Canada

Introduction

The small cluster of pandemic-related Canadian writings from 2020 grew in 2021, but only a little, possibly because of delays in the international supply chain of the publishing industry. As with many responses to the pandemic, they were often collective. A special issue on pandemics in the journal Canadian Literature was edited by Christine Kim, who highlighted not the global scope of the Covid-19 disease but the dramatically different, and not always well-equipped, local responses. Anthologies emerged: apart: a year of pandemic poetry and prose, edited by Dave Margoshes and Courtney Bates-Hardy, and Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic, edited by Linda M. Morra and Marianne Ackerman. Individual efforts were notable too: Lillian Necatov published il virus, and Philip Resnick released Pandemic Poems (both in Poetry). Daniel Hahn translated Plague Diary from the Portuguese by Gonçalo Tavares (Translations: Letters and Auto/Biography), who wrote daily during his lockdown and whose entries were translated almost as soon as they appeared. To contextualize the pandemic further, Don Sparling published a survey of almost half a century in Canadian fiction about pandemics in an essay in the Central European Journal of Canadian Studies (Criticism: General Studies). I still expect another wave of publications to push to shore next year.

A much bigger trend in literature in Canada, but one whose relevance and resonance might not yet be appreciated by the general public, is that in recent years Indigenous writers have incorporated Indigenous languages into their books more prominently, most obviously in their titles. Usually, it happens when memoirists are restoring visibility to their cultures or when poets are calling attention to language, but it also happens in the six short stories in Norma Dunning’s Tainna (Fiction), whose main title is an Inuktitut word that means “the unseen ones” (the subtitle). Nevertheless, the trend is by far most evident in poetry. In a book about topics such as sexual relationships and life in academia, the Dene and Métis poet Tenille K. Campbell uses Dene in the main title, and the translation in the subtitle: nedi nezu (Good Medicine). Campbell encourages the listener to “mix in the words / from your nation”. Louise Bernice Halfe, also known as Sky Dancer, released awâsis: kinky and dishevelled with the main title in Cree—though I am not certain about a translation in the subtitle in this case. Francine Merasty’s debut, however, gives non-Cree speakers the translation after the slash: Iskotew Iskwew/Fire Woman: Poetry of a Northern Rez Girl. The book reflects on the traumas elicited by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in 2017. A more publicly established multimodal artist, John McDonald released Kitotam: He Speaks to It, a title (also in Cree with an English translation) that highlights his work as a performance poet and beat poet (all in Poetry).

In Indigenous memoirs, we see the trend in Darrel J. McLeod’s Peyakow: Reclaiming Cree Dignity; Eli Baxter’s Aki-wayn-zih: A Person as Worthy as the Earth, with a title in Anishinaabaymowin; and Nicola I. Campbell’s Spílexm: A Weaving of Recovery, Resilience, and Resurgence, with a title in NłeɁkepmxcín (all in Letters and Auto/Biography). These Indigenous words speak to a confidence in the assertion of Indigenous languages in English contexts, to the co-existence of these languages even when English is known to be destructive as a weapon of colonialism, and more generally to the act of translation in any communication.

Of course, other languages get the same treatment in a country as vast and diverse as Canada, all in poetry here. I have already mentioned Lillian Necatov’s Italian-titled il virus. An example appears in Arabic too, Rayya Liebich’s Min Hayati, which might be loosely translated as “from my life” or “from my dear,” a book that meditates upon the author’s mother’s death. The loss of a maternal figure, but this time a grandmother, is also deeply felt in Adrian De Leon’s Barangay: An Offshore Poem, which uses the Tagalog word for boat and for neighbourhood to grieve not only a person but also the lost ability to move linguistically between communities. Possibly drawing on Old Norse but more explicitly writing about human-nature relationships and bodily contaminations, Rebecca Salazar offers a kenning in sulphurtongue. (See also the kenning of Therese Estacion’s Phantompains). Closer to English and its loan languages is a French title: Aaron Tucker’s Catalogue d’oiseaux. Catherine Graham’s Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric invokes the Latin diphthong in a lyric essay in response to a cancer diagnosis (on schizophrenia as illness, see also ky perraun’s Miraculous Sickness). In another Latinate title, George Murray offers us Problematica: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. And of course there is “simply” English—but a lesser-known example—from Megan Gail Coles, Satched, a word that means “soaked through” or “weighed down” in Newfoundland English and that, in this case, alludes to a sense of ecological despair that permeates fragile environments and remote regions such as Newfoundland and Labrador under exploitative capitalism. (Although all of the examples above are in Poetry, there is also one example in Drama: the use of Portugese in Elaine Ávila’s Fado: The Saddest Music in the World.)

Steeping with Satched in a local-global discourse, Andreae Callanan’s The Debt (Poetry) examines the generational problem of Newfoundland and Labarador’s financial subservience to Canada (and previously Britain) and its “Crown land”. Nature itself is made complicit by the colonial legacy: “We are all debtors here, beholden / to this jagged place for every lungful / of spruce-laden salted air” (see also Neil ten Kortenaar’s Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence in Criticism: General Studies). Relatedly, her husband Mark Callanan in Romantic (Poetry) dramatizes the cost of a parking ticket “that foretells / the cost of spending / too long in one place”, but he also imagines being “a vacant, / poorly stitched and half-inflated / bladder of a pig that’s kicked free”. The allusion to Canadian football in the regional economic subtext invites a connection to the satirical study in Henry Adam Svec’s Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs (Fiction, but multimodal). Svec claims to fear that “these songs will be commodified as a bound, bourgeois shelf decoration, the base reality of so many ‘folk’ anthologies, and subsequently as episodic television series, T-shirts, and echoic VR experiences. Who knows the limits of the logic of capital?” Indeed, the commodification turns inward from things we see, wear, and experience to our bodies themselves, as in the culture of YouTube consumerism and body branding in Daphné B.’s Made-Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture Under Late Capitalism, translated from French by Alex Manley (Translation: Non-Fiction). Regional economics can only be understood in national contexts that are themselves implicated in global economics.

Thus, issues of diaspora and postcolonialism remain central in Canadian literature and letters. The Guernica press recognizes this reality by publishing international texts in Canada, such as the Vietnamese-American author Anvi Hoàng’s Why Do You Look at Me and See a Girl? (Letters and Auto/Biography), in addition to Canada-focused books such as Ewan Whyte’s Shifting Paradigms (Criticism: General Studies). In another story that involves captive women, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s The Son of the House interrogates class and gender in a Nigerian setting that reflects much of the patriarchy of the surrounding world (Fiction). And Thomas King’s classic short story from the early 1990s, “Borders,” was reanimated in 2021 as a graphic novel by illustrator Natasha Donovan, drawing out the complexities of Indigenous nations stuck between colonial nation-states (Miscellaneous). Scholarship on the related topic of multiculturalism includes Daniel McNeil’s essay “Even Canadians Find It a Bit Boring: A Report on the Banality of Multiculturalism” in the Canadian Journal of Communication, which entertains the notion that proponents of official multiculturalism were out-of-touch elites. For a reinterrogation of the nationalist thematic (and thus generalization) of multiculturalism, see Shane Neilson’s “Return of Thematic: Diversity as the New Survival in Canadian Literature” (both in Criticism: General Studies).

Transnational interplay is not only economic; it is also cultural and literary, and it might be indirectly related to what appears to be a surge in 2021 of LGBTQ+ writing in Canada. Daniel Hannah’s Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form (Criticism: General Studies) offers a fascinating thesis about “modernism’s emergence from a troubling of masculine privilege, mobility, and desire” (according to the publisher, McGill-Queen’s University Press). Kirby (a mononym) makes a related but provocatively simpler claim in Poetry Is Queer (Poetry, but multimodal). About understanding queerness, Kirby states that “I’m tired of making it easy” but also conveys youthful enthusiasm for queer love and romance. A similar sense of affirmation comes from Tanya Boteju’s Bruised (Fiction), a coming-of-age story centered on roller derby and an LGBTQ+ community (for a much darker vision in the context of murdered gay men in the horror genre, see David Demchuk’s Red X in Fiction). To help acknowledge and understand the youth in such a community, editors Lindsay Herriot and Kate Fry assembled Trans Youth Stories: An Intergenerational Dialogue after the “Trans Tipping Point” (Anthologies). In keeping with trans methodologies that are about interconnections, multimodalities and interdisciplinarity, Kristi Carpenter and James Brunton edited TransNarratives: Scholarly and Creative Works on Transgender Experience (Criticism: General Studies). For more scholarship, see the special issue on queer bodies in Studies in Canadian Literature edited by Domenico A. Beneventi and Jorge Calderón (Journals: Special Issues) and Mathieu Aubin’s essay in the Journal of Canadian Studies, “Writing in Their Time: A Queer and Feminist Analysis of Vancouver’s 1979 Writing in Our Time Series”.

Why might queer writing be a trend in 2021, if in fact it is? One answer might be the pandemic, as suggested by the poet and musician Ivan Coyote’s Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures (Letters and Auto/Biography). Coyote’s book begins to answer fan mail and messages from years past that could finally be top of mind during the lockdown. For Vivek Shraya, another multimodal performer and writer, in How To Fail as a Popstar (Drama), the lockdown afforded the irony of not having a massive audience for music and theatre, though the pandemic is not on Shraya’s introspective list of 40 reasons for her “failure” in the music video (“Showing Up”, extended cut, on Vimeo). Indeed, the lockdown’s shift to the interiority of physical spaces might well have become an ontological shift too. My collaborator Morgen Mills observed to me that “masks are obviously powerful metaphors for many things, but for trans people in particular they are significant—a feeling that ‘everyone is hiding, not just us’”. With a related sense of universality but with a foregrounded imperative of critique, the illustrator Syan Rose published Our Work Is Everywhere: An Illustrated Oral History of Queer and Trans Resistance (Miscellaneous. For another theme of resistance in a comic, see also Gord Hill’s The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book: Revised and Expanded, also in Miscellaneous). Quite possibly, the trend is related to the continuing success of a relatively new and youthful publisher, Metonymy Press of Montreal (est. 2015), and its many new books, including Helen Chau Bradley’s Personal Attention Roleplay and Callum Angus’s A Natural History of Transition (both in Fiction). All these books from 2021 demonstrate the vigour of queer writing in Canada during a pandemic when “history” and “transition” often seem to have stopped, only to spring ahead into new urgencies and emergencies.