No Safeguards<\/em> After overhearing Ma Kirton fighting with her daughter early on in No Safeguards<\/em> (H. Nigel Thomas, Guernica Editions), a neighbour comes over and advises, \u201cWe the older heads know the cliff. We mustn\u2019t let the young ones run carelessly and fall over it.\u201d The daughter, Anna, has quit her education and fallen in with a deeply religious crowd. Her mother can see through their devotion; she knows the dangers that cult-like devotion to religion can lead to, but nothing she says can steer her daughter away. Some four decades later, Anna has lived her mistakes. She has fled her home in St. Grenadine and her marriage with an abusive zealot, claimed refugee status in Canada, and brought her two sons to live with her. She now lies dying, her oldest son Jay by her side, narrating the story, and willing his younger brother Paul to come back to his family.<\/p>\n No Safeguards<\/em> deals with some big issues \u2014 religion, abuse, sexuality \u2014 but it is first and foremost a family story. Tolstoy famously said that families that are unhappy are all unhappy in their own way. There is truth to that, of course, but family unhappiness springs from the same sources \u2014 miscommunications, resentment, and the layers of guilt and blame that come with them. A grievance can be held a lifetime, some small slight from childhood, forgotten by the one who delivered it, can be held on by the victim and grow into a thing that defines them. H Nigel Thomas captures the intricate, multi-layered family relationship with sensitivity and a deep, honest understanding.<\/p>\n Ma Kirton was wise enough to know about long-held resentments, and she did all she could to avoid creating the grudges that can destroy a family. She takes no satisfaction in being proven right when Anna\u2019s religion leads her into an abusive marriage. And when Anna at last flees, Ma Kirton doesn\u2019t gloat, she sets about helping her, providing money, support, and pulling in the experience of others to ensure that Anna can get into Canada, and once there, stay. She takes in the boys, giving them a home until their mother can get Canadian citizenship.<\/p>\n By the time his mother leaves, Jay has been on the receiving end of his father\u2019s brutality for most of his life. Anna leaves in large part so that another son does not have to live through the abuse that could be set off by anything; the father\u2019s religious righteousness used to justify petty control. If Anna showed Jay affection, he was beaten, if he was too inquisitive, he was beaten. It turned him into a quiet child, one Ma Kirton knows has seen too much. But Paul, too young to know what he was spared, blossoms in his new home; taken care of by Jay, encouraged by his grandmother, he has become known as Ma Kirton\u2019s genius, a precocious boy whose academic successes makes him a minor local celebrity.<\/p>\n You can never know the sacrifices someone makes for you, and this is especially true of the young. While Anna \u2014 in a chapter that is essential account of the immigrant experience in Canada \u2014 lied her way over the border, claimed refugee status, worked under the table enduring humiliation and sexual abuse at the hands of the sorts that take advantage, all to make a better life for her family, Paul had already found a better life. And when it comes time for the family to be reunited, Paul only knows that a woman he doesn\u2019t remember has taken him from his good life to a new one that is much different, and ultimately, much worse. Paul falls deeper and deeper into trouble, beat down by the changes, by hormones, and by the North American school system. He becomes a sullen teenager, hurtling toward those cliffs Ma Kirton\u2019s neighbour warned of, blaming the whole thing on his mother\u2019s decisions.<\/p>\n In Canada Paul makes life for everyone around him difficult.\u00a0 Anna becomes incapable of dealing with her rebellious young son, his constant verbal abuse, his hatred of everything, and falls back on the only comfort she has ever known, religion. This only further sets off Paul; for five years, he is the angry teen, exasperating the family, taking all his anger out on Anna, mostly.<\/p>\n Jay, meanwhile, attends college and does what he can to keep the peace. But he is quiet, reactive. He explains Anna to Paul, and Paul to Anna, but it does little good and Paul spends as much time ragging on Jay as he does his mom. But amid Paul\u2019s pose, bravado, and young arrogance, there is a small bit of crying out for help. What one person thinks they are making clear can be missed entirely by another. With all of Paul\u2019s noise, Jay can\u2019t be expected to pick up on those cries for help. But that doesn\u2019t prevent Paul from resenting that they were not acknowledged.<\/p>\n In the end, Paul realizes he has to leave. Staying only perpetuates the relationships he has with his family; a new start is needed. He leaves to Latin America, trying one last time to open up to his brother. This is the one time that Jay clearly hears Paul\u2019s desire to share something. But Jay, after five years of support \u2014 of putting up with it \u2014 has had enough. He rejects Paul, who leaves, his resentment, for the first time, justified.<\/p>\n Paul moves toward his cliffs and survives. Anna does not; her life of worry catches up when her son leaves without saying goodbye, she becomes ill and does not recover. Paul returns, months after his mother\u2019s death, seemingly comfortable in his own skin for the first time since he was young. He does not see right away the worry he has caused, that his selfishness has caused his brother to drop out of grad school. But with Paul back, the brothers can get on with their lives; Jay no longer worried about Paul\u2019s extended absence, and Paul, ready to live his life honestly, without pose.<\/p>\n The book ends with the reunited brothers, wiser for their experiences, talking over the things they could not before; the private experiences of life. The resentments all linger \u2014 in families there are some that never go away \u2014 but they seem to be learning to work around them. No Safeguards<\/em> is meant to be the first book in a trilogy, and the end of it feels like a beginning. It is a testament to H. Nigel Thomas\u2019s storytelling that the reader is left wanting to see where the brothers will go next. The eponymous first story in Indians Don\u2019t Cry<\/em> establishes the themes that are returned to throughout the book: separation, loss, and the frustration that comes from being caught in a system that affects the lives of the characters so much but that the world beyond knows little \u2014 and cares little \u2014 about. In \u201cIndian\u2019s Don\u2019t Cry,\u201d the frustration stems from the government\u2019s requirement that children go to a school far away from their home on a reserve in Northern Ontario. Their father has tried to find and keep work near where they will live, but when that fails, he returns to the reserve, where his resources are. And so, his children are taken each year for many months to live in a different world and change without him there to guide them, returning each year, increasingly as strangers. All there is to do is cry.<\/p>\n The effects of separation are returned to from many different angles. In \u201cOn the Shooting of a Beaver,\u201d a young man returns home to hunt on his father\u2019s trapline; the son has become used to city life, and is uncertain where he belongs. When a beaver appears, he hesitates, unsure if he should shoot it with his camera, which is his preference, or his gun, which is his father\u2019s. \u201cWelcome\u201d has a young man waiting for his girlfriend to return from school. Her letters have become infrequent, but he remains hopeful until she returns, pregnant with the child of a man she has met down south. In \u201cSummer Down on Loon Lake\u201d a young woman tries to find a way to tell her family she will not be coming back to the reserve once she is done with school; her life is now elsewhere. In all these stories, the characters have been shown a world away from the one they have known, and are unable to go back to their former lives. The catch, as shown in stories such as \u201cTrack Star\u201d and \u201cDirty Indian,\u201d is that they are not be welcomed in this new world; they are othered by racism, trapped between two worldsd uncertain of where they belong.<\/p>\n The strength of these stories are their honesty. The writing is for the most part straightforward, but Kenny occasionally falls into a habit of over-explaining. It\u2019s as though he doesn\u2019t trust the power of his writing to convey the essence or thoughts of his characters. Physical traits are shoe-horned in; at the start of a story a character will look in the mirror to excuse a description. Thoughts are handled similarly, with Kenny stating feelings that are already clear through context. It\u2019s the sort of prose that first-time writers (as Kenny is in this book) feel they need, but as their confidence grows they rely on it less. These missteps are minor, and I it would not have been so distracting to read if it weren\u2019t for the fact that the poems have none of this, and are so much stronger for it.<\/p>\n With the limited space of verse, Kenny boils the words down to the bare minimum\u2014which results in some of the most effective writing in the book. \u201cI Don\u2019t Know this October Stranger\u201d touches on all the themes of his stories \u2014 change, loss, separation \u2014 but in only a handful of lines. Another fine example of allowing the characters room to develop by understatement occurs in \u201cDeath is No Stranger.\u201d The woman is not described; the strength of the words creates a vision of her in the reader\u2019s mind. She stands by a grave, her partner buried, worrying about her children. In five short stanzas, a life unfolds; her husband, her kids, the oppressive past and inescapable future.<\/p>\n The near-perfect \u201cOld Daniel\u201d is the most powerful piece in the book.\u00a0 The poem opens with a scene of the old First Nations ways \u2014 smoke and laughter in a wigwam, the comfort of family \u2014quickly brought into the present in the form of reminisces by an old man interred at an senior\u2019s home. The visiting relative promises better times ahead and leaves, forgetting about Old Daniel until he receives a call, months later, asking him to arrange the funeral. Almost a hundred years of change, history, and loss are driven home; Old Daniel\u2019s time is being forgotten, and no one, not even his relatives, much care.<\/p>\n Indians Don\u2019t Cry<\/em> was originally published in 1977. Since then, it seems Kenny has written little \u2014 the supplementary material in the new edition mentions only an unpublished memoir. It\u2019s a shame that a writer, who in his first collection showed so much promise in pieces such as \u201cOld Daniel\u201d and \u201cDirty Indian\u201d \u2014which should be required reading for all Canadians \u2014 would go silent. I sincerely hope this new edition will find the audience it so much deserves, and precipitate a follow up.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction Reviews No Safeguards by H. Nigel Thomas Toronto, ON: Guernica Editions, 2015 298 pp. $25 After overhearing Ma Kirton fighting with her daughter early on in No Safeguards (H. Nigel Thomas, Guernica Editions), a neighbour comes over and advises, \u201cWe the older heads know the cliff. We mustn\u2019t let the young ones run carelessly and fall over it.\u201d The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":839,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":720,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/720"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nby H. Nigel Thomas
\nToronto, ON: Guernica Editions, 2015
\n298 pp. $25<\/p>\n
\n
\nIndians Don\u2019t Cry<\/em>
\nby George Kenny
\nWinnipeg, MB: U Manitoba Press, 2014<\/p>\n