The Dominion - Megan Stewart

February Books

Cameron Fenton — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 05:52:02 +0000

Essays on queer parenting, and a seductive new cookbook

And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents and Our Unexpected Families
Susan Goldberg and Chloe Brushwood Rose, eds
Insomniac Press: Toronto, 2009.

Queer people have long fought to overcome a collective sense of invisibility, but queer parents are all the more likely to be lost or ignored in complicated networks of chosen family, partners, sperm donors and surrogates. The stories in this collection are loud and inspiring examples of courage, creativity and love in queer parenting. I knew these people existed somewhere—the queers who make their dreams of babies and families come true, in the queerest of ways.

The experiences shared in this book are sweet, well-meaning stories of struggle and pride, and they deserve to be heard. Located beyond the standard categories of parents, donors or "alternative family networks," queer parenting must be acknowledged as something inherently unique. And first-person narrative prose is the best way to capture these experiences.

However, the focus on personal narratives leaves some threads only partially explored. Common themes emerge through many of these stories, such as the need to challenge mainstream conceptions of the family, and the subsequent limitations of language to describe family roles and relationships. Many of the authors engage in the same search for non-biological links that hold their relationships together. They need new language to describe their family. This project—finding words to fit our experiences and creating new words where there were none before—is queer in itself.

If queer is about making space for difference, acknowledging the fluid, shifting and inter-sectional nature of identity, and being ourselves in the world, then the stories shared in this collection are not only about queer as an identity category, but more about living queer. Queerness extends beyond your intimate life and the identity of your partner; it materializes in the structure of your social and family circles, how you conceive your children, how you parent and the people you parent with. Despite my desire for a more in-depth exploration of themes brought up in these stories, this book succeeds in the most urgent of its aims: creating a space for these stories to be heard.

—JD Drummond  

Wisewoman’s Cookery: Food, Sex, Magic and Merriment
Shannon Loeber and Mary Elise Edwards
Shannamar Publishing House: North Vancouver, 2009.

This is a sexy book.

Almost every page in this aphrodisiac cookbook features an image of nude bodies, flower petals like a woman’s flesh, and food pics you can almost lick.

The authors self-published this guide to folklore erotica and also grew the vast majority of the herbs, spices and vegetables in their North Vancouver gardens. The recipes are theirs and the research is extensive.

I love what these women have done—through each ingredient, they’ve found a way to tell the story of a powerful, sensuous and creative woman with a reputation as a smut-lover who rocked in the sack. They introduce us to Veronica Franco, a 17th century Venetian courtesan, as a way to play up the carrot, a household phallic symbol Wisewoman trumps as a tool for self-love and muscle conditioning. (And the carotenoids that give the carrot its colour are antioxidant.)

And then take the plum. A pert, late-summer stone fruit that looks and feels like bum cheeks, the plum reached Europe from Persian orchards on the spice trails ruled by Alexander the Great. Wisewoman introduces legendary men of history and literature to elevate the women standing behind—and laying with—them. Alex, for example, was wanted by all the regal Macedonian wenches, but he lusted after Roxana, a noble from across the Mediterranean Sea who conquered his loins, heart and kingdom. It’s not like she seduced him with plums, but the story behind the man allows the authors to tell us about a woman and a fruit, both with sex appeal.

Oh, and on the pages dedicated to the plum and a recipe for plum liqueur, there is a pleasantly soft-core etching of two people fucking.

As appealing and arousing the content, the packaging of this book doesn’t always do it justice. I hate to rag on typography, but the font is coarse and thick—it needs to be much more elegant and pleasing to the senses. The awkward and text-bookish footnotes that follow lines of poetry, classic artwork, and passages from various myths and legends are distracting. The treatment is stuffy and in utter contrast to the relaxed, open-minded and experimental content.

An element of new-age and sage hippie surrounds Wisewoman, who delivers a message to find pleasure in our bodies and the natural world around us. Will I work my way through the recipes for raspberry sex tonic, blackberry body syrup, love-apple seduction or spiced nuts? Maybe one day... For now, reading about the food is enough to enlighten and stimulate.

—Megan Stewart

JD Drummond is a researcher, writer and artist who is almost finished her Master's of Social Work thesis focusing on sexuality, gender and disability.

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia.

And Baby Makes More Cover

Wisewoman Cover

January Books

Kyle Hodnett — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:00:00 +0000

New works by Nickerson and Bolano, and a collaborative effort by Campbell, Boyd, and Culbert

McPoems
Billeh Nickerson
Arsenal Pulp Press: Vancouver, 2009.

Sometimes I feel I’ve missed out by never working at a fast-food chain. Apart from the drudgery, exploitative wages, and perilous working conditions, these restaurants are so geared for mass appeal that they become rare meeting points for a wide range of characters and classes. With a quick eye for anthropological observation, Billeh Nickerson recalls his years as a McWorker in this short poetry collection. Cleverly divided into thematic sections reflecting the questionable quality, service, cleanliness, and value of his employer, Nickerson recounts the mixture of mundane and surreal moments at McDonald’s like a clean-mouthed Charles Bukowski. Characters almost unbelievably bizarre such as “the unicorn”—a customer who orders soft-serve cones to stick on his forehead, or the woman who eats lunch then purges in the parking lot show a grim side of the restaurant and the world it inhabits.

Accumulated anecdotes form a bleak picture, but Nickerson delivers observations with humour that sustained during his time in the trenches. "Daylight Savings Diptych" passes on a Zen-like maxim that when the clocks change in spring and fall customers will yell at you because they arrive too late for breakfast or too early for lunch. McPoems offers a smart and witty insiders view over the counter for those of us who’ve never asked, “Would you like fries with that?”

—Shane Patrick Murphy

The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Roverto Bolaño
Melville House Publishing: Brooklyn, 2009.

Despite dying nearly seven years ago, each posthumous Bolaño release further cements his reputation as a literary icon of the twenty-first century. Brooklyn-based Melville House Publishing gets in on the action with this collection of interviews Bolaño gave as he rose to fame in Spanish-speaking populations. These interviews attempt to contextualize the ongoing debate over Bolaño’s acceptance by North American audiences. Is it his romantic left-leaning idealism that strikes a chord, or do his stories play into preconceived North American perceptions of a Latin America preoccupied with sex, violence, and obscure literary movements? While these interviews provide depth to his character and motivation to write, they offer only a glimpse into Bolaño’s perception of his own fame. The most in-depth interview in the collection is taken from the Mexican edition of Playboy, and depicts Bolaño as jokey and self-deprecating to a fault. Interesting to ravenous Bolaño fans, the uninitiated would do better reading The Savage Detectives or Nazi Literature in the Americas—his fictitious encyclopedia of the right-wing literati.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

A Thousand Dreams: Vancouver’s downtown eastside and the fight for its future
Larry Campbell, Neil Boyd and Lori Culbert
Greystone Books: Vancouver, 2009.

A Thousand Dreams tells grim stories of missing women, sardine and cat food diets, epidemic illness and the crippled support systems that struggle to manage the situation that is life, and survival, on Vancouver’s downtown eastside.

Although they never lived in the neighbourhood of which they write, the book’s authors spent much of their professional lives in its streets, meeting its residents and uncovering its secrets. The team, consisting of a journalist, a coroner-cum-politician and a criminologist document work being done in the east end community. Careful not to overlook the positive, the book shines a light on successes like harm reduction and InSite, the supvised injection site that won a recent constitutional challenge over the Harper Government. However,the battles depicted here are largely bureaucratic, and power is accessed through political clout.

Much of A Thousand Dreams details the health and social services available in the community, yet it is not for residents of the neighbourhood, it’s an introduction for outsiders. Compelling to read but not comprehensive; the book uses case studies to illustrate how an individual navigates the system, telling stories of a few as seen through the eyes of community organizers attempting to support them.

Outside of these studies the vast majority of the east end’s poor, drug-dependant, mentally ill and desperate appear faceless in the book, shifting indistinguishably like clouds overhead. No doubt, an impression not intended, but A Thousand Dreams focuses on challenges understood by most Canadians—ineffective RCMP funding, back-room maneuvering, high-rise developments, Da Vinci’s Inquest—not cat food for dinner, a dirty needle for dessert or a damp parking garage for a bed. The remarkable stories are about the activists, writers, organizers and health professionals who fight for the future of Vancouver’s downtown eastside

—Megan Stewart

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia.

Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

December Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 06:32:43 +0000

New works by Hall, Rogers and With

The Certainty Dream
Kate Hall
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2009

I’m normally skeptical of a book of poetry containing multiple references to contemporary metaphysicists and epistemologists. Academic poets can be such stiff writers, getting stuck in a search for canonical purpose and intellectual weight. Their poems get “workshopped” until they are systematically drained of all their energy and inspiration.

This is not the case with Kate Hall, whose finished poetry sounds much more like Wallace Stevens than GWF Hegel. Some lines from the last poem capture the feel of this book as a whole:

“this became the dream his dream in which I did not allow him to speak
and the dream in which I imagined him speechless before me”

In Hall’s dreams, Thomas Aquinas is a self-help author. Hume is a tour-guide for bird watchers. Descartes is going to a Halloween party. Elephants and disembodied voices arrive in the mail.

The Certainty Dream weaves its way through absurdist outbursts and giddy indulgences of graduate-level philosophy while remaining rooted in the immediacy and, yes, the certainty of everyday life.

While Hall had me reaching out to Wikipedia to decode some of her academic name-dropping (I still don’t know if she means David Sosa, Ernest Sosa, or maybe Sammy Sosa), but she provides enough context and imagery to avoid turning her book into an academic in-joke.

Hall seems to be working in the same emerging style as her editor, Toronto poetry guru Kevin Connolly, whose Revolver was a Griffin Poetry Prize nominee last year. Like Connolly, Hall’s poems unfold with wit, colourful layers, and no overwhelming sense of ego or pomp.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Paper Radio
Damian Rogers
ECW: Toronto, 2009

If poems are word-compilations that broadcast music from the page, it’s hard not to like Damian Rogers’ idea of poetry as a paper radio. The former arts editor at Toronto’s Eye Weekly uses this musical metaphor to transmit a disparate set of themes, ranging from inter-personal and family tensions to a preoccupation with Shakers.

There are moments of genuine intensity here, but Rogers plays it fairly safe in her debut collection. Her clever quips are some of the most memorable parts: “Your problem is my problem—which is why I hate hearing about it.” Or, “No one tells the truth anymore and we’re grateful—though the lies bore us to tears.”

When Rogers sets aside her bleak humour, she earnestly shares intimate moments and everyday epiphanies through characters that remain silhouettes, without much detail to draw us close to them. And occasionally the Shakers, with all their dance-mad celibacy, sound like a poet looking for quirky inspiration.

But Rogers’ sense of humour and quick pacing makes this an upbeat, melodic, and highly-experimental debut. We’ll be looking forward to future work by Rogers where she’ll inevitably sharpen the tuning and crank this radio’s volume.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ Prison
Cathleen With
Viking Canada: Toronto, 2009

Having Faith isn’t about trust, belief, or religion. It’s about a girl having a baby girl while in prison.

Trista is one-quarter Inuvialuit and 15 when she has Faith, a premature child who is deaf, brain-damaged and diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Born into a violent night following punches to her mother’s belly and the bloody death of a store cashier, Faith spends the first three months of her life in a juvenile detention facility before being shipped south to a foster family.

Her mother spends those same months deluded, detached or drugged. As Trista gropes through her days at the Polar Girls' Prison, each brings greater loss and self-disappointment as her plans for motherhood are dashed as quickly as her approaching court sentence.

As Trista draws further into herself, novelist Cathleen With is at her best. It’s unclear what Trista remembers and lets ruminate in her head and what she shares with the staff and other girls at the prison. These monologues can be disorienting, but through the course of the narration, they become more frequent, more confusing and we can appreciate Trista’s own bewilderment, loneliness and longing.

The author lived and taught in Inuvik and here builds an insulated world of snow drifts, ice roads, wolf trim on parkys and the dark, northern secrets of molestation, alcoholism, gambling and neglect.

At the Writers and Readers Festival in Vancouver last year, With said she has seen girls “just go sideways.”

“They would talk about their life as if it were going to be over by the time they were 30. Suicide. Drugs. Whatever. Better get on with life.”

Born to a 13-year-old mother in Jackfish Bay, a remote, fictional town outside of Iqaluit, Trista inherits a world where men slip little girls fivers to get them off.

“Sometimes you don’t even know what the sexual assault is,” said With in Vancouver. And speaking for the young abused characters in Having Faith, “Oh, that happened too. Maybe that’s why I can’t get my shit together.”

Trista’s voice is urgent and desperate and sometimes buoyant. With opens the door for her redemption, but this novel offers little reprieve. The prose evokes cold climes, ghosts that haunt and forgive, sunless days and frozen bodies in the permafrost, but With’s scenes foster a sense of faith—a confidence in survival, strong women, intuition and love.

Trista inherits aspects of her grandmothers’ cultural knowledge and skill—but barely. She cherishes their values and generosity, but doesn’t have the social support or maturity to embrace it. With has surrounded Trista in female role models who flash through the narration as potential futures for the inmates at the detention facility.

Having Faith speaks to trust and spirit, but Trista learns it’s also about having faith in family and the friends we chose as family.

With received acclaim for Skids, a short story collection about kids living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and again in Polar Girls, With brings us a harrowing and mesmerizing voice of a young Canadian fighting to survive on the margins of society.

—Megan Stewart

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia.

Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

October Books

Moira Peters — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:02:42 +0000

New works by Holbrook & Holtz, translation by Rexroth

Joy is So Exhausting
Susan Holbrook
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2009

On writing humor, Dorothy Parker said, “There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind.”

Susan Holbrook’s Joy is So Exhausting is a collection to make Parker proud. Tongue-in-check tart, Holbrook’s poetry is full to the brim with truncated aphorisms (invented) and the juxtaposed rhetoric of double-entendres: “Your First Timpani? Take a deep Brecht and relapse.” Her words play musical chairs and broken telephone at the same time.

While I’m less keen on the Canadiana in-jokes (Green Party, Conservative Party, Peter Mansbridge) and other CBC News refrains, I appreciate that even these dropped names exist in a galaxy far from purple.

Speaking of blue, Holbrook’s sexy lady-love responses to Lorca move liquidly, acting as a sort of Psalm and response style poetical liturgy. And “Poetsmart Training for Your Poet” is hold-your-sides hilarious. Show it to your scruffiest poet and get them in line already.

You’ll read Joy is So Exhausting with a dry pair of eyes; this writer’s whet her wit sharp.

—Melissa Bull

Written on the Sky: Poems from the Japanese
translated by Kenneth Rexroth
New Directions: New York, 2009

At some point, most Canadian pre-teens gain a rudimentary understanding of Japanese poetry. Unfortunately my exposure to this tradition has never branched out from those unrhyming lines of five, seven, and five syllables I learned in grade four.

Given this limited exposure, I was excited to learn something from this short collection. However, this is far from an educational tool. Apart from the names and genders of the poets, and the dates they lived, no background information is provided. But this lack of supplementary material is only slightly disorienting. When confronted exclusively with the poems themselves, you can uncover a lifetime of visceral images in these succinct verses.

I keep returning to Masaoka Shiki’s poem, which reads in its entirety: “Frozen in the ice / A maple leaf.” Bare and direct, that maple leaf can spark deep imaginative involvement. Then again, it can be just a leaf in the ice. Stripped of decorative phrasing and emotional triggers, each re-reading provides a new response.

Packaged in a glossy black and gold jacket with ornate flowers and butterflies, this collection seems so much like a romantic gift that they could have published it on pink heart-shaped pages. Cynical as that might sound, it’s probably damn effective as such.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

This One’s Going to Last Forever
Narine Holtz
Insomniac Press: Toronto, 2009

It’s one thing to look for love in all the wrong places; it’s another not to look at all.

Narine Holtz’s style cuts to the point and embraces our so-called sexual deviances, her characters share the same confidence to love and find love in the most unexpected places.

Take the sexy amputee who fulfills the fetishized desires of a man and wonders at the cosmic joke of “leaving her homophobic girlfriend” and finally discovering pleasure where she’d only known pain. The phantoms of her past disappear as “her cunt caramelized like sugar sweating in a hot pan.”

One of This One’s best lines is delivered by a middle-aged gay man who performs drive-through weddings dressed as Elvis. The words he speaks about his fag hag, Tracy, and the reasons he’s drawn to her eccentric drama, are among the most tender of this collection.

While the writing is not overtly sexy, Holtz delivers enough intimacy and eroticism to tease but not quite satisfy. This suspended gratification almost has me begging Holtz for a collection of erotic stories that fulfils the fill-in-the-blank anticipation of This One.

This collection of short stories is anchored by the central chapters, telling the story of Clara and her emerging politicization. If you weren’t a small-town Alberta lesbian coming out in Montreal in 1989, Holtz takes you there: “Even the meaning of the words the other students used—words like ‘colonialization,’ ‘hegemony,’ and ‘deconstruction”—weren’t clear to her.”

The greatest source of internal conflict for Clara is her sexuality, and despite her experience with men, she’d rarely known the pleasure of intimacy and love. Say hello to Gabby, who makes Clara blush when she says, “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”

However, Gabby’s loyalty is to women, not to one woman. Here Holtz, who was awarded the Alice B. Award for debut lesbian fiction for her previous novel, channels Nietzsche: “In the end, one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.”

Clara’s sexual soul searching may not have been written for comic effect, but her insecurities and coming-of-age epiphanies rarely failed to crack me up. On one hand, her voice is prescient, endearing and sweetly pathetic. On the other, it’s self-absorbed and tedious. Her doubts also flit through the minds of many queer women; she’s not alone and she’s not original. Once between the sheets with her lover, her mind is finally put at ease.

—Megan Stewart

Melissa Bull works in Montreal as a writer, editor, and translator. Her first collection of short fiction, Eating Out, was published by WithWords in 2009.

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia.

Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

September Books

Moira Peters — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:43:36 +0000

Short stories by Goldbach, humour by Leiren-Young

Selected Blackouts
John Goldbach
Insomniac Press: Toronto, 2009

Sometimes realism can be too realistic. Without narrative flare or insight from the author, superficial realism can spiral around banalities that make the life of an amateur literary critic look like an atomic bomb of excitement.

John Goldbach occasionally gets trapped by the boredom and frustration of his characters in Selected Blackouts, his debut collection of short fiction. These stories rapidly shift from exuberant experiments to monotonous dialogues with little compromise between the two. It’s a shame to see a few drawn out and directionless stories deter from otherwise brilliant moments scattered throughout this collection.

Luckily, Goldbach’s humour often shines in original narrative structures and bleak subject matter. “How Much Do They Know?” is the inner-monologue of a character reunited with some long-time friends at a Christmas party. It would take timelines and diagrams to unravel the years of cheating, jealousy, and backstabbing outlined in this short story. But the essential point is the narrator knows several secrets about each person around the table. In listing his own collection of secrets, he comes to realize each friend likely holds an equal number of unspoken stories about himself and the others. The story’s conclusion is a straightforward and inevitable comment on friendship itself: “I really don’t understand why we tolerate each other.” The idea is familiar to most close-knit friends, but Goldbach infuses this everyday observation with his own insights and humour, which is what realism should set out to do.

Goldbach has a talent for unveiling the psychological tensions that awkwardly bind people together, but one story in particular, “Easter Weekend,” simply gets bogged down in tiring exchanges between characters who can’t express themselves. Here Goldbach takes a security-camera view, recording objective words and actions in colourless prose. There is some logic in presenting the teenage stock-characters in their own light: They repeat cliches, they interrupt each other, and they leave the most important parts unsaid. But too often Goldbach gives us only these mumblings while neglecting the anxieties brewing in the undercurrents. Unfortunately, a realistic depiction of a boring conversation makes for really boring reading. Nevertheless, these somewhat lifeless dialogues find their balance in Goldbach’s shorter, punchier, and more endearing pieces.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Never Shoot A Stampede Queen: A Rookie Reporter in the Cariboo
Mark Leiren-Young
Heritage House: Victoria, 2008

A cub reporter haphazardly lands himself at a small-town community paper and over-uses the adjective venerable as if the irony were original.

Naturally, 22-year-old Mark Leiren-Young has a lot to gain from his months at the Williams Lake Tribune in the early 1980s and, 25 years later, he introduces the memoir Never Shoot a Stampede Queen with the goal of staying true to his younger self.

Stampede Queen won a Leackock Award for humour, but much of the prose struck me as condescending and aloof—not the insight and wit I hoped for. Maybe it’s the immature narrator’s persistent indelicate stereotyping after he arrives in the Cariboo, a ranching region in the central interior of British Columbia. But in time he dismantles many of his own caricatures and begins to write with pathos, maturity and even humour.

The narrator laments, upon arriving in Williams Lake, population not very much, “It was my worst nightmare. I was about to start work as a newspaper reporter in a town with no news.”

By the time he realizes how wrong he is, Leiren-Young is on his way back to Vancouver and restless to finish the profile of a local judge, an investigative piece on bigoted landlords, and the series on the town’s crime rate he committed to and was genuinely keen to report. He proves himself a very good reporter with natural storytelling instincts and a common touch.

Despite unfair leaps and character assumptions, Leiren-Young nails the reality of community reporting: an epic 24 news briefs and stories in one day; typing merely to fill column inches; covering issues of poverty, housing, and First Nation rights that merit national attention; wages that have barely risen in two decades; vicarious traumatization in the criminal courts; and the surprise of finding humanity where it’s least expected.

The strength of this collection of non-fiction stories is voice and storytelling. When he’s not making a Clint Eastwood comparison, Leiren-Young shares fantastic anecdotes worthy of broad Canadian attention. We hear the narrator grow up through language and professionalism—he becomes a better journalist and is progressively more open-minded. His writing becomes increasingly nuanced, and it seems as if Leiren-Young eventually sees past the cliches to connect with a more honest portrayal of the Cariboo.

—Megan Stewart

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia. Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

Political and Chemical Blowback

hillarybain — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:26:24 +0000

How the Canadian government poisoned rural New Brunswick

VANCOUVER–The term ‘blowback’ has two definitions. One is environmental, the other political; both come with a human cost. Blowback happens when chemicals sprayed in the air catch wind currents, blow back towards those doing the spraying and fall on homes, farms and people. Blowback also describes the unintended adverse results of a political action or situation. Chris Arsenault documents how these dual forms of blowback met in rural New Brunswick in his first book Blowback: A Canadian History of Agent Orange and the War at Home.

Blowback documents the irresponsibility of the Canadian government as it pursued a decades-long campaign to spray small town and rural New Brunswick with more than a million litres of Agent Orange, considered one of the deadliest synthetic chemicals known to humankind.

From 1956 to 1984, the military and its private contractors showered more than 1.3 million litres of toxic defoliant on and around the Canadian Forces Base Gagetown, including the town of Enniskillen and its several hundred residents. The reason for spraying was simple: to defoliate trees and brush to make space for acres of training ground and shooting ranges at the base, writes Arsenault.

Arsenault is unabashedly critical of Canadian military neglect, which he describes as deliberate, and has choice words about the systemic defoliation at Gagetown:

…partially a story of inaction, ignorance incompetence and laziness: contract supervisors who didn’t follow safety labels; military personnel who buried improperly sealed barrels of toxin in random locations; aerial sprayers who missed their targets, destroying crops and swaths of land; and power companies who decided spraying dioxin was a cheaper way to clear brush from electrical lines than hiring workers with saws and axes.

Spraying was also used on the land because the topography and foliage simulated conditions in Vietnam. “Of all possible North American test sites,” Arsenault outlines, “it had the terrain most like Vietnam.”

Arsenault uses facts gleaned from Freedom of Information requests, primary sources and interviews to condemn the Canadian government for its complicity in using chemicals against its own people at a concentration higher than the US sprayed in Southeast Asia.

Agent Orange gained infamy when the US used it during the Vietnam War, resulting in serious health consequences for multiple generations of Vietnamese.

In his opening passages, Arsenault outlines similar consequences in New Brunswick, including a resident of Enniskillen who had 11 tumours removed from her body.

One of the most galling examples of private traumas endured by those spraying and being sprayed with the toxic defoliant is that of Ken Dobbie. As a teenager in 1966, he handled Agent Orange with his bare hands while on a six-week contract to strip the bush. Now suffering from a host of neurological and blood disorders, Dobbie told Arsenault, “We were told this stuff was safe enough to drink.” Dobbie is now a leading plaintiff in a lawsuit against the federal government.

In 115 pages, Arsenault has compiled a history of Agent Orange in Canada that includes both insight and humour. From the first internal memo to the NDP politician in the 1980s to the press exposés and to the largest class-action lawsuit in US history, Blowback is compelling reading for every Canadian who wants to know more about the wizard behind the curtain. The author's research unearths years of military paper trails and includes extensive interviews with past Gagetown military personnel, labourers contracted to spray, and rural New Brunswick residents.

With dozens of footnotes per chapter, the passages can seem textbook-like. The stories he relates about the individuals most impacted by spraying—like Paul and Cora Thompson, who can’t have children, and Marilyn Kissinger, whose brother and teenage friends died en masse—are haunting and unforgettable, but also underdeveloped. Arsenault seems to have established the trust of one-time Gagetown infantry and past Enniskillen residents. He does each one justice, but would do the reader a favour by indulging a narrative style to heighten memories, loss and sacrifice. However, he does corroborate first-person accounts with documented information, enhancing one through the use of the other.

The war at home, Arsenault writes, is not for mere poetic effect or political rhetoric. No, the history of Agent Orange in Canada is about the war coming home and being waged against Canadians. What citizens finally realized, and what spurred them to mobilize, writes Arsenault, is that they have the justification and agency to blow back against the government and military that poisoned them.

Megan Stewart is a Vancouver-based journalist.

Blowback