Essay, Poetry, and Fiction Reviews
Imagination’s Many Rooms
by Amatoritsero Ede,
Griots Lounge Publishing,
180 pages, $21.99,
ISBN: 978-1-7776884-9-3
This edited collection of creative-cum-literary nonfiction essays previously published in the Maple Tree Literary Supplement website gives insight into many of the cultural concerns of the writer Amatoritsero Ede. He is the editor of the journal and an award-winning poet, and while originally from Nigeria, Ede is now a professor at Mount Alison University.
The book has four sections: “Reminiscences”; “Cultural Critique”; “Oh, Canada!”; and “Literary Essays.” The first piece titled, “Going to Meet ‘The Man’” is an utterly charming personal essay about the eighteen-year-old Ede’s trek to meet poet and professor Wole Soyinka at the University of Ife in 1982. Ede’s devotion to poetry and chutzpah are wrapped up in a youthful innocence that I don’t think has ever left him as the rest of the volume testifies. (Plus, I’ve read some of Ede’s poetry.) In the second piece, Ede adopts the perspective of Harry Oludare Garuba, who died in 2020, to carry on a posthumous conversation: “My regard to the boys wherever they have all scattered to; it seems to be a season of migrations. I am very much alive here, waiting for all of you to come home, have a drink with me here and talk celestial poetry.” Poetry for Ede is like oxygen.
The cultural critiques dip into various topics, such as the mess of American politics (Trump), the horror of the African slave trade and its effects, the Arab Spring, and Nelson Mandela. In “Charlie Hebdo’s Ghost,” Ede argues for a different use of language when talking about terrorism. Jim Jones and David Koresh are not labelled “Christian terrorists.” So why should the term “Muslim” or “Fanatical Muslim” be used in front of the word “terrorist”? Ede says, “It is the conflation of Islam with terrorism that discomfits everyone from political pundits to presidents or scholars and street-side philosophers when they try to approach the subject. That aporia immobilizes moral consensus and defeats the world of policy when it seeks to legislate against these criminals and social misfits.” Ede is careful not to downplay the seriousness or the complexity of the problems.
As a born and raised Canadian, I found “Oh, Canada!” to be trenchant in its criticism of Canadian immigration policies. “Stories abound of immigrant specialists like surgeons, teachers, accountants, and editors being forced in a desperate bid to earn a living, into occupations beneath their skill levels and outside and below their areas of expertise. A consequence is the irony that an immigration system specifically designed to attract the highly skilled into a knowledge economy inadvertently encourages an erosion of knowledge.” As it seems evident that Canada needs immigrants, attention needs to be given to how they are selected and treated.
The literary essays section of the book offers much to ponder. I can’t say I agree with everything, and I’d argue that’s a good thing. I am getting another perspective. Ede prefers the term high school “pupils” to “students” while I’m fine with “students.” I think embedded in the word is the notion that students need to study. It’s not a passive identity. I object to “learner,” a term often flung about in post-secondary circles as in odious term “learner-centered.” Or given the current commodification of education, “client” or “customer” may be more accurate. But I digress and run the risk of lapsing into a rant.
Ede is deeply committed to poetry, and his background appears to lean heavily to the more traditional, such as T.S Eliot. I appreciate Ede’s commentary about poetry and its precedence over prose. Ede notes:
I would say that poetry is the only possible engine for prose of any kind, whether the artistic prose to which Bakhtin referred—that is the novel—or to creative non-fiction, the biography, the essay—ordinary or literary—or even the common letter. Since some concepts can be abstract, the mind needs the ‘image’ in order to elucidate a point or idea or thought. The ‘image’ is the unit of poetry, and good poetry excites all kinds of images and appeals to the senses in a near palpable manner.
I’m not sure I agree. However, it’s an interesting way to think about it. I do like Ede’s comments about the form of poetry—the idea of the line as the basis, but I am not as negative as he is on experimental forms. In fact, I am happy to have been exposed to bp Nichol’s “Catching Frogs.”
This book offers a wide range of topics and perspectives. I felt as if I were sitting with someone and having thoughtful conversations in which we could exchange ideas and feelings. And I learned a lot. The few inclusions of Yoruba stories within some essays make me want to go find more. They reminded me of Aesop—and the wisdom that can be found in the world if we are ready to listen.
J’Accuse . . . ! (Poem Versus Silence)
by George Elliott Clarke,
Exile Editions,
198 pages, $26.95
ISBN: 978-1-55096-953-5
Using Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse” to title his essay-in-poetry alerts readers to the motivation for George Elliott Clarke’s latest book—a cry of outrage against those in power. The Dreyfus affair was a mess of antisemitism and flawed procedure. Clarke’s experience is similar in that he was accused of supporting a poet who had been convicted of murdering Pamela George, an indigenous woman, and a planned speech that he was to give at the University of Regina in 2020 became a flash point of confusion and anger. Clarke cancelled the lecture amid cries for the lecture to be stopped.
This book is Clarke’s side of the story, an attempt to explain what happened. It’s a book of frustration and fury. Clarke takes particular issue with journalists, who misunderstood or willfully mispresented the situation in order to create more volatile stories. And in doing so, they misrepresented Clarke, a Black Canadian with some indigenous heritage, a writer who has consistently explored the dangers of racism. I can only imagine how hurt he must have felt. The book gives some sense that the wounds are deep and profound. He also feels betrayed by fellow academics.
So what happened? Clarke is invited to give a speech. He is asked if he will include poetry from the convicted killer, with whom he has worked for many years, editing poetry and becoming friends, and it’s important to note that until a few months before the planned speech he had no idea the man he was working with had been convicted of and imprisoned for a brutal crime. Clarke replies that he hasn’t written the speech yet, so he doesn’t know if he will include the killer’s poetry. Pamela George’s family and many other members of the indigenous community object to the inclusion of the killer’s poetry. The lecture is to be titled “’Truth and Reconciliation’ versus ‘The Murdered and Missing’: Examining Indigenous Experiences of (In)Justice in Four Saskatchewan Poets.”
And the whole thing blows up in the media. Clarke cancels his speech.
I remember when this mess happened, and I recall thinking that there was no way Clarke would come out of it unscathed, regardless of his intentions or past actions. And that view remains valid as far fewer people will read his book than the numbers who read or listened to the news or social media at the time.
The issue is complicated. First of all, the trauma that First Nations people have endured and are still enduring is real and incredibly harmful. Not wanting to hear the words of a vicious (and it was a vicious crime) killer is completely understandable. Pamela George did not get to live her life. The killer does get to have his life. No amount of prison time can redress that inequity. Secondly, judgements were made about Clarke without all the facts or even some of them. Such a problem appears to be an epidemic these days. Thirdly, Clarke is a university professor working within a specific intellectual framework (one that I understand; I am an instructor at a college) that research is good, that knowledge needs to be sought, and that the process can be uncomfortable, but that the process is the essential task. Clarke took exception at the idea that he could answer the question of whether or not he would include the killer’s poetry before he had researched his lecture:
Soon, my unsaid lecture got impeached in speech whitey-white!
Then came moseying the mint-condition, yellow newsprint—
cozy letters as black as burnt-over land, the buried deaths,
so a screen could wash yellow like piss-gilded snow,
my niggered narcissus self get mangled stigmatically—
cos I couldn’t say what I’d quote cos I didn’t yet know.
As an academic, I get Clarke’s point. Discussions about the personal life of artists and writers frequently take place in the classroom. And it can be hard to reconcile the amazing creative work of some people with their other actions. Clarke mentions those “supreme in Art, yet defective in heart,” such as Pound, Caravaggio, and Villon. I haven’t read any of the killer’s poetry, nor do I plan to. I doubt that it reaches the heights of Pound’s or Villon’s poetry or Caravaggio’s pictures. And none of those three lived in pleasant circumstances the way Pamela George’s killer is.
Clarke’s essay-in-poetry displays his customary erudition and facility with language. But it’s hard to read as it’s so angry. And I guess I understand that as well, as Clarke sees himself as a victim of cancel culture, in effect a verbal lynching. Defending one’s right to speak what others may find objectionable (excluding vile speech such as hate speech) is important. But being protected from harmful speech is also important. And the lines are not clear.
Overall, it’s impossible to read this book and not be disturbed. It’s loaded with challenging images. Clarke uses his platform to explain his experience. He continues his goal of educating his readers by including examples of the brutal treatment of numerous victims of racism. The first poem in the collection is called “For the Murdered & the Missing: A Spiritual,” and it uses the rhythms of a spiritual to cry out about the loss of so many women and the lack of justice; for example:
Why she gotta go missing?
Why she gotta be murdered?
Indigenous insisting,
Justice for our massacred.And he wants justice for himself:
Lookit! To suggest that either Poetry (Rhetoric) or Civil Rights
must be cancelled to assert sincere Solidarity
with any community of righteous Grievance
is to posit a blatant Tyranny!
The style of the poems with italics, exclamation marks, and capitals mirrors Clarke’s fury, and it’s exhausting. What happened to him is wrong. If people cannot take the time to have conversations about their differences, to find out the situation, and to have some sense of understanding and empathy, then nothing much will improve without force and probably violence. Did Clarke make a mistake by not immediately saying he would not use the killer’s poetry in his speech? Perhaps—but not by the academic standards of his profession (professor and poet) and his personal convictions about poetry and search for truth. The final poem asks readers to “Remember Ms. George” and goes on to state Clarke’s essential position:
But I’s a poet who values Poetry more than Silence . . .
*
This paper curls as it burns,
and the black ink flickers, smudged,
fluting skyward as smoke.
Immediately saying no would have avoided so much of this pain. But it may have caused another kind.
After the Harvest
by Keagan Hawthorne,
Gaspereau Press,
80 pages, $22.95
ISBN: 9781554472529
As always Gaspereau has published a beautiful object with After the Harvest, by New Brunswick poet, Keagan Hawthorne, but the contents are as lovely as the book itself. In simple but arresting diction, Hawthorne explores the cycle of life as it’s found on a farm and within a family. The poems look backward in time to when farming was less big business and more what families did to survive and provide food for others.
One of the key symbols is the seed, necessary for plants and people to grow. Farming is and was hard work, and Hawthorne captures the farmscapes of the past with an exquisite eye for detail and a splendid ear for sound. For example, in “Peacock Feather,” the use of alliteration helps build the picture of a man feeding peacocks:
My grandfather, up before the others,
has gone around back to feed the birds.
Cooked cracked corn in a metal pail,
he coos at the cocks who slip him wary looks
while they beck the mash,
It’s easy to see the scene, and then the poem intensifies as the speaker, who is dreaming, hears his grandfather call the birds and later is “cussing out the cows.”
Alliteration and rhythm are key tools for Hawthorne, and he often adopts the meter and language of prayer. In “Agricola Noster,” which begins, “Our Farmer, who art come upon thy quad, / hallowed be thy sacks of sweet crushed grain,” the cadence and movement of the “Our Father” continues and exemplifies another world that is changing, that of the religious one.
Hawthorne plays with various forms, including a kind of puzzle in poetry. Five poems title “Creature” numbered from I to V, the speaker asks the reader to hazard a guess. The poem starts with a nod to Wordsworth: “In reaping and sowing, men lay waste their powers / and that, my dear friend, is a game / that you will never be able to win / unless you can guess me my name.” Each of the five poems reiterates the call to guess while developing images of the land and the people in it. The third poem notes, “I crank the armature of the cell, / those tiny windmills laboring / to unpick entropy in the fields of the sun.” Hawthorne is deeply invested in what makes life, both plant and animal (including humans). And many poems refer to the various forms of light.
Other poets have clearly inspired Hawthorne, for example, Elizabeth Bishop, who provides a form for “Nine O’Clock News from the Old Farmhouse Kitchen” with nine stanzas describing commonly found objects, such as “empty cat dish in the porch” or “ugly painting no one actually likes.” “Wolf Willow” (after Jan Zwicky, as noted) so beautifully captures the sense of place: “Follow the stretched-out evening / along the old cow track, through the broken gate / to the coulee where soft air purls through the swale.” The richness of Hawthorne’s imagery is enticing.
Overall, the poems have a sense of nostalgia for a way of life lost and a huge respect for the work of farmers and the land that provides food. There’s an air of quiet contemplation, a regard for the prairie landscape, and a respect for the writers of both past and present. My favourite poem, although it’s hard to choose, is “The Hedge,” about a grandmother who plants a lilac hedge. The poem is reminiscent of Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno,” especially the section about his cat Jeoffry. Hawthorne’s poem starts “For the colour of lilac is the colour of robes and ribbons / which were not often worn on a farm” and continues in this manner with two lines about the lilac and other aspects of the grandmother’s life and death. It’s truly beautiful.
The world now is so fast-paced that it’s easy to forget or perhaps never even learn that so much of life is utterly dependent on the natural world, its cycles, and the hard work of farmers. Slowing down to appreciate this fundamental part of existence is a gift that these poems offer.
Best Canadian Essays 2023,
edited by Mireille Silcoff,
Biblioasis, 226 pages, $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-77196-503-3
Whether a “best” collection of anything is truly the best is endlessly debatable, but any collection of recently published work provides a wonderful tasting experience. The sixteen essays chosen by Mireille Silcoff for Best Canadian Essays 2023 includes a wide range of topics and styles, as usual, and readers will find much to provide them with hours of enjoyment and education.
I used this book in a first-year college composition course, and the first essay we discussed was the first in the book: Emma Gilchrist’s “Genetic Mapping.” Students loved this essay, as did I, as it deals with issues of identity in a profoundly personal way that pummels the heart. Students were also thrilled (and this part is sad) to be assigned an essay that gripped them. Several said they had not expected to be reading an essay like this one in an English class. Gilchrist details her search to find her genetic parents (she was adopted), a search complicated by her birth mother’s lack of clarity about the birth father. As Gilchrist says, “[W]hat often starts out as an innocent interest in family history can lead to shocking results, uncovering infidelity, donor conception, adoption and, well, family secrets of all varieties. A whopping 27 percent of DNA test-takers said they learned about close relatives they didn’t know about previously, according to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center.” The genetic background of a person is one part of identity, a huge part, and when that background shifts, identity needs to be reconsidered.
Other essays in the book also deal with identity, and maybe that signifies prevailing concerns in our world today. Michelle Good’s “‘Play Indians’ Inflict Real Harm on Indigenous People” captures an important issue that has been in the news far too often as individuals claim to be part of an Indigenous community to gain advantages. As Good says, “How would a person have established themselves as Indigenous pre-DNA testing? By way of what has always been done: identifying connections through shared history, community, tradition, geography and family.” Her message to Joseph Boyden, for example, is clear. She says he is adopted: “a person adopted by an Indigenous community becomes welcomed and accepted as part of the community but is not magically, suddenly, Indigenous.” Good believes it is time for legislation in Canada to punish “fraudulent profiteering” by ‘Play Indians.’
Kathy Page’s “That Other Place” examines identity through the lens of health and uses the metaphor of a grey passport: “A new grey passport brings new responsibilities. When you inhabit the kingdom of the sick, it is your job to understand and explain your disease, and the medical and bureaucratic systems it has forced you to be part of.” Being sick is exhausting enough, but the communication responsibilities, as Page describes them, simply ramp everything up to unbearable levels. Then throw in the pandemic when seeing doctors and getting appointments with specialists became almost impossible. And it’s a toss-up what’s worse: knowing what’s wrong with you or not knowing and still trying to find out. Anyone who is healthy should feel very very grateful.
How identity is created or understood is further examined by Kunal Chaudhary’s “The Sun Is Always in Your Eyes in Rexdale,” which combines a personal account along with a moving criticism of how gun crime was (and is) treated in a racialized Toronto suburb. Gun violence mushroomed after a massive gang raid in 2004, which took gang leaders out of the community. That sounds good, right? But as Chaudhury notes, using research done by Amy Siciliano, the removal of leaders left a bunch of teenagers who shot up the neighbourhood. What follows is the Safe Schools Act, which has the effect of teaching children they are incipient criminals who need controlling. And the focus is on neighbourhoods that are full of immigrants of colour who are likely struggling financially. Chaudhury ends his essay noting that as the pandemic strikes, Rexdale again hits the news as its infection rates are far above the average. It’s the people who are blamed, not the policies that contribute to harm.
In her introduction to the collection, Silcoff discusses the idea and form of the essay and how many of the essays included combine the personal with research. She notes, “Our current, tumultuous age—which seems to be playing out at hyperspeed—is an important time for essayists, because in moments of great change, it’s good to have chroniclers with the presence of mind to step back and assess.” And it’s good to have someone like Silcoff who has assembled such an effective collection.
Best Canadian Stories 2023
edited by Mark Anthony Jarman
Biblioasis, 210 pages, $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-77196-501-9
Mark Anthony Jarman, the editor of Best Canadian Stories 2023 calls this book a “tribute to the talent of Steven Heighton,” and includes two works by Heighton, who died in 2022. Jarman notes, “I hope all the other talented writers in this stellar volume are honored to be in this, a commemorative issue, a sad occasion, but also a community of scribes and friends.” Anyone who met Heighton will have been touched by his kindness and generosity of spirit, so I expect the other writers included feel honoured to be in his company in these pages.
Heighton’s works bookend the collection. The first story, “Instructions for the Drowning,” delves into the faltering marriage of Ray and Inge, who may be suffering from the lack of children in their lives. As a child Ray is told by his father that to save a drowning person, he would have to knock out the person. And Ray believes him: “If his father said the operation worked—and he made it sound like performed routinely in the summer lakes of Canada and the northern states—then it must.” When Inge appears to be drowning and taking Ray with her, the couple gets into a physical battle that endangers both. Heighton’s prose is crisp and clear, balancing beautifully against the chaos of physical and emotional danger.
Readers of Canadian fiction will likely recognize most of the fourteen writers in this volume. Caroline Adderson’s “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone” deals with a familiar problem, one that isn’t going away any time soon. Taryn and Cory are party-crashing high rises in Vancouver so they can steal money to fund a self-organized (you can learn anything on the internet) drug withdrawal and detox. Broke and homeless, Taryn has already suffered far too much in her young life, and Adderson does a great job of showing her humanity as Taryn grows concerned about a baby sleeping in a bedroom. This story is unutterably sad and moving.
Conflict forms the basis of fiction, and Oma El Akkad’s “Oddsmaking” deals with two: family breakdown and climate disaster in the form of forest fires. While the story is somewhat fantastical as the characters are involved in betting on forest fires, it seems less fantastical all the time: “Once there had been a fire season but now the year was the season and the migrations constant.” It’s less of a fantasy and more of a prediction or an observation.
David Huebert’s “Oil People” combines class distinctions in a town near Sarnia with sexual awakening and bullying. Jade’s older sister Jackie gives her a life lesson: “You’re growing up. It’s not easy. It’s mean. . . . Sometimes you get bitten. Sometimes you bite back.” Nine-year-old Jade is traumatized by the stories of birth defects after Chernobyl. She’s being intimidated by boys at school. She’s called an “oil witch” because she eats baloney. It’s a world of hurt. But she gets back at the boy who is the source of innuendo.
Kate Cayley’s “A Death” addresses the effect of Avery’s death on her daughter Allegra with her former (and younger) partner Maura and examines how sexual politics changes. Avery has a particular view, Maura another, and fourteen-year-old Allegra yet another. “Maura once told [Avery] that she was the only queer she’d ever met who seemed to be genuinely regretful, even to the point of seeing herself as cheated, that it was not the late eighteenth century or perhaps the early nineteenth, who wished for the electric charge of absolute secrecy.” In contrast, Allegra “was frank about sex, gender, politics, while treating all these things as not really very serious, when to Avery and Maura they were deadly serious, enough to shout at each other about.” Avery lives by a number of ideals, and eventually comes to regret some of them. And despite the breakup, these women care deeply for each other and their child.
The stories are wide-ranging in time and place. Sadness and loss prevail as is appropriate given that the volume pays tribute to one of Canada’s most respected writers. Jarman’s choices will doubtlessly lead to readers seeking out more works by all of these writers. And that is a very good thing.
