Canada

Introduction

Looking back the short distance from 2017 (Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation) to 2016, we can see that many of the concerns of creative writers and scholars in Canada relate to dominant narratives of national and corporate power over people and the land. Now some of the most prominent critical figures in the country, Indigenous writers — primarily the First Nations but also the Inuit and the Métis — are establishing collective and individual voices as never before, thanks in part to extensive engagement with social media as a political tool and community builder, and in part to awareness of colonialism raised further by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Report in 2015. The TRC focused on Canada’s residential school system, residential schools being the places where government and church worked together to assimilate Indigenous children, often brutally (see also “Cultural Genocide and the First Nations of Upper Canada: Some Romantic-Era Roots of Canada’s Residential School System” by Kevin Hutchings in Criticism: General Studies). So, in Burning in the Midnight Dream, the poet Louise Bernice Halfe responds directly, sometimes in Cree, to the TRC and its process, and to her family’s history in the residential school context. “I don’t like walking backwards,” she writes. Implying a contrast of walking with flying, she continues: “Old ones haunt my thoughts / tiny spirits that brush / the colour off my wings”. With a similar starting point, debut poet Lisa Bird-Wilson’s The Red Files takes its title from one of the residential school archives in which she discovers and orders the traumatic evidence of colonization on her family. Like rising star Jordan Abel’s Injun, which analyzes almost 10,000 pages of novels from the genre of the Western to sensitize readers to offensive keywords and to simulate colonial destruction of Indigenous languages, The Red Files takes stock of colonial repositories of cultures in an ongoing Indigenous project of reclaiming land, culture, and words, all of which connect — their connection being one of the major lessons from Indigenous writers for colonial peoples. Abel’s work, conceptually deft and extraordinarily interactive through simulation and critique, is likely to be read long into the future.

Documenting and studying the literary and cultural works of many of these writers is now a task that is shared by more than one generation of Indigenous and settler scholars. Probably the most comprehensive book to appear in 2016 is Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures, edited by Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra, a book organized by positioning, images and myths, debates, new issues, and pedagogy. It contains essays by a wide variety of Indigenous scholars, including Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan), Craig Womack (Creek), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee), Janice Acoose (Saulteaux), and Jo-Ann Episkenew (Métis), plus several essays by emerging and settler scholars. In the context of drama and constructed identity, there is also Performing Indigeneity: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, edited by Yvette Nolan and Ric Knowles; it is promoted as “the first [such study] in which all of the contributors are Indigenous artists or academics”, and it thereby answers a call from Indigenous figures and their allies who claim that now is the time for non-Indigenous figures to clear the stage. Given the present (2017) urgency of debates about cultural appropriation of Indigenous painting and voices in Canada (e.g., the Woodland style of Norval Morrisseau, and the story of Chanie Wenjack, who froze to death after escaping his residential school in 1966), this claim deserves to be heeded or at least acknowledged with the utmost care. In the North American context more generally (a necessary move given that many Indigenous nations on Turtle Island have traditional territories that cross the border), the other book is The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature, edited by Deborah L. Madsen, an entry in the familiar series of encyclopedia-style reference books. These major contributions to scholarship are necessary partly because of the speed at which the debates and issues are evolving. Shorter studies from 2016 have been included below (in Criticism: General Studies) by Jill Carter, Warren Cariou, Katy Young Evans, and others. I want to mention, in particular, Alana Bell’s “Truth and Reconciliation in Life Writing: The Year in Canada”, because it argues that the TRC’s Report is less likely than memoirs to reach a broad audience and thereby affect the hearts and minds of people in Canada (on life writing, see also David Constantine’s The Life-Writer in Fiction; on the TRC, see also In This Together: Fifteen Stories of Truth and Reconciliation in Anthologies; for a thematically related trio of plays about struggling with and reconciling difference, see Daniel MacIvor’s Try, in Drama).

Acts of poetic resistance and interrogation of power occur alongside the Indigenous context in Canada (if “outside the context” is impossible), as they do elsewhere. Moez Surani’s experimental poetry in عملڍة Operación Opération Operation 行 动 Oперация) (which is “operation” in the six languages of the founding United Nations) is composed of an inventory of code names for military operations; for example, Desert Fox and Climate Change (for climate- and environment-related literature, see Penn Kemp’s Barbaric Cultural Practice and Jan Zwicky’s The Long Walk in Poetry; Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Spawning Grounds and Alissa York’s The Naturalist in Fiction; Ellen Close and Braden Griffiths’ My Family and Other Endangered Species in Drama; Wendy Whelan-Stuart’s “Sap Rising: Bodies Figured as Trees in H.D., Atwood and Glück” in Criticism: General Studies; and Melissa Le Sheung Ying on Monique Proulx, Jane Bone on Margaret Atwood, and Shaun A. Stevenson on M. T. Kelly in Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). Surani’s Operation suggests that governments use poetry to name violence, not always euphemistically. Danielle LaFrance’s Friendly + Fire considers similar themes: “MILITARY LINGO SUBLIMATES SMACK TALK FROM HERE ON IN”. In contrast to the stridency of military commands, the insistently lower-case bill bissett, aptly described by his publisher as “Canada’s shaman of sound and performance poetry”, released Th Book in 2016, the latest in over 70 other volumes of poetry by this prolific wizard of anti-establishmentarianism. Although bissett was once censured in Parliament, Stephen Collis might be the only poet in Canada to have been sued for as much as $5.6 million (Canadian) for obstructing work on an oil pipeline through a forest, his work later used in court as evidence (the suit against him and his allies later dropped). His Once in Blockadia recounts protests in a modernized Wordsworthian fashion: “Dear Imagination—lighten up! Your part is human protest / But there are no visionary scenes…”. Similarly adopting the modes of classic poets, George Elliott Clarke, Canada’s Poet Laureate and arguably the best ear in the business, started in 2016 a three-book project entitled Canticles, a Poundian epic that addresses the history of the transatlantic slave trade and other issues contextualized by his own style: “An epic poet is like that dog, upholding / Classicism and Virtue, despite fresh, imminent Decay, and current, / Ongoing Decadence” (see also Clint Burnam’s Pound @ Guantánamo in Poetry). If I may link “Decadence” to greed, I find a small “protest” in Sharon McCartney’s laconic, aphoristic Metanoia (possibly my favourite of 2016, and a beautifully designed book too), where she links greed to fear, which she defines as “the false conviction / that if someone else has what I want / I am diminished”. Politically, of course, Canadian poets (and other writers) are active and engaged, working to familiarize the public and the nation with major problems of our ways of life, hoping to create social change by convincing readers that it is needed and possible.

This is not to say that all writing is political in the same way. The consummate experimenter Anne Carson released Float in 2016, a collection delivered in a clear plastic box in which the unbound texts “float” separately, open to rearrangement: death-of-the-author politics. In a dream in Weyman Chan’s Human Tissue, the poet reports, “Everyone had gathered round the large aquarium / to see a brown clam hanging off a wedge of rot. / I said, Who wants to see a new life form?” In the context of 2016 (pre-150th anniversary), he seems to be speaking about a Canada about to be born out of a primordial, perhaps colonial, “rot”, but this semblance is my reading in polarized times. As if answering Chan, Phil Hall, in Conjugation, plays with sound and sense: “sew dew, eye so do I sew dew-eye so, do I?” M. Travis Lane, in one of the long poems in her Witch of the Inner Wood, asks a different question, one that arguably secularizes and re-genders phallocentric creation myths by making God a witch: “What is the world / but the reflections of a thought, / a witch’s thought?” (for other feminist work that reappropriates labels such as “witch”, see, for example, Erin Wunker’s highly anticipated Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life in Non-fiction). The list of similarly established poets publishing in 2016 is too long to repeat, but readers should look to Michael Crummey, Steven Heighton, Laurence Hutchman, Joy Kogawa, Daphne Marlatt, Hoa Nguyen, Tim Lilburn, Robert Moore, Lisa Robertson, Carmine Starnino, and Aritha Van Herk. Of the so-far unmentioned new poets in 2016, many deserve mention, and here are but a few: Aaron Kreuter, Alexandria Oliver (whose sonneteering in Let the Empire Down is a highlight of the year), and Vivek Shraya. The country is privileged to have such a diversity of voices that people want to hear in spite of their differing, often contesting, views.

In thinking through the political implications of Canadian writing in 2016, I notice especially that so many writers attract readers through intertextuality and crossover genres, and thereby politicize the borders of genre (see also “Border Studies in the Gutter: Canadian Comics and Structural Borders” by Brenna Clarke Gray in Criticism: General Studies). For example, Mona Awad explores the structural implications of Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” in 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. Jen Sookfong Lee works through the murder mystery in The Conjoined. André Alexis rejuvenates crime fiction with his character-driven The Hidden Keys, which was reportedly inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Another adventure, Gary Barwin’s Yiddish for Pirates recounts a quest for the Fountain of Youth in the voice of an ancient Jewish parrot:

Second verse same as the first, a little bit more oysgemutshet worn out, a little bit worse. Before he climbed out the window, Moishe left a letter for his parents. If the world is a book, I must read it all.

Likewise, immortality seems possible in the sci-fi of M. G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia, where the problem with implanted memories in technologically long-lived people is “Nostalgia Syndrome”. Veering away from speculative fiction after her MaddAddam trilogy, Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed rewrites William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Nadia Bozak interrupts her Western-esque Border Trilogy with novelistic short fiction for young adults, Thirteen Shells (see also Lisa Moore’s Flannery, in Fiction, for a YA novel that is critical of body imaging in the era of social media and the 2008 economic crash). Guy Gavriel Kay’s Children of Earth and Sky could be described as historical fantasy. Playwright Robert Chafe’s Two Man Tent seems part novel, part short story, part script (for more on Newfoundland drama, see also The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Plays: Volume 3, edited by Denyse Lynde, in Drama). Douglas Coupland’s Bit Rot is not always clearly fiction or non-fiction, but a narrator ponders addictive technology and wonders “what it must be like smoking while using the Internet. It must feel holy.” The re-emergence and validation of genre fiction (also through recent trends in graphic novels and superhero movies) have attuned writers and readers to genre, almost as if we were in a golden age of pulp fiction once more.

Contemporaneity and history are in many ways a dividing line in the Canadian literary market. Some readers look mainly for mirrors of society today, and Clea Young delivers with Teardown, highly contemporary short fiction about love and living through precarity and consumerism. Differently historical but still very recent, Stephen Henighan’s The Path of the Jaguar goes back 20 years to the end of the Guatemalan civil war to recount a tale informed by Mayan religion. Going farther south, Cora Siré imagines contemporary South America, but with a fictional country (where we would find Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay) and magic-realist inflections in Behold Things Beautiful. Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing leaps intergenerationally from China in the 1940s, through the 1960s, and into the 1980s. Yasuko Thanh’s Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains explores the Hanoi Poison Plot of 1908. Kevin Major’s Found Far and Wide journeys through the history of the Newfoundland sealing disaster of 1914, the First World War, and the prohibition era in New York. And then we have Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience, a play that became a successful TV show and has only recently (2016) appeared in print — a synergistic rollout timed to the opportunities of the moment.

These sorts of journeys through space and time preoccupy not only creative writers but also scholars. The eminent Carole Gerson’s essay “Canadian Literature at Home and Abroad: International Contexts of W. D. Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889) and Robert Weaver’s Canadian Short Stories (1960)” examines these canon-makers in confederating times. Reingard Nischik continues his extensive work in this area with Comparative North American Studies: Transnational Approaches to American and Canadian Literature and Culture. Recognizing that transnational cosmopolitanism is not restricted to an imagined urban society exclusive of Indigenous involvement, Frank Schulze-Engler published “Global History, Indigenous Modernities, Transcultural Memory: World War I and II in Native Canadian, Aboriginal Australian, and Māori Fiction”, likely of special interest to JCL readers.

In Canadian literature, one of the most recognized of all transnational writers is Michael Ondaatje. Of all the individual authors under consideration by scholars publishing on Canadian literature in 2016 (though we cannot claim that the bibliography is complete, given the constraints of space and the thousands of primary and secondary sources that are less conventionally academic, literary, or highbrow, etc.), Ondaatje was the subject of nine essays, the highest number that we could include for the year (Alice Munro had this honour in 2015 and remains nearly as popular as Ondaatje in 2016, with six essays; see Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). A couple of the essays focus on his 2011 novel The Cat’s Table, a few more on his still relatively neglected 1976 novel Coming through Slaughter, and all eight return to familiar themes in Ondaatje studies of postcolonialism, postmodernism, history, mourning, space, and haptics (that is, the complexities of the sense of touch).

It is tempting to wonder what the bibliography for 2017 will bring, when the celebrations and protests of Canada’s 150th year since Confederation in 1867 will have come and gone. Will there be more Canadiana — 2113: Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush (in Anthologies); Fifty Percent of Mountaineering Is Uphill: The Life of Canadian Mountain Rescue Pioneer Willi Pfisterer (in Non-fiction); Sounding Thunder: The Stories of Francis Pegahmagabow (in Criticism: General Studies); the playfully unexpected juxtapositions that can be found in the Non-fiction of The Hockey Scribbler and Queers Were Here: Heroes and Icons of Queer Canada? How will CanLit icons such as Ondaatje fare in the scholarship when Indigeneity is likely to be as timely as transnationality in new and re-examined conceptions of Canada? In a Canada of global proportions, how will the wider cultural and intergenerational mosaic from Europe interact with the Indigenous peoples or their place-names, as in Helen Hajnoczky’s Magyarázni (in Poetry), “where Hungarian is Latin, where / the Suburban is broken down at the Petro-Can just / outside of town, bus broken down in the Kananaskis”? Is this why Canada will still matter to Europe and the Commonwealth? Will the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, follow once more in his father’s (former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s) footsteps to China, as his brother Alexandre Trudeau did in 2016 with Barbarian Lost: Travels in the New China (in Non-fiction)? As the nation changes, 2017 will be an opportunity for milestones in literature and major political statements that will respond to 150 years of coast-to-coast colonization and nation-building that began, in fact, much earlier, and that will attempt to shift the course of national development into a more sustainable future.