How to Pronounce Knife
by Souvankham Thammavongsa,
Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2020
184 pages, $24.95
Immigration is a fraught topic, and while much is said about immigrants, most of the fourteen stories in How to Pronounce Knife give voice to the people who have left their homeland for what they hope will be a better life elsewhere. Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in a Lao refugee camp in Thailand. She grew up in Toronto and lives there now.
The title story sets up the collection as it shows the immense difficulties facing newcomers. Saying a word such as knife reveals the essential weirdness of English spelling and pronunciation when a person learns a word through reading. As a child I thought the name Penelope rhymed with antelope. I’d heard the latter said. I’d only read the first. Such an error is common among young readers, but Thammavongsa takes the situation much further. A Lao child asks her father how to pronounce knife and then uses his incorrect answer when reading aloud in class. She has a melt-down when criticised by a fellow student. The heart-breaking essence of the story is the child’s realization that her father isn’t going to be able to help her: “As she watches her father eat his dinner, she thinks of what else he doesn’t know. What else she would have to find out for herself.” All people have to find out things for themselves, but it’s much more difficult without a guide through a culture.
“Chick-A-Chee” is another story dealing directly with language. Two young children are left alone while their parents work and are told never to call the police if there is trouble. The appearance of pumpkins on front steps mystifies the family as they wonder why anyone would waste food, but they figure out that going to a wealthy neighbourhood on Hallowe’en will garner the children safer treats. Again at school the mispronunciation is made clear.
Many of the immigrants in these stories find themselves in low-paying jobs. In “Mani-Pedi,” Raymond wants to be a boxer, but he isn’t good enough to win, so he works at his sister’s nail salon. He is interested in one of the customers, but his sister says to forget it, that his dreams are foolish. He tells her, “Don’t you go reminding me what dreams a man like me out to have. That I can dream at all means something to me.” In “The School Bus Driver,” Jai and his wife leave Laos, and in Canada, she takes up with her boss, saying that such a “friendship” is common in Canada. What is also common is the changing of Jai to Jay. The anglicising of names is seen as a form of erasure. In “The Universe Would Be So Cruel,” Mr. Vong, a printer of Lao wedding invitations, wonders why people allow name changes. He says, “You just can’t have Lao wedding without Lao letters on the invitation. And you have to have your real given name there. . . . Why would you want to be Sue when your name is really Savongnavathakad?” And that’s another issue for immigrants. Not only do they have to mold themselves into the new culture, but also they may wish to retain some of their old culture as that helps to create who their identity.
Another kind of cultural difference is explored in “Slingshot.” The story opens with the identification of difference: “I was seventy when I met Richard. He was thirty-two.” The narrator lives with her granddaughter, who falls in love regularly. Richard says there’s no such thing as love, that it’s “a construct.” So is age, in a way, as the narrator thinks after Rose calls her old. “We don’t know we have wrinkles until we see them. Old is a thing that happens on the outside.”
Thammavongsa dispenses wisdom in all these stories in a clear and thoughtful manner by positioning her characters in a real world, one that more people need to be familiar with—the world where people are struggling to survive in meaningful ways. They want to be accepted and understood, but it always seems a bit out of reach, so many remain as loners, reliant on themselves and their perceptions of themselves. These are deeply moving stories.
Looking Back, Moving Forward: Fiction Poetry Essays
edited by Julie C. Robinson
Toronto, ON: Mawenzi House, 2018
210 pages, $24.95
Looking Back, Moving Forward is a selection of works from writers in the Borderlines Writers Circle, a program of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. The included writers are from various places, but they have one thing in common: they are all immigrants to Canada and so must cope with vast changes in their lives. As Julie C. Robinson notes in her short Introduction, “writing our human stories preserves diversity, preventing a single hegemonic narrative.” That preservation, indeed celebration, seems more and more important each day.
The book is organized by genre: fiction, drama, poetry, journalism, and memoir. Each work offers something of value, whether the writer is directly addressing the topic of crossing borders or is doing so in a more metaphorical way. All the works are concerned with identity as its inevitable that immigrants have connections to their former home and their new one, and their new lives straddle cultures in varying degrees. Writing is away to explore where one fits in the world, or even what that world is. And this book gives readers a wide choice of genre and experience.
The first story, “Little Blue Angels,” by Alma Mancilla was originally published in Spanish in Mexico and has been translated by the author. It deals with two of the most significant borders that exist: the one between sanity and madness and that between life and death. Trauma such as the death of a child can push a person into madness, and Mancilla describes her character’s journey gently and with great compassion. In an Author’s Note, Mancilla elaborates on the difficulty of crossing the borders of language: “Trying to write in a language that is not your first (whether form scratch or in translation) is something of a masochistic task, one that seeks accomplishment amidst the constant reminder of one’s limitations.” I believe her, but please note that there’s no sense of any linguistic limitation in this story. Mancilla goes on to refer to Borges’ difficulty in translating his own work as he believed that “Spanish and English have ‘two quite different ways of looking at the world.’” As language exists in reference to culture, this idea makes perfect sense.
The second story, “Chest Pain,” by Anamol Mani is an O. Henry about love and loss. Like Mancilla’s story, it is general in its sense of borders, but the pain of heartache is familiar to most people. Mohamed Abdi’s “Blinded by Love” features a love story that just may work out. It starts as a version of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (in Mogadishu), but at least for a while, clan differences are set aside against the violence overrunning Somalia. Janine Muster’s “Novemeber Days” is another love story with a character who leaves her home and partner in East Germany and finds a potential love in Edmonton. But it’s complicated.
The one drama, “Hagar,” by Aksam Alyousef, deals with the catastrophe that is Aleppo and how the main character, Hagar, is trying desperately to get out with her small son. The only other voice is that of Nazreen, a friend of Hagar’s ex-husband, who she hopes can help her. The characters are thinly drawn, but Alyousef makes it clear how awful the situation is and how utterly alone Hagar is.
The poetry selections are as diverse as the fiction. Susana Chalut’s “The Song of the Lark: Sixteen Poems” uses English and Spanish effectively, and in her Author’s Note, she says, “The search for my English voice is an ongoing process and, like life, it requires hard work and lots of editing.” In “13 Sounds,” the last poem in the group, she starts by saying, “everything written is a step closer / to immortality.” The border of life and death can be altered, it seems. Luciana Erregue-Sacchi’s “Twelve Poems” also use English and Spanish, and the poems reflect her education in art history. Nermeen Youssef’s “Extinct” is full of imagery of ice and snow, not surprising for someone who lives in Edmonton.
The non-fiction pieces range from a review of the film The Namesake and a critical piece, “Fighting Stereotypes in Popular Media,” both by Tazeen Hasan to a first person account by Shimelis Gebremichael of moving to Edmonton from Ethiopia. Leilei Chen’s “Life Begins at Forty” details the struggles of moving from China to Edmonton, and changes start with her move inside China from Anhui to Guangzhou, a prosperous city where she felt like an immigrant: “Local people spoke Cantonese: I spoke Mandarin. It was funny to think that I could understand English from the Voice of America or BBC but not Cantonese from my own city.” So she learns Cantonese. Kate Rittner-Werkman in “Liebe Mutti, I Don’t Mind Being German,” reveals the challenges she and her mother had in coming to Canada (as the title suggests). Canada has given her a way to be German and accept both her past and her present identities. “Hawa: The Madwoman in the Market,” by Asma Sayed, shows the effect that an experience in childhood of seeing a woman living on the street in Upleta, India, still haunts the author.
The most moving piece in the book (and they all are) for me is “Running in Munich,” by Mila Philipzig. She explains how running helps to situate herself in a new place. In 1988, she moved to Munich to study and ran, a pleasure that cost no money and which allowed her to explore. Philipzig brilliantly shifts to poetry to mark an enormous change in her life when she is out running one day. Both the prose and poetry sections are direct and connect emphatically with readers. The final lines are powerful in their simplicity: My life now / clearly cleaved / into a before and after.”
Mawenzi House is doing a wonderful service by publishing writers who may have more difficulty being published by bigger or better known companies. But I expect that will change as readers not only deserve to know the works of these writers, but they need to. People’s experiences, whether real or imagined, give readers insight into others’ lives. And insight can foster understanding and compassion.
The Youth of God
by Hassan Ghedi Santur,
Toronto, ON: Mawenzi House, 2019
206 pages, $20.95
What happens when you are a seventeen-year-old Somali-Canadian boy growing up in Toronto? You are smart and religious. You are being bullied, and your family is falling apart. And what happens to your caring and middle-aged Somali-Canadian teacher with a pregnant and traditional wife? In The Youth of God, his second novel, Hassan Ghedi Santur deftly constructs the worlds of student Nuur and teacher Mr. Ilmi, where they intersect and where they bump up against other cultural worlds. Both Nuur and Mr. Ilmi are Muslim, but Nuur’s dedication to his religion is visibly demonstrated by his clothing, a kufi (small white cap) and qamiis (long brown robe). And that apparel makes him a target.
The novel opens in springtime with Mr. Ilmi’s thoughts about Nuur and what has happened to him. He doesn’t know. It then jumps back to winter when Nuur is attempting to cleanse himself in the boys’ washroom, so he can pray. But some other boys try to force his head into a dirty toilet. Nuur knows his appearance is an issue: it “gave him an air of piety and screamed weakness when all the other boys at the school looked like extras on the set of a Kanye West video.” But he is resolute in his faith. That and the desire to do well at school so that he can become a doctor are what hold him together.
Nuur’s faith is a solace to him, but it is also isolating. His older brother is not religious, his father has left his wife and taken another, and his mother cries all day. The mosque is a refuge. Things do not improve when Nuur’s father comes back. Nuur’s only ally is Mr. Ilmi, who can see Nuur’s intelligence and sensitivity. And as Mr. Ilmi once wanted to be a doctor, and now teaches high school science, he is drawn to the young man and tries to encourage him as he does with all his students when he can.
Mr. Ilmi is dealing with his own issues. His marriage was arranged, and his wife Khadija has been in Canada for two years. She is slow to learn English, and Mr. Ilmi had hoped that she would progress quickly and then go to university and be “whatever she wanted.” What she wants, it seems, is to be a wife and mother in the most traditional sense. And he hates her cooking. His mind often drifts back to a girlfriend he once had and their passion, something absent in his marriage. He’s also concerned about his students. Mr. Ilmi is a respected teacher, and while the bullies are badly behaved, they do recognize his authority and sincerity. Santur makes it clear that these boys are wrong, but not evil.
And that’s another question the novel raise. What is evil? In his religious zeal and lack of community, Nuur ends up as the pawn of men with strong beliefs but little apparent regard for the well-being of a young man, while pretending otherwise. This novel can break your heart. It shows the mistakes that people make, and let’s face it, everyone makes mistakes, but some can’t be walked back from, even when a kind teacher is trying to help or when people realize the enormity of their error and try to fix it.
Anyone with an interest in how immigrants negotiate a new culture while trying to maintain their identity through connections with the culture they have left should read this novel. And that should be everyone. Santur writes eloquently of the basic human need to belong to a group, whether it’s family or something larger. And lack of belonging leads to tragedy. Perhaps some of the wisest words come from Ayuub, Nurr’s older brother, who chastises Nurr for criticising their mother for taking their father back. Ayuub (who is mostly invested in having as much sex as is possible) says, “So don’t judge, bro. You have this whole black-and-white thing about life. You gotta allow some room for messy shit. We all make choices. Some good ones and some really shitty ones. That’s life. So don’t fucking judge.”
The gift of this novel is that Santur shows why some people make bad choices. Almost always there’s something else at play that isn’t immediately apparent. Life is complex, and a seventeen-year-old boy is only beginning to understand that.
How a Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry
by Adam Sol
Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 2019
208 pp, $19.95
Adam Sol kicks off his field guide to poetry with a terrific assumption: poetry matters. He then goes on to explain that his interest is in what poetry “can do” not so much what it is. He wants his guide to be like a friendly park ranger who can point out a goldfinch to someone who can see identify the bird the next time without the ranger. As one of the jurors for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, Sol read over 630 books. He is also a poet. To spread the word about poets whose work did not make it to the shortlist, Sol started a blog and posted essays on how poems move. This book contains many of those essays and is a welcome addition to anyone’s bookshelves.
How a Poem Moves has a lovely organizational strategy. Each of the 35 essays has a title beginning with “How a Poem” and then shifts to a verb. So we have such delights as “How a Poem Wrestles with Its Inheritance” on Rahat Kurd’s “Ghazal: In the Persian”; “How a Poem Pushes Us Away and Beckons Us Closer” on Marilyn Dumont’s “How to Make Pemmican”; and “How a Poem Clarifies Its Blur” on Jeff Latosik’s “Aubade Photoshop.” The titles of the essays are alluring, and so is their content. In regard to Kurd’s poem, Sol briefly explain what a ghazal is, how Kurd has mastered the form, and how Kurd copes with a tradition she may not fully understand but must use, especially language. Sol points out what the poem seems to do: it suggests that studying the tradition is valuable; it acknowledges the difference between a person immersed in the culture and one who isn’t; and it suggest that honouring one’s tradition is valuable—and all that in an eighteen line poem.
The beauty of Sol’s commentary is that he is open-minded and clearly believes that the mental play of reading poetry is worthwhile. He’s also extremely knowledgeable about poetry and can supply history. In “How a Poem Doesn’t Dish” he examines Damian Rogers’ “Ode to a Rolling Blackout,” in the context of confessional poetry at a time when personal information is splashed all over social media, and so the concept of confession is profoundly altered. Sol notes, “The speaker’s position between confession and restraint, identification and distance, seems to me the central subject of the poem.” Sol never insists.
In “How a Poem Mourns” Don Patterson’s sonnet “Mercies” is discussed. The poem is a straight-forward narrative of a sick dog’s last visit to the vet for a final injection. It’s heart-breaking. Sol touches on the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet forms, and where the volta may be in this sonnet. And he explains “the effortlessness with which Paterson shapes his sentences so that the rhymes and rhythms move fluidly, without calling too much attention to themselves, but also varying the meter enough so it doesn’t go flat.” Sol scans the first few lines, so unsure readers can see how it’s done. The commentaries are accessible to any reader with an interest in poetry as Sol explains what is necessary and then moves on to thoughtful considerations.
This book is a gem. It includes thirty-five poems and rich commentary on them and poetry in general, but that’s always through the lens of a specific poem. The breadth of poetry here is wide as is Sol’s knowledge. It’s one of those books that you can leave lying around and pick up to read a poem and the accompanying essay randomly. Or even just the poem, because after all, that’s what the focus is. Poetry.
