The Dominion - Matthew J. Trafford

Copper Ore, Silver Screen

dawn — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:47:08 +0000

<cite>Under Rich Earth</cite>

TORONTO–Under Rich Earth (Bajo Suelos Ricos), which world-premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, is a documentary about the very small town of Junin in the Intag valley in Ecuador. It is also a film about the very large – and Canadian – mining company (Ascendant Copper) that wants to move into the valley and build a mine.

The film documents Ascendant sending hired thugs to threaten and intimidate the anti-mining townspeople, while the government in the capital city of Quito responds sluggishly, and the Chairman of the company leaves phone messages saying that nothing is wrong and that the majority of the local people fully support the project.

Which turns out to be at least partially true.

The town of Chalguayaco Alto, down the road from Junin, is pro-mine – and this difference leads to some heated violence and animosity between the two towns. Two journalists from French Press Agency (AFP) were held in Chalguayaco Alto, along with representatives from the regional council of Cotacachi. Director Malcolm Rogge says: "The risk of physical harm was very real and I took all precautions necessary to preserve my security while getting as much of the story as I could."

In addition, Ascendant Copper, while they granted an interview with General Manager Francisco Veintimilla, refused to allow on-camera interviews with the CEO or Chairman of the company.

Given these circumstances, it's more or less understandable if the film feels a little bit one-sided at times.

The filmmakers were obviously incredibly close to their subjects, so much so that they were entrusted with recordings of local radio broadcasts and camcorder footage of some of the illegal attacks on mine protesters, as well as photographic evidence.

Incorporating this material into the movie is a great technique for corroborating the Junin people’s story of what happened there, and documenting the actions of the armed paramilitaries who were sent into the area to intimidate those against the mine. The use of this “found” material, however, also serves to further embed the eye of the film in the community of Junin, and distances the audience further from the pro-mine perspective.

The limited perspective available to the filmmakers contrasts with the 'objective observer' tone of the film.

"I think it would have been difficult for any non-Ecuadorian journalist with a camera to maintain the perception of neutrality during that time," said Rogge.

It might have been helpful if the viewer had some idea of this and the reasons behind it (American filmmakers, and European and North American human rights observers, had been in the anti-mining community the previous year). As it was, questions about how the filmmakers discovered this story, found these people and gained their trust so completely are left largely unanswered by the film itself.

Questions of perspective aside, what’s incredible about the movie – other than the cinematography itself and intimate access into people’s lives – is the structural device Rogge uses.

He starts the film with camcorder footage of an armed shoot-out between pro- and anti-mining factions, then moves back in time to fill in the story up to that point, and then forward past it. This cyclic structure lends momentum and drive to the film, which helps provide a clear sense of narrative while simultaneously presenting the different events and accounts of events in the film.

But most remarkable of all is the outcome of the documented struggle: the mining is disallowed, setting a historical precedent, helping to shape Ecuador’s national policy and inspiring other communities to fight against global mining companies.

For once, the people triumph, and the film – which belongs so deeply to these people – is a triumph too.

Matthew J. Trafford works with deaf college students and writes in Toronto.

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May Books

Moira Peters — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:00:36 +0000

New works by Wickers, Vuong-Riddick, Boyko and Bryan

Stations of the Lost
Brian Wickers
Mansfield Press: Toronto, 2006.

This book offers readers something remarkable: the chance to engage with a captivating voice and enlist the experience and lifetime observations of an extremely erudite and affable poet. Here we have a complicated and finely textured emotional landscape of ex-wives and teenage daughters, elderly fathers and the children who look after them. There is a solid quality to the voice in these poems, a sense that the speaker has withstood life’s inclement weather and will live to withstand more. In addition to carefully wrought images and phrases, Wickers is adept with sound; in the lyric “A Seashell From the Seychelles,” the ‘s’ sounds mimic the sea, and the resulting miasma of sound and meaning is beautiful. Wickers shines when he’s being ostentatiously humorous, as in “Marginal Questions, Winter, English 101, Frost.” The poem riffs off questions a teacher might ask students – mentally and verbally – while teaching Frost’s famous poem: “Who owns the woods – in which of several senses?/ do you own property have you ever tended to animals.” These poems span the pains and joys of life while reflecting on what it is to be human.

--Matthew J. Trafford

The Evergreen Country: A Memoir of Vietnam
Thuong Vuong-Riddick
Hagios: Regina, 2007.

As a child in Hanoi and later a student in Saigon, Vuong-Riddick witnessed Vietnam's turbulent changes in the second half of the 20th century. Historically under French colonial rule, Vietnam was occupied by Japan during World War II, then reoccupied by France, only to be split in two after Communist rebels led by Ho Chi Minh captured Hanoi. The Evergreen Country is Vuong-Riddick's vivid memoir of these times, brimming with historical, cultural and personal insights. The tone is straightforward: events are presented chronologically, with occasional welcome asides to describe relevant cultural details or social practices, including feet binding, teeth dyeing, betel chewing, and the use of the "shame pole" to punish immodesty. Vuong-Riddick casts both sides of the political conflict in a suspicious and violent light, and only hints at where her biases may lie. Vuong-Riddick is a likeable narrator, and we become interested in her personal growth and family, even as we're drawn into the larger historical narrative. Despite the ever-present tension of war, what emerges from the book is a colourful picture of a vibrant and dynamic country.

--Sam Fraser

Blackouts
Craig Boyko
McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 2008.

First short story collections often possess a restless quality, as the developing writer casts out his or her net as widely as possible to determine just what sits within reach. In Blackouts, individual sentences often show signs of overextension, falling into the kind of exploratory wordiness that signals a young writer straining to broaden or discover the range of his abilities. Occasionally this effect works: “It sounded like a word she’d borrowed from her husband, the psychiatrist, the psychologist, whatever.” As this sentence from “Black Ink” presses outward, each word becomes essential to one character’s conception of another: first a tossed off statement of designation, then a frustrated amendment, and finally exasperation. At other moments, the unchecked forward momentum weakens the impact of some of the poetic passages. Subtle differences between the modifiers notwithstanding, sentences like “Science pursues truth impersonally, dispassionately, disinterestedly,” from “In the Dark,” would benefit from greater concision. The stories in Blackouts are extraordinarily varied in style and subject matter. Given the ambition of this collection, it may only be a matter of more time spent in the workshop for Boyko’s trials to yield major results.

--Bob Kotyk

Gerbil Mother
D.M. Bryan
NeWest Press: Edmonton, 2008.

D.M. Bryan’s first novel is a marvel. From the first few sentences—“Take it on trust—the moment's a bad one. Not Greek tragedy, but ordinary doctor's office despair, regular as a diagrammed digestive system”-- the narrative voice jerks us awake. Bryan has taken a classic character—the harassed mother of small children overwhelmed with noise, sleeplessness and loneliness—and, with the use of a judiciously chosen device, both heightened and deflated its pathos. Gerbil Mother is narrated from the point of view of a foetus, which is unusual in itself, but Bryan has gone one better and made this foetus a bully. The foetus tells us from the beginning “I see at once what a bad mother we have,” and it takes us several chapters to realize how unreliable this narrator is. This judgement mimics the actual voice a selfish toddler might use were it capable of eloquent expression, and the effect is startling. Bryan's language is sophisticated and vigorous, and every paragraph pops with images like this one: “Ref in a dirty diaper, shaking the ropes of the ring. The crib.” A tough and imaginative debut.

--Linda Besner

February Books

hillarybain — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:52:09 +0000

New works by MacArthur, Armstrong, McPherson and Glenn

Take Us Quietly
Tammy Armstrong
Goose Lane Editions,
Fredericton, 2006.

The poems in this book meander: geographically they cover Canada from coast to coast, as well as foreign locales like Spain, Guatemala, and Indonesia. While the range of content may be admirable, there’s a sense of something missing in this collection, and in the individual poems themselves—a lack of common purpose and cohesion. Take these two stanzas from “Mathematics:” “A cigarette mark/ burnt through a twenty-dollar bill/ into your forearm/ is my logarithmic reminder./ I’ve memorized them all./ When my sight is faulty tungsten,/ my fingers will read polysyllabic.// This rock and scald of absence blisters/ into Saturday morning:/ coffee, samosas, Globe and Mail,/ my feet tucked beneath the angles of your leg.” While the thread connecting mathematics, the number twenty, and logarithms is clear, the movement to chemistry (tungsten) and literature (polysyllabic) feels strange, not to mention the tangle of other images and allusions which are in no way accessible to the reader. Throughout the collection the poems seem to skim the surface of something beautiful, but never take the plunge into real depth or meaning. Take Us Quietly leaves the reader wanting more matter and more art.

--Matthew J. Trafford

Six Ways to Sunday
Christian McPherson
Nightwood, Gibsons, BC, 2007.

In his debut collection, McPherson conjures a gritty and colourful Ottawa, populated by addicts and losers, obsessives and gawky teens. In “The Plastic Garden,” the first and best story of the collection, a retired model-maker named Rumford feuds with skateboarders menacing a little girl’s garden. Rumford’s rage after the first failed confrontation is touching in its excess, and McPherson's other hapless characters are equally sympathetic: jazz-playing Two Seconds and Elvis-haired Squid seem to scrape by mostly on luck and pure gall. Occasionally, the plots beggar belief, or coast along the edge of an easy pathos. The intentionally silly “Chilidog Love” is playful enough to escape standards of believability, but it feels out of place among the darker stories. Where the collection falters is in the saggy dialogue, and also where the writing dips into weak similes, like Johnny’s father in “Autograph,” “scribbling away with the intensity of an accountant.” But McPherson’s endings, like the pool hustles, drug deals and long afternoon shags of these stories, have a nice way of leaving things open to the unexpected.

--Saleema Nawaz

Combustion
Lorri Neilsen Glenn
Brick Books: Toronto, 2007.

Glenn's second poetry collection considers the big abstractions of connection, cyclicity, and death. Glenn's background is in ethnography, and her removed evenness of tone, which could have seemed clinical, here reassures the reader with its empathic solidity. Her first and second person narration feel both intimate and cautious, considering some of her explosive subject matter, like the true story of FBI investigators severing the hands of murdered M'ikm'aq woman Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. Glenn shifts lightly and cleanly from physical and emotional detail to broader images and ideas. Addressing the title object in "Smooth Rock on Laurencetown Beach," she muses "memory / like you, is shucked from mystery, / rests snug in my hand." The changing moon is one of Glenn's recurrent images, her nod to a vaster perspective of time. Glenn's own perspective occasionally takes a wry turn into gallows humour, as in "Birthday in Middle Age," where she harrumphs, "So, each lacy card a shovel." Combustion is a surprising title for so steady and compassionate an exploration of what it means to watch and be watched. "The heart is a hymnal," writes Glenn, and indeed her collection is also something brave, to be read and sung.

--Jane Henderson

Isolated: Two Plays
Greg MacArthur
Coach House: Toronto, 2007.

Get Away and Recovery, the two plays contained in this collection, have a lot in common. Both storylines feature a nebulous epidemic—in Get Away, it's apathy and discontentment, in Recovery it's a vague, nameless drug— that engulfs society and leaves MacArthur's characters huddled on the outskirts, in outposts they like to imagine they've chosen themselves. Macarthur's characters, despite their slightly surreal surroundings, feel real, as do their interactions with each other. Garbo and Henry are a pair of teenage vagabonds; Leroy is a snotty Dutch teenager; David is a hopeful middle-aged man whose loneliness leads him to desperate acts. “What do they say?” is a recurrent line in both plays, an appeal to old adages and folk wisdom, neither of which can be marshaled to offer the characters much more than temporary comfort. Both stories play with the idea of numbness, and while both storylines unspool towards events that should provoke an emotional reaction, these stories occur in a kind of frozenness that makes them difficult to connect to. It's hard for readers to feel invested in characters who don't seem invested in themselves.

--Linda Besner

January Books

Stuart Neatby — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 05:23:38 +0000

New works by Dixon, Barlow, Moure, and Murray

The Girls Who Saw Everything
Sean Dixon
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2007

The premise is appealing: the members of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club will act out The Epic of Gilgamesh. Not everyone who takes part is aware they’ve been given a role. And there’s a robot involved.
What happens when the Luna Cabal attempt to re-enact this epic poem is set alongside Runner Coghill’s story (parents and twin sister dead, surviving little brother) in the detailed account of two members of the Cabal. Because of this meta-fictional approach, the characters seem real and unreal, mature and immature. A quest, a parody, a mildly funny commentary on CanLit, as well as an earnest work of fiction, the book hovers between story and literary feat. Though Dixom draws clever parallels, from mentions of In the Skin of a Lion, which begins with an epitaph from Gilgamesh, to Fall on Your Knees, which examines the bond between sisters, this story’s construction may be too ambitious. The dualities add up to this human notion: “If you happen to walk past a room full of people in mourning, you should probably join them because they’re probably lonely.”

--Sheryda Warrener

Abode of Love: Growing Up in a Messianic Cult
Kate Barlow
Gooselane Press; Fredericton, 2006.

The opening chapters of Kate Barlow’s memoir read deceptively like C.S. Lewis. There are rich descriptions of aged aunts and childhood hijinx—climbing roofs and pilfering through drawers. You half expect the bored protagonist, on holiday from boarding school, to stumble across an old wardrobe. There certainly is a closet in the household, but instead of Narnia, Barlow discovers the remnants of her grandfather’s failed utopia, a messianic cult. Barlow’s childhood home was also know as “Agapemone,” an abode of love where aristocrats could await the resurrection, having relinquished their possessions to the group coffers. Scandals emerged when Barlow’s grandfather, who claimed to be a Messiah, took a “spiritual wife,” in addition to his legal spouse. Barlow skillfully juxtaposes slices of family life with the broader history of the cult. The information, however, is laid out in snatches that the reader slowly pieces together, as did Barlow herself. It’s a clever device, but it sometimes slows the pace unnecessarily. The level of analysis is faithful to Barlow’s age at the time, but this means a more adult critical examination is occasionally lacking.

--Claire Tacon

O Cadoiro
by Erín Moure
House of Anansi Press (Toronto, 2007)

O Cadoiro is a book of love poetry. Hard love. The unrequited kind. Moure writes, "I want to speak no ill of love / becomes I am rightly afraid of it." Further, she writes, "(my heart missing you / its own beast loses heart)." The poems in O Cadoiro are based on medieval Iberian lyric. Often they are presented as translations of Galician and Portuguese songs, but they are very much the "fount" of Moure's invention. In this book, she is consumed by language's failure to articulate emotional experience, by "...the nub of lyric poetry: that one thing can stand for another. Not as metaphor...but that concrete experience can distill to 'mere figure' or 'basal significant'." Moure tries formal structure, lists, concrete poetry. She mixes French, Galician, Portuguese, English. Throughout, she calls on the reader to witness her failure—which, it seems, is the point. She writes, "Where the lyric fails me, the poem." And asks: "Can you follow me in the markings we call / words through such liquidity?" In O Cadoiro, Erín Moure tells reader to suspend their disbelief, for, as she writes, "though poems recuperate, they do not solve."
--Ben Hart

The Rush to Here
George Murray
Nightwood Editions, 2007

This new collection of poems from George Murray contains something truly new; he has written a series of sonnets using an entirely novel kind of rhyme. It sounds unlikely, but the results more than justify the flouting of convention. The rhymes are sometimes based on sound (as in homophones), but more often centered around meaning – synonyms, antonyms, association, etc. To illustrate from a randomly chosen sonnet, “Lullaby”: Murray rhymes ‘utmost’ with ‘paramount,’ ‘receive’ with ‘tuned’ (think radios), ‘signal’ with ‘pulse,’ ‘light’ with ‘dawn,’ ‘time’ with ‘ancestor,’ ‘does’ with ‘execute,’ and ‘rage’ with ‘blaze.’ While some writers might be tempted to let the innovation carry the collection, hoping for an audience enamoured of formal poetry, Murray takes the time to craft each poem into something thought-provoking and beautiful, so that a reader unfamiliar with sonnets might still be enthralled. In terms of subject matter, Murray covers a lot of ground – from reflections on parenthood to the implications of quantum physics, from the sex lives of the Devil and the Greek gods to the annoyance of home renovations. The Rush to Here is worth rushing out for.

--Matthew J. Trafford