Canada

Introduction

In 2018, literary production in Canada was affected dramatically by renewed discussion about the power of storytelling and the literature industries’ regulation of that power. The editors at Bookthug changed the name of the press to Book*hug, a manifestation of a culture becoming more aware of how language triggers intense feelings and more willing to minimize negative discourse. The same press published but then recalled the poet Shannon Webb-Campbell’s Who Took My Sister? (Poetry) when its depictions of true crime provoked a critical response from a victim’s family. The book is slated for release under a new title and with very different content in 2019, demonstrating sensitivity and responsibility – qualities needed more and more as we listen to each other and the planet – at a time when debates about free speech and freedom of expression are ongoing in creative, academic and political circles.

Harkening back to much earlier concerns about censorship, the once controversial Leonard Cohen’s book, The Flame (Poetry), was published posthumously in 2018. Cohen died in 2016, forty years after his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers shocked readers with its brazen and problematic sexual fantasies. Tempered by the years, The Flame rekindles Cohen’s romance with mortality and offers a glimpse into his notebooks and their creative processes. (Larry Mathew’s An Exile’s Perfect Letter, in Fiction, gets its title from a Cohen poem.) In a different form of redux, Margaret Atwood’s 2018 re-release of her 1971 book Power Politics (Poetry) comments indirectly on the fiery tweeted disagreements about (“bad”) feminism that she has provoked and stoked recently. Atwood once again appears to be the single most interesting author to study in Canada, at least by the measure of the many examples listed below in Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers. But an even more prolific mainstay of the CanLit scene, George Bowering, has produced another novel, No One (Fiction), and Rebecca Wigod has published a biography of him, He Speaks Volumes. John Metcalf (in addition to his own collection of short fiction, Finding Again the World) has edited a selection of Hugh Hood’s short fiction, Light Shining out of Darkness, which echoes the title of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (Fiction), the first glimpse here of the elemental theme I explore below, light being borne by air and fire. All these writers have moved between forms and genres, but it is Dionne Brand who published in two of them in 2018: The Blue Clerk (Poetry) and Theory (Fiction). (From a younger generation, Jordan Tannahill did too, in Drama and Fiction, and so did Priscila Uppal, who died tragically this year but published irrepressibly [see Poetry and Anthologies]). Brand’s books reflect on acts of imaginative writing and the ways in which theory becomes practice.

Brand is a major writer whose career began in the 1980s when the CanLit era was rapidly transforming, becoming more inclusive through the disintegration of the national canon of the “two solitudes”: English Canada and French Canada (a relevant study from 2018 being Patrick Coleman’s Equivocal City: French and English Novels of Postwar Montreal). This generation is represented in CanLit poetry by examples such as A.F. Moritz’s retrospective, The Sparrow, and new collections by David Solway, Agnes Walsh, Lorna Crozier and Fred Wah and Rita Wong. In fiction, other authors established in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Joy Kogawa, Miriam Toews and Lisa Moore, all published books which together represent the wide geographic diversity and various cultural backgrounds of Canadians writing for the page.

More specifically and imperatively, Indigenous action against colonialism and colonial nationalism has become a major theme of Canadian literature, as explained in Why Indigenous Literatures Matter by Daniel Heath Justice. The reasons are also evident in Anthologies such as Indian Act: Residential School Plays, edited by Donna Michelle St. Bernard and Daniel David Moses; and kisiskâciwan: Indigenous Voices from Where the River Flows Swiftly, edited by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber and Talking back to the Indian Act: Critical Readings in Settler Colonial Histories, edited by Mary-Ellen Kelm and Keith Smith. Singly authored books include Eden Robinson’s Trickster Drift (Fiction), the second instalment in a trilogy; Drew Hayden Taylor’s Sir John A. (Drama), a title that engages with Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald and Louise Bernice Halfe’s retrospective selection Sôhkêyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer (Poetry). Like some of Taylor’s and Robinson’s work, Halfe’s places emphasis on having courage and strength in the face of ongoing colonization.

If Halfe’s “Sky Dancer” calls upon us to understand our identities as intertwined with the elements, we have a wide variety of texts that tease out the significance of the things we make and the things they are made of. We could begin this inquiry with Kate Braid’s Elemental (Poetry). For illustrations focusing more on a single element, see Nasser Hussain’s SKY WRI TEI NGS (writing from Leeds through Coach House Books) (Poetry), Kath MacLean’s Translating Air (Poetry), and Ella Zeltserman’s The Air Is Elastic (Drama). There is also a surprising number of titles that refer to light, such as Richard Wagamese’s Starlight (Fiction), Joelle Barron’s Ritual Lights (Poetry), and Dave Bidini’s Midnight Light (Letters and Autobiography). Related to light is fire: Jordan Tannahill’s Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom (Drama), Rawi Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society (Fiction) and a translation of Pan Bouyoucas’s Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife by Sheila Fischman (Translations). In contrast with fire is water, as in Nicholas Bradley’s Rain Shadow (Poetry); Sharon Bala’s The Boat People (Fiction); and Robert Chafe’s Between Breaths (Drama), which is about Newfoundland’s famous whale saver, the Whale Man. The land is connected to water in Stephen Henighan’s Blue River and Red Earth (Fiction), and it is further acknowledged in Cecelia Frey’s Lovers Fall back to the Earth (Fiction) and Veena Gokhale’s Land for Fatimah (Fiction). Probably these prominent references to earth, water, fire, and sky could be found often in any year, but in 2018 the United Nations convened the first global meeting to work against air pollution, which has remained in the Canadian imagination thanks to the success of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer since 1989. The UN’s recent focus on single-use plastic pollution and its accumulation, and the surprising circulation of plastics through the elements, have contributed to a growing awareness of a need to act now in many areas of science and public policy. In the context of this urgency, Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky published Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis. To say that we live in a time when humans are finally realizing their manifest destruction of earth, air, and water – often through fire – would be a dramatic understatement in petrocultural Canada, but these writers are at least maintaining concern through their works.

Much of the political landscape that grew the Canadian extractive industries, in spite of rising alarm over the natural environment, was shaped at the end of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st by a succession of federal governments. Noting the typically Canadian irony of federal politics – and arguing that neoliberal notions of meritocracy are a sham – was Alain Deneault’s Mediocracy: The Politics of the Extreme Centre (Translations). Meanwhile, two former prime ministers published books in 2018. The Conservative leader and diligent promoter of Alberta’s oil industry, Stephen Harper, gave us Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption (Non-fiction). From slightly before the “disruption” of the Liberals as the “natural governing party” of Canada came the Liberal leader Jean Chretien and his new memoir, My Stories, My Times (Translations). From one step further back, we can relive the political spectacle of circa 1968 with Trudeaumania (about former Liberal prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau) by Paul Litt (Non-fiction). With Theresa May in power in the UK, it was also especially timely in 2018 for reflections on women in government, such as Monique Bégin’s Ladies, Upstairs! My Life in Politics and After (Letters and Autobiography), a recollection of the women’s movement in electoral politics by one of the first women elected to the Canadian House of Commons. Without the vote, such positions would have been inaccessible to women, as suggested by such studies as Joan Sangster’s One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada.

Compared at least to those of the elected officials, perhaps a more productively fantastic sort of memoir was the renowned playwright Tetsuro Shigematsu’s 1 Hour Photo (Drama), which followed up on his acclaimed story of his father, Empire of the Son (2017), with the story of a friend of the family, the 90-year old Mas Yamamoto. But more conventional memoirs were abundant in 2018. The novelist Elizabeth Hay turned to memoir with All Things Consoled: A Daughter’s Memoir. Daughters in particular were a theme, with examples such as David Chariandy’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter, Marusya Bociurkiw’s Food Was Her Country: The Memoir of a Queer Daughter, and Heather O’Neill’s darkly comic Wisdom in Nonsense: Invaluable Lessons from My Father. A related scholarly text was Tanis MacDonald’s The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies. Another memoir of special interest to readers of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature is Michelle J. Smith and Clare Bradford’s From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literature, 1840-1940 (Criticism: General Studies). In the age of #MeToo and the Canadian inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, these books seem well-timed. Indigenous writers also published significant memoirs this year, including another political memoir, an account of working toward Inuit self-government by the first premier of Nunavut: Let’s Move On: Paul Okalik Speaks Out. The highly respected addictions counsellor Doug Knockwood also published Doug Knockwood, Mi’kmaw Elder: Stories, Memories, Reflections and Darrel J. McLeod released Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age (all in Letters and Autobiography).

Canada is a place with many challenges resulting from colonialism and missed opportunities for leadership on the environment and climate-related transitions, but its artistic, literary and scholarly production is remarkable. Compared to some of its allies and neighbours, it is remote enough and small enough to need a variety of allies in the world. These books attest to the so-called national conversation about hopes that can be shared and problems we often face alone, problems that sometimes need widespread cooperation to overcome.