Canada

Introduction

In late 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its final report — a major document, likely to resonate historically, on the facts and legacies of the residential school system that worked to separate families and supplant the cultures of the First Nations (the Canadian term for the Indigenous peoples in Canada). After Canada’s largest ever class action lawsuit, the commission was established to gather testimony from thousands of survivors who told their stories, often publicly and in the national media. This touchstone in Canadian and Commonwealth social awareness should have a lasting effect — not only of protecting Indigenous children and reducing over a century of assimilationist educational policies, but also on literary and scholarly production in Canada. Coincident book-length scholarship from 2015 demonstrates the urgency of cultural and geographic decolonization. Eminent scholar Margery Fee’s Literary Land Claims offers critiques of Northrop Frye’s and Margaret Atwood’s nationalism and “the dominant discourse” (p9) that it effected, one of imperialist thinking grounded partly on Romantic notions of the sublime wilderness and partly on the actual ground of land never conceived, by settler-colonists, as ownable by “Indians”. In a different study, First Nations scholars and allies work together to promote new literatures and criticism: Heather Macfarlane and Armand Garnet Ruffo’s Introduction to Indigenous Literary Criticism in Canada spans from 1892 with E. Pauline Johnson’s “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” to 2010 with Renate Eigenbrod’s “A Necessary Inclusion: Native Literature in Native Studies”. It also collects several oft-mentioned essays, such as Thomas King’s “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” (1990), Margery Fee’s “Writing Orality” (1997), and Jeannette Armstrong’s “Land Speaking” (1998). Reflecting on how Indigenous writers have adapted English while combining it with their mother tongues, The Decolonizing Poetics of Indigenous Literature by Mareike Neuhaus examines the role of Indigenous holophrases (single-word sentences from ancestral languages) in Indigenous literature in English (see also Anne Mongibello in Studies on Individual Writers).

Complementarily, with an innovative “big data” recombination of selections from 10,000 pages of novels in the Western genre, the new poet Jordan Abel’s Un/Inhabited widens the creative response and growing awareness related to land claims and other issues surrounding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Another book that depicts a nineteenth-century West, The Pemmican Eaters by established poet Marilyn Dumont, reclaims John A. Macdonald’s derogatory word for the Métis and evokes the years of Louis Riel’s resistance to the federal government. Also exploring the so-called Indian question is the weighty Broadview collection of nineteenth-century race-related writings by internationally renowned poet and performer E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake, entitled simply Tekahionwake. Although the latter three Indigenous writers focus on the past for their materials, the present search for identity inspires poet Shannon Webb-Campbell’s Still No Word, while Drew Hayden Taylor’s play Cerulean Blue focuses on a contemporary blues band that is blockaded into a First Nations community, hilarity ensuing. In contrast with Cerulean Blue, Richard Wagamese’s novel Medicine Walk is more tragic, addressing as it does a father’s dying wish and the cost of alcoholism to First Nations and Canadian society. Lee Maracle is especially direct in teaching lessons from the strength of tradition in the poems and close-up images of nature in Talking to the Diaspora, suggesting that the trauma of the past can be healed by other remnants — nay, living memories — of earlier times (See also Maracle’s Memory Serves, Non-Fiction).

Debates about race and racialization more generally are ongoing, inspired partly by how Justin Trudeau’s government, elected 2015, renewed the country’s official policy of multiculturalism (which was developed partly through the leadership of his father, Pierre Trudeau, when he was prime minister) through actions such as the plan to welcome up to 25,000 Syrian refugees in 2015 and 2016. A contesting inspiration is the belief that this multiculturalism does not do enough to address racism, to systematize anti-racism, or to acknowledge the diversity of cultures and racializations — hence an article such as “Make-Believing White Civility: Historical Re-Enactments at Fort Langley, British Columbia” by Megan Davies (in Criticism: General Studies). Farther east, one of Canada’s most public poets and scholars (and playfully critical counterpoint to Trudeau) is George Elliott Clarke, whose Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature offers his most recent work on what he calls Africadian identity (a compound of African, Canadian, and Acadian), including a highly regarded bibliography. Another bibliographer and critic, Winfried Siemerling, engages with Clarke’s literary territory in The Black Atlantic Reconsidered and its accompanying website, www.blackatlantic.ca, arguing that African Canadian cultures of literature and music are inseparable from African American cultures and vice versa. (See also “Beyond Windrush and the Original Black Atlantic Routes: Austin Clarke, Race, and Canada’s Influence on Anglophone Caribbean Literature” by Michael Bucknor in Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers, Clarke, Austin). Related comparative studies from 2015 have been compiled by another German Canadianist, Reingard M. Nischik, whose The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature is the source of many relevant essays listed in Criticism: General Studies), such as Eva Gruber’s “Comparative Race Studies: Black and White in the United States and Canada”. Further readings on this topic include Giulia de Gasperi et al.’s Writing Cultural Difference: Italian-Canadian Creative and Critical Works; Elizabeth A. Galway’s “Border Crossings: Depictions of Canadian–American Relations in First World War Children’s Literature”; Fiona Polack’s “Juxtaposing Australian and Canadian Writing”; and Alia Somani’s “What Is Remembered and What Is Forgotten? South Asian Diasporic Histories and the Shifting National Imaginary”.

Notably, in Canada, the study of comparative literature often involves not only diasporic, Commonwealth, Canada–USA, and other multicultural relationships, but also French–English connections. Although these two official languages and their cultures remain “two solitudes” whose distance from each other is now sometimes perceived as less important than the increasingly complex national fabric (e.g., there being, at the provincial and territorial levels, several Indigenous languages that are also official), scholars continue to discover forgotten intersections. For the most recent overview, see Marie Vautier’s “Comparative Canadian/Québécois Literature Studies” in the aforementioned Palgrave Handbook. Related studies from this year include Chloë Taylor’s “Birth of the Suicidal Subject: Nelly Arcan, Michel Foucault, and Voluntary Death”, Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani’s “‘Le “je/jeu” intertextuel’: Textual Interplay and Intertextual Identity in Roxanne Bouchard’s Whisky et paraboles”, and Agnès Whitefield’s “Suggestive Sonorities: Representing and Translating Silence in Works by Québécois Poets Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau and Anne Hébert”. To focus on the cultural production of literature in bilingual Canada, some bilingual magazines are under consideration in Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture: Canadian Periodicals in English and French, 1925–1960 by Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith. This book and accompanying website, www.middlebrowcanada.org, benefit from Hammill’s expertise in literary celebrity and other aspects of middlebrow culture. As with current academic journals, such as Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne (represented in the various sections below), some venues have been and are truly bilingual.

The fact is, however, that Canada in 2015 was not the anglo- and franco-European colony once imagined. Jakob von Baeyer considers the Frygian theory, in “The Displaced Cosmopolitan: Canadian Nationality and World Citizenship in the Fiction of Mavis Gallant”, that Canada skipped a stage, going from pre- to post-national so quickly that writers such as Gallant and many other Canadians, now here or abroad, could only ever be citizens of the world. (Gallant’s death in 2014 did not yet, as of 2015, occasion a multi-authored retrospective on her work, but one will almost certainly emerge — if not from Canada, then from the United States where her readers are more numerous). In Vancouver, for example, French is not second to English in popularity; it is after Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, German, and Tagalog. Montreal is the world’s second largest predominantly French city after Paris, but it is multifariously diverse. The result is a Canada and a nation that is not only multicultural but also multinational, international, and transnational. In Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination, Kathy-Ann Tan proposes “alter-national” (echoing perhaps the “alterna(rra)tives” attributed to Thomas King’s work) alongside “post-national” as an alternative to “de-nationalized” and, I think, decolonial (pp3–4). Influenced (as was von Baeyer) by Gayatri Spivak’s theory of planetarity, Tan’s thesis is “that prevailing notions of citizenship and national identity are, in periods of emergence and crisis, reimagined along transnational and post-national lines of social, political, cultural, sexual belonging” (p11). In Canada, an almost perpetual identity crisis means that other and Othered identifications are often stronger than national identifications.

The classic identity crisis so often attributed to Canada has never lost its appeal, but the regions (i.e., some of the others) tend to assert identity with more confidence — often against stereotypes that marginalize regions and privilege “centres” such as Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto (none of which is geographically central). This decentralization was part of a critique of nationalism manifested by, for example, the variety of 1980s and 1990s anthologies that ran counter to the national canon of anthologies that Robert Lecker and his colleagues (including me) discuss in Anthologizing Canadian Literature: Theoretical and Cultural Perspectives (see Criticism: General Studies). Lecker stops short of predicting “the death of anthologies” (p29) but does worry about consolidation in the publishing industry and its effects on diversity. In 2015, only one anthology had a titular regional identification: By Great Waters: A Newfoundland and Labrador Anthology. Lisa Moore’s Racket was also drawn from Newfoundland, and Wayde Compton and Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s The Revolving City was from British Columbia. (Michael Newton’s Seanchaidh na Coille/Memory-Keeper of the Forest: Anthology of Scottish-Gaelic Literature of Canada, Julia Lin’s AlliterAsian: 20 Years of Ricepaper Magazine, and Dalbir Singh’s Love, Loss, and Longing: South Asian Canadian Plays evoke other parts of the world — and, of course, parts of urban Canada). Regional literature and culture, however, have not disappeared in an era of globalization; they have had instead to work against the magnification of stereotyping on a global scale. María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, for example, edited Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador to dispel the myth of this farthest eastern province, and latecomer to Confederation, as “a remote nothingness with a sea full of cod” (pxiii). It might be remote, but from St. John’s one can travel to Dublin or London as easily as Toronto.

Alongside the national, regional, or niche anthology is the collection of works by an individual author. In 2015, a surprising number of Canadian authors published their Collected Poems. Poets associated with the foregoing margins (which is the position of most Canadian poets today, unfortunately), such as Daryl Hine, Al Pittman, Len Gasparini, John Thompson, and William Hawkins were recognized by their respective Collected Poems (in Hine’s case, The Essential Daryl Hine). Slightly better known poets Phyllis Webb (Peacock Blue) and Jan Zwicky (Chamber Music) also released career-spanning collections, but whereas Zwicky’s is a scant 103 pages, Webb’s is a massive 512. Webb’s status as the co-founder of CBC Radio’s long-running flagship program Ideas helps to justify such a retrospective, which in turn helps to contextualize the modernist mystique resulting from her long period of not publishing. With this tome, her prolificacy may not be doubted. Deft and deeply introspective and political, Webb’s work merits international attention.

More hotly anticipated, however, was Christian Bök’s The Xenotext: Book 1. With stunning originality, Bök encoded a poem into the genome of the E. Coli bacterium so that it could archive and reproduce the poem. The Xenotext: Book 1 is the introduction to the concept, and follow-up books will relate to the next phase of the project, which is to encode the poem into D. Radiodurans, a superbacterium that can survive radiation and outer space.

This enthusiasm is not to suggest that 2015 did not have other exciting releases from major and up-and-coming poets. Anne Carson published not one but three: Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Short Talks (a reissue in the Bricks Books Classics series), and her translation of Antigone. Further highlights came from George Elliott Clarke (with Illicit Sonnets rather than the previously cited scholarship of Odysseys Home), Erin Mouré, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Robyn Sarah (winner of the Governor General’s Award for the poetry of My Shoes Are Killing Me), David Solway, and Zach Wells.

In prose fiction, the list is full of recognized writers such as Caroline Adderson, Andre Alexis (winner of the 2015 Giller Prize), Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, Gil Courtemanche, Elizabeth Hay, Lawrence Hill, Mark Anthony Jarman, Alice Munro (with a reissue, Wilderness Station), Steve McCaffery, Heather O’Neill, Jane Urquhart, Guy Vanderhaeghe (whose Daddy Lenin won the Governor General’s Award for fiction), and Kathleen Winter. A welcome addition is veteran writer Paul Yee, known for his children’s and young adult literature, whose A Superior Man is his first novel for adults and tells the story of the aftermath of Chinese and First Nations involvement in building the national railway.

Beyond the veterans there is, for example, emerging novelist Jean Marc Ah-Sen, whose Grand Menteur, on the list of the Globe and Mail Best 100 Books of 2015, is about Mauritian street gangs. Written in English interspersed with Mauritian Kreol and French, it is a diasporic crime fiction. Another genre bender from a new author is Saltwater Cowboys by Dayle Furlong, a novel about Newfoundland miners who move to northern Alberta for work; it hearkens back to early Canadian Westerns about exploration and mining in the Northwest.

Studies of individual authors in Canada are probably not as diverse as the many publications by new and old writers here. Margaret Atwood remains the most popular subject of study, attracting much more scholarly attention than any other writer. (She attracted attention, too, when in August of 2015 the right-leaning newspaper The National Post — of Conrad Black fame — seemingly censored an essay by her when an editor realized that it was critical of then-prime minister Stephen Harper.) Genre, economics, and feminism are many of the popular topics under discussion after her conclusion of the MaddAddam trilogy. Second to Atwood, Alice Munro is the most written about in 2015, as scholarship has caught up to her winning of the Nobel Prize in 2013. We have yet to see if this big win causes her to rescind her announced retirement. Canada also released a postage stamp bearing Munro’s likeness in 2015, on the occasion of her 84th birthday.

2015 was a year of big anniversaries, too, for some of Canada’s best literary and artistic publishers. According to Quill & Quire (itself turning 80), Coach House Books turned 50, Brick Books 40, and Drawn & Quarterly 25. Canada itself will have to wait until 2017 for its 150th year.