism, resolve never to make that a closer look. The rising volume of conversations it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the pussy.” mistake again.” about sexual assault is not, on its own, real advance- But that is how it sounds. For another example, take Paglia’s essay is an easy target perhaps. But as ment. The #MeToo campaign has been in many the recent abuse allegations against Florida-based a cultural benchmark that we have not much pro- ways an awakening, yes. It has amplified the voices rap artist XXXTentacion; in September, the music gressed from, at least not in any demonstrable way, of women who have experienced gender-based vio- press reported these accusations with disturbing it is useful, compelling even. One could argue that lence and arguably cleared a path for victims of all exactitude, including details of how the rapper told in fact we have regressed. It was just in 2014 that genders to come forward, encouraged by the secur- a woman to choose which kind of barbecue tool the “prudent and cautious” remonstration reared ity of common ground. Still, it is an exercise moored he would put into her vagina. Instead being given its head in a Canadian courtroom, rather than a in quantity. #MeToo required no specificity, just vague phrasings like “lewd comments” or “accusa- newsmagazine, when a judge, Robin Camp, asked that users post two short words to their social media tions of assault,” the public was privy to a reality that an accuser, “Why couldn’t you just keep your knees platforms. Anything from an unsolicited libidinous is typically paraphrased and thus softened. together?” It is true that in the current melee of sex- DM to a violent rape was fair for submission. In the The case of Stanford University student Brock ual assault accusations in Hollywood as well as the scramble to make space for all, the weight of the Turner is similarly instructive. In January 2015 literary and media worlds, the question of consent worst gets lost. Vagueness is a cloak. Turner assaulted an unconscious student and was has been pushed to the fore in public conversation. The speed and intensity of these past few weeks charged with two counts of rape, two counts of The outpouring of support for people who have signal the need for a better conversation about sex- sexual penetration, and one count of assault with survived sexual assault, and the growing numbers ual assault. The one we are having continues to be intent to rape. (The first two charges were dropped. flawed, in part because—on a fundamental level— He was convicted of the others.) It was a case that Carly Lewis is a writer living in Toronto. Her work we lack an understanding of what that term even sparked international outrage, though only after has appeared in New York magazine, Guardian, means. We still do not have an adequate vocabulary the victim’s impact statement was published by Atlantic, Maclean’s and Walrus. She is a regular for abuse. The problem is not, as Paglia wrote in her BuzzFeed. Emily Doe’s powerful and brutally hon- contributor to the Globe and Mail. 1991 essay, that we’ve hidden the truth about sex est account made the abstraction of a sexual assault

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 5 case incontestably real. “In public news,” she wrote, documentation and correspondence, including of the catchall term “sexual assault” has ended up “I learned that my ass and vagina were completely text messages, related to his relationship with the making rape seem less traumatic than it is. Actions exposed outside, my breasts had been groped, student, both academic and otherwise. Kipnis such as “cat-calling”—vile to be sure, and much too fingers had been jabbed inside me along with pine uses those records and Ludlow’s perspective to prevalent—now seem on par with rape, because we needles and debris, my bare skin and head had piece together what she deems a more believable use the same vocabulary to discuss both. Online we been rubbing against the ground behind a dump- counter-narrative to the student’s. Rather like a have created a buoying support system for survivors ster, while an erect freshman was humping my half defence lawyer yearning to shriek “Eureka” in a of sexual assault. I have both given to and benefited naked, unconscious body. But I don’t remember, so courtroom, she scours text messages, photographs, from this compassionate digital community, in how do I prove I didn’t like it.” and social media for holes in the accuser’s story. which women hold each other up, share resour- It is a sickening moral failure that we don’t regis- Through that process she becomes a pontificating ces, name names, and fight for a better society. ter the horror of sexual assault until a survivor lays armchair detective-turned-self-appointed judge. But in conflating the experience of being sexually bare the proof. But as a counter to ambiguity and Kipnis’s abrasive, irreverent style—once so assaulted with the experience of being mistreated euphemism, the details become pivotal. entertaining in her writings about gossip and shame emotionally or psychologically, we attenuate the (2010’s How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in experience of rape. Being grabbed in a bar can be round the time Brock Turner was charged, Bad Behavior) or the trap of romantic relationships traumatic (and constitutes sexual assault, to be Athe cultural critic and professor Laura Kipnis (2003’s Against Love: A Polemic)—seems exactly the clear) and psychological abuse is too often over- waded into the morass of campus rape discourse wrong tone for an exploration of the dynamics of looked. But we must draw a line in the terminology when she responded to a policy statement issued sexual harassment and assault on campus. At one between cruel behaviour and abuse and rape. When by her employer, Northwestern University, that out- point, she recalls laughing with a fellow writer over we label everything “abuse,” we do unfortunately lined new guidelines for romantic arrive at what Kipnis describes as or sexual relations between fac- Out of compassion and respect for “sexual paranoia.” ulty, staff, and students. “The Great Our warm embrace of all Prohibition,” as she referred to the privacy, we allow a wide linguistic berth people who have suffered across new policy in an opinion piece for the spectrum has indeed come the Chronicle of Higher Education, when talking about sexual assault. In the at the expense of clarity, which is stated that in order to protect the vastness of this room, our potential for vital for progress. With little oppor- integrity of the university’s aca- tunity for closure through the jus- demic and work environments, real understanding is lost. tice system, venting on Twitter has “When a consensual romantic or understandably become a norm. sexual relationship exists or has existed between the writer’s sister having been raped while passed Ambiguity often veers into misconception. It is in people in positions of unequal power at the uni- out in a frat house. “We laughed because we’re this fog of accusation and half-communication that versity, the person with the greater power must not feminists with a certain shared mordancy about narratives are written overtop of truths. hold any supervisory or evaluative authority over female propensities for self-martyrdom, among As Sarah Schulman writes in her book Conflict the other person in the relationship.” Simply put: other things,” she writes. It seems germane to note is Not Abuse: professors were not to have sex with students if they that in an interview with the New Yorker soon after were currently grading them. her book came out, Kipnis said that she herself has Sometimes invoking the language of abuse is More from the policy: “When individuals never encountered sexism in the workplace. an avoidance of responsibility, just like speak- involved in a consensual romantic or sexual rela- The dissonance in her argument is hard to pro- ing in metaphors. Like when people say, “I tionship are in positions of unequal power at the cess at times. “Even lots of charisma can’t force feel like I’ve been raped,” to mean they are university…there is the potential for a conflict of a person to drink,” she writes at one point about upset. In reality, what they feel is nothing like interest, favoritism, and exploitation.” the Ludlow case, in which the events in question what they would feel if they’d been raped. It’s Kipnis disagreed. In that Chronicle article, titled occurred after a night of drinking. “I suppose a a turn of phrase that means they don’t like “Sexual paranoia strikes academe,” she cited the professor could pressure a student to drink. Still, what is happening and don’t know how to American academic Jane Gallop, who suggested there’s the sinister implication that if a professor make it better. It’s an overstatement of harm that in her day, sleeping with professors made could, he’d want to. Why exactly? Oh right—so using abuse tropes. And sometimes we are young women like her “feel cocky.” Kipnis argued that he could force her into sex.” Whatever Kipnis so insistent on our right to overstate that we that “the melodramatic imagination’s obsession might think of Ludlow’s particular case, it cannot do things that are not merited by the actual with helpless victims and powerful predators is seem a stretch to anyone who has read a newspaper dimensions of the conflict. what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to recently (or ever) that there are professors—or the detriment of those whose interests are suppos- movie moguls, beloved musicians, high-profile Later, she continues: “Being the object of over- edly being protected, namely students. The result? magazine editors and aspiring senators—who try reaction means being treated in a way that one Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.” to force women and girls into sex, with the help of does not deserve, which is the centerpiece of injus- Kipnis’s Chronicle article makes reference alcohol or not. Kipnis, an otherwise thoughtful and tice…There is a continuum of pathology in blame, to a Title IX complaint filed against another attentive thinker, seems to woolgather flippantly cold-shouldering, shunning, scapegoating, group Northwestern professor, Peter Ludlow, who was about what may or may not have happened, from a bullying, incarcerating, occupying, assaulting, and accused of sexual assault by a student. Ludlow deeply skeptical starting point. killing. These actions are substitutes for our better claimed the relationship was consensual; the stu- And it’s all too bad, because she does make a selves, and avoid the work of self-acknowledgment dent alleged that it was not. Following the essay’s powerful case for refinement in terms of how we required for resolution and positive change.” publication, Kipnis herself became the target of a talk about sexual assault, on campus and off. “In Title IX complaint, filed by the complainant in the the post-Title IX landscape, sexual panic rules,” she he editors of the recently released Sexual Ludlow case, along with another student; she also wrote in the Chronicle. “Slippery slopes abound. TViolence at Canadian Universities: Activism, became the focus of protests by female students, Gropers become rapists and accusers become Institutional Responses, and Strategies for Change who alleged that the article created an uncomfort- survivors, opening the door for another panicky avoid some of the pitfalls of popular discourse by able campus environment. Kipnis’s own Title IX conflation: teacher-student sex and incest.” This is defining their focus much more clearly; it is appar- investigation and those of others became the basis a point she explores in the book as well. Kipnis is ent right from the title what this book, a collection of of her recent book Unwanted Advances: Sexual writing, after all, from a sense that a broken system essays and research by Canadian activists and aca- Paranoia Comes to Campus, published this past has failed her, as it has many women. The various demics, concerns itself with: sexual violence. The spring. Its broader focus is what Kipnis perceives Title IX officers in Kipnis’s book for example, did book presents a critique of existing responses, and as a victim’s-eye vision of feminism: “I find myself not follow a uniform process and lacked any com- actions that are being taken, or could be, to address wondering when this version of besieged woman- mon definition of what constituted sexual miscon- the problem. Julie S. Lalonde, a Canadian social jus- hood came back into fashion,” she writes. duct. They made it up as they went along. If you tice activist based in Ottawa, argues that campuses Much of Unwanted Advances focuses on cut through all the polemic, Kipnis’ book is a call should allocate resources to prevention, not merely Ludlow’s case. Following an investigation, Ludlow for clarity. be spurred into action by the bad public relations resigned without signing a non-disclosure agree- On this point, she is right. In the eyes of the of high profile incidents. “Evidently, if a campus’s ment, and provided Kipnis with access to all mainstream public, the fatiguing oversaturation approach to sexual violence only addresses high

6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada profile cases, then it is not adequately focused on prevention,” she writes, calling to mind the frenzy of apologia that’s followed the wave of male celeb- Misreckoning rities and public figures being exposed for sexual assault, and even the Brock Turner case. Salvaged from the season’s first bite “Focusing on everyone’s positive role in end- from the frosted knots of forest floor, ing sexual violence rather than painting men as an elbow of black locust. perpetrators and women as victims was a welcome Suspended now from the bough uprooted, change by community and campus groups alike,” paper cranes pirouette above the heat vent. continues Lalonde, detailing her research. In my mind, I do see everyone, including Kipnis and Strata of sky illuminated, Paglia, nodding along to this, and that’s a good start. alternating bloom and arctic blue. In focusing on tangible actions—whether com- Branches vein the evening. mendable or problematic— the book also presents a foil to the soft focus of the sexual assault “conver- An empty plate rests on a table. sation.” It seems perplexing, given the unexplored The blade of the butter knife breathes. potential suggested by such proposals, to devote such time and resources to the pursuit of investiga- Inhale to fill the corners, tions against someone like Kipnis. Sure, she may to slice the room with primrose light, to draw the eyelids closed like petals. be irritating. But harmful? Is it possible we are we focusing on “rape culture” at the expense of An upholstered chair waits taut as a lung. addressing rape itself? When dusk descends the city exhales the day. But perhaps we target what we can see and name, and in this moment, a “hostile environ- These are the whirrs and wheeze, ment on campus” may be easier to define than the clicks and crush of the hour. what constitutes sexual assault. It is also easier Loneliness slinks its tail out the door. for universities to say, and believe, that they are taking action by creating safe spaces for women It flocks at dawn than to have processes and policies that actually wings beating up against a bare bird box. serve vulnerable students, which would require Count the span of rooftops by twos, effort beyond virtuous declaration. The softness of and treetops nearly tipped tender and green. the language permits the illusion of improvement. It is distance that speckles the horizon. In March 2016, the Ontario government passed Bill 132, which stated every college and university Survival wheels in skeins through first light must have a sexual assault policy detailing how as sunrise pinks the kitchen, two cups steaming. the school would handle and investigate reports of sexual assault. Many have criticized the law’s Crows and gulls circle above, loose and varying guidelines, as well as the failure a monochromatic braid of caws and keows. of post-secondary institutions to properly put the Their cries cavern the moment. law into action on campus. Carleton University, for example, stipulated that filing a complaint with The ticking of a clock circles these movements. The pouring. The steeping. The sip. the school disqualified complainants from talking about their assault to the press, or discussing it on Slow hands tick over each surface, their own social media accounts. The province’s Mother’s silver, Father’s atlas, Lover’s jawline. response was that it encouraged schools to write Every hour chases its tail. their own policies. History, and Kipnis, would sug- gest that women are not always beneficiaries of Outside the clematis is yet without a bloom. this approach. Brandon University’s sexual assault Under a waning crescent it cuts a deal with winter. policy made news last year when it emerged that sexual assault victims were threatened with sus- The air begs a negotiation, pensions if they discussed their assaults with any- beckons the day to follow and soften. one but a school-affiliated counsellor. Hushed tones: who else will lay claim to this thought?

“The erosion of rights can happen in a variety Something takes leave, replaced by an urgency that sweeps, of ways, and manipulation of language is one of a leaf that broadens as it grows. them,” Kelly Oliver wrote in “There is no such thing as ‘nonconsensual sex.’ It’s violence,” an Spring whispers the hope of love renewed. opinion piece published in the New York Times Hushed and headstrong it marbles the afternoon last year. Indeed, the matter of language has begun with the intimacy and thrill of a secret. to come into the light of late. Harvey Weinstein’s grandstanding damage-control statement used the Cast long shadows, kneel upon growth, look up. term “non-consensual sex” in its denial of sexual Here in the violet gloaming, revive. assault allegations and was widely criticized for doing so. Many on social media have responded to Each burgeoning minute, each newly frail thing, makes itself known and eclipses the thaw. the cascade of sexual assault stories by noting that Icicles lament, point by point. “perverts” and “predators” are not the same thing, particularly after Senate-hopeful Roy Moore was That which sprouts will inevitably grant pardon. labelled the former. Who doesn’t know the differ- What once surrendered now anchors. Hold tight. ence? I can’t help but wonder exasperatedly. Yet rapists become perverts, sexual assault becomes locker-room talk, rape becomes non- Alison Strumberger and Gillian Sze consensual sex—or “20 minutes of action,” as Brock Turner’s father put it—and crimes become mere The renga is a Japanese collaborative poetic form and has been a favourite of Gillian Sze and Alison delinquency. Slippery slopes do abound, as Kipnis Strumberger for years. Their book, Redrafting Winter (BuschekBooks, 2015), composed of seven rengas says, and clarity is crucial. Without it we really are written via snail mail, was a finalist for the 2016 Quebec Writers’ Federation A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry. hiding the truth.

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 7 Calling the Lobster Telephone What surrealism can teach social scientists Joshua Nichols

Making Trouble: Surrealism and the Human Sciences Derek Sayer Prickly Paradigm Press 95 pages, softcover ISBN 9780996635523

f you were to ask someone what the term “surrealism” means, you might well call to Imind images of Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks, René Magritte’s bowler hats, or André Masson’s strange and troubling, almost Boschian, scenes of violence and eroticism. Surrealism’s most com- mon reference points are, after all, to this set of European artists, familiar from a particular (and to my view puzzling) species of poster in which artists’ names occupy no less than a quarter of the avail- able space—reminder for those who are unfamiliar with the work and cultural trophy for those who claim to be. The second, everyday sense of the term that you are likely to be directed to is the adjective “surreal,” which, given the nature of recent political events, has suddenly taken a place of prominence in our see associated with the term “surrealism” is a ser- Dying—Typhoon Coming On) (1840), Snow Storm— lexicon. The sense of disorientation it conveys con- ious methodological text in the social sciences. That Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), and Rain, fronts us as a blurring of the boundaries between is precisely what Derek Sayer is offering us with his Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway the waking and the dreaming world. This can either latest book. While this association might not be (1844). Turner filters the symbols of 19th century lead you to the frightening possibilities that all of initially welcomed by the more staid among social progress and empire through a lens that shows this is merely in your head (which modern philoso- scientists, I believe that any reader who decides us only a dizzying movement of light and shadow phy refers to as the problem of other minds and, if to inquire further and explore the idea will be without distinct shape or direction. In these paint- taken far enough, can lead to a loss of contact with richly rewarded. (This has certainly been my own ings, there is an inescapable sense of impending reality) or that the shared normative framework experience. Full disclosure: I pursued a master’s disaster, collision and shipwreck that, to my mind, that allows us to share a social world is dissolv- degree in sociology under Sayer’s supervision at the connects these works to the social and political ing, leaving us in the condition that the sociolo- University of Alberta before moving on to complete malady that the surrealists inherit and attempt to gist Émile Durkheim termed “anomie,” which can doctorates in philosophy and law, as well as the investigate. As Sayer puts it: be translated as “normlessness.” There is another requisite law degree.) In Sayer’s work the connec- word connected to “surreal,” suggested by the title tion between the surrealists and the foundational The surrealists always insisted that surrealism of Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche. figures of sociology (Marx, Durkheim, and Weber was an instrument of knowledge rather than The work is translated, somewhat unsatisfyingly, among others) is by no means implausible. Rather, just a literary or artistic movement. A central as “The Uncanny.” A happier English translation there is a strong contextual and methodological part of their critique of the white, western, would be the rather ungainly term “unhomeliness,” resonance. bourgeois civilization they had come to which helps direct our attention to the intimately It is helpful for us to remember that both soci- despise was a sustained challenge to modern troubling nature of this experience—it is one that ology and surrealism are rooted in the end of the scientific rationality as a privileged vehicle follows you home and exposes something you can- long 19th century and the impending breakdown for understanding the world. In this respect not retreat from, an abyss that stares back, to bor- of European colonial imperialism; Durkheim’s they anticipated some of the core arguments row Nietzsche’s evocative phrasing. “malady of the infinite” (the evocative phrase he of later postcolonial and feminist perspec- My point here is that what you generally do not used to describe the condition of anomie) captures tives, seeking to provincialize the privileged something endemic in both this period and ours. standpoints from which knowledge is usually Joshua Nichols is an assistant professor at the It is a condition we can see hinted at in the mid- derived. School for Public Administration at Dalhousie 19th century with the darkly impressionistic shift University and a fellow at the Centre for in J.M.W. Turner’s work in paintings such as Slave Sayer’s use of surrealism in Making Trouble is International Governance Innovation. Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and more in line with the origins of the term itself. After

8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada all, its original context is the aftermath of the First (especially Breton, but it can be seen in other family familiar scenes and ask what can be done World War. André Breton was a psychiatrist treating members of surrealism—both within Breton’s inner to make trouble. The operations that one victims of shell shock. What was surreal was not circle and in the more distant relatives who associ- would have to perform in order to multiply only the individual’s life, but the culture itself. How ated more with the self-proclaimed inner enemy the senseless features of perceived environ- can you relate general claims to morality with the of surrealism, Georges Bataille) is that the aim is ments; to produce and sustain bewilderment, horrors of the trenches and shell shock? This ques- not to escape the dream to return to the waking consternation, and confusion; to produce the tion was not an academic one for the surrealists, world, but rather to learn how to live in a world socially structured affects of anxiety, shame, as the majority of them served in the war and were where dream and reality are inseparable features. guilt, and indignation; and to produce disor- struggling to make sense of that experience and In other words, the view from nowhere is simply ganized interaction should tell us something their own everyday reality. Their question was: How not possible and so the dream of metaphysics and about how the structures of everyday activities do you live between the waking and the dreaming its promise of objective norms is little more than are ordinarily and routinely produced and world? And beyond that, how do you show others dogmatism. What remains is a form of skeptical maintained…my studies are not properly that they too are in this liminal state between sleep inquiry that follows dreams because they are the speaking experimental. They are demonstra- and waking? How do you bring them to the notion lines of fracture in social norms, so as to attack the tions, designed, in Herbert Spiegelberg’s that the dream-reality barrier is undecidable? Max very foundations. phrase, as “aids to a sluggish imagination.” Ernst (who served as a gunner in the German army Which brings us back to Making Trouble, as I have found that they produce reflections in the Great War) captured this when he explained Sayer’s aim is not to point to a set of methodological through which the strangeness of an obstin- of Dada: tools that can be used to simply bring disorder, ately familiar world can be detected. but rather to point to the tools that the surrealists [It] resulted from the absurdity, the whole manufactured and their resemblance to some of This notion of methods for making trouble immense stupidity, of that imbecilic war. We the most productive critical resources of the social brings us to the context of this book and the cur- young people had come back from the war sciences. He helps us to see the surrealists as intel- rent state of the social sciences in the university— in a state of stupefaction, and our rage had to lectual forerunners for the kinds of critiques of the which is, Sayer argues, plunged in a bureaucratic find expression somehow or other. This it did world later made by social science. stasis. Should the value of knowledge be measured quite naturally through attacks on the foun- This would not be all that surprising for those by its potential productive utility or number of dations of the civilization responsible for the working in the French tradition of social theory, citations in a given year? This is the premise that war. Attacks on speech, syntax, logic, litera- as the connections between leading figures in the lurks behind new systems of assessment such as ture, painting and so on. surrealist circle (and at its edges) and those of the the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the post-structuralists of the 1960s and ’70s extend United Kingdom and other methods of qualitative These are the tasks that surrealism set for itself. beyond the confines of the academy. The surreal- assessment that lay claim to being more “objective.” It was not merely an aesthetic. Rather, it was a way ists published cutting-edge (or perhaps better yet The problem with these tools and systems is not of being in the world. Michel Foucault evocatively bleeding-edge) periodicals such as Minotaure simply that they exist, but rather how they can be captured the heart of this project in an interview for (1933-1939) and Acéphale (1936-1939) that com- used to yield conclusions that they cannot possibly Arts Loisirs in 1966 when he said that “the dream bined the works of art, literature, poetry, and social justify, and how they suppress others that don’t for Breton is the unshatterable kernel of night at the theory by their luminary friends and associates. cleave easily to their logic. After all, what would the heart of the day.” Or, to use a connection that Sayer They created secret societies that mixed together “impact factor” have been for Friedrich Nietzsche’s fleshes out beautifully, we can think of Breton’s the insights of French anthropologists and sociolo- Thus Spoke Zarathustra or David Hume’s A Treatise surrealism in light of Human Nature during of Walter Benjamin’s their lifetime? As Hume work and see it as a famously put it in his auto- set of “techniques biography, the Treatise “fell for awakening”—not Surrealism’s context is the Great War’s aftermath. stillborn from the press.” Its to some ultimate impact was posthumous reality in which the André Breton was a psychiatrist treating victims and continues with us to truth is clear and this day. While counting present, but rather of shell shock. What was surreal was not only the citations may serve as a to a liminal space individual’s life but the culture itself. useful indicator of a num- between the sub- ber of different things, as ject and the object. the means for determining There is, as I see it, “impact” it is, at best, a more than a little ramshackle metric. When resemblance here between surrealism and the gists studying so-called “primitive religion,” such this is introduced through the formal instruments ancient Skeptics. The aim of the philosopher Sextus as Marcel Mauss and Durkheim, with a violently of law and policy and then applied to the gov- Empiricus was not some zero-sum truth game, convulsive sense of theatre that we can see most erning bureaucracy of the university as the means but ataraxia, which he defines as an “untroubled clearly expressed in the avant-garde playwright to determine the value of academic work and and tranquil condition of the soul.” Skepticism Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. In their Paris the best distribution of funding, this ramshackle provides us with a set of arguments that focuses the worlds of art, literature, philosophy, and the metric is converted into something approximating on how we can claim to know things, but its ends social sciences crisscrossed and overlapped in a religious dogma. What is on its own a provisional are not confined to simply winning arguments. social tapestry that extended from the academy to metric of some limited utility can acquire an aura of Rather, the point was to achieve ataraxia or—as the café and beyond. Their influence on philoso- impersonal authority that makes it almost impos- Pyrrho maintained—acatalepsia, which refers to an phers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and sible to refute and, in the guise of “performance” ability to refuse dogmatic claims to absolute truth Jacques Derrida is both deep and lasting. and “impact,” become a means to attack academic and instead see that for every such claim there is Sayer builds on these connections by providing freedom. a contradiction that may be advanced with equal us with thought-provoking examples of resem- The surrealists (much like the Skeptics) offer us justification. blance between surrealism and the work of some a useful set of tools to counter this kind of bureau- The Skeptics refused Aristotle’s famous claim of the leading social scientists of the last century cratic dogmatism. Their approach to the pomp and that philosophy begins with wonder (the Ancient in the Anglo-American context. The most striking, circumstance that surrounds the so-called “object- Greek term thaumazein being closer to the shock to my eye, is the work of Robert Merton, Clifford ive criteria” of these schemes of measurement is to and awe sense of the word) by basing it on doubt Geertz, James Clifford, and Harold Garfinkel. It is ask what can hope to guarantee the objectivity of and thereby exposing foundational normative Garfinkel’s description of his method of “making the criteria. This is not a caustic acid that simply dis- claims as being little more than an argument from commonplaces scenes visible” in particular that solves everything and leaves us empty handed. The authority—the schoolyard phrase being “because I draws out the rich resonance between surrealism aim of Making Trouble is not unending negativity; said so”—or infinite regress (the unsatisfying claim and social science methodology: nor is it to replace one system with another. Rather that the foundation of the world is “turtles all the it resonates strongly with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s way down”). The similarity with the surrealists Procedurally it is my preference to start with remark that the goal of his philosophical approach

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 9 “A clear, timely and essential book about the importance of trust as an engine for the Internet.”

Michael Chertoff, former secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security

One of the Hill Times’ Best Books of 2016. Now in paperback and with an afterword.

Look Who’s Watching: Surveillance, Treachery and Trust Online Look Who’s by Fen Osler Hampson and Eric Jardine Watching Edward Snowden’s revelations that the United States National Security Agency Surveillance_Treachery_and Trust_Online and other government agencies are spying on Internet users, the proliferation of cybercrime, the growing commodification of user data and regulatory changes — which threaten to fragment the system — are all rapidly eroding the confidence users have in the Internet ecosystem. Based on a combination of illustrative anecdotal evidence and analysis of new data, Look Who’s Watching clearly demonstrates why trust matters, how it is being eroded and how, with care and deliberate policy action, the essential glue of the Internet can be restored. The paperback edition includes updated data and an afterword that covers what has happened with user trust and data breaches since the first edition appeared.

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

10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada is not to refine or completethe system of rules, of a general will), and only a unitary body politic, Sayer puts it: but to find a form of clarity that would make the it seemed, would do. The overlapping pluralism philosophical problems that trouble us completely of the European composite monarchies with all Prague furnishes a very different vantage disappear. of their regional distinctions had to be formed point on the experience of the modern than The kind of social science Sayer shows us in into “the people.” The 19th century compounded London, Paris, Los Angeles, or New York; a Making Trouble focuses on assembling and arran- the complexity of the problem as the European perspective that—as with Braque or Picasso’s ging reminders and examples that can help us see nation-states developed more extensive systems cubism or the Dadaists’ photomontages— that our seemingly objective criteria—which we of colonial administration to maintain and expand challenges our familiar fields of vision…What, use to construct the everyday world—provide only their empires. The social sciences were marshalled to my mind, makes Prague a fittingcapital a limited perspective and cannot offer us absolute and they served, in many cases, to extend the reach for the twentieth century is that this is a place certainty. Like Wittgenstein’s therapies, this form of of empire. in which modernist dreams have time and social science helps us open our eyes to the horizon As the 20th century opened it was clear that the time again unraveled; a location in which the of possibilities that the plurality of perspectives rifts had spread and combined. The hulking imper- masks have sooner or later always come off to have to offer. This is, at least to my mind, the proper ial leviathans of Europe were on a collision course, reveal the grand narratives of progress for the province of the social sciences. They are critical the impacts of which would serve to fundamentally childish fairy tales they are. practices of investigation whose aim should be to reorder the legal, political and social dimensions assist social actors in seeing what they are doing of the international order. It was in the spaces Prague’s crossroads vantage point has much in anew, thereby offering them an opportunity to do between the glittering European metropoles and common with that of the surrealists. Both serve to things differently. the blood and muck of the trenches that surreal- expose the blood and soil that has always accom- The line of disruptive thinking from the Skeptics ism was born. The surrealists are, in so many ways, panied the European dreams of order and empire. through Wittgenstein through the surrealists is the fin de siècle offspring of Nietzsche’s blinking The story of the role played by the social sciences by no means the only heritage of the social sci- last men and Marx’s haunting spectres. In Making in maintaining those dreams is not an unfamiliar ences. This area of study also developed out of the Trouble it is the questions of the social sciences and one. Foucault charts it clearly. What Sayer offers us long 19th century and the interstitial processes of methodology that take centre stage. is a reminder of the place of the surrealists in the European imperialism. The disciplines of anthro- A fuller treatment of that context can be found critical response to this movement. It is the scale of pology, sociology, psychology, and economics in Sayer’s Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: the social sciences played in another key. Its aim is clearly exhibit these origins. They were forged as A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press, to undermine, erode, and displace this dogmatism. sites of social investigation that were inseparable 2013). In this related and far more extensive book, Sayer’s Making Trouble offers us a series of remind- from the colonial and imperial projects of making Sayer offers us the history of a city that sits at “the ers and examples so we may see that “strangeness the modern nation-state. This project was predi- crossroads of Europe” and the edges of empire with of an obstinately familiar world.” It is, simply put, a cated on the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia and all of its fights for national identity. It is, as its title view of the social sciences as practices of freedom. its makeshift solution of establishing an anarchic suggests, not simply a history of a single city, but of This slim volume has much to recommend itself community of politically self-contained and legally a history of a city as the capital of the 20th century. to the curious lay reader. Its only shortcoming is its autonomous units. The challenge was to shore up This is not to suggest thatPrague offers us a his- length, but readers who make their way through the arbitrary force of the sovereign by grounding it tory in the tradition of the grand narrative. Quite Making Trouble and find themselves wanting more in the people (whether by the fictional formalism the opposite, this is a text built on the model of the could turn to its companion book, Prague, and of a social contract or a more ephemeral notion pluralistic perspective of montage and cubism. As plunge fully into the text.

BIOGRAPHIES & MEMOIRS

Tolstoy and Tolstaya Journey of a Thousand Miles Jacob-Isaac Segal Mike Starr of Oshawa A Portrait of a Life in Letters An Extraordinary Life A Montreal Yiddish Poet and his Milieu A Political Biography Andrew Donskov Dr. Ruey J. Yu, with Kate Jaimet Pierre Anctil Myron Momryk Tolstoy and Tolstaya’s legacy is still The beautifully written and compellingly Celebrated throughout the Yiddish Follow the son of Ukrainian immigrants regarded as one of the greatest inspiring rags-to-riches story of a world, Montreal writer Jacob-Isaac as he rises through the Canadian political contributions to Russian history and Taiwanese youngster, Ruey Yu, born Segal (1896-1954) paved the way for system and reaches the position of a world literature, while their day-to- into a ravaged and occupied country, the emergence of a major literary cabinet minister. What were the steps in who went on to co-found and build a movement in the North American this political “ladder” to Ottawa? How did day life has been recorded through multi-million-dollar American skin care Jewish diaspora. In tracing the the ethnocultural communities contribute their correspondence. This volume empire, NeoStrata. poet’s literary trajectory, this book to Starr’s political success? This study presents the last 239 letters plus 11 demonstrates that it reflects the examines Mike Starr’s career in an attempt hitherto unpublished letters between I opened my mouth and spoke two words. history of the Jewish immigrants to to answer some of these questions. the spouses, painting a remarkable [...] Two words that changed my destiny: North America at the beginning of the 20th century. portrait of their life and times. Chemical engineering. www.Press.uOttawa.ca Facebook.com/uOttawaPress Twitter.com/uOttawaPress

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November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 11 Northern Shadows CanLit in an era of Truth and Reconciliation and ‘peak’ diversity Stephen Marche

any years ago, I was mistaken for a literary Jew. My first book,Raymond Mand Hannah, had just been pub- lished—a novel-in-emails about a long-distance relationship between a graduate student in Toronto and a yeshiva student in Jerusalem—and I had been invited to participate in a Jewish literary fes- tival in Vancouver. Some moments in a writer’s life can be confusing; others are fraught and grueling. The part where somebody flies you to another city and puts you up in a hotel and buys you meals and talks to you about your work isn’t. You go. I went. I was on a panel about “the future of Jewish fiction in Canada.” It’s a testament to my youth- ful arrogance that I found it perfectly natural the organizers of a Jewish literary festival would want my perspective. I mean, who wouldn’t? Then again, the main character in my book was Jewish, I had just returned from a group tour of Israel with other writers (not of all of whom were Jewish) where I had met all the major writers there, and I was also a regular book reviewer for the Forward, the Jewish paper in New York. Their confusion was natural, and so was mine. The evening was typical. I met the organizer and my fellow panelists at a midlist restaurant, the best that could be justified on the expense account of a charity; over mediocre pasta and wine, we flattered one another and discussed distant mutual friends and close mutual books. Then we went to some Leonard Cohen matter a great deal to me.” That negligible as they are, are in the middle of a grand room in some university where a small crowd of probably would only have muddied the matter. and quintessentially Canadian upheaval. The rash literary devotees joined us to worship the abstruse Maybe I should have stood up and told the whole of recent scandals in CanLit—Joseph Boyden, the little cult of literary fiction in which we were minor story: “Sorry, everybody, I’m not Jewish. I never Hal Niedzviecki editorial and subsequent defences, priestly functionaries. I’m not sure I can pinpoint said I was Jewish. I am kind of Jew-ish, if you know the Walrus fiction editor kerfuffle—possess a sin- the exact moment when I realized that everyone what I mean, but I would never claim to be Jewish, gular defining feature that distinguishes them from was operating under the assumption that I was especially since Judaism contains a series of mech- the literary scandals of any other country: Specific Jewish. I think it was the first time somebody used anisms that would allow me to convert to Judaism works of literature are almost never discussed. No a Yiddishism I had never heard before. Anyway, it and call myself a Jew straight out, so in fact my one really cares whether the materials under dis- was clear by the end of the panel, when the organ- real identity might well be found in my refusal to cussion are any good. The questions that matter are izer, my host, swept a hand across our small group become Jewish even though I am Jew-ish.” who gets to write and under what terms. The scan- and declared, “Meet the young Jewish writers of I did the good Canadian thing, instead, and dals move forward through op-eds, not novels. The Canada.” smiled and kept my mouth shut. battles are about arts administration before they I wonder now what I should have done at this “For the past couple of years, something called are about art. Canadian literature will eventually point. Should I have stood up, in the middle of the ‘the appropriation debate’ has been raging in be nothing but memos on the subject of Canadian applause, raised my hand and clarified? “Sorry, Canada,” Margaret Atwood said, while giving the literature. everybody, I’m not Jewish.” That would have called Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University, 26 years The Canada Council for the Arts has recently out for an explanation, wouldn’t it? “Sorry every- ago. She traced the debate a lot farther back, to taken an explicit stance “opposing appropriation,” body, though I’m not Jewish, I am married to a Toronto’s Sunday Globe of May 22, 1892, in which E. which was outlined in statements by director and Jewish woman and I have Jewish children, and Pauline Johnson wrote a long essay on “The Indian CEO Simon Brault as well as Steven Loft, the direc- I’ve travelled in the Middle East and read a great girl in modern fiction”—a critique of the figura- tor of its Indigenous program. They spoke solely number of Jewish writers, and A.M. Klein and tion of the “Indian maiden” who dies for love of a about the appropriation of Indigenous culture white man. So the debates that have been raging and, as one might expect of an arts funding body, Stephen Marche is the author, most recently, of The lately in Canadian literature are not exactly new. they mostly offered bland bromides, in this case Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and They have taken on a new force and a new rage, about treaty obligations and traditional lands. They Women in the Twenty-First Century. however. The literary powers that be, hilariously were light on specifics, mentioning not one single

12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada example of work that might be rejected for the always shifting. The meaning of the phrase “cul- immoral ones with tasteless ones with syncretic art act of appropriation. The purpose of their state- tural appropriation” itself is highly variable. Some of any kind. And the term is so loose that its defin- ment, and the accompanying op-eds they wrote definitions are as vague as “the adoption or use of ition could easily shift again. in its defence, was to respond to the Truth and the elements of one culture by members of another The results of a debate fought in terrible formats Reconciliation Commission (TRC), but given the culture.” A commonly cited definition of cultural on poorly defined terms have been predictably difficulty of articulating a clear position on an idea appropriation comes from American legal scholar empty. A few white men have lost their jobs, or been as complicated as cultural appropriation, the effect Susan Scafidi’sWho Owns Culture?: Appropriation transferred to make it look like they lost their jobs, was mainly to demonstrate how firmly they stand and Authenticity in American Law: because people, or institutions, accept that out- on the right side of history: “We are all agents of come as a marker of progress; it tends to dampen either stasis or change. For every act of political, Taking intellectual property, traditional the Twitter rage anyway. The semantic fluidity of social or cultural agency that challenges the status knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts the phrase means that the conversations Canadians quo, there will always be opposing forces fuelled from someone else’s culture without permis- need to have are not happening: Both sides of the by colonial entrenchment/privilege, oppositional sion. This can include unauthorized use of debate are simply talking past one another. They paranoia or, simply, inertia.” Their stated aim, to another culture’s dance, dress, music, lan- are talking about different things even though they engage Canadian culture with the process of truth guage, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, are both using the phrase “cultural appropriation.” and reconciliation, is necessary and worthwhile to religious symbols, etc. It’s most likely to be The question matters much more than some ctrl- be sure. But the vagueness is terminal. They offer harmful when the source community is a ​ left versus alt-right flame war. Its political conse- no larger plan, leaving judgment to the individual minority group that has been oppressed or quences could not be larger for Canada: How are assessment committees, and to the artists, to whom exploited in other ways or when the object of we to approach reconciliation? What is the future of it falls to grapple with the real questions. What appropriation is particularly sensitive, e.g. multiculturalism? What does decolonization look would such a plan look like anyway? How would sacred objects. like? I will not concede that the cultural questions they even begin? Would they cross-reference the are less important. They will tell us whether we are ethnicity of the artists with the ethnic specificity of Scafidi’s definition is a starting place, but for many a meaningful country. the work of art in question to ensure they were not who use the word, Scafidi is not broad enough. The in conflict? How would they establish that a writer lawyer and broadcaster Supriya Dwivedi once told o one should so much as write a poem in is white or Indigenous? Would they require formal me that “you know it when you see it.” Nthis country, or draw, or act, or teach a documentation? Would they require testimonials The phrase cultural appropriation has a huge class in philosophy, without reading the Truth from the community? How would they define cul- variety of meanings; it has been used to describe and Reconciliation Commission report of 2015. tural elements as belonging to one ethnic group Beyoncé wearing a sari, and ivory hunters burn- It should be required reading for any class that over another? These are not rhetorical questions. ing sacred Kongolese icons. At times it can mean a purports to teach Canadian culture in any form. It They matter to the larger cultural appropriation disrespectful ventriloquism—white people wearing should be required reading for any program that debate, not just the specific question of Canada’s dreadlocks or putting on Indigenous headdresses at wants to teach Canadians how to practice art. It is a tortured relationship to Indigenous culture. a music festival after dropping E, taking on attrib- blueprint to our collective pathology. It is a big first Perhaps because the conversation on cultural utes of other cultures as a disingenuous escape from therapy session. appropriation is so light on specifics, it frequently their own. At other times, it serves as a metonymy To start with the most obvious point contained fails to resemble a conversation at all. A few months for the colonial project as a whole—simply any in the report: We are making culture in a country ago, Aaron Mills, a scholar and member of the Bear cultural exchange in which the ethnic groups in that we took by cultural genocide. By destroying Clan Anishinaabe from Couchiching First Nation, question exist or have existed with a power imbal- family structure and cultural practices and reli- volunteered: ance. Occasionally, the semantic variability of the gions, the government and churches, over multiple term leads to absurdities. The University of Ottawa generations, annihilated Indigenous Canadian To invite Jonathan Kay, Steve Ladurantaye, cancelled yoga classes because somebody felt they ways of life. Here is the father of our country, Sir Anne Marie Owens, Andrew Coyne, Elizabeth were “cultural appropriation” even though the John A. Macdonald: Renzetti—and anybody else who argues in worldwide spread of yoga was very much a long- favour of opening cultural appropriation to term soft-power project of the Indian government. When the school is on the reserve, the child debate—to sit with the elders at Turtle Lodge But the vagueness of the term can be diminish- lives with its parents, who are savages; he is at some point this summer at a date that will ing as well—it puts truly horrific acts in the same surrounded by savages, and though he may work with most of us.... And if you come to category as some kid wearing a poorly thought- learn to read and write, his habits and train- our house, we will treat you with respect. through Halloween costume. The U.K.-based ing mode of thought are Indian. He is simply fashion label KTZ used a Nunavut shaman’s sacred a savage who can read and write. It has been The headline that appeared in the Globe and garment whose design had come to him in the strongly impressed on myself, as head of the Mail describing this sensible and generous offer? middle of a dream of drowning, and used it without Department, that the Indian children should “Apologies over cultural appropriation debate attribution or payment. As I write this, a woman be withdrawn as much as possible from the ‘insufficient’: Indigenous scholar.” What could in England is selling the 1885 medicine bag of a parental influence, and the only way to do show more completely the reduction of the whole Métis chief from Batoche on eBay. The description that would be to put them in central training debate to points-scoring? Mills’ offer could only be literally reads that the artifact was “found on grave.” industrial schools where they will acquire the taken, even by the piece’s headline writer, as a kind The vagueness of “cultural appropriation” gives habits and modes of thought of white men. of rhetorical ploy. And Mills is so right: The frame- license to a lazy and horrifying glibness, too, horri- work for the debate on cultural appropriation— fying even if unintentional—imagine if you were to Putting aside, for a moment, the sheer cruelty of social media, op-ed polemics, TV segments—is experience the desecration of the vandalism of the the ideas conveyed, note the rather complicated inadequate. The shallowness of the format is pictographs of Matinenda Provincial Park and then notions of language and identity the passage con- inimical to the empathy, the complexity, needed hear the most powerful journalists in the country tains. It would not have been sufficient to produce to pursue the truth. The debate has been designed describe their desire to set up a prize to celebrate it. “a savage who can read and write,” that is, an to fail, literally: The purpose of the new media is The Scafidi definition implicitly creates a Indigenous person given the tools to move through to provoke impotent outrage, the least demanding spectrum. At one extreme there is cross-cultural modernity. It is a matter of using language to strip route to attention. Without a doubt, Turtle Lodge influence, like Picasso being inspired by African away Indigenousness itself. The foundation of our would have been infinitely superior to Twitter as sculptures, on the other extreme mockery and culture was the pulverization of distinction, even on a venue. degradation, like minstrel blackface. Both legitim- the level of language. The Canadian literary scene was intrinsically ately could qualify as “cultural appropriation” by You can read the TRC report for yourself. It is a vulnerable to media that promote empty piety Scafidi’s definition. The question becomes where very detailed work, which reads like an extensive, anyway. Writing in Canada is a goody two-shoes to draw the line between what you will accept and elaborate horror story, and I won’t pretend its profession, a virtuous activity that rewards sanc- what you won’t. That question is unanswerable—or significance can be unpacked in a single essay. It timony. Sanctimony creates a feeling of deep to be more accurate, every answer is as personal explains too much, too well. One essential insight security, both through intellectual certainty and as taste: “You know it when you see it.” But any is that it wasn’t criminals who devastated the First by creating an intellectual community, but it relies answer avoids the more substantial problem of the Nations. It was priests and teachers and the RCMP on an inherent instability. The ground of virtue is spectrum itself, which conflates criminal acts with and scientists. The virtuous are the scum here. The

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 13 point of Canadian colonial culture was the extrac- been taught them.” The overwhelming majority of du nord,” their own kind of nobility, by reproduc- tion and exportation of value, and the destruction Canadian writers and artists are simply too ignorant ing Indigenous ceremonies as they traveled up of originality. The drive of Canadian colonialism of Indigenous cultures to steal from them. America the rivers. This is a very profound, very substantial was, first, to pretend that Indigenous people did not was based on the exploitation of African-American Canadian dream—to become something different exist, and second that, if they existed, they should bodies and souls—that exploitation is reflected in from the people of the countries they abandoned, be made British. Therefore, the best of Canada stole their art. Canada was based on conscious exclusion to belong here for real. But the becoming of Grey children and starved whole tribes. of Indigenous bodies and voices—we don’t appro- Owl also reveals the heart of the pathology: The The grand evils dribbled down to minor priate; we ignore and destroy. mainstream of Canadian life is so totally incapable humiliations, as in other countries. I have always The rare examples you can find of Indigenous of recognizing Indigenous existence, requires so wondered why Canadians care so little for their his- people in Canadian literature serve mainly as completely their obliteration, that the only way to tory, why an event like the War of 1812—rich with mystical wilderness negotiators. In Marian Engel’s represent First Nations is by pretending to be them. fascinating characters and heroic incident—should Bear, a First Nations elder named Lucy Leroy “Many white Canadians claim, as a matter of pride, be more or less completely forgotten. The Truth and teaches the white woman how to fuck a bear. In some ‘Indian blood’,” Atwood wrote in her essay on Reconciliation Commission report explains with- the writings of white Canadians, First Nations are the “Grey Owl syndrome,” “perhaps to convince out explaining: When themselves that the land your country is based they live in is the one they on taking away First ‘ought’ to be living in.” Nations’ history from The cliché of Canadian art is that it is obsessed Canadians speak of them, and replacing with landscape. The Truth and Reconciliation reconciliation as if it were it with a history from a process that is well a country thousands report reveals the terrifying why: Canadian under way. It isn’t. There of miles away, why can be no reconciliation wouldn’t you throw landscapes are visions of country with no people. without the truth; we out your own hist- are not even remotely ory too? The cliché of close to the truth. The Canadian art is that it is obsessed with landscape. mostly half people, half the North, the gas station mainstream vision of history in this country—and The TRC report reveals the terrifying why: Canadian you stop at on your drive to the cosmic encounter remember that English Canadians are so ahistorical landscapes are visions of country with no people. at the cottage. It cannot simply be a coincidence in outlook that they barely remember their own that some of the worst writing by non-Indigenous military heroes—is so distorted that it can barely He suspects that something has happened, writers in this country has involved Indigenous imagine the Indigenous other at all. There is a quote a law characters. Arguably the worst line, almost cer- from Cohen’s Beautiful Losers: “The English did to been passed, a nightmare ordered. Set apart, tainly the worst sex scene in Canadian literature, us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans he finds himself, with special haircut belongs to the Métis lover Jules Tonnerre from did to the English what the English did to us. I and dress, Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners—“Ride my stal- demand revenge for everyone,” says F., the French- as on a reservation. lion, Morag.”1 Canadian gay character. This is the fundamental But mostly Indigenous people are simply not fraud of CanLit’s victimology, that we are all just So A.M. Klein described the existence of the there, removed, set aside. Atwood took the part of survivors here. The settlers imagine that they par- Canadian writer in “The Portrait of the Poet as Susanna Moodie, the prim settler. Alice Munro’s ticipate in the Indigenous experience by lasting a Landscape.” Why is our culture so derivative? Why vast study of Canadian life does not contain, so far winter. Susanna Moodie praised the Indigenous are we so unoriginal? The answer is in the country’s as I can remember or reckon, a single Indigenous people she encountered. “Often I have grieved that foundational annihilation. character. Michael Ondaatje, one of the broadest people with such generous impulses should be This cultural dilemma may seem small, negli- and most successful cultural borrowers of all time— degraded and corrupted by civilized men; that a gible—but it emerges from the deep matrices of our effortlessly moving between Sri Lanka, early 20th mysterious destiny involves and hangs over them, oldest power structures. The question we should century New Orleans, an uncomfortable Chinese pressing them back into the wilderness, and slowly be asking is different from the one debated: Why is restaurant in Camrose—never touched Indigenous and surely sweeping them from the earth.” She is there so little cultural appropriation of Indigenous material, and had to leave Canada, at least intel- wilfully, necessarily blind to her own role in the cultural forms in this country? Needless to say, I am lectually, to write his masterpieces Coming Through “mysterious destiny” of the First Nations. not promoting the idea of cultural appropriation, Slaughter and Billy the Kid. The great CanLit revolu- The Truth and Reconciliation Commission since the phrase can mean so much that I find so tion saw the importation of global literary forms, report is a work of art criticism as much as a docu- loathsome. But what distinguishes Canada as a col- not the encounter with an Indigenous reality. The ment of political activism. There is a gaping wound onial force is how little it found worthwhile in the cultures Canadian writers of the 1960s were imitat- at the heart of our culture that we cannot stand to cultures it conquered. Mughul architecture in India ing were American and British. They were trying to look at. By virtue or by crime, we must turn away. is full of lotus and prayer lamp motifs adopted from sound like Sylvia Plath and John Berger. Hindu iconography. The Romans borrowed hugely There is one species of cultural appropriation anadian multiculturalism, or its literature from the Greeks. The Americans brutally exploited unique to mainstream Canada’s relationship to Canyway, is simultaneously reaching a crisis Africans but all American culture that is distinctly Indigenous culture, however. Major Canadian art- also given the name of “cultural appropriation.” We American is a fusion of European and African- ists have a habit of becoming Indigenous—similar live in increasingly diverse cities—their diversity is American cultural modes. Why did Canadian set- transformations occur in other countries but with their principal attractive feature—and our literature tlers take so little from the multifarious and rich nowhere the near the same success or number. In has aggressively promoted diversity for 30 years or Indigenous cultures they encountered? the careers of Black Wolf, and Grey Owl, and Joseph more. But again the lack of cultural appropriation is Indigenous writing is in the middle of its own Boyden2, the dense mass of Canada’s denial of the distinguishing feature of the literature that has renaissance, with and without white people. But Indigenous reality folds in upon itself, like a great resulted. in non-Indigenous Canadian literature, examples star becoming a black hole. Archibald Belaney, Other than a few rare exceptions—Ondaatje of Indigenous characters and motifs are exceed- the English settler who claimed to be Ojibwa Grey being the most glaring—Canadian literature is ingly rare: I Heard the Owl Call My Name, bits from Owl, was the world’s greatest catfisher before a highly diverse collection of writers producing several of Mordecai Richler’s novels, some choice social media existed. But even by the 1930s, when novels and stories that would have been completely passages in Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, his career blossomed, he belonged to an ancient suitable, in style and characterization and plot, to Rudy Wiebe’s Big Bear, Robert Kroetsch’s Gone tradition. The coureurs de bois became “hommes the market of 1950s England. Literary diversity is a Indian, Robert Bringhurst’s translations from the species of intra-exoticism. Canadian multicultural- Haida. A very few works in a very large corpus. 1 Margaret Laurence’s literary reputation is at a low ebb at ism, let’s remember, was invented, not out of any the moment, and I would hate to contribute to that ebb. André Alexis in his Globe and Mail piece on cultural Despite that line, The Diviners is radically underrated. A sense of responsibility to the world or our love for appropriation acknowledged, honestly I thought, Bird in the House is even better. foreigners or because we’re good people, but as his own ignorance: “The culture of the people who 2 I know him somewhat. We’ve met only on a few occa- a counter to ethnic nationalism in Quebec and a sions, but I enjoy his conversation and his books. I also first named the land isn’t taught to me. I don’t know believe he has genuinely done meaningful service for chipper embrace of the globalization that was going their religions. I wish I did know them. I wish I had Canada. to be shoved down our throats anyway.

14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada According to the most recent national survey, can’t make a living as a Cape Breton writer any- of colour are expected to explain themselves to a Canada is 78 percent white, roughly the same as more, or not for long anyway. Start with The Birth larger audience. I was not comfortable participat- England and Wales; America is 61 percent white. House but go to The Witches of New York. Naturally ing in that mechanism,” awkwardly explaining And yet Canada insists on defining itself by its it is writers of colour3 who have noticed the multi- himself, as a writer of colour, to a larger audience, diversity. It is the only country in the world where cultural exhaustion first. In his new book Curry, through an uncomfortable mechanism. What are the more patriotic a person is, the more that person Naben Ruthnum describes a genre of novels about you going to do? Markets have a tendency to win. believes in multiculturalism. From thirty thousand delicious-but-smothering homelands written in the Sarmishta Subramanian, editor in chief of this feet in the air, what Canada is is the whitest country decadent-but-alienating west, a genre with which magazine, articulated the same crisis in an article in the Americas. We are a not-very-diverse country he has little familiarity even though it limits the published a few months ago in the teeth of the cul- that celebrates diversity as if it were our essence. possibilities of his career. tural appropriation flame wars: Campaigns for diversity always claim that they are making their institutions “look like Canada.” I asked a close relative if she had any recom- The kind of cultural diversity that emerges Canada, outside of the few neighbourhoods where mendations – as I put it in the email – “super- from this approach often seems stilted to me, the media producers happen to live, looks pretty typical ‘I miss the homeland’ novels you’ve weighed down by its own colourless virtue.” damn pasty. read by South Asian authors in the past few Canadian drama and sitcoms are a paragon of The literature of Canadian diversity is, in many years.” She replied “Oh God, I avoid those like diversity-checklist casting, often accompanied ways, a literature of blood and soil. Boyden, ironic- the plague. My white friends seem to enjoy by diversity-checklist musical score…A non- ally enough, has been clearest on this point: “I truly them.” white journalist once told me that at one point believe in something called ‘blood memory’,” he in her career she could not settle into the right declared at a panel in Toronto. Mostly Canadians Ruthnum calls such novels currybooks, a fine job producing or editing at the network, but write—with the extreme rarity of a book like Dionne phrase. The market for currybooks is simply a fact that people inexplicably kept trying to nudge Brand’s What We All Long For, with its overlapping of life: her into on-air work even though she wasn’t white and black and Asian characters—about their interested. Eventually she understood: her own ancestors. If you’re Portuguese-Canadian, What they’re interested in up here in Canada, name was a valuable commodity on air— you don’t write about Jamaican-Canadians, even it seems – at least, it can seem when you’re more than her ideas off the air, though the if you’ve married one and have little Jamaican- sending that email to a journal or an agent latter would shape content just as much, if not Portuguese-Canadian babies. You write about old or a publisher – has a lot to do with how you more. That is checklist diversity in action.” Portuguese-Canadians, preferably dead, for Anglo- write about where you ultimately come from, Canadian women, the people who buy books in and not about what you write about as a The white market wants diversity, therefore the this country. brown Westerner with a collection of different white market determines the limits and values of Politically, multiculturalism remains popular interests and experiences. diversity. Multiculturalism, and the writers who because it works and it makes us feel good about have to make a living inside it, are facing an impos- ourselves. How else could we tell Quebecers that Ruthnum, raised in Kelowna, has a deeper connec- sible choice. If you sell your ethnicity, that is what their desire for their own country is racist? And tion to Return of the Jedi than to Hindu rituals, and you are selling. But if you deny your history, how Canadian literature follows, as always, in the the work with which he identifies most directly is can you be yourself? Writers, from anywhere, don’t wake of the country’s least controversial politics. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, written, natur- want to be loved for the village their grandfather Sanctimony is the means and the end. Canadian ally, by two white people. Ruthnum finds himself came from. We want to be adored because we are literary institutions have scoured the country for in an impossible position—he is supposed to have just so unspeakably wonderful in ourselves. diversity while the market remains overwhelm- a home where he doesn’t, in two places. In the Cultural appropriation implies a white-centric ingly white—the intrusion of demographic reality. end, he innovates an Antonioni-like solution to his worldview. As I write, one of the most popular films In this light, the Boyden story reveals its economic identity stalemate, taking on the white-sounding in China is the Hindi film Dangal; nobody in China substance. You can say what you like about the pseudonym Nathan Ripley for thrillers, and his own is worrying about whether it is appropriate for them fluidity of identity or the to enjoy an Indian film, traditions of adoption or whether they are in First Nations culture, From thirty thousand feet in the air, what enjoying it authentic- but if I were a young ally. Their directors and Cree writer considering Canada is is the whitest country in the Americas. producers are worried writing historical fic- about why the Indian tion, I’d be pissed. The We are a not-very-diverse country that celebrates culture industry is so sale of diversity has much stronger than diminishing returns. diversity as if it were our essence. their own. A cultural If somebody takes a appropriation debate is slot, that slot is taken. meaningless even in a And that’s not just for Indigenous voices: If you’re name for more literary work. After Curry by Naben post-imperial pastiche-heavy culture like Japan’s. a young Mennonite writer, do not pass go, do not Ruthnum, Nathan Ripley published Find You in the The whitewashing of the decision to cast Scarlett collect two hundred dollars, move straight to L.A. Dark. Johansson in Ghost in the Shell did not prevent the Miriam Toews has already written the novels, for a A whole generation of post-diversity writ- movie from becoming wildly popular and critic- generation or two at least. Canadians have probably ers is facing a similar impasse to Ruthnum’s. Jen ally successful there, while here and in America it had their fill of that flavour for a while. Sookfong Lee wrote in the Humber Literary Review was decried for its erasure of Japanese ethnicity. Joseph Boyden is both an excellent writer and an about an editor who expressed disappointment Appropriation as an idea assumes that western cul- excellent man, a highly skilled storyteller who has that her newest manuscript did not “build on [her] ture is the only culture with any power, which is its fought intensely for Indigenous rights, but he has existing audience.” Asked why, the editor admit- own kind of colonial assumption, and also increas- not been selling his excellence. He has been selling ted it was because it was not about the Chinese- ingly inaccurate. his identity, or an identity. To be more accurate, Canadian experience. Sookfong Lee says she was The ideal of multiculturalism was spelled out the identity called Joseph Boyden is what Canada so discouraged she put the novel away; it remains in Section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights has been buying. There is not a shred of doubt in unpublished. In Pasha Malla’s Fugue States, a thirty- and Freedoms: “This Charter shall be interpreted my mind that my first novel would never have been something writer named Ash Dhar finds himself in a manner consistent with the preservation of published if it didn’t have Jewish characters. The trying not to write exactly the kind of novel that and enhancement of the multicultural heritage problem with having a national literature that is a Fugue States is—a journey of self-discovery by way of Canadians.” In America, Jewish grandchildren moral beauty pageant is that if you want to find out of a return to a homeland. Following the publica- call their grandparents granddad and grandma. if you’re any good you have to leave the country. tion of the book, Malla told an interviewer: “Writers In Canada, more often than not they are bubbe Multicultural literature is reaching an impasse, 3 I have struggled with this phrase, because needless to say and zadie. Multiculturalism, as a policy, has been an impasse of exhaustion. This already happened it reduces the writers in question to their racial identity, deliberately empty of meaning, which is proper. which is the exact opposite of what I want to do. On the with Canadian regionalism, which dominated the other hand, I do not have another word. This is the heart Laws should not tell us how to feel. Nonetheless market and the administrations for a while: You of the crisis. “Racialized,” maybe? Section 27 does offer a vision: Americans want a

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 15 16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 17 more perfect union. We dream of a country where tion. And it will mean negotiating with the count- sick. But why should we try to be Dickens or Joyce? every difference is respected. This sounds lovely. less immigrant groups who bring their own cultures We have all been raised to be good little literature- It even sounds sensible. But the Canadian system with them. Meanwhile our entire legal and political lovers, without asking what it is we love. Maybe can be, in its own way, as coercive as the American. order is built on the edifice of the Crown. It is prob- there shouldn’t be novels anymore. Maybe there They say, you should become American. We say, ably worth remembering in the recriminations and should be something else, something new. Maybe you should stay what you were. One forces you out. the loathing and the self-righteousness and the it will appear here. The other keeps you in. outrage battles that are to come, that there is at least I should probably confess that, by some defin- one source for hope. We have no other way forward. itions anyway, I have long been a cultural appro- anada in 2017 is riding high. We are the most The French-Canadians have wanted a new arrange- priator. My first book was Jewish enough to confuse Cpopular country in the world, the most edu- ment for generations. The Indigenous communities Jews, remember. My second book, Shining at the cated, the most open. Our economy is the strongest are ready. And I believe, broadly speaking, English- Bottom of the Sea, was an homage to the Onitsha in the developed world. And it is exactly now, at the Canadians are getting there too. Consider the market literature of Nigeria, among other things. moment of triumph, that the shadows are lengthen- following statement about the residential schools Love and the Mess We’re In made orgasms out of ing and darkening. made in the House of Commons: Islamic calligraphy. I live in a globalized world, in After 36 years of multiculturalism as official multicultural cities, and I travel, and I read, and policy, Canadians are starting to realize that we The burden of this experience has been on it was inevitable that I would encounter and love have very little idea what multiculturalism means. [Indigenous people’s] shoulders for far too African and South American and Arabic writ- We have stumbled into a completely radical vision long. The burden is properly ours as a gov- ers, and use their work to become myself, as they of social organiza- had used others’ work tion. There has never to become themselves. I been, in the history took what I found around of the world, a multi- The Canadian literary scene was intrinsically me, which I loved, and cultural society that I made of it some small was not an empire. vulnerable to media that promote empty piety. thing of my own. This is obviously true Writing in Canada is a goody two-shoes profession, But openness to influ- for the great cosmo- ence is only part of the politan centres of the a virtuous activity that rewards sanctimony. story. True cosmopol- 19th and 20th centur- itanism involves restraint, ies—London, Paris, too. I think of a book I New York. But it was didn’t write. When I was also true for the great caliphates which produced ernment, and as a country. There is no place a kid, I became very obsessed with the Wisakedjak such intense cultural mixing under the banner of in Canada for the attitudes that inspired the stories of the Ojibwa. They are a kind of story cycle Islam. The Roman Empire brought half the world Indian residential schools system to ever pre- of a trickster as are found all over North America, together, but under subservience to Rome. The vail again. You have been working on recover- but there was some part of me that loved the point of empire is to define the peripheries by the ing from this experience for a long time and Wisakedjak stories more; they are more urbane; permission of the centre. Canada’s multicultural- in a very real sense, we are now joining you they involve a kind of grotesque physical comedy in ism is accidentally radical, at least in conception: It on this journey. The government of Canada a cosmic space that I admired—bloody ass-wiping imagines nothing but periphery, difference without sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness on trees that results in certain species having red centre. of the Aboriginal peoples of this country for bark forever. But the best document I was able to Earlier this year, Justice Minister Jody Wilson- failing them so profoundly. find recording the Wisakedjak stories was literally Raybould made the following declaration to the from a geologist who recorded them in 1915 as Assembly of First Nations: It was Stephen Harper who uttered these words, an anthropological document for the Department who took the first national step on the route to rec- of Mines. Memoir 71: Myths and Folk-lore of the As much as I would tomorrow like to cast into onciliation. There is no need, at least at this point, Timiskaming Algonquin and Timagami Ojibwa. the fire of history the Indian Act so that the to make the task of reconciliation a Liberal-against- The book comes with a fold-out geological survey. Nations can be reborn in its ashes—this is not Conservative issue. We should aspire, on all sides, That says it all. a practical option—which is why simplistic to prevent it from becoming a political football. It Maybe it’s impossible to explain this to op-ed approaches, such as adopting the UNDRIP is too important. And, besides, Liberals are now writers and the Twittersphere, but novelists must as being Canadian law are unworkable and, failing where Conservatives have failed before, and understand. I was not somehow oppressed into not respectfully, a political distraction to under- I do not imagine the NDP would fare any better. writing that story. If I had written a story inspired taking the hard work required to actually “The burden is properly ours”—“ours” meaning all by Wisakedjak, I would not have been punished by implement it. non-Indigenous Canadians. The failure is ours, all some imaginary army of politically correct enfor- of ours. cers. It wasn’t a question of taste, either. It was this: To summarize: adopting the nation-to-nation rela- If I had written that story, what would I have been tionship is a distraction from its implementation. eanwhile, dreaming, failing, we go on liv- writing? What? The justice minister has been raised exactly Ming and writing. Cultural appropriation as There was another way. I could have learned to this moment, child of a chief, a former chief her- an idea, as a tool for unpacking the interchange of Ojibwa and found somebody who knew the oral self, as educated as it is possible to be, as dedicated meanings in Canada, is immensely too crude for tradition to tell it to me. When I did my PhD in as it is possible to be, given as much power over the the reality we face. But the debate around cultural English literature, the English department at the law as anyone in the country. Even she cannot get appropriation has been revelatory. The debate is University of Toronto made me learn Old English rid of even the Indian Act, and the Indian Act is not too vital for us to devote our energies to creating basically so that I could read ten poems and a a document that an enlightened and decent coun- strawmen and burning them. A retreat into the past, couple of histories. I could have learned Ojibwa and try can possess as law. That is how far we have to into antique colonial modes, would be a disaster. written something bizarre and unprecedented, but go. The phrase “nation to nation” contains our best As for the future of who we are, the truth is that instead I wrote a bunch of mostly banal short stor- hope, but its meaning remains equivocal. we don’t know yet. We don’t know the we who is ies for little literary journals. So let us take a deep breath and recognize that, going to emerge. It is true that there is no novel The task of imagination is at hand. The time of if we are to plunge forward into multiculture and without inhabiting other people’s bodies and risk is at hand. We don’t know what a multicul- into truth and reconciliation, we are attempting souls—other, different people from other, differ- tural culture looks like, and we don’t know what a truly radical political and cultural creation. It ent places and other, different times. The genius a nation-to-nation relationship looks like. All we won’t be easy. It is not simple. There is no preced- of Dickens was that he could make you believe he know for certain so far is that, without both, we ent. Decolonization will mean nation-to-nation was in the heart of every kid in a whole city. The have no future. We will be living other people’s relationships with 618 First Nations; it will mean genius of Joyce was that he could inhabit the voice history. negotiating a nation-to-nation relationship with of the whole world, and his embrace revealed the and within a French-speaking nation that is trying subterranean connections underlying common ecently, I was having a Facebook conversation to preserve its own heritage in the face of globaliza- humanity. He could inhabit a dog eating its own Rwith one of my cousins. We were discuss- 18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ing the situation around the hydroelectric dam not recognize them in the Canadian art I see or Lutheran ministers, or Muslim nuclear technicians, in Muskrat Falls (her mother, my aunt, is from the Canadian books I read. I remember a friend of or Korean bakers. If I cannot write about them, if Labrador) and she wrote me this: “Muskrat is my mine, who was then married to a Muslim-Canadian I cannot judge them and betray their confidences, motherland.” I have been unable to stop think- woman, now divorced, came into my house and I have nothing to write about. If they are not my ing about this phrase. My cousin is Inuk and I am automatically, without thinking or asking, moved culture, I have no culture. If they are not my people, ashamed to belong to a country destroying her my copy of the Koran to the top shelf. I was recently I have no people. motherland. But I envied her for her motherland, playing in a poker game, and a Ukrainian-Canadian too. I do not have a motherland. I have only my guy who’d grown up in B.C. was talking to a Sikh- he underlying premise of Canadian literature mother. I have my mother and my wife and kids and Canadian guy about his memories of Sikh temples Thas always been that writing is a virtuous a small library. when he was a kid. His father was a car salesman in activity and that diversity and multiculturalism are I wander Toronto, city of the motherland-less. town and the town had suddenly become Sikh. My virtues. What if they’re not? What if they’re dirty? If Toronto were to disappear tomorrow, it would friend had vivid childhood memories of receiving Anishinaabe scholar Basil Johnston once called have left behind no cultural product that there is prasad, the religious offering that at Sikh temples Joseph Boyden a “shining bridge.” Boyden himself not a better example of elsewhere. Nobody really is a sweet pudding of ghee, flour and honey, which preferred the name “He who must enlighten.” We loves Toronto. Even the people who do love it love he found utterly disgusting. He associated the taste need that bridge more than ever right now, but I it the way you love the lasagna you grew up eat- of prasad with being dragged around a strangers’ doubt, at this point, that Canada can even conceive ing. “Certain places seem to exist mainly because world while his dad flattered and hustled. The Sikh- of an artist as valuable who is not a knight in the someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro Canadian guy was laughing his head off at the story, moral meritocracy. Here’s what is obvious about belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, although I’m not even sure I can call him Sikh- Joseph Boyden, the moment you step out of the belongs to William Faulkner,” Joan Didion wrote Canadian anymore. His wife—their marriage had Canada Reads writing-makes-the-world-a-better- in her famous essay on Hawaii. “A place belongs been arranged—decided that the Catholic school place mentality: He’s just another fucked-up bril- forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it system in their neighborhood was superior to the liant writer. He’s at least in part been fucked up by most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, public system, so they had converted. His children our pathological relationship to Indigenous culture. renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in are now… what? Should I call them Sikh Catholics? Frankly we’re all fucked up by it. The question is his image.” No one has ever loved Toronto that way. Does that make sense? There’s only one name for whether we know we’re fucked up. We need a close Maybe Toronto cannot be loved that way, because those children. They are Canadians. examination of our fuck-up-edness, immediately. it is a place of only temporary belonging, because Everyone who lives in Toronto knows that this Boyden could serve as a shadowy bridge, but he people come to Toronto not for meaning but for is by no means an extraordinary story. Cultural won’t. White audiences were reading him all those freedom from meaning. Maybe Toronto will never flux is the norm here; it exists not just in violence years to make them feel like good people, not to produce a single great masterpiece, just 50 decent and degradation. It infuses everyday life. Without make them question themselves. The betrayal of pieces. Georgia O’Keeffe said about the Pedernal the ability to move freely between cultures, even sanctimony is the one unforgiveable crime. mountain in New Mexico: “It’s my private moun- the most basic kind of description would be nearly Our ever-more-purifying virtues are leading us tain. It belongs to me. God told me that if I painted it impossible to execute in the multicultural cities of away from the realities we need to confront. Maybe enough, I could have it.” Toronto is nobody’s private Canada. Alice Munro watched the women she grew we should stop trying to shine like good little boys city, yet. Toronto wants to be admired for what it up around, then she judged them and betrayed and girls. Maybe we should go into the shadows pretends to be, not loved for what it is. their confidences; they were all white. The women and be ourselves. Multiculturalism produces odd stories; I do I grew up around were the daughters of Chinese

“Challenges prevailing narratives of Canadian multiculturalism and inclusion.” — Angela Y. Davis

“A comprehensive and necessary book for anyone who cares about the past, present and future of Black life in this country.” — Black Lives Matter Toronto

“Brilliantly elucidates the grotesque anti-Black racist practices coming from the state.” — Afua Cooper

“Eye-opening and chilling.” — Andrea J. Ritchie

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November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 19 What Joni Allows The beautifully opaque life, and work, of Joni Mitchell Alexandra Molotkow

consensus, or counter-consensus, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of but contingent also on how much Joni Mitchell fodder they provide their critics, David Yaffe how easily they can be made into HarperCollins Canada an example. What makes them 448 pages, hardcover interesting to posterity is less their ISBN 9781443444811 inherent genius than their utility: “The test of time is less like a sep- aration of wheat from chaff than aiting to meet Joni like clearing out the apartment of Mitchell for the first a dead relative,” writes H.J. Jackson Wtime, biographer in Those Who Write for Immortality: David Yaffe was so nervous that he Romantic Reputations and the crushed his wine glass. The restau- Dream of Lasting Fame, a study of rant staff told him not to worry; she the factors that contribute to a writ- was actually very nice. After closing er’s afterlife, “when you can’t keep time they returned to Mitchell’s everything so you save the footstool home, where the artist hopped but get rid of the clock, discard the from topic to topic—art to film to nest of tables but reupholster the environmental disaster—occasion- chaise longue because you can use ally throwing barbs at her con- i t .” Given Mitchell’s stature, it’s sur- temporaries—“it was all delivered prising that Yaffe’s book, as other with a joie de vivre,” Yaffe writes. critics have noted, is the most sub- “She loved to be provocative.” Their stantial yet on her life and legacy. conversation continued over the Other attempts have fallen short, phone the following week, but when Mitchell resists being flattened to an avatar as Carl Wilson wrote in Bookforum, the interview was published in the (Image courtesy Amy Gahran/Flickr) “either too hagiographic or subsum- New York Times, she called Yaffe ing her under second-wave fem- in a fury. “She was a maestro, hurl- even great ones, are persona-dependent. Leonard inism or California lifestyle-ism.” ing one indignity at me after another,” he writes. Cohen’s body of work is animated by Leonard Neither is totally appropriate, and Mitchell actively Her objections, it seems, were less a response to Cohen, such that Sylvie Simmons’s 2012 biography, resists being flattened to an avatar. his account than a reflex against being pinned to I’m Your Man, is a delight to read, whether or not As Josephine Livingstone noted in the New anyone’s impressions. She took special umbrage at you’ve ever listened to one of his albums. Bob Republic, most of Mitchell’s career aligns poorly Yaffe’s description of her home as “middle class,” Dylan’s work is inseparable from his aura, and even with the California ideal she embodied at the start; which she thought pejorative, and reductive. From Laura Nyro—a rare contemporary of Mitchell’s though the trope of the seventies singer-songwriter the start, Mitchell has always been exacting about whose work is just as brilliant—made room in her was built to her model, Mitchell’s “confessionals” the spaces she makes for herself. music for a listener to nest in. Nyro communicated are too abstracted to feel at all diaristic—know- Reckless Daughter is a biography without a by enigmatic reasoning, through both small and ing the subjects of her songs is often distracting. thesis, and Joni Mitchell doesn’t need one; she sweeping gesture; the details of her character, Like most artists who have been hailed as political is one of the few artists so present in her work lovingly assembled by Michele Kort in 2002’s biog- symbols, she also has limited utility as a political that one wonders less about who she is. Not raphy Soul Picnic, don’t so much complement the symbol. Her strength and resilience and refusal to that the circumstances of her life don’t inform her work as issue from the same place. be sucked dry by patriarchal vampires make her music—they do: her childhood in Saskatchewan, Mitchell’s work is much more opaque. It rarely admirable through a feminist lens, but her own the months of isolation after she contracted polio permits ecstasy, instead demanding constant atten- convictions are hard to map onto an ideology; her as a child, her pregnancy as a young art student and tion—it is harder to make yourself comfortable in, strongest stances seem to be mostly about herself. her decision to give her daughter up for adoption. harder to appropriate. The same could be said for This myopic sense of her own marginalization But her work is so dense with her sensibility, and her: she is often described as aloof, ornery, compel- might have contributed to her disturbing decision so virtuosic, that it doesn’t require a biographical ling but hard to please. Yaffe’s cautiously respectful to appear in blackface, initially at a costume party code to crack, nor is her persona one that warmly approach, his reluctance to scribble his own take and then on the cover of her 1977 album Don Juan’s invites interest. over the materials of her legacy, is reverent. The Reckless Daughter, as a character she alternately This may seem a complicated way of saying that book feels as if it is written for Joni, whose approval called “Art Nouveau” and “Claude the pimp,” and her work speaks for itself, but consider the paucity is rarely and only conditionally offered. It’s meant claimed to have based on a man she’d seen on the of artists to whom this applies. Many more artists, to be definitive, drawn from extensive interviews street. As Carl Wilson notes, Mitchell had a signifi- and unprecedented access, but it is not a great read; cant black fan base and worked with black artists Alexandra Molotkow is a writer and an editor at it’s more like a monument. more than most white musicians in her genre, but Real Life magazine. An artist’s legacy is subject not only to critical “was often crassly self-congratulatory about it,” and

20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada callous in her identifications. Yaffe writes that much of the history of blackface “was unknown to her”— she had thought of this grotesquely misguided ges- ture as a form of tribute. Coming up in the LRC More benignly, Mitchell is a classic curmudg- eon, matter-of-factly trashing fellow artists and mythologizing her own persecution such that a producer’s misstep might become, in her telling, a Israel and the politics of fear deliberate attempt to sabotage her art. She is ungra- cious almost as a matter of principle: “I once asked Patrick Martin David Crosby, ‘Why is Joni so mad at me?’ ” Judy Collins told Yaffe. “He said, ‘Joni hates everybody.’ ” Collins’ version of “Both Sides, Now” gave Mitchell her first big break; Crosby, who produced her first How to raise a dinosaur album (admittedly not well), saw her playing in a Kate Lunau club in Miami and brought her into the West Coast limelight. Mitchell’s wariness was forged in real experience—she has survived countless attempts on her agency, autonomy, and character by the Michael Ignatieff settles down men in her personal and professional lives, from Ira Wells her marriage to Chuck Mitchell, “a guy who was using her and keeping her down,” in Crosby’s words (“my first major exploiter, a complete asshole,” Mitchell told Yaffe), toRolling Stone dismissing her Sex and secularism as “Old Lady of the Year” and the “Queen of El Lay” Susan Whitney just before the release of Blue—her vigilance has been essential to her success. Her prickliness feels at times like an evolutionary adaptation to protect her genius, and she has that antiheroic cast so often Of horses and men beloved, yes, in male artists, of someone whose Kamal Al-Solaylee outsize spikes reflect the formidability of the threats they’ve deflected. “She’s a really strong woman who doesn’t give a fuck about what anybody thinks,” Yaffe quotes Joan Baezas saying; she doesn’t strictly Hipsters with MBAs mean it as a compliment. “We all wish we could be Colin Horgan that way, but we can’t.” If the story of Mitchell’s strength in the face of sexist hardship serves her legacy at all, good; but feminist readings of great artists are exasperating Z c

for the fact that gender is not the reason they mat- Great reading. ter. The feminist take is often self-defeating: either 3 gifts for V it reduces artists to an abstraction of their identity, Great ideas. just $100! or it vaults them to martyr status, leaving them vul- nerable to teardowns once their flaws are remem- Great gift idea! c bered. Gender overshadows the work, so that the artist is evaluated according to their fitness to a pol- GIFT #1: Z itical imposition, or else it skews the way that work Gifts are from: is interpreted. Mitchell is not her gender, nor is her Name Name gender an accent or qualification to her talent, but c it affected every part of her life and career, which OrgaNizatiON OrgaNizatiON became her material, which stands on its own. address address Reckless Daughter is at times plodding, both over- and underwritten; many times I wanted City PrOv COde City PrOv COde to stop reading and just listen to The Hissing of Summer Lawns. But perhaps its flaws are what GIFT #2: ORdER By 12 dECEmBER! best serve its subject: the book builds a portrait of c a complicated person whose character is not easily c Name q Please start or q renew my own: $ 56.00+tax * assimilated into narratives literary or political. I am q Plus ____ 1-year gifts for $40 each: $_____+tax * OrgaNizatiON not one of those disingenuous purists who believes * Please add GST/HST on $56 and $40 prices: that an artist’s life or character is irrelevant gos- address ON: $7.28, $5.20; NL, NS, NB, PE: $8.40, $6.00; Rest of sip—nor do I believe that an artist is reducible to Canada: $2.80, $2.00. $______the best or worst of their moral decisions or charac- Outside Canada: Add $30 each for postage: $______City PrOv COde teristics. The facts are always more or less relevant, Z OR: 3 gifts for $100 and save the tax! $100.00 and it doesn’t diminish the work to pair it with an GIFT #3: + _____ additional gifts (just $33 each!) $______understanding of person. But, as Yaffe conveys, one (Enclose an additional sheet if necessary. Additional gifts are also tax-free.)

of Mitchell’s most cherished values has always been Name self-sufficiency. This has led to stubbornness, in the Total Gift Order: $______OrgaNizatiON studio and out. Producer Henry Lewy, who worked q Cheque enclosed q Please bill me later with Mitchell on her greatest albums, was always address Please charge my: q Visa q MasterCard credited as some variety of “engineer” in the liner Card No. ______notes. But it also created a body of work that relies City PrOv COde on no advocate, no backstory, no external way in. “A Expiry: ____/____ Signature: ______producer is an interior decorator,” Mitchell said. “I LRC Gift Subscriptions, PO Box 8, Stn K The Literary Review of Canada is published 10

decorated my own house. I don’t need a decorator.” Toronto ON M4P 2G1 Tel 416-932-5081 times a year. GST/HST#848431490RT0001 GH1711

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 21 LRC Xmas 2017 house ad 171115a.indd 1 2017-11-15 05:47:16 PM The March of the Cheezie Our snacks as a history of ourselves Christine Sismondo

ies with a view to establishing a Snacks: A Canadian Food monopsony—a single-buyer market History in which they set the price, wresting Janis Thiessen all economic agency away from the University of Manitoba Press farmers. Even the American-owned 352 pages, softcover Old Dutch, Thiessen argues, posed ISBN 9780887557996 a wrinkle to conventional think- ing about agri-business, since it behaved like a “local business” by ur snacks are under using Canadian raw ingredients and attack. Sugar is a modern- labour and, instead of establishing Oday super villain, pro- an abusive monopsony and relying cessed foods are the new tobacco, on American potatoes, the guid- and it looks as if the potato chip’s ing principle by which it operated heyday is coming to an end. Many was cooperation—with both labour will see this as a small snippet of unions and farmers. In Winnipeg, good news in the current daily it was even described by workers as deluge of bad, a sign that the fight having provided a “sense of com- against corporate control of our munity.” food systems is finally paying off. Although Thiessen doesn’t Snack food has, after all, become a actually make this argument in her potent symbol of the industrial food book, it is hard to read through chain, as well as a key battlefield, this history and not think about since snacks have been blamed for a Canadian snack foods in connec- range of modern problems, includ- tion to national identity. We love ing obesity and Type 2 diabetes. employed in the snack food industry—at least in every little detail of difference between us and There is also a more generalized anxiety that, Canada. our neighbours to our south and the fact that our somehow, processed food has disrupted the nat- The 1950s potato chip boom is a great example. snack foods, like our Bloody Caesars and hockey, ural order that involves families bonding over the Demand for salty snacks was on the rise, thanks to are distinct. We have our Vachon Jos Louis cakes, pleasures of preparing and eating natural and the post-war demographic boom of coonskin-cap- our Coffee Crisp, our Canada Dry and Pop Shoppe homemade dinners together. That’s a pretty rosy wearing children, who needed entertainment and a and dill pickle chips (Thiessen’s favourite flavour)— picture, but as University of Winnipeg historian quick energy fix. That demand gave rise to a swath not to mention the cultish devotion to Hawkins’s Janis Thiessen argues in her new book,Snacks: A of independent chip manufacturers—a sector hard Cheezies (as opposed to the puffy kind), an Canadian Food History, it is neither an accurate made possible by new machines that promised to innovation that was made here. We can also claim depiction of most people’s pasts, nor a practical help entrepreneurs make “greaseless” potato chips heart-shaped Valentine’s Day chocolate boxes as ideal for the many who cannot afford the time or in relatively small spaces so they could “turn pota- our own contribution to the culture, via Ganong. money to make this a reality in the present day. toes into CASH!” This was not entirely dissimilar to And fruit-flavoured potato chips? Ours too, thanks Further, a close look at the history of snack produc- the pre-war automated doughnut machines that to Hostess, which launched those in the 1970s. tion in Canada reveals that it fails to neatly fit into led to a host of doughnut shops, which historian (Orange, cherry, and grape, in case you’re won- the oft-accepted narrative of Big Food versus the Steve Penfold wrote about in his 2008 book, The dering.) Granted, that invention didn’t have legs. people. So, maybe we should think twice before Donut: A Canadian History. The potato chip boom Now that we live in the age of adventurous eating, gleefully celebrating the demise of the Cheezie. probably looked a lot more like the modern-day though, it may be an idea that should be revived, a The snack attack, Thiessen argues in her book, craft beer movement than anything out of the Big thought that seems to have occurred to Hostess’s is often launched with arguments that oversimplify Food narrative, although, of course, this diversity new owner, Frito-Lay. It recently held a contest for and are ahistorical. Her history complicates the eventually fell victim to consolidation as large com- Canadians to nominate their wildest flavour ideas, narrative by closely examining the history of panies entered the market. resulting in such unusual potato chip flavours several Canadian snack greats—Hostess, Old Even then, there were interesting instances of as Perogy Platter, Grilled Cheese & Ketchup, and Dutch, Robertson’s Candy, Ganong chocolate and resistance to foreign corporate ownership, notably Maple Moose, a savoury-sweet combo that rivals Hawkins Cheezies, to name a few—to demon- the case of Federated Fine Foods, a chip company grape for weirdness. strate how the Big Food story minimizes the role that was owned by Manitoba potato growers. The Other companies made bold moves in market- played by independents, farmers and the workers company seems to have been a creative attempt to ing, notably Old Dutch, which sponsored Kids Bids, control the means of production, instead of sell- a Canadian television game show that featured Christine Sismondo is the author of America Walks ing crops to food processors and packagers who, local children bidding on new toys using discarded Into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and traditionally, make the bulk of the profits in the Old Dutch wrappers and box tops. To a modern Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops (Oxford snack food chain. Those agri-processors also have reader, that premise is probably about as appetizing University Press). a tendency to consolidate other, smaller compan- as grape-flavoured potato chips, mainly because

22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada snack food-sponsored programming that targets scarce and she suffered from malnutrition. Some by an apple pie sundae (yes, that’s a real thing— children has been under fire for years. Wanting to people don’t have the luxury of refusing food served recently at Aloette in Toronto) is called an know how the children actually felt about their par- based on how it was processed or what it looks like. epic meal; a Big Mac combo followed by an Apple ticipation, though, Thiessen tracked down former Buying organic and local food and then preparing it Pie McFlurry is decried as the end of civilization. Kids Bids contestants and interviewed them. Many at home requires both time and money, which is in Although McDonald’s lists its calories and most had positive recollections, since…well, they walked short supply for many families. fashionable bistros do not, it is the former that away with toys—sometimes bikes—that their par- The agri-business typified by the snack industry is blamed for obesity. What we are really talking ents wouldn’t have been able to afford. Much in the may be controversial, but it has also put a lot of about, then, is not calorie counts but class position way couponing is a way for people who don’t earn affordable food on the table over the years. Thiessen and “taste,” and the relationship between the two. high wages (or any wages) to buy items normally cites food historian Rachel Laudan who argues that Thiessen sums all this up with a personal anecdote out of their price range, collecting and organizing the “culinary Luddism” movement romanticizes about her father, who caught gophers for cash and Old Dutch wrappers gave lower-income families an the food ways of the past, since, in all but a few eras, used the money to buy soda pop and snacks instead opportunity to work together towards an otherwise the vast majority of humans had “mean, short lives” of giving it to his family, who could have used it. She unaffordable luxury, Thiessen’s findings indicate. and were constantly “afflicted with diseases, many asked him why: Despite this, Kids Bids would be a non-starter of which can be directly attributed to what they did today. The snack-food industry is always operat- or did not eat.” Those who could afford food spent I don’t remember the exact words of my ing from a position of defence these days, a pretty a lot of time doing all the processing of that food at father’s response, but I do remember being major shift from, say, a few decades back, when home, a task that fell largely to women. For many told that everyone needs some pleasure and they were generally considered a relatively whole- of us, this is not exactly a past we’d like to relive. enjoyment in their lives, and that no one some childhood treat, in moderation. Parenting and work are already challenges, without deserves our moral judgment. But has the villainy of snacks been overstated? adding the pressure of making homemade bread to Well, that depends on whom you ask. Potato chip the duty of bringing home the bacon. Those who Indeed. Indulging in a snack, for many people, companies argue that their products contain more don’t have the time or money to go for homemade represents a rare moment of pleasure, to be enjoyed nutrients and fibre than most breads, making them foods often feel judged, made to feel as if they are on breaks, nights off, and at gatherings with friends a reasonable snack for teens. They also point out failing their children. and family. Thiessen points out that snacks are a that potatoes, even when fried and salted, are both None of this is to say that Thiessen sanctions staple at celebrations and holidays, where they are “real” and “food.” Even the common-sense test the industrial-food complex, which makes snacks shared between people who are making connec- proposed by the food guru Michael Pollan, author easier and more affordable than fresh foods. Her tions. Continuing to enjoy them represents a quiet of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Cooked—to eat question: What is the use of telling people who can- insistence on indulging in pleasure, even faced with better by adopting a pre-modern diet and refusing not afford to choose the approved foods that they culinary narratives that stress hard work, family anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize should buy local or organic foods? By framing it values and self-denial—the Protestant work ethic as food—has its problems. As many (including as a choice, when it isn’t for many, it places all the applied to food. In fact, choosing pleasure in an era Thiessen) have pointed out, there are now gran- responsibility on the people, not the system, which in which culinary discourses are really discourses nies born in the 1970s, who might have grown up makes healthy choices difficult, if not impossible. of virtue is practically an act of rebellion. Snackers on grape chips and Pop Rocks. Or, perhaps your Finally, who has the right to judge? A meal of of the world, unite! grandmother grew up in an area where food was foie gras, duck-fat fries with fleur de sel, followed

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November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 23 Love and Lucre Our odd, abiding affair with bookstores Grant Munroe

Bookshops: A Reader’s History Jorge Carrión Translated by Peter Bush Biblioasis 304 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781771961745

Browse: The World in Bookshops Edited by Henry Hitchings Pushkin Press 224 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781782272120

n his introduction to Browse, an anthology of 15 international writers’ reflections on the Ibookstores that shaped them, editor Henry Hitchings stresses the importance of bookshops as havens and cultural venues, but also as “mustering points”—places of ideas “too strange or explosive” for mass circulation, centres of “dissent and radical- ism.” This militant enthusiasm might seem at odds with images of cats sunning themselves on books in display windows, but it speaks well to a certain international perspective on the institution as represented in the anthology. When Yiyun Li writes of her initiation into English through pirated copies The futility of books—and their importance of Reader’s Digest bought from a back alley Beijing (Carl Hinding, Naestved, Denmark / Library of Congress) storefront, or Alaa Al Aswany recalls reading his collection, Egypt on the Reserve Bench, to a charged what stands out as the most radical function of several chapters of a new book that might, in the bookstore audience days before the uprising at the institution, one witnessed dramatically by Li end, after a several unsold months, return to its Tahrir Square, it serves as a reminder that these and Aswany, is its role as a gateway to change— publisher for pulping. spaces aren’t only ones of “safety and sanity” but whether personal, political, or societal. It comes Yet these old customs make for odd commerce. of rebellion. as no surprise that the potential of these spaces is For all the browsing—in stores or online—are These days, in North America, other sorts of most apparent during times of flux, whether it’s the people buying? According to a 2014 report from the revolution seem to threaten the industry. Ebooks waning of the Cultural Revolution or the waxing industry authority Bowker, some 300,000 new titles came. Ebooks stalled. Amazon’s here. Will Amazon of the Arab Spring. Or, more broadly, during our are now published annually—in America alone. stall? We’re often told by those with concern for global age of aggressive technological advance. (Include self-published books and the number tops maintaining open, real-world cultural spaces that it While this transformative aspect of bookstores one million.) While this might indicate a healthy should. But whatever the future holds for the writ- is a theme explored by many in Browse, including readership, the truth is murky. Last year, a study ing, reading, and selling of books, it seems clear Michael Dirda, Pankaj Mishra, and Elif Shafak, it’s undertaken by the National Endowment for the that readers’ romance with traditional bookshops most often coupled with memories of youth. As Arts revealed that the percentage of adults who will survive. The publication and early critical contributor Juan Gabriel Vásquez writes, “When a read literature—novels, short stories, poetry, and success of Browse, put out by the U.K.’s Pushkin writer is asked to choose his favourite bookshops, plays—had dropped to a 30-year low. Forty-three Press, and Bookshops, a cultural history by Spanish he won’t generally pick the one he most often vis- percent of American adults, it found, had read “at academic Jorge Carrión, published by the Windsor, its, but rather the scenes that inspire his nostalgia: least one work of literature” in the previous year— Ontario-based Biblioasis (for whom I worked until the nostalgia of starting out.” Like most young down almost fourteen percentage points since earlier this year), confirm the tenacity and cultural readers, Vásquez fondly recalls spending “hours 1982. But it can’t be all bad, especially given the importance of that affair of the heart. In both titles, sitting on the ground, leafing through the towers wave of stories heralding the revival of brick-and- of books [he’d] picked out in order to choose one.” mortar independent bookstores. After decades of Grant Munroe’s writing has appeared in the Thankfully, with the possible exception of Maoist closures, the indies seem primed for recovery in Walrus, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Los Angeles China, where, as Li writes, “books were to be paid communities where Chapters and Barnes & Noble Review of Books, and elsewhere. He’s the founder of for before being touched,” centuries of custom failed. The market capacity for throw cushions and the Woodbridge Farm, a writers’ residency based in allow, and even encourage, this sort of manhand- tea cozies, it turns out, is less robust than it is for Kingsville, Ontario. ling—even to the point of thumbing through books hand-sold by knowledgeable staff.

24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Given the trade’s white-shoe leanings, it care about quality. But there is also the need to There’s charm in Carrión’s rambling, 300-page shouldn’t surprise us that another recurring theme build a stock that keeps the stores alive. approach, but there’s tedium, too. The book’s nar- throughout both books is the shuttering of cher- Though Browse is a charming anthology well rative fails to grip onto a meaningful arc; visits ished stores. In Bookshops, Jorge Carrión reflects on worth the time of anyone interested in the sub- to new cities become episodic: After arriving in several former storefronts, including Manhattan’s ject—especially those captivated, as I am, by the Budapest, Marrakesh, Lima, Tokyo, San Francisco, legendary Gotham Book Mart. Dirda laments the remarkable similarities that exist among booksell- and elsewhere, Carrión travels to the best book- loss of many that once thrived during the 1980s, ers around the world (it thrilled me to learn how shops, comments on their selection, riffs on a “when the greater Washington [D.C.] metro area universally sullen many are)—it avoids such hard number of subjects (censorship, literary readings, boasted forty or fifty shops.” Novelist Iain Sinclair questions of commerce. Its essays, written by paper, etc.), then jumps onward. It is fun the first dedicates his contribution in Browse to the rise and acclaimed writers, mostly explore what novelist two trips, duller the third, tiring the fourth, fifth, fall of Bookmans Halt (“no apostrophe, please”), Iain Sinclair describes as “the powerful connec- sixth, seventh. It’s tempting to wonder if Carrión’s a “functioning used-book pit that represented tion between the two trades: the honourable and efforts would have been better realized as a shorter everything now amputated from the good life” in altruistic profession of providing modestly priced collection of tightened essays—on libraries and England. It’s said that all small presses are two mis- reading matter to a hungry but diminishing demo- bookshops, the trade of bookselling, and so on, takes away from bankruptcy. Bookstores may have graphic and the entitled, despised tribe of scrib- even at the expense of cutting 100-odd pages of more leeway, but not by much. In the end, as with blers who cough up product.” asides, local colour, and pop culture commentary. any business, success comes down to numbers. s a cultural history, Bookshops addresses mat- s Dirda and others show, the spectre of loss he figure I was quoted by one bookseller was Aters of exchange on a broader scale—and does Ahaunts much writing about bookstores. T“between five and ten thousand.” That was so quite brilliantly. Carrión holds the commercial Yet when we talk of the threat of losing them, the number of decisions he had to make when at restrictions of a bookstore as its most defining what are we lamenting the potential loss of? the London Book Fair. Not content—that’s all I’m not speaking here too easily found online. of the great market- It is the interactions place in England, where Carrión explores the dual-minded implicit in the face- publishers hammer out to-face commerce of deals for international nature of the bookseller, who sees books not only books, the romance of translation rights—but as art but also as fungible objects that occupy relationships between a quieter affair that, customers and book- for 36 years, has been valuable space within a perpetually renewing sellers. Strip the per- taking place out of a sonal contact and you block of hotel suites organizational scheme. have Amazon.com—a in London, Ontario. virtual behemoth that, Each spring, fall, and through its new open- winter, publisher sales representatives and regional attribute, especially when compared with its other ing of brick-and-mortar Amazon Stores, may be booksellers meet to sell and order, respectively, half, its “twin soul”: the library. With characteristic attempting to conjure a simulacra of the “in-person new titles scheduled for publication the following enthusiasm, Carrión explains: book buying experience”; take away the commerce season. Similar fairs are held in large and mid- and you have libraries, which don’t evoke quite the sized cities across the continent. All follow a similar While the Librarian accumulates…the same sense of discernment through ownership. model: During private two- to four-hour appoint- Bookseller acquires in order to free himself Some worry about Amazon Stores’ aggressive ments, reps guide booksellers through “highlight from what he has acquired; he sells and buys, expansion into New York, Seattle, and other cities. lists,” or customized inventory. In the pre-digital puts in circulation. His business is traffic and But these spaces—clinically spare, tended by clerks age, these sessions were done by flipping through transit…The Bookshop…is attached to the trained to tout the shops’ limited, face-out, four- foot-high stacks of publisher catalogs; now they’re sinews of the present, suffers with it, but is plus-star-reviewed stock, all “assembled according often scrolled through on hotel room hi-def TVs. also driven by an addiction to change. algorithm,” according to the New Yorker—shouldn’t Over the course of the fair, booksellers attend as concern anyone with a long view of what keeps many as eight appointments. A single appoint- In the most interesting passages of his work, independent bookstores alive. Despite the hair ment can cover as many as 2,000 items. All expect a Carrión explores this dual-minded nature of the pulling of alarmists, traditional booksellers have response: “I’ll take two,” “Seven,” “Pass.” Decisions eternal bookseller: women and men who see books remained as resilient as print books themselves. on how to stock your mid-sized shop with novels, not only as art (and their collections as canon), but On his tour of Italy in 1786, Goethe wandered into biographies, children’s books, poetry, genre fiction, also as fungible objects that occupy valuable space a well-appointed shop in the university town of fine art monographs, memoirs, Harry Potter bob- within a limited, perpetually renewing organiza- Padua: bleheads, restaurant guides, and more: between tional scheme. five and ten thousand of them. It’s not an easy mental position to hold. As the [T]here were half a dozen people when I Earlier this spring, I drove to London to speak famous porteño bookstore owner Héctor Yánover entered, and when I asked for the works of with reps about this process, which seems among noted, “A bookseller is the being who is most aware Palladio, they all focused their attention on the most obscure links in the long chain of relation- of the futility of a book, and of its importance.” me. While the [bookseller] was looking for the ships that brings an unfinished manuscript into the Maintaining that friction seems the great discipline book, the [other patrons] spoke highly of…the hands of readers. My hope was to finesse a way into of the trade. The goal: achieving profitability by work and with the merits of the author. one of their closed-door meetings—to see which balancing consumerist demand for reliable goods books were stressed, which were skipped, and with works of untested literary merit. For Carrión, The magic of this passage is in its familiarity. why. That didn’t happen. “It takes years to build a bookshops are cultural centres, but above all, they None of us has experienced anything identical, relationship through honesty,” a Penguin Random are businesses. Since the institution’s earliest days, but I suspect most of us, 230 years later, have House rep told me apologetically. “We can’t risk the latter has served to maintain the former: We’re encountered something similar. Though we may be giving that away.” reminded that though Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie entering an age where the community connected What risk? Hurt egos, mostly. If aspiring auth- was a 25,000-copy bestseller in the mid-18th cen- with literature—those Goethe identified as the ors knew how tightly their passion projects would tury, its sales were dwarfed by “tales of chivalry, “secular clergy, nobility, and artists”—narrows, the be boxed into snappy ten- to 20-word tag lines— harvest calendars, horoscopes, gaming rules, recipe core of the culture remains, as will the intuitions “A creepy coming-of-age story about a blended books,” and other bits of well-forgotten dross. that support it. While in London, I asked booksell- family,” for example, said of Demi-Gods by Eliza Despite insights like these, Bookshops suffers ers and reps for their perspectives on the current Robertson—and how mercilessly booksellers from an overstock of slower-moving items. Rather business. A few were cautiously bullish. But most regarded the retail viability of said works—“I’ll take than a present and well-arranged cultural history, agreed with a veteran of the trade, a woman who, two”—more might question their chance of estab- Carrión scrambles his work within a continent- for the past 30 years, has seen a cycle of regional lishing a career through sales, let alone striking it jumping travelogue, wherein he accumulates shops close and open: “On the whole,” she said, rich. That’s not to say that the parties involved don’t imaginary stamps from wide variety of stores. calmly, “all’s steady.”

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 25 Peak Twins Doppelgängers, hauntings, and the rise of the neuro-fantastic John Semley

feeding off each other produce a Bellevue Square fresh, new literary subgenre, the Michael Redhill neuro-fantastic. Doubleday Canada 272 pages, hardcover ental illness and the super- ISBN 9780385684835 Mnatural, the mad and the eerie, have long mirrored one Little Sister another in fiction. For English Barbara Gowdy Romantics cast into a repressive Patrick Crean Editions regime of Victorianism, madness, 312 pages, hardcover manifesting in the erratic, inscrut- ISBN 9781554688609 able behaviour of characters like Heathcliff, must have seemed a Lost in September strangely appealing state. Haunted Kathleen Winter pasts and ancestral curses hang Knopf Canada over Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, 304 pages, hardcover too, and her later novel Villette, ISBN 9780345810120 thick as fog rolling over the rural English moors—the weird and eerie within the realist trappings of n Wuthering Heights, Emily Gothic literature. Brontë has her intermittently As delineated by Todorov, the Icruel, hopelessly romantic, fantastic is a literary subgenre infinitely malleable anti-hero in which a character in a narra- Heathcliff howl for the ghost of tive, and the reader in turn, is his deceased love, Catherine, suspended between two possibil- in a wonderfully revealing way. ities: that supernatural events are “Be with me always,” Heathcliff actually occurring or that they are implores, “take any form—drive me mad! only do Identities in these stories are not so much fractured the product of delusion and hallucination, that they not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” into spiky, schizoid splinters as they are nested are all in your head. “The fantastic,” Todorov writes, Madness, in Heathcliff’s (and perhapsBront ë’s) inside each other. People gaze through the perspec- “lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesita- estimation, amounts to a kind of haunting: the tives of relative strangers, literalizing Proust’s prom- tion common to reader and character, who must possessing of one body by the animating spirit of ise of art’s ability “to behold the universe through decide whether or not what they perceive derives another. Identities dissolve into one another in a the eyes of another, of a hundred others.” from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion.” paranormal play. Redhill and Gowdy conjoin seemingly super- The American expat Henry James gave fullest Elsewhere in Brontë’s novel, too, characters natural or paranormal goings-on—Bellevue Square expression to the tension between the supernatural describe ghosts and spirits in similar terms: “I was has more doppelgängers and winking meta-ges- (a strange reality as it exists) and madness in The sure she was with me,” Heathcliff says of Catherine’s tures than a Paul Auster novel, or the latest season Turn of the Screw, a sort of inscrutable ghost story soul; “I shall love mine yet; and take him with of Twin Peaks—with realist narrative trappings. about an English governess living in a rambling me: he’s in my soul,” pines Isabella Linton. Love (This sense of workaday-naturalism-otherwise- country estate who is either legitimately visited itself is a co-constitutive concept: the lovers’ souls disturbed distinguishes these titles from the more by the spirits of deceased caretakers or otherwise entwined, two spirits living within one another. magical realist flourishes of Alison Pick’sStrangers losing her grip on reality. James’s story then offers More importantly, to the external observer, such a With the Same Dream, with its ghost narrators, up a third option: Perhaps the governess is both state of fervid romance is indistinguishable from or André Alexis’s 2015 Giller Prize-winner Fifteen losing her mind and being taunted by the spirits insanity. Take me with you. Live inside me. Do not Dogs, in which Greek gods bless Toronto canines acting through suspiciously precocious children. leave me. Drive me mad. with human cognition.) Here mental illness is a Insanity and supernatural incident similarly seem Of late, this configuration of madness has form of contemporary haunting, and the books to produce one another in The Shining, in which reappeared in some Canadian page-turners: offer visions of “modern ghosts,” to use a phrase an alcoholic, creatively stopped-up novelist is tor- Michael Redhill’s Giller-nominated Bellevue from Bellevue Square. Indeed, this is Redhill’s title mented in turn by demons both metaphorical and Square, about a bookshop owner dogged by a for his planned triptych of novels, of which Bellevue actual. There is no stable terra firma from which the woman who looks like her—just like her; Barbara is the first. It suggests a narrative preoccupation reader might objectively appraise these proceed- Gowdy’s considerably more entertaining Little with the twinning of the irrational and the meta- ings, a reality that produces something closer to Sister, in which a woman inhabits the body and physical, a tradition that stretches back at least as true horror—the mind slipping away from itself, mind of a stranger during thunderstorms; and far as the unwelcoming hearth of Brontë’s Heights, into the inky, cobwebby abyss. To this, the writers Kathleen Winter’s Lost In September, in which a if not further, to the hoary Gothic manors of Horace add actual ghosts and goblins and blood-suckers. homeless Montrealer rattled by PTSD believes Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. himself the reincarnation of General James Wolfe. The Franco-Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan f the new books, Bellevue Square deals most Todorov has a term for those earlier stories: the Oexplicitly with the subject of mental illness. Its John Semley is a books columnist at the Globe and fantastic. In these recent Canadian novels, some of hero, Jean Mason, is beset by “doppelgänger prob- Mail and the author of This Is a Book about the which are themselves suspended between pulp and lems.” Mason’s lookalike hangs around Bellevue Kids in the Hall (ECW Press, 2016). serious literary fiction, the states of fractured duress Square, the public park in Toronto’s Kensington

26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Market, a well-known local hive of eccentrics, lay- Redhill brings such perils to the fore—less the subjugated to the rigours of Protestant-Catholic abouts, pot dealers, and the obviously mentally ill. ghostly spectre than the clanking suit of animate repression, and papered over with a veneer of (That the park shares its name with the New York armour. As Bellevue’s Jean pursues her own dark pleasantness. The dissonance between our his- City hospital infamous for its psychiatric ward, is double, a mystery writer named Ingrid, her loved torically-constituted sense of self and its reality is either a happy coincidence or an example of the ones become convinced that her sanity is com- enough to drive any sentient Canadian a little mad. kind of textual density Redhill so clearly savours— promised, that she’s lapsing back into a state of or both.) mental distress. In one scene she wakes up and he neuro-fantastic differs from Todorov’s “In downtown Toronto,” Jean observes, “you sees “a distortion simmering in the air beside the Tfantastic in one major way. The fantastic, by have to be prepared at all times to intersect with bed,” and feels the weight of someone on top of her. virtue of its historical context, privileged the real- people living in other realities.” Superficially, She tries to scream, but feels “strangled for air.” (The ity of hauntings, demonic possessions and the she’s talking about material differences: the lines sequence recalls the phenomenon of sleep paraly- like. The historical slog from medievalism through between rich and poor, the fickle turns of fate that sis—a disorder that itself straddles the supernatural Enlightenment (an always deceptive epochal separate the well-to-do from the down-and-out. and physiological.) “Don’t let her in!” Jean tells term, given the period was marked as much by But Redhill’s deeper implication is clear. He means herself. She’s the inverse of countless characters of witch-finders and demonologists as by amateur that “other realities” bit astronomers peering quite literally, referring through primitive tele- to actual other selves, scopes), Romanticism, manifested in the To the Victorians, the supernatural may have felt and Victorianism was doubles and doppel- nearer (historically and cognitively) than the hard dogged by its own gängers that populate ghosts of a crude, Bellevue Square. science of neurology and mental health. In the rough-hewn past— This play of iden- which seemed more tity, and its connec- neuro-fantastic, this wonky symmetry is reversed. real to its denizens than tion to mental health, the alternative of men- reappears in Little Sister, tal illness, or lunacy, Barbara Gowdy’s first or hysteria, or insanity. novel in a decade. Gowdy’s protagonist, Rose, runs Gothic literature, shielding herself from the spirits To the Victorians, the supernatural may have felt a Toronto repertory cinema and is, like Redhill’s and shadow-forms besieging her body. As Jean’s nearer (historically and cognitively) than the hard bookseller, directly involved in facilitating experi- sense of herself unravels, Redhill forces his reader science of neurology and mental health. ences of empathy-via-art. Rose likewise has a habit to reckon again with that most central question: Is In the neuro-fantastic, this wonky symmetry of getting lost in a slipstream of shifting identity any of this really happening? between “reality” and “insanity” is effectively when she finds herself repeatedly transported into There is, perhaps, a level of national allegory at reversed. Our modern understanding about mat- the person of a literary editor named Harriet, who play in these stories, best expressed in Kathleen ters of mental health, as well the whole field of is involved in a torrid affair with a married man. Winter’s novel. Her protagonist, Jimmy Blanchard, neuroscience, grounds these novelistic discus- Rose feels a “pulled-thread sensation beneath her is either a down-and-out reincarnation of James sions of insanity. The current regime of rationality, skin” as she is zapped into the body of another, like Wolfe, the British general who claimed victory over secularism and scientism—which finds expression, a ghost inhabiting a still-living body. That Rose’s the French at the Plains of Abraham in 1759, or a ironically, in a frothing, quasi-religious zeal—vests mother is lost in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease victim of PTSD who believes himself to be Wolfe. credence almost exclusively in the option of insan- colours these body-jumping flights of fancy, with Here, mental and historical trauma are entwined, ity and mental illness. But as the paranormal inves- degenerative mental illness playing the role of as if the ghost of Wolfe is being resurrected to tigator Dr. John Markway puts it early in the film an old ancestral curse in a Gothic novel. Like her reckon with the modern consequences of a long- adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s American-Gothic ailing—albeit still spry, charming, and vivacious— ago conquest. Likewise, the proliferation of aven- The Haunting of Hill House, which itself features a parent, Rose’s mind is not quite her own. (To say ging ghosts, doubles, and schizoid mental states mentally shaky lead character confronted by the nothing of Harriet.) coincides conspicuously with our nation’s efforts likelihood of ghosts, “Look: I know the supernatural Where Gowdy lets the threat of dementia and in this anniversary year to grapple with its past and is something that isn’t supposed to happen. But it mental deterioration loom over the proceedings, its own social and historical traumas—more often does happen.” At the risk of getting insufferably “meta” about the whole thing—although it’s something Redhill’s novel does rather extensively, verging on distrac- tion—all novels, all fiction, can in a way be seen as allegories of a kind of schizoid break. (That the protagonists of Redhill and Gowdy’s novels are both involved in the propagation of fictional stories, as a Valentine’s night bookseller and cinema owner respectively, further refugees crossing the border — underscores this connection.) frostbitten The fundamental tension is sustained indefin- itely, the hesitation of Todorov’s fantastic extending itself beyond the book’s pages, the ambiguity of resolution persisting long after the narrative has resolved itself. The reader is always haunted, carrying both her own perspective, and that of the character moving through the story—itself a phantasmic realm conjured by the interplay of words on the reader’s imagination. As the literary Anna Yin critic Thomas Jones wrote in a 2009 essay in the London Review of Books, “There is a sense in which all novels are ghost stories: fictional characters are Anna Yin has authored six books of poetry, including Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac. translucent phantoms, which readers believe in (or She is Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate. Her poems can be found published with Arc don’t); readers lurk in the presence of characters, Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio, World Journal and Room Magazine. She spying on their most intimate moments, eavesdrop- has been featured at 2015 Austin International Poetry Festival and 2016 Edmonton Poetry ping on their innermost thoughts.” Festival. A finalist for Canada’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrants Award in 2011/2012, she The neuro-fantastic transposes supernaturalism teaches Poetry Alive. Her website: annapoetry.com onto this topography. The mind, after all, is the ori- ginal ghost in the machine.

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 27 Primus extra pares Power and the evolution of the PMO Mel Cappe

the importance of administration and attention messengers, census and stationery, as well as keep- Prime Ministerial Power in Canada: Its Origins to detail as an instrument of governing and the ing the provinces afloat, all have their modern Under Macdonald, Laurier and Borden exercise of power is crucial. And it is that explora- analogues. The Fenian raids as well as the Riel Patrice Dutil tion of administrative detail that is really the major Rebellion, the Boer War and the imperial war cabi- UBC Press value of this work in the understanding of prime net of the First World War, on the other hand, were 394 pages, hardcover ministerial authority. Patrice Dutil has earned his preoccupations of these earlier prime ministers. ISBN 9780774834742 place in Canadian letters by having founded the The instruments of power are similar today Literary Review of Canada (LRC). He should also to what they were in the first 50 years of be thanked for this contribution to our understand- Canada. Constitutionally, prime ministers in the ing of prime ministers in Canada and the origin of Westminster system really only have two pow- their power. ers: they can organize government and they can hen Governing from the Centre by On the shoulders of such giants of historical appoint ministers. If you are a savvy and wily PM, Donald Savoie was published in research as Michael Bliss, Peter Hennessy, Jack those may suffice. But you will have to supplement W1999, positing that power had begun Granatstein, Norman Hilmer, Ramsay Cook, and them with other instruments to entrench and main- consolidating in the Prime Minister’s Office in the John English, Dutil casts light on the minutiae of tain your power. mid 1990s, I argued with Savoie that the evolu- governing that elucidates the challenges of manag- Instruments of power are manifold but the tion of this phenomenon was important, but it ing and entrenching power. He organizes the book constraints on that power are extensive as well. was not new. Rather, I noted, it could be traced around a historical description of the three early Clearly all PMs use appointments and patronage to back to Trudeau père and the advent of a central- prime ministers followed by a focus on structure, great effect as ways of building and entrenching the izing PMO that had the likes of Marc Lalonde, Jim substance and then style as explanations of how political support they require. Appointment to cabi- Coutts, and Tom Axworthy continuously accruing the three centralized and exercised their power. net has always been and continues to be the main power to “The Centre” and changing the dynamic (Full disclosure: I get an acknowledgement for a source of authority of the PM. However, each time of decision-making the PM appoints a min- in government. Turns ister he creates losers out I was wrong. As in the caucus. As Dutil Patrice Dutil, a capable Caucus can be a check on a rogue PM. shows, consolidating historian and scholar power may require fir- of public administra- But intuitive political skills can make a leader. ing a minister or forcing tion, shows in Prime them to quit. When try- Ministerial Power in When Mulroney was at eleven percent in the polls ing to discern whether Canada: Its Origins a finance minister like Under Macdonald, he would still get a standing ovation. Alexander Galt or Paul Laurier and Borden, Martin “was fired or those trends should be quit,” a clever observer cast back to the origin of once said “he was quit.” their development, and if blame is to be laid, then discussion over a pizza encouraging the treatment Macdonald, Laurier and Borden each appointed Sir John A. Macdonald deserves his share. of “style.”) themselves to the position of president of the Privy With careful comparative research—I picture The strength and innovation of the book is in Council (which has lately been assigned to a utility Dutil, sallow and wan, emerging from what must the detailed analysis of the use of royal commis- player) to great effect. In addition they appointed have been months in the archives—the author sions, orders-in-council and correspondence as themselves to the railways, post office or defence paints a detailed picture of these three leaders and instruments of power. Moreover, its description of positions to give themselves the ability to affect their exercise of power. Who knew that Macdonald the development of a professional, non-partisan the party across the country. Of course these were used the deputy ministers to exert control over public service from the partisans appointed by nation-building jobs. But they also positioned the his ministers; or that Laurier fired so many of his these prime ministers is important. But it does PM to go beyond the portfolio and exercise power ministers to control the party; or that Borden could not draw sufficient conclusions about the impact over the party. send troops to the Boer War without even a discus- of these instruments on the daily act of governing Each of the three prime ministers relied on sion in cabinet, let alone the House of Commons? Canada. Nor does it consider these instruments in key colleagues to build and maintain a consensus Dutil makes several key points in this book. comparison with other instruments of power. How of support. Macdonald relied on Hector-Louis One, in a Westminster parliamentary democracy important were they relative to patronage? How Langevin (a scoundrel, crook and racist to be sure, the prime minister is more than primus inter pares. did they complement the use of the bureaucracy but a loyalist and father of Confederation as well). Two, the agglomeration of power around the PM or party management? And what can a thoughtful Sir Wilfrid Laurier used former premiers. And Sir has been going on for a very long time. Three, the reader glean from this analysis about the relative Robert Borden relied on Arthur Meighen. instruments of that centralization have changed power of the PMO in 2017? Unfortunately, there is not an exposition of over time. Four, the subtlety of the exercise of power The parallels to modern policy and politics are the personal or institutional relationship with is manifest in outstanding leaders. And finally, striking. The priorities of Macdonald, Laurier, and the finance ministers of the day. Pierre Trudeau Borden were infrastructure, Indian affairs, informa- with John Turner and Donald Macdonald, Mel Cappe is professor in the School of Public Policy tion technology, debt and transfers to the provinces Brian Mulroney with Michael Wilson and Don and Governance at the University of Toronto and as well as defence. Sound familiar? The portfolios Mazankowski, Stephen Harper with Jim Flaherty, was the 18th clerk of the Privy Council, secretary to of Indian affairs, public works, railways and canals, or Jean Chrétien with Paul Martin (fraught as that cabinet and head of the Public Service of Canada. post office, and expenditures for cables, telegraphs, relationship was), were remarkable and interde-

28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada pendent duos. Trudeau fils and ground him. Pierre Trudeau Bill Morneau, so far, appear swam in the mornings in the to be merely a competent and private pool built for him with businesslike pair. The bailout of party money. And of course the Commercial Bank leading Entomology Margaret had their first-born to the firing of Alexander Galt child, Justin, while living at (November 1867) aside, the first your brown lips remind 24 Sussex (talk about “to the 50 years seemed not to have manor born”!). And who can me of moth wings, wilting from strong finance ministers. forget Stephen Harper walking oil in human touch Dutil convincingly makes his son Ben to school and… the point that the administra- shaking his hand. Of course we tive competence of the prime all saw Justin Trudeau’s public ministers made them a force challenges with the nannies to be reckoned with compared Sun-stains hired for his young children to the bumbling incompetence and were impressed with Xavier of some of their ministers. And can I swallow light? walking in the Pride parade and they used the cabinet and its ghost-soft, flaxen — can it fill the PM’s socks. And we have much more frequent meetings since learned about the impact the cracks in these bones? (sometimes daily) to discuss the on policy of William Lyon minutiae of governing and to Mackenzie King’s mother and control the debate among min- his dog Pat, even after they died. isters. To some analysts, daily Dutil points out the impor- cabinet meeting centralizes tance of Agnes Macdonald, Zoé power in the PMO. To others, Laurier and Laura Borden to cabinet not meeting regularly Anny Tang the prime ministers. Laureen is a manifestation of centraliza- Harper, Aline Chrétien, Mila tion. Mulroney, Margaret Trudeau, By the same token, the power Anny Tang’s writing has been shortlisted for the 2016 PEN Canada New and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau of those early leaders was to Voices Award and selected for a stage reading at the 2016 Eden Mills Writers’ are, likewise, hugely important some extent constrained by the Festival Fringe competition. A recent graduate from Queen’s University, she to the functioning of the prime need to maintain a cabinet con- received the James H. Stitt Prize in Poetry and McIlquham Foundation Prize ministership. There is a need for sensus on the agenda and pri- in English for fiction. Her writing has been published in the anthology. this intimacy and private time. orities, as it is today. Even if the And it is necessary for maintain- cabinet is but a focus group, woe ing their families and liberating betide the prime minister who them to think big thoughts. ignores the political markers put Dutil’s book goes up to down by ministers in cabinet. If of their success. the line of insight, revelation you don’t think cabinet or caucus matter, just ask Chrétien worked from the prime minister’s and discernment, but does not quite go over. His Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron or Theresa May. Centre Block office, closer to the House. Harper description of the details of the history seems to All prime ministers use their command of policy worked from the Langevin Block office, away from prevent him from drawing conclusions about the and programmes, and Dutil characterizes adminis- the cut and thrust. Style indeed matters. As Dutil application of his research to the prime ministers trative detail as the base of their power. But in some points out in the chapter on Borden, our eighth PM of recent time. In the year of Canada 150, the first respects it is their intellect and their command of was distant, aloof and withdrawn and did not main- 50 years of the country’s history can only tell us so policy (what Dutil calls “substance”) that elicits tain the intimacy with his cabinet or caucus needed much about power of prime ministers. The history loyalty. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the former constitu- to maintain his power. He ultimately resigned from of the most recent 50 years of prime ministerial tional law professor, was clearly the smartest guy in office, depleted, worn out, and a shadow of the war- power will be even more fascinating. the room, a comment also often made of Stephen time leader he had been. Prime ministers are indeed first beyond equals: Harper. Harper was always on top of his files and Interestingly, the PMO did not exist as an insti- primus extra pares. As Donald Macdonald, a strong knew at least as much about an issue as any of tution for maintaining or elaborating power in the finance minister to Pierre Trudeau, said when his ministers. Jean Chrétien was the only person first 50 years. There were no Marc Lalondes, Derek declining to run for the leadership of the Liberal I know who faithfully read the back page tables of Burneys, Eddie Goldenbergs, Ian Brodies or Gerald party, “I just don’t have the royal jelly.” There is the Economist. Paul Martin was a policy wonk of Buttses. That came later. Rather, Dutil’s prime min- something special and hard to define needed to be great capacity and would engage in vigorous, some- isters used the formerly partisan but evolving pro- a successful prime minister. times violent argument with analysts to turn each fessional public service and especially their clerks Consolidating prime ministerial power is a issue over in his mind and see it from all angles. of the Privy Council and their deputy ministers to response to the evolution of the challenges faced Sympathies to the minister or analyst who was not help manage the ministries. Borrowing from the by the country. The decline of empire, increasing prepared in dealing with their PM. Justin Trudeau Northcote-Trevelyan Report from Britain, they set globalization, coalition or minority government, appears to be a brilliant retail politician with the the stage for the evolution of a great institution of increasing use of technology (be it rail then or inter- capacity to choose capable people to surround governance: the public service. net now) or intergovernmental relations all require himself with and to know when to take their advice. The chapter on a day in the life of his subjects an increasing degree of centralization of authority. Of course, caucus can be a check on a rogue brings much-needed animation to Dutil’s text. Justin Trudeau said, “Cabinet government is back.” prime minister. But intuitive political skills can It shows that not only were these men members But he is still forced to be the primary manager of make a leader. Mulroney was a model in this of Parliament and leaders of parties and govern- international relations as leader-to-leader relations regard. When he was at eleven percent in the polls ments, they were also husbands, fathers and real will now more than ever leave foreign ministers he would still get a standing ovation from the cau- people. The intimacy of their personal lives affected involved, but not responsible. cus. He knew the name of each MP’s spouse and their performance as prime ministers. They also To sum up, there are three triads of prime their children. He used all this to great effect as an each chose to work at home sporadically to clear ministerial power: S3, I3 and P2A. Dutil bases his instrument of power. Similarly, Chrétien used his their heads and provide time for strategic think- analysis on S3: structure, substance and style. The petit gar de Shawinigan persona as a way of keeping ing. Macdonald’s time with his disabled daugh- determinants of success for a PM in the exercise of the caucus and public happy. But he was well read, ter was important for him, as Dutil points out. power are also related to I3: intellect, intuition and contrary to the public perception, keeping up in Chrétien much preferred to work from 24 Sussex intimacy. And prime ministers are at the intersec- the Economist, reading biographies and listening to than from his office. Abroad, he was sometimes tion of P2A: politics, policy and administration. Well Mozart and Beethoven. These politicians’ intuitive accompanied by his grandson Olivier. Mulroney managed, all these elements translate into power. understanding of the public and the intimacy they worked the phones from home. And his son Ben could develop with their caucus was a determinant (before becoming an entertainment guru) helped

November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 29 A Long Way From Home The Kurdish struggle has the world’s attention, briefly, but not its sympathy Ava Homa

literally so. Some rain on the day of Being Kurdish in a Hostile the Halabja chemical attack would World have saved many lives, but it did Ayub Nuri not rain then. In painful contrast, University of Regina Press during the refugees’ escape across 304 pages, softcover the borders to Iran and Turkey, ISBN 9780889774940 the rain would not stop, causing vehicles, humans, and mules to get stuck in the sludge. eing Kurdish in a Hostile But it is not only God who over- World starts with the looks the Kurdish plight. The rest Bchapter “The Wrong of the world not only turns a blind Place” and 300 pages later ends eye to their struggle, but adds to with “An Uncertain Future.” The it. When the UN Security Council memoir-cum-history tells the imposed sanctions on Iraq in the story of a Kurdish-Canadian jour- 1990s to punish Saddam Hussein nalist’s life against a detailed for invading Kuwait, the dic- account of the Kurdish struggle in tator remained unhurt; it was Iraq over three decades. In doing The Sykes–Picot Agreement map shaped the future of the Middle East. the nation’s citizens who were so, it frames the story of every Kurd (Royal Geographical Society / Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot) affected, and none more than the who is born “the wrong” ethnicity, Kurds in northern Iraq, whom never experiencing more than a short-lived sense tinues to this day under different guises. Hussein put on their own internal embargo, leaving of security or freedom in his or her lifetime. It is Nuri was a playful five-year-old when shrapnel tens of thousands to scramble for scraps. As hunger Ayub Nuri’s story, and it is mine, and it is the story killed his grandmother before his eyes; it also shat- claimed lives, women became its first victims: of millions. tered his own knee, an injury he lives with to this The plight of the Kurds, a distinct and stateless day. He was a teenager when he witnessed snipers When a combine harvester went to a field, ethnic group scattered throughout Iraq, Turkey, kill three random men on the street. “I saw him curl hundreds of women and young girls, some Iran, and Syria, is tragic even by the Middle East’s up on the ground and twist in pain,” he recalls of walking for as many as three days, would run exceptional standards. The underdogs in a turbu- one man. These brutalities are an initiation for a alongside to pick up any kernels of wheat that lent region, the Kurds have suffered both at the youth who later becomes a reporter during the Iraq the machine might have missed. They clus- hands of the states that have dominated them, war and has to describe mass graves. tered close to the harvester, sometimes inches often with brutal violence, and from western neg- In Nuri’s book, such scenes of harsh reality are from the sharp blades, ignoring the driver’s lect and betrayal. Even now, as the west’s curiosity interspersed with moments of humour and wry constant warnings, to scour the ground and interest turns to the formidable Kurdish forces wit. As a boy during the Iran-Iraq war, he imagines beneath the machine’s huge wheels…They that helped liberate Raqqa from ISIS, the uncertain Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini sitting in slept among thorns and scorpions on people’s future of that population has not seemed to capture their separate bunkers and shooting at each other. land. their sympathy. Nuri’s book traces that apathy’s The Kurdish word for “artillery shell” is the same long history. word for “soccer ball”—top, Nuri explains. “As a Nuri writes that the U.S., in particular, had Nuri is from Halabja, a Kurdish city on the Iran- child I always wondered why a ball would explode encouraged the Kurds to rise up time and again Iraq border and the site of Saddam Hussein’s infam- and kill people,” he writes. against Saddam Hussein, but left them to be mas- ous chemical attack on March 16, 1988, that killed But by age twelve, the boy who thought Saddam sacred after it struck deals with the dictator. In several thousand Kurds in a matter of minutes. The fired every shell himself, is, he admits, “addicted to the 1970s Iraqi Kurds had been backed by the U.S. tragedy was part of a two-year genocidal campaign guns.” As a young man, he watches families picking and Iran in their autonomist struggle against the by the pan-Arab Baathist regime targeting Kurds for through the skeletons retrieved from mass graves to Iraqi Baathist regime. But when the shah of Iran extinction. The Iraqi dictator established a culture see if they recognize an article of their loved ones cut a deal with Saddam, the Kurdish movement of torture, rape, and execution that the world hoped who were buried for over a decade. In one moving collapsed overnight and hundreds of thousands would end after his removal from power, but con- scene during the Kurdish exodus in 1991, when of civilians had to flee their country. The master- starving Kurds are trekking through the Zagros mind of the operation, U.S. secretary of state Ava Homa’s collection of short stories, Echoes From mountains to escape reprisal from Saddam Hussein Henry Kissinger, famously responded to the House the Other Land, was nominated for the 2011 Frank for a failed uprising, a Kurdish man stands in the Intelligence Committee’s criticism of his 1975 O’Connor prize. She is the second vice-chair of the middle of the road and shoots his machine gun betrayal by declaring, “Covert action should not national council of the Writers’ Union of Canada, into the sky. “Where is God? Someone show him to be confused with missionary work.” His plan, two and the North American director of the Association me,” he shouts. That’s a lot for a believer. His fellow years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize for trying of Human Rights for Kurdistan of Iran (KMMK-G). travellers might have rebuked him on any other to end the Vietnam War, led to the deaths of about Homa is an activist and a political analyst special- day, Nuri writes, but here they “quietly agreed that 40,000 Kurds. izing in women issues and Middle Eastern affairs. the heavens had betrayed them.” Sometimes this is The tragedy was repeated nearly two decades

30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada later, in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. George Nuri’s book, which takes the reader up to that physical destruction, rarely affected me,” he tells H.W. Bush encouraged Kurds to rise against point, is well timed. It was published in the weeks us at one point, but readers never see him acquire Saddam and looked away when Baathist loyal- leading up to this fall’s independence referendum this immunization, or the personal cost at which it ists cracked down on the uprising with the aid of in which more than 92 percent of Kurds voted comes. helicopters and artillery barrages. Defenceless yes, and the fall of Raqqa at the hands of Kurdish One of the few instances where Nuri shares the refugees on the run couldn’t afford to worry about forces—perhaps the longest the world has paid effect of an experience on him is when he sees their ruined homes or an uncertain future. They attention to the Kurds. The demand for secession “the look of devastation” on a lonely woman who wondered if they would make it out of Iraq without was opposed by Iraq as well as Turkey and Iran hears the news of her husband’s death. “I had wit- being gassed. The humanitarian disaster ended who continue to suppress their restive Kurdish nessed the demolition of homes, the desecration of only after Danielle Mitterrand, the wife of French populations. And the international community corpses, piles of dead bodies with blood dripping president François one into another…but Mitterrand, urged the nothing had prepared international commun- The underdogs in a turbulent region, the Kurds me,” he says, for that ity to impose a no-fly have suffered both at the hands of the states that woman’s quiet emo- zone. tional annihilation The same super- have dominated them, often with brutal violence, before strangers. powers that had ignored A few more such per- or exacerbated Kurdish and from western neglect and betrayal. sonal reflections would misfortunes later found have strengthened this these tragedies useful. In 2003 the country that had ubiquitously turned its back on Kurds yet again. book, which is released in a world desensitized shrugged at the Halabja attack, asking for evidence Canada’s government declared its interest in going to oppression. Because Kurds’ obstacles are not that Saddam Hussein was responsible, now used along with the “One Iraqi policy,” despite all Prime merely the sectarian and aggressive regimes in Iraq the massacre to justify its invasion of Iraq. Minister Justin Trudeau’s declarations of solidarity and Iran, or Bashar al-Assad in Syria, or Turkey’s The euphoria of a post-Saddam Iraq was with the voiceless and the dispossessed. authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The brief. Within a few years, photos had emerged of Only three weeks after the vote, Iraqi forces, problem is something closer to one articulated by American soldiers, formerly perceived as saviours, outfitted with U.S.-supplied heavy weaponry and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963, when he places the posing with their tortured victims in Abu Ghraib aided by Iranian-trained Shia paramilitary units, blame for the plight of black America not in the Ku prison. Sympathy for anti-U.S. insurgents rose in took control of oil-rich Kirkuk and other disputed Klux Klansman “but the white moderate, who is Iraq. While Baghdad shattered in sectarian violence territories, looting and burning properties, and dis- more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers and people were killed or abducted on a daily basis, placing some 180,000 civilians. a negative peace, which is the absence of tension to the autonomous Kurdistan Region grew prosper- Being Kurdish does well in describing the a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.” ous, attracted foreign investors, adopted laws broader story that led to the present day, but Nuri What emboldens the bullies of the Middle East is to protect women and religious minorities, and himself is absent through much of the later years. a world that is too conservative to support change moved towards democratization. The Kurds’ good Shifting between the political and personal, he in favour of justice, which tells the Kurds to keep fortune lasted until 2014, when ISIS took over much maintains a distance from his own story even when waiting. Nuri’s book paints a devastating picture of of central and northwestern Iraq and proceeded to he is present, as if he is an observer rather than a what the lives of millions look like in the meantime. attack the Kurds, slaughtering the religious Yazidi participant in his life. This can be a drawback in minority and enslaving their women. a memoir. “The sight of blood, of dead bodies, of

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November 2017 reviewcanada.ca 31 Letters

Re: “History’s Ghosts,” Margaret Mac- are explanatory plaques attached to these monu- distinction with important implications for con- Millan in conversation with Randall ments. I agree that Hitler should not remain stand- temporary society. Hansen (October 2017) ing in downtown Berlin after the end of the Nazi Erna Paris t is true that beyond the dates of events and era; on the other hand, Sir John A. Macdonald was Toronto, Ontario Iother indisputable facts, the way we understand more than the architect of the residential school what happened yesterday is a conversation that system. He was Canada’s first prime minister, and Re: “History’s Ghosts,” Margaret Mac- shifts with changing social mores. For many rea- his achievements should be understood within Millan in conversation with Randall sons—the emergence of a human rights culture; the context of contemporaneous attitudes towards Hansen (October 2017) the questioning of the “great man” approach to the assimilation, an approach that we now understand onuments are raised for adoration, and at past in favour of particularized social histories; an to have had disastrous human consequences, but Mconsiderable cost, but they should not be increasing awareness of racism and the concomi- which was thought to be progressive at the time. sculpted until the war, the occupation, is over, the tant victimization of minorities; the prevalence of Yes, it was paternalistic and disrespectful, but the propaganda is stripped, and the loser has gotten to mass communications—we are currently disput- fact that people thought differently is part of our publish their side of the story. ing whether certain symbols representing the past history. What we need—once again, with teachers We have way too many symbols of adoration, should be removed, and also whether particu- on the front line—is a curriculum that takes the many of them of British tyrants, and they should not lar groups hold the exclusive right to represent high road, not the low road. Children will not learn be here. But these figures of history should certainly aspects of the past, thereby closing down a larger to think with nuance about complex questions if be written up, and carefully researched facts about conversation. We’re debating and redefining lan- their teachers and school boards limit themselves them should be available to everyone from primary guage, narrowing the meaning of common words, to moral indignation. schoolers to the elderly. It’s never a good idea to such as “racism,” for example, by arguing that only I’d make two points: I respectfully disagree with allow the victors, and only the victors, to write those with presumed power can hold racist views. MacMillan’s preference for restoring Canada Day to their history. When they do, we should be quick to In an earnest, but misguided, interpretation of Dominion Day, and Hansen’s preference for swear- question their dictation. The kind of power Britain the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report ing allegiance to the Queen during citizenship has had to dictate history and sway the minds of recommendations, the Toronto District School ceremonies for reasons of continuity. Our present millions for centuries has resulted in all kinds of Board expunges the ancient word “chief” from job links with the world more likely derive from an human rights abuses, while the perpetrators have titles, without being asked to do so. Some teachers attachment to the post-Second World War liberal walked free. thoughtlessly practise shaming by teaching “white order, with its connective tissue of international All of history needs to be questioned constantly privilege” to their students, deepening anger and organizations, treaties, and Enlightenment values, by writers who aren’t hampered by intimidation divisiveness. than to Britain. Second, Japan’s record in teaching and propaganda, but we haven’t nearly reached So much of the above is the result of not studying its appalling Second World War history is, in my that stage of civilization. the past in context. As MacMillan and Hansen point view, unworthy of praise. Janet Hudgins out, when statues of disowned historical leaders I’d also clarify that while Canada has indeed Vancouver, British Columbia are torn down, who they were and what they stood always been multicultural, it has not always sub- for simply vanish from public view. What we need scribed to official multiculturalism, a historical

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32 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada BIG NAMES BIG IDEAS BIG BOOKS

Claire L’Heureux-Dubé A Life Constance Backhouse

Both lionized and vilified, Claire L’Heureux-Dubé has shaped the Canadian legal landscape – and in particular its highest court. The second woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the first from Quebec, she was known as “the great dissenter” on the bench, making judgments that were applauded and criticized in turn. L’Heureux-Dubé’s innovative legal approach was anchored in the social, economic, and political context of her cases. This book employs a similar tactic. Rather than focusing exclusively on high- profile cases and jurisprudential legacy, Constance Backhouse explores the sociopolitical and cultural setting in which L’Heureux- Dubé’s career unfolded, while also considering her personal life. Beautifully written, this compelling biography covers aspects of legal history that have never been so fully investigated, enhancing our understanding of the judiciary, the creation of law, the distinctive socio-legal environment of Quebec, women’s experience in the legal profession, and the inner workings of the top court.

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Give and Take Health Advocacy, Inc. The Citizen-Taxpayer and the How Pharmaceutical Funding Rise of Canadian Democracy Changed the Breast Cancer Shirley Tillotson Movement Sharon Batt Enthralling, witty, and masterful, Give and Take brings to light In this unsettling analysis of Canada’s surprisingly unruly tax the breast cancer movement in history, showing the tax clashes Canada, Sharon Batt investigates and compromises that made the changing relationship between Canadian democracy. patient advocacy groups and the pharmaceutical industry, as well November 2017 as the contentious role of pharma 420 pages, 11 photos funding. 978-0-7748-3672-2 jacketed hardcover available now 396 pages 978-0-7748-3384-4 jacketed hardcover

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Travellers through Empire Indigenous Voyages from Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws Early Canada Yerí7 re Stsq’ey’s-kucw Cecilia Morgan Marianne Ignace and Ronald E. Ignace 9780773551343 $39.95 cloth, 392pp 9780773551305 $39.95 cloth, 528pp “Exceptionally well researched and very fluently “I couldn’t put this book down! A masterpiece of multi- written … an important contribution to the disciplinary research on the Secwépemc Nation’s history growing literature on Indigenous travellers out- from the Ice Age to the present: science and archival side the bounds of their traditional territories.” records serve to back up the volume’s primary source of Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia and knowledge, the oral narratives and shared memories of author of Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the the Secwépemc people. These accounts go deeper than Heart of Empire science, to the moral lessons of how the humans and the Call of Empire land we live on should relate to each other. Only the From the Highlands to Hindostan Ignaces could write a book of this magnitude, based on Alexander Charles Baillie their lifetimes of research while living Secwépemc lives as 9780773551244 $39.95 cloth, 464pp well.” Leanne Hinton, University of California, Berkeley The history of four generations of a Scottish family in the service of the East India Company.

Tug of War Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting, and the Rise of the Security State The Hand of God Jocelyn Wills 9780773550476 $39.95 cloth, 518pp Claude Ryan and the Fate of Canadian The Same but Different Liberalism, 1925–1971 “Surveillance. Advanced technologies. National security. Hockey in Quebec Michael Gauvreau Multinational capitalism. Tug of War deftly probes and integrates these vexed themes. Through deep research, Edited by Jason Blake and Andrew C. Holman 9780773551299 $44.95 cloth, 704pp masterfully contextualized, Wills tracks Canada’s Mac- 9780773550551 $32.95 paper, 352pp “Artfully crafted, profoundly insightful, based on ex- Donald, Dettwiler and Associates (now MDA), a global tensive scholarly and archival sources, The Hand of God giant in satellite communications, to show how patriot- “Hockey is so integral to Canadian culture and not only offers a vivid and illuminating understanding ism and technological enthusiasm gave way to financial The Same but Different is an important reference of a key French-Canadian figure but also opens up a ambitions, lured by markets for military and surveillance on hockey in Quebec. The authors’ new readings new perspective on Quebec.” technologies. A powerful book.” of hockey from French and English points of view Jean-Philippe Warren, Concordia Unive rsity and Pamela Walker Laird, University of Colorado Denver, are original, interesting, and valuable.” author of Un supplément d’âme: Les intentions primordiales and author of Advertising Progress: American Business Jean Harvey, University of Ottawa de Fernand Dumont and the Rise of Consumer Marketing

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