Title | : | Changing the Face of Canadian Literature: A Diverse Canadian Anthology (12) (Essential Anthologies Series) |
Author | : | |
Rating | : | |
ISBN | : | 1771835230 |
ISBN-10 | : | 9781771835237 |
Language | : | English |
Format Type | : | Paperback |
Number of Pages | : | 400 |
Publication | : | Published September 1, 2020 |
Changing the Face of Canadian Literature: A Diverse Canadian Anthology (12) (Essential Anthologies Series) Reviews
-
Changing the Face of Canadian Literature is an anthology of new writing by a diverse range of Canadian writers. In his preface, the anthology’s editor, Dane Swan, places the notion of diversity front and centre of this collection. He writes, “this anthology does not celebrate multiculturalism, it celebrates diversity. Diversity is a far wider spectrum. Diversity recognizes those franchised and disenfranchised…recognizes the geography of Canada…recognizes that new writing can be written by the young and the young at heart…that an author may identify as male, female, or other…”
Swan’s sentiments are laudable. Yet his assertions about the self-evident merits of diversity in literature rest on a somewhat simple pluralistic argument — the notion that simply introducing a quota of writers from diverse backgrounds corresponding accurately with sociological and demographic factors will naturally produce literature that is more authentically Canadian.
This is akin to what the American critic Henry Louis Gates has dubbed the “Kodachrome fallacy,” the idea that literature should simply present a mirror image of our social world. It doesn’t do adequate justice to the way that national traditions and cultures are constructed in the processes of reading and writing. Swan has missed an opportunity here to map out a convincingly grounded argument for the principle of diversification and make a case for an understanding of the possibilities it makes available for Canadian literature.
The danger of this loosely conceptualised, ready-made notion of diversity poetics is the ease with which it slips into ready-made, lazy formulations and essentialised identities, cut off from meaningful dialogue with other visions of Canada. Diversity poetics often seems to come pre-packaged with a predetermined antagonism to a distorted caricature of white mainstream culture.
Most of the writers in this collection, which usefully spans poetry, short stories, and non-fiction, are from non-mainstream; that is, non-white ethnic heritage and of diverse sexuality. Identity seems a central preoccupation for many of them. Make no mistake though, the diverse range of genres, forms and voices make this an exciting, albeit very uneven, yet frequently pleasantly surprising collection.
Adam Pottle presents excerpts from his poetry collection School for the Deaf. His work explores what he terms “the fiery beauty of Deafness and disability.” Yet though it is centred on the impact of his deafness on his identity and worldview, his poems are filled with startling imagery and are impressively transformative.
Fiction writer and poet Pamela Mordecai presents excerpts from The Tear Well, a story that seems to be set in Jamaica. This excerpt is another early highpoint in the anthology. She captures characterisations that go beyond stereotypes of Caribbean life as well as the all-too-easy Manichean dichotomies between good victims and bad oppressors — the ‘patriarchy’ and white European culture in general. The story depicts an abusive marriage and the impact this has upon the couple’s children and the wider family. The images of Jamaican masculinity are revealed as the fascinating, mysterious object of Mordecai’s attention, and are therefore also ours as readers.
Identity is the determinative and constitutive factor in the work of the transgendered poet Charlie Petch. Yet in Petch’s poems “My First Boyfriend” and “Daughter of Geppetto” this is not necessarily reductive or limiting. Petch finds a way to address the specifics of experience while also making that experience speak to broader issues of human identity and presence: “I remember the boy you might have been/ smell sumac carefully./ Did you know it was poison then?/ That enemies can smell sweet?/ That betrayal is part of growing up?”
In the selections from Mary Pinkoski’s suite of poems “Let the Ghosts Out,” her touchstones are talismanic women writers Anaïs Nin, Tara Hardy, and Anne Waldman. Her poetry focuses on embodiment and presence as experienced by women: “We are nothing more than dilapidated shelters/ Seeking small mercies/ Like a sparrow choosing to nest in our branches”...
There are allusions to the biblical Garden of Eden and to the women in her family: “I am the first generation of women in my family/ To not know what it is like to have another place in my body.” This evocation of a unique embodiment for women’s history and cultural experience is an interesting and potentially controversial one at our particular cultural juncture, when such claims are being increasingly challenged by the discourse around transgendered identities.
However, the anthology contains several less than successful efforts. Pratap Reddy’s story “The Lime Tree,” is yet another example of a writer preoccupied with identity. It’s a fairly simple autobiographical narrative featuring a slightly old-fashioned handling of dialogue and the requisite elements Canadian readers have come to expect from stories set in the Indian sub-continent— intricate familial relations, glimpses of archaic and slightly oppressive social hierarchies and traditions, and detailed itemising of exotic food items. Overall, readers are left with the impression of a fairly amiable yet somewhat unambitious story. It’s content to putter along to its rather predictable conclusion without ever probing beneath its own florid, slightly antiquated surface.
Toronto-based Sennah Yee’s poems about Canada focus on her identity, yet she doesn’t seem to have found a way to translate her experiences into something larger or more interesting for her readers. Unfortunately, many of the poems are pervaded by something almost bordering on animus against white people in general. In “Wanderlust,” she remarks that “I have traveled halfway across the world/ to have white backpackers make me feel alien/ in the very continent that they insist I am “really” from”. It’s a strange and unapologetically racist sentiment. She presents no details about exactly how these “white backpackers” supposedly make her feel “alien,” nor how they can be said to represent all whites. She relies on the reader to make the ready-made racist assumption that the backpackers’ mere white presence in Asia is akin to colonialism. This ungenerous sentiment is no more acceptable from Yee than it would be from a white Canadian writer.
Doretta Lau’s story “At Core We Think They Will Kill Us” evinces many similar unpleasant traits. She prefaces her story with a Claudia Rankine quotation, suggesting her identification with the oppositional stance of African American poetic traditions. Yet she presents a Manichean worldview divided between bad, oppressive white supremacists and saintly, virtuous non-white intersectionals.
She recounts the NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s brief encounter with a racist white woman who “continues to colonise the space with her hate.” She then jumps from racism to an assertion about women’s fear of men: “at core, women are afraid men will kill them.” She spins this into an assertion about the threat faced by all “people of colour:” “We know [the racists] will murder us even though we are minding our own business and the law will be on their side.”
This is lazy writing comprised of sloppy analogies, conflations, and generalisations. Which “people of colour” is she referring to here? Is she also referring to the ‘model immigrants’ who are often just as racist in their attitudes towards certain “people of colour” as white racists? And why does she lazily assume that “the racists” are linked with white mainstream society?
The recent protests and racial accounting in the wake of a cop’s murder of George Floyd have sparked a renewed interest in the work of the African American writer James Baldwin. Baldwin’s example is quite apt to this discussion because in his searing essays, novels, and drama he found a way to express his anger through his art, speaking trenchant truth to power about the very real racist aggression experienced by Black Americans without reducing his art to incidental accounts of hatred and resentful outbursts.
In the last essay of his book The Price of the Ticket, Baldwin had this to say: “The object of one’s hatred is never, alas, conveniently outside but is seated in one’s lap, stirring in one’s bowels—and dictating the beat of one’s heart. And if one does not know this, one risks becoming an imitation—and, therefore, a continuation—of principles one imagines oneself to despise.”
To his credit, the anthology’s editor Dane Swan has tried to include a broad range of different types of poetry in this anthology, going beyond the world of journals into the realms of performance art and spoken poetry. In some respects, though, spoken word poetry has a big disadvantage. What is illuminating and powerful in a live spoken-word performance can often appear flat and of limited poetic interest when presented on the page, particularly when displayed alongside more formalised poems. This is unfortunately the case with the work of the spoken word poet Dwayne Morgan and the performance poet Jamaal Jackson Rogers.
But the anthology has several standout pieces. Sara Tilley’s short story “Crystal” is one of these. It presents the story of a breakdown of a relationship, yet Tilley’s take on this well-worn scenario has a distinctively magical realist feel. The narrative describes Carrie’s Phantom Baby, linked by its umbilical cord to her wrist and floating buildings-high into the sky, accompanying Carrie on her journey across Canada as she tries to get over her breakup. It is subtle, masterful storytelling that has transformed the familiar and quotidian into something breathtaking.
Doyali Islam’s poem “she” is another one of the anthology’s high points. I don’t know much about “la famille faisons” that she dedicates the poem to, but I don’t really have to so assured is Doyali Islam’s control of diction and form and her succinct evocation of the characters and narrative in this poem. The poem describes a family who’ve chosen to live what they deem to be a more authentic life in nature, without the amenities of modern life: “she is a stern woman whose cheeks rarely betray/ a fissured smile, she followed/ her merry brown-beard of a husband/ into apex’d wilderness…”
The poem’s narrator bemusedly recounts her visit to the pioneering family: “i once made an accidental pact/ upon those nettles, palm down, five fingers, all,/ more scathing and reddening than pledging/ in a court of law.”
Inevitably, of course, nature wins: “a falcon prowls overhead, and/ black ants march inside the breadbox, and/ on the kitchen counter, claim undefended/ blonvilliers brown sugar cubes as their own.”
Leslie Shimotakahara’s short story “The Breakwater” is another high point. It’s a poignant story dealing with the aftermath of a family’s estrangement against the background of the forced internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. The protagonist must reckon with his troubled relationship with his rebellious brother. More than just an account of troubled times, the story is a study of filial resentment, failure, and finally familial responsibility. The story’s power lies as much in what it does not explicitly state as what it does state. It is a restrained and mature response to life’s complexities.
Michael Fraser’s five poems represent another of the anthology’s triumphs. Each is formally accomplished, intelligent, and strikingly original. “The Black Union Dead” depicts its speaker and a colleague burying dead soldiers after a U.S. Civil War battle. The breathtaking opening, with its striking diction and rhythmic metered pulse, jolts the reader into that violent world: “The sun-shattered morning sieves/through bottomlands clapping cadavers/ rippled under the tree’s tea-green antlers. /Me and Abel crumble low,/ hinge and shoulder remains from/ the Tennessee’s mud-soaked banks.”
Fraser’s use of enjambment is impressive, but his diction is especially exciting. It features a slightly unfamiliar and archaic, and yet somehow more primal form of regional English — “copperhead,” “pig sticker,” “pipjennies,” “livermush,” “gray back-infected,” “top-rail sawbones” — full of compound nouns, stressed vowels and clashing consonants that are evocative of the time and the regions through which the war rages, and of the very act of war itself.
Ashley Hynd identifies as indigenous, and her poetry is focused on her indigenous identity and culture and the history of Canada and the U.S.’s eradication of that culture. Her poems take language and everyday artefacts and turn them into ironical and, at times, gently self-mocking meditations on indigenous history. Some of Hynd’s poems seem to merely round upon themselves—plunging writer and reader into an ethical cul-de-sac of accusation and self-abnegation, with no possibility for anything else. Yet “Captain Injun,” one of her better poems, succeeds because she seems to achieve a sort of tightrope act, balancing a playful, wittily seductive address to her readers with a sharp-edged double-voicedness. The poem’s dialogue seems to offer the reader an escape of sorts from the sense of complicity in the sorry history of indigenous and settler interactions— “still I think we’ve lost our way in all this” — only to leave the reader with a vague sense of somehow having been duped in the exchange: “handing me the wing-deer antler smooth beneath finger/ —feathers pressing outwards from sinew noose round neck/ ghost touch lingering in the dust “maybe it was never ours”/ I say, the taste of gift tumbling round in my fingers.”
The anthology ends on a strong note with the work of the Montreal-based poet Klara du Plessis. Refreshingly, unlike most of the identity-focused authors in this anthology, du Plessis addresses a broad range of concerns—the nature of being, the meanings latent in artefacts, the inherent nature of things, and the grammar of art. The poems are allusive, subtle, self-conscious, yet confident in diction and tone.
“To the woodcut above my writing desk” is an impressive update on the ekphrastic poem. In du Plessis’s version of ekphrasis, the woodcuts evoke such a variety of scenes in her imagination that it seems as if they’re interrogating the poet and her poem.
The woodcuts provoke the speaker’s memories of artists like Paul Cézanne, who've represented mountains. But the poem’s reflective momentum propels the reader outward to the reader’s own existence projecting onto the present moment: “potential for plunder/…Shoot from the hip./ Project a collective haemorrhage into the soft expanse/ of the present.”
It’s an oddly jarring conclusion to this impressive poem. It seems to be an invitation and condemnation. In du Plessis’s reckoning, imposing one’s own personal tincture onto the still-evolving project we call Canada seems to be an act of desecration. But it's a challenge that writers from diverse backgrounds must have the courage to accept. -
This was a decent compilation of Canadian literature often from slightly more obscure authors. About the anthology itself, I have two things to say: I appreciate the list of other anthologies in the last pages featuring diverse and disenfranchised Canadian voices; and I seriously hate the font choice.
Here are some pieces I especially liked:
Micro (Sennah Yee): The age of the author is probably similar to mine, so I can look back and imagine instances in my own timeline from Yee's point of view, and where my social location was at the time.
Medicine (Jamaal Jackson Rogers): I really enjoyed the sensory imagery of the setting and the powerful emotional connotations of the woman's simple statement.
4 for julius eastman (1940-90) and is this the magic? (Charles C. Smith): I'm not sure if this was intentional, but the really interesting format of the poetry allows it to be read multiple directions for different contexts, essentially making these poems several in one.
Resurrection Sunday (Jael Richardson): As hilarious as the white-tears-producing writing is, this one held a strong message about the power of representation and truthfully portrayed small town Canada culture. Sad ending, but I would like to think Dale made a difference in that town that will radiate out from a few people.
Colin K and Facebook (Dwayne Morgan): very important subject matter that feels extremely powerful with the writing. I would love to see this performed as spoken word. The emotions and beats are evident even on a page.
The Kayaking Lesson (Jennnilee Austria): aaah this hurt me to read, with the aggressive swan-god-white guy privilege, but I very much enjoy the ending and the agency it gives to the main character.
Post-Colonial Sea Salt (Ashley Hynd): recognizing similarities of your social position in the writing on the back of a jar of sea salt emphasizes how often and prominently colonialism features in Hynd's life.
And excerpts I liked:
5 Haiku for/from Canada (Sennah Yee):you're frightened that I've/flourished right in the hyphen/that you've slapped on me
And... (Ian Keteku):And once I checked out the story of my life. And returned it, the next day. And I didn't like the author and couldn't relate to the protagonist.
Winter (Ian Keteku):White Santa with a god complex/blesses gifts upon decent children/too scared of poverty to not believe in him.
Essay dwellers (Klara du Plessis)Vowels age into words.
-
I got a digital copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
What I liked:
I am always really interested to hear from writers with more diverse backgrounds and diverse characters. There was definitely a lot to find in this collection. Some of the stories were very well written, and I was sad when they ended as quickly as they did
What I didn't like:
Like so many anthologies, the amount I enjoyed any given story varied a lot. There was also more poetry than I expected, which didn't change my rating, but because I didn't expect to find so much it did throw me off, so I mention it. The first story in the anthology also deals with some pretty graphic subject matter, and I wonder if it was the right choice to punch readers in the face like that immediately. I have to admit I almost put the book aside, wondering if I'd be able to handle the content after I read it.
Overall:
As much as I question one or two of the editing decisions that went into this book, it was refreshing to see an anthology from writers with such varied backgrounds. The stories were also unapologetically Canadian, but questioned the idea of "being Canadian" at the same time. For me, it's a solid 3* but I'd definitely read the next anthology. -
One of the first things I can remember hearing about Canadians is that there aren’t any. Every one in Canada identifies as something else, or comes form somewhere else. But no matter who or what, everyone has a voice in this anthology. Everyone who wishes to speak can be heard, and that says a lot about literature and what it means.
In this anthology, there are writings by over 30 different Canadians who have this place to tell their story, in verse, in prose, in poetry . This isn't fiction, though. It is an anthology of academic writings by respected authors, and these are lived experiences and nothing told me to expect the writings to be fun. But I didn’t really enjoy these stories. They were difficult to read. Sadly, a lot of the works dealt with racism and/or abuse and how that looked from different perspectives. It’s not pleasant subject matter, although some of these stories were powerful and life-affirming. -
Yeesh. After reading about various forms of rape and abuse in the first three chapters, I had to put this down. There is something perverse about treating diversity as synonymous with trauma. I prefer to read (and love being introduced to) writers from underrepresented backgrounds, but not when the stories are restricted to such narrow subject matter--that seems compiled to educate a mainstream reader, rather than for the pleasure and growth of a diverse audience who can see themselves in the stories.
-
Well curated. A beautiful book. Will come back to this often. Definitely recommend it.
-
I really appreciated this collection!
I think it's really important to challenge mainstream (white) perception of who Canadians are and what Canadian literature can be.
I would especially recommend this anthology to other white folks because I think that white Canadians are often ignorant of the ways that we harm BIPoC in day-to-day interactions. I think most people have heard of "microaggressions" but a number of pieces inside this anthology provide a window into how microaggressions are perceived by the people that experience them.