Irene Marques

A.E.: I will like to touch on what you have referred to, in your essay in MTLS issue #21, as a conservative “Anglo-Saxon ethics and aesthetics” that directly influences Canadian literary establishments’ (non)promotion of Canadian literature. Are you saying that a one-sided Anglo-Saxon ethics and aesthetics impoverishes the literary arts in Canada, an immigrant country? What do you think can be done by the national and provincial art councils respectively to encourage more inclusion for a robust and culturally diverse Canadian literature?

I.M.: As I note in that essay, I do think that Canadian literature favours for the most part an Anglo-Saxon ethic and aesthetic. Given that I define what that means in there I won’t go into detail about it here. We are a country of others among others, who should constantly be striving to become Same. Here the term “Same” implies reaching a stage where peoples of different backgrounds see each other not in terms of being less or more than the other but rather as beings vis-à-vis other beings of equal merit and capacity and beings who remind them of themselves (of their own difference). It also implies entering a realm of trans-dialectical, trans-personal learning, where one group allows the other one in itself and learns to adjust to the other. This does not mean losing our difference and becoming all alike: it means inhabiting more fluid identities, getting in and out of selfhood, so to speak. Luce Irigaray puts it beautifully: “Approaching and speaking to me with his hands.  Bringing me back to life more intimately than any regenerative nourishment, the other’s hands, these palms with which he [she] approaches without going through me, give me back the borders of my body and call me to the remembrance of the most profound intimacy. (121); A kind of house that shelters without enclosing me, untying and tying me to the other, as to one who helps me to build and inhabit.” (142) Even though Irigaray is speaking here specifically about female/male relations, I believe that her philosophy can be also applied to relations between all human beings.

Canadians do come from many places around the world where English is not the lingua franca and they come with the ethic and aesthetic of their languages and literatures. If we are to become diverse artistically, we need to allow the many ethics and aesthetics of the people who make up Canada to “write themselves” in Canada so that the country can reflect its real inhabitants. This means that even if the writing medium is English, that English will be injected with the “otherness” of all those people who live here, their ethic and aesthetic. That “otherness” will create innovative and powerful literature. We must remember that language and literature grow the best when in contact with other languages and literatures, other ethics and aesthetics, and not in isolation. But I must really emphasise the idea and importance of “aesthetics” here: it is not sufficient to value writing that expresses different life experiences, the ethic, that is—though that is essential of course—and be satisfied with that type of diversity of voice. It is equally important to value the diversity of writing technique, the medium. In Canada it seems to me that often we value diversity in life experience (the ethic) and may allow that to come out in writing but not so much in the writing technique and so the writing aesthetic mostly valued continues to the Anglo-Saxon one. But think, for instance, about Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. It is an astoundingly beautiful and powerful book that touches us to the core precisely because it matches the life experiences of Black American slaves with a unique aesthetic. Without Morrison’s innovative style, one would not be able to feel and enjoy the novel as much as we do. Writing advice in Canada often goes more or less like this: show don’t tell (as if we could separate one from the other: doesn’t the “shoe” need all the parts to make itself beautiful and sturdy, to go back to my initial metaphor?), use minimal language, avoid the lyric and flowery, curb the irrational (what constitutes the irrational is of course dictated by a given cultural paradigm), the emotional, be clear so that your reader does not get confused (shouldn’t a novel be a thing that confuses the reader and makes her/him suspend judgment, point to another way, another reality not yet imagined or known and allow one to arrive at gradual revelation and enlightenment, much of which may in fact come later when one has had enough time to digest and meditate upon the words read?), etc, etc. I am aware that I may have just written a very long and convoluted sentence here for some readers…perhaps a sign that I am living, thinking and writing between cultural paradigms, going in and out, if you will.  This advice is problematic on many counts. I also often see, especially in poetry, an exaggerated post-modern game going on where writing becomes a long list of disconnected words or (grand) expressions presenting itself as creative and innovative writing. This type of writing comes across as overly mechanical and without a clear poetic intention, feel, story and warmth. It becomes too cerebral without the holistic trait that I think is important in poetry. If Canada continues to apply parochial standards to what it means to write well and have incestuous circles of literary production, we will continue to generate the same type of literature: mono-cultural and myopic. I think one of the things that Canadian Arts Councils and other literary institutions really need to do is to have jury members and employees that reflect different literary aesthetics and ethics, people who may have been educated in other countries or at the very least people who have some serious training in international literatures—people who have read abundantly outside of the English language cannon.

A.E.: You are trained as a critic of Comparative Literature. As we both know, that discipline needs literature written in other (world) languages for a ‘comparison’ to be possible. This requires active translation of Canadian literature in languages other than English or French (for example, Portuguese, Persian, Bengali), on the one hand, and even translations between French and English, on the other. Do you find that the Canadian academy (especially CanLit departments) and literary establishment encourage such translations; any examples of such translated works?

I.M.: My reply to the previous question partly answers this question. As a person trained in comparative literature and being able to read in four different languages, I do think that it is paramount that people read from outside the English canon and translation plays a crucial role in that as noted above. Comparative Literature programs are very important in that regard since they form students who read and write in several languages and study works in translation and many do end up doing translations. For example, in 2016, a volume with the complete stories of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was published in English, skilfully translated by a comparative literature graduate from the University of Berkeley, Katrina Dobson. Clarice Lispector is a remarkable writer and that the English speaking world has barely paid attention to her is regrettable. I sometimes include some of her short fiction in my English courses and I find that the students have difficulty understanding her at first because she is so different and they have been reading mostly the same type of literature. And yet, I also find that they really like her and are very pleased to have discovered her.

I can’t comment on the specifics of Canadian Literature departments and their involvement in promoting and pushing for translation as I don’t have precise information on that. But according to statistics less than 4% of works written in languages other than English are translated into English, whereas works published in English are widely translated into many other words languages (see http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140909-why-so-few-books-in-translation). This is problematic, as I elaborate in my noted essay, because it creates an imbalance: we end up with the Anglo-Saxon ethic and aesthetic infiltrating itself in the minds of the many people of the world. Yet the Anglo-American world reads mostly works produced within itself and so we have, if you will, an act of self-cannibalism. But we all need to “eat” the other in order to grow, empathise and expand our own selfhood. The Anglo-American world actually loses out quite a bit in this scenario because it becomes more and more isolated, imprisoned in a single prism of vision, understanding, cognition. This can have far-reaching consequences of intolerance too where we come to see ourselves and our culture as the centre, as the only one valid—and this can lead to xenophobia, ethnocentrism, racism, etc. The British just decided to leave the E.U. and the U.S.A. voted for a President who seems to be the epitome of someone with an arrested, self-feeding ideology, who does not give much attention to the views of others. I wonder what they have been reading—likely only books from “their own library.” However, deep down, I think most of us, if not all, whether we are conscious of it or not, yearn to exit our own (small) selfhood and connect with the other, become other… To read the “other” (and the “otherness” of the “other”) is to exit, suspend and expand the self and to expand the self is an act of kindness toward the self and the other. It is what we in fact desire ontologically. And here I would like to quote a poem titled “Identity” by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto which illustrates this idea, quite handsomely, I think:

Identity

I need to be another
to be myself

I am a grain of rock
I am the wind that erodes it
I am the pollen without the insect

I am sand sustaining
The sex of trees 

I exist where I become a stranger to myself
Waiting for my past
Anxious for the hope of the future

In the world that I combat, I die
In the world that that I defend, I am born (13; my translation)

A.E.: Vis-à-vis an Anglo-Saxon ethic and aesthetics, what is your view on the critical objectivity or lack thereof in the awarding of Canadian literary prizes. There was a storm of controversy about a 2008 Governor General’s prize for poetry, for example. It was a first book of poems and some in the literary community felt that it was a premature win.

I.M.: I would say that there is an incestuous nexus that affects the Canadian literary circles in general and that would naturally affect the awarding of prizes. I expand on this in my noted essay. This is not to say that there aren’t people out there who are not interested in promoting impartiality but the beast is complex and there are many interests at play. I also think that many writers are actually afraid to speak out because they are afraid to lose connections, alienate their publishers and funders, or to seem ‘petty’, etc. And let’s be honest: there is that (annoying) Canadian tendency of being overly polite and non-confrontational which often means not telling what we really think or feel about a specific issue. That creates an appearance of cordial relations that does not correspond to the reality. It prevents genuine communication from taking place and consequently it arrests the development of a true, wholesome community.  

 A.E.: How would you suggest an immigrant writer navigate the Canadian literary field to be successful?

I.M.: I don’t think I have the answer. But it also depends on what we mean by success. Personally, I believe that one ought to write from a true place, a place that feels true to ourselves and not let the Canadian mainstream literary scene dictate what and how we ought to write—what constitutes good writing. My hope is that in due time the literary establishment will open itself to more voices that challenge the Anglo-Saxon ethic and aesthetic. I think my answer to the following question elaborates on these issues as well.

A.E.: What do you think of new initiatives of inclusion like FOLD – Festival of Literary Diversity in Toronto.

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