Canada

After more than three years of the Covid-19 pandemic, another raft of publications on that topic has arrived. The tide moved slowly; the pandemic caused shortages in materials in many different industries, including publishing, and writers themselves might have been slow simply because the pandemic has kept a grip on us. Even today, many people remain masked as cases of the illness continue to spike occasionally in communities around the world.

In this context, the sociologist Amy Kaler’s Until Further Notice: A Year in Pandemic Time [Letters and Auto/biography] charts daily responses to the changes in habits occasioned by the new dangers of public and even private indoor spaces. Meanwhile, Mitchell Consky was applying the documentarian skills of a journalist to domestic spaces transformed by the terminal cancer of his father in Home Safe: A Memoir of End-of-Life Care During Covid-19 [Letters and Auto/biography; see also Heather Patterson’s Shadows and Light: A Physician’s Lens on COVID]. For both Consky and Kaler, the experience of time was altered; often it slowed down even as new developments rapidly came and went. Interestingly, the ongoing pandemic was tied up in the sense of an ending in Bruce Whiteman’s The Invisible World is in Decline: Book IX (Poetry), the conclusion of a remarkable 40-year long poem. But rather than conclude, in Next Time There’s a Pandemic [Letters and Auto/biography], Vivek Shraya explores how we can learn, for a future emergency, how to be better at surviving, personally and interpersonally. Studying this theme of human connection in pandemic literature, Wendy Roy looks to women writers such as Emily St. John Mandel and Saleema Nawaz to assess the value of community and communication in the face of rampant contagion [Criticism: General Studies]. And Christine Kim, editor of Canadian Literature, recontextualizes the pandemic in terms of dystopian and utopian fiction in “Endemic Times” [Criticism: General Studies].

Indeed, the pandemic has inspired a lot of contemplation and creativity that addresses the apocalyptic potentials of disease, naturally, but also climate change and crisis in the Anthropocene. Billed as a dystopian plague novel, A Suitable Companion to the End of the World by Robert McGill [Fiction] tells the story of a suicidal runner who encounters an amnesiac who is under threat from corporations and governments seeking infection control. Meanwhile, Mari-Lou Rowley’s Catastrophe Theories [Poetry] draws on mathematics and evokes oneirology to imagine antidotes to the technological determinism of our age. This technological determinism is nowhere more relevant than in Victoria Hetherington’s Autonomy [Fiction], wherein an online artificial intelligence named Julian is one of the only hopes for survival in the face of a society-collapsing plague. In Madhur Anand’s Parasitic Oscillations [Poetry], birdsong can only be heard online, because the birds have been killed; in Asa Boxer’s The Narrow Cabinet [Poetry], the apocalypse is of zombies. And in Gabe Calderon’s Màgòdiz [Fiction, its title drawing on the word for “rebel” in the Anishinaabe language], a war that no one remembers has left a scorched earth inhabited by scattered resistance groups that contend with threats of enslavement and natural disasters such as flooding.

The pandemics in these works can easily be read as parallels to global overheating, and in J.D. Kurtness’s Aquariums [Fiction] a marine biologist travels to the Arctic, where her expertise in building simulated ecosystems for zoos is juxtaposed with macroclimatic breakdown. The ice also melts in Tasnuva Hayden’s An Orchid Astronomy [Poetry]. In Kasia van Schaik’s We Have Never Lived on Earth [Fiction], the environmental emergency manifests itself in both forest fires and deadly warm oceans. Against the backdrop of uneven global overheating, Joanne Leow’s seas move away [Poetry] explores a world of migration, from Singapore to Saskatchewan. With a different diasporic background but a related plot of migration in the Anthropocene, Jaspreet Singh’s How to Hold a Pebble [Poetry] seeks to uphold small things against the crushing magnitudes of declining empires and fallen worlds.

There are signs of hope. For Gary Saunders in Earthkeeping [Non-Fiction], our climate anxiety can still be held at bay by rediscovering joy in nature. In parallel with Singh’s remarkably positive outlook and the do-it-yourselfism of his “how-to” title, Chris Turner sees the bright side in How to Be a Climate Optimist: Blueprints for a Better World [Non-Fiction]. Britt Wray aims for a different kind of blueprint in Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis [Non-Fiction], and cultural critics Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offer us Rehearsals for Living [Non-Fiction], a constructive dialogue in the face of anti-Black racism and neo-colonialism.

It is the neo-colonial and post-colonial and simply colonial themes that were most prevalent in Canada in 2022, even if the pandemic and the related apocalyptic malaise might seem more timely at first. This trend is a continuation of that which I noted in last year’s bibliography: strong evidence of strong pride in Canada’s many Indigenous nations and communities, and vigorous literary and discursive efforts toward the ideals of reconciliation and decolonization. If these sources sometimes appear to be far from the literature that is the focus of this journal, they are simultaneously essential to what is sometimes called the national conversation, the cultural context to which literature responds. Indeed, these sources sometimes literally set the terms of the debates that creative writers take up in their works. So, for example, the politician and author Jody Wilson-Raybould (Kwak’wala) released True Reconciliation: How to Be a Force for Change [Letters and Auto/biography], expressing the view that “reconciliation” has become a buzzword that may never have been sincerely used to begin with. Acknowledging that reconciliation is not always an appropriate term or framework, editors Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, Aimée Craft, and Hōkūlani K. Aikau collected the essays in Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation [Criticism: General Studies]. Relatedly, John Brady McDonald (Cree and Métis) in Carrying It Forward: Letters from Kistahpinânihk [Letters and Auto/biography] assigns the responsibility of reconciliation to Canadians, not Indigenous peoples, and expands the term to address specific types of oppression, such as sex work and incarceration. More confrontationally, for Annharte (Marie Annharte Baker, Anishinaabe), the goal should be “retaliation not reconciliation” in Miskwagoode [Poetry, using the Anishinaabe word for a woman wearing red]. The calls to action are diverse and challenging.

The word Kistahpinânihk in McDonald’s title is a Cree (Néhiyaw) word for a gathering place that means, more specifically, his home town of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan (which is not far from my own home town of North Battleford). (Riffing on notions of home, the Dene writer Katłįà published her third book, the novel This House is Not a Home, and the Cree writer David A. Robertson released his first novel for adults, The Theory of Crows, both in Fiction.) As I observed last year, Indigenous writers have become much more likely to use Indigenous words and phrases in their English titles or as titles on their own. Often, translations are readily offered, but more often now the responsibility of translation is shifting to readers of English. I was able to infer, not necessarily correctly, that the title of Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know: Indigenous Re-Search Methodologies [2^nd edition, Criticism: General Studies], by Kathleen E. Absolon (Minogiizhigokwe, Anishinaabe), means “learning.” Conversely, I was not able to find a quick translation of the phrase or individual words from the Cree in online Cree dictionaries in the case of Ruth DyckFehderau and the James Bay Cree Storytellers’ oral histories in story form, E nâtamukw miyeyimuwin: Residential School Survival Stories of the James Bay Cree, Volume 1 [Letters and Auto/biography]. This problem of settlers encountering work by Indigenous writers must be solved by a deeper engagement with the works (and cultures) themselves, a problem that exposes the bibliography as a colonial method of research. If or when bibliographers are primarily focused on lists and their aggregates, they risk losing the finer distinctions, as when we treat Cree and Inuit writers as identically Indigenous.

Arguably, any bibliographer’s attention to trends in bibliography is also a willingness to indulge in a specifically corporate colonial method, one that counts examples to determine popularity; it’s not entirely different from the trend-based, click-baiting Internet of Lists. Simultaneously, however, the bibliography lets us see that, in Canadian criticism in 2022, race, queerness, and disability were recognized topics that warranted consideration and study. Although previous years of our bibliography have sometimes shown clusters of attention to individual writers across various journals and publishing houses, in 2022 it was the genre of the special issue that was the means of concentrating attention. One writer not new to such attention was the Jewish novelist and essayist Mordecai Richler, the subject of a special issue of Canadian Literature back in 2010. In 2022, more essays in that journal and one book appeared on his work; see, among others not on our list, Shana Rosenblatt’s Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values; Adam Gopnik’s “Many More Mordecais,” and Judith Woodsworth’s “Remaking Richler for French Canada” [Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers]. Another writer, newer to the scene, is the Black poet and teacher Canisia Lubrin, the subject of another special issue of Canadian Literature featuring scholarship by, among others, Nicholas Bradley, “I in an Own Place”; Cornel Bogle, “Tracing the Black Diaspora in Canisia Lubrin’s ‘The Mongrel’”; and Manahil Bandukwala, “I is the Chorus: Canisia Lubrin’s The Dyzgraph^Xst” [Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers]. Canadian Literature also published special issues on comics and extractivism, while The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature had one on the genres of fantasy and magic realism. Identifying current (and ultimately historical) sources in a bibliography also identifies a locus of creative and scholarly engagement with social and political realities that are reflected in literature and other creative writing.

Canada is presently a cultural landscape that showcases a great diversity of writers with serious critical aims, yet with few overt neocolonial revanchisms in publishing. More than I have ever noticed, there is recognition among writers and editors that neocolonial processes are subversively active, along with systemic racism, and that there is a shared project of writing to address the problems resulting from them. The socio-political landscape is a different story; of course, Canada (too) has political divisions and ideological echo chambers that threaten to terrace the landscape. The energy of the literary and scholarly industries is not directed toward celebrations of one nation or one cultural group that should be steps above others. It celebrates survivals; it celebrates writing itself, writing in the face of disparate challenges.