The Dominion - Literature & Ideas

A Call to Fight Feminicide, in Juarez and Beyond

Tim McSorley — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 09:27:27 +0000

Laval author puts a structural lens on the killings of women and girls

MONTREAL—Ciudad Juarez. The name conjures up images of violence, maquiladoras, drug traffickers, kidnappings, military interventions, and dead women—too many dead women—in the city's streets.

In her book, Féminicides et impunité: Le cas de Ciudad Juarez (Feminicide and Impunity: The case of Ciudad Juarez, Les Éditions Écosociété: 2012), Marie France Labrecque explores in detail how (and why) women have been special targets, going beyond the usual explanations (organized crime, battles for turf among narco-traffickers, the documented inhumane conditions of maquiladora work, etc.) to relate these deaths to what she calls “feminicides” (féminicides).

Feminicide refers to a system of violence that results from state policies that create social, cultural, economic, and political inequalities and inequities for women and girls. It encompasses more than does the word femicide, the killing, rape, and violence against women and girls because they are women. Making this distinction lets Marie France Labrecque clarify how the ongoing murders of women are embedded in multiple structures of patriarchy found in the family, in society, and in state policies.

Labrecque, a professor emeritus at the University of Laval specializing in Mexico and political economy, argues convincingly that without a deep understanding of feminicide, the political changes needed to end the killings in Ciudad Juarez—and elsewhere—won't be possible. She supports her arguments with quantitative and qualitative data, all horrific and sometimes too much to digest in a single reading.

These details give insights into what needs to be changed to end the murders, punish those who are responsible, and begin to build a more just and equitable society. But they also suggest that making change will not be easy. In fact, women’s rights activists who traveled to Mexico in January 2012 actually found a continuing overall increase in deaths of women and girls since 2006, especially in the border state of Chihuahua where Ciudad Juarez is located, with this happening despite special agencies and programs set up by the Mexican government allegedly to address violence against women.

During the spring presidential election campaign in Mexico, students and others demonstrated against the complicity of the government and its contributions to crime and corruption. Their protests continue, and it is to be hoped that Enrique Peña Nieto, the newly-elected president who begins his term this winter, will listen to their calls and establish the conditions in which full human rights are guaranteed for women and all citizens.

However, it already seems more likely that Peña Nieto's administration will only perpetuate the practices of past governments and do little to end the violence and murders of women. Fears are that he will continue past policies and privilege the militarization of the fight against drug cartels, fail to stop and punish the corruption within the army and police, and do nothing substantive to end the killings of women and girls.

If that is the case, women will remain oppressed and all that Labrecque relates in her powerful book will continue—including the complicity of the USA and Canadian governments in these practices. Therefore, it's important for feminists and others to keep pressing for change and an end to impunity, not only in Ciudad Juarez, but also here in Quebec and Canada where there is need for more and strengthened solidarity with Indigenous women whose lives and rights have not been protected by past and current governments.

The conditions underlying femicide and feminicide are not just over “there”: they are impediments to full justice for all women and girls here, too.

Abby Lippman is a community activist/feminist/researcher-writer in Montreal. An abridged version of this review, translated to French, has been published in aBabord magazine (October/November issue).

Feminicide and Impunity cover

Poem to Raymond Taavel

Miles — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:44:27 +0000

For Raymond, and for all of the Raymonds, which is to say: for everyone

Editor's note: In the early morning of April 17th, prominent gay rights activist Raymond Taavel was fatally assaulted as he tried to break up a fight outside a popular Halifax nightclub. Later that day, as rumours swirled that the murder was a hate crime, hundreds gathered on Gottingen Street, in Halifax's North End, to collectively mourn and pay respect to Taavel. Tanya Davis, Halifax's poet laureat, recited the following poem.

There are words that spring to mind
like sadness
like violence
like senseless crime
like how this affects all of us
like how every tear in every eye falls from all of us
and today Halifax is an ocean of anguish
a sea of angry
beside the Atlantic.

And how do we handle this
what happens next
how do we manage the sorrow and the stress?
This afternoon I walked the sidewalks
not so different than the one where he met his death
where no person should ever have to lay their head
both concrete and Raymond were innocent.
I walked the sidewalk and every person I met
I tried to look into them

Do you know? Do you know?
Do you know what we're supposed to do now,
'cause I don't

I won't hate more
I won't love less
so many people - maybe even his killer - are loveless
not unloveable
maybe ignorant, definitely sick
and probably he shouldn't have been let out to walk around
and probably he was hateful and homophobic
but what's painful
besides this loss, besides all death
is the simple fact of it that remains:
this isn't over yet
- people left behind for every step we gain

I walked down the sidewalk that is in the city where I live and love
I look for eye contact
for allies in the right to live and love
I wore black and tough
as it is complicated stuff
how to protect oneself and yet open up

I stumble here
it isn't clear
I put my ear to the ground to listen for the sounds of people's fear
being taken down by other people's fear
who are guilty for their deeds but do not live in isolation here

There are systems failing us everywhere
prisons and education and mental health care
there is separation stark and severe
we reach out our hands to make connection
but some are all mixed up
bring death and destruction
it's all fucked up
like when he struck him, here

And, now, a being from the tribe of Love is gone
and we are one less strong
in a battle we are tired of fighting in the first place
lay down your arms
peace is your birthright

One more time we pick up the pieces and we keep loving
struggle for freedom
for all beings
Gottingen street gets another beating.

Well, we'll love it harder
reach our arms out further
to encircle all of our neighbours
'til we work through all of the hating

this is for all of you
this is for the pain in our city today
this is for Raymond

Tanya Davis is Halifax's poet laureat

Remembering Raymond Taavel on Gottingen Street, Halifax

Fertile Soil for Social Change

Martin Lukacs — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:22:12 +0000

Kuyek's "Community Organizing" a wise guide for activists

Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach
Joan Kuyek
Fernwood Publishing: Halifax, 2011

The strength of this book comes from Joan Kuyek’s perspective, informed by over 40 years of organizing. Initially intended as an update of Fighting For Hope: Organizing to Realize Our Dreams, which Kuyek wrote in 1990, it has instead become a book that reflects both the changes in the world and Kuyek's learning over the last two decades.

Kuyek’s political experience is rich and deep. It began in the 1960s, when she did research for the federal government’s Company of Young Canadians program. What she learned there quickly transformed her interest towards participatory democracy and community action. She did community organizing in Kingston, where she dedicated herself to the women’s liberation movement and was elected as a city councillor (“alderman”). Later came various organizing in Sudbury, and then national work with the United Church’s “The Church and the Economic Crisis” project and the Urban-Rural Mission with the World Council of Churches. She then went back to Sudbury to work as the founding program coordinator of the Better Beginnings Better Futures community development program, followed by a year with the national Urban Issues Program of the Bronfman Foundation. She then helped found MiningWatch Canada, where she stayed for ten years.

Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach is indeed holistic and comprehensive. Kuyek examines the creation of positive social change based on a coherent and wide-ranging analysis of the context in which the work is done and the principles needed to make it effective. Her concept of a holistic approach draws on Aboriginal ‘medicine wheel’ philosophy, in an effort to bring balance to the various aspects of organizing. She notes, “whole chunks of experience and information are often missing from our work.” She uses stories from her own history of involvement to illustrate the holistic approach, which add much to the principles and analysis contained in the book.

Perhaps the most important part of the book is her perspective on starting points for effecting real change—by which she means changing the societal systems that perpetuate problems, and not just winning piecemeal victories. It is not, as she would have argued earlier in her life, on environmental, social or political questions that we must begin our organizing. Instead, she offers a gardening analogy, of creating fertile soil from which good things can grow.

We need to begin with our own lives and those closest around us. We must generate enthusiasm in those who are willing to get involved, so that they will stay involved and enjoy doing so. This must be so, because we are asking a lot of people: “Asking ourselves and others to take on the work of confronting these systems of domination is asking people to take on a dangerous and difficult task.”

Kukey finds hope and inspiration in First Nations communities, where the maintenance of traditional ways of life has gone hand in hand with improvements in social, political and economic life. Having outlined the many problems with our current culture, she finds it necessary for non-Indigenous people, too, to undertake a radical transformation of our cultures and communities.

And along with this type of coherent vision, she provides many principles and tools: a list of conditions for how to create safe learning environments, "the web of influences" exercise, questions for visioning exercises, activist theatre, media resources, and more.
This book is really a toolbox, a strategy-box, and a vision-box, all in one.

Kuyek clearly illustrates how we can either meet or fail the challenge of class or race, and its impact on our organizing. She’s also able to communicate a valuable understanding of subtleties in discussions on different aspects of power and economics, both of which are often insufficiently or problematically discussed or investigated in activist efforts.

Kuyek has much wisdom to share: frankly acknowledging the problems of fragmentation and disunity in organizing; explaining why developing a sense of “we” based on vision and values is better than organizing based on defining “enemies”; and learning to welcome how synchronicity seems to play a supportive role whenever we’re doing the right work.

For someone interested in getting involved in organizing, this book can serve as a comprehensive and inspiring introduction. For those already committed to this work, it is a valuable resource for reflection and guidance.

An accompanying Resource Guide for Community Organizing is available at www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/community

Greg Macdougall is an educator, activist and writer in Ottawa. More of his writings and work are online at www.EquitableEducation.ca.

Community Organizing

Reconsidering Reconciliation

Martin Lukacs — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:56:16 +0000

Simpson's offers radical answers to long-standing questions

Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence
Leanne Simpson
Arbeiter Ring: Winnipeg, 2011

In recent years, the topic of reconciliation between Indigenous nations and the Canadian state has been hotly discussed. But what exactly does the word “reconciliation” mean?

So far, our government's answers have been efforts to supposedly hasten land claims processes for unceded territories, and public apologies such as the one Prime Minister Harper offered to survivors of residential schools in 2008, notably referring to the period as a “sad chapter” in national history. But the devastating inequalities still faced by Indigenous people in Canada's legal system, child welfare bureaucracy and social and economic structure raise many questions as to whether such acts have ushered in a new, reconciled relationship. In an age when government policies are still actively harming Indigenous people, is it believable that federal bureaucrats honestly wish for a mutually beneficial reconciliation? Or is the entire concept little more than a tool for whitewashing Canada's dishonorable treatment of First Nations, both past and present?

In Dancing on Our Turtle's Back, activist and scholar Leanne Simpson answers these questions and many others, proposing a definition of reconciliation that is radically different from any offered by the colonial state. Reconciliation, Simpson writes, must be rooted in the political and cultural resurgence of Indigenous peoples: restoring traditions, revitalizing family ties that have been ravaged by residential schools and neo-colonial child welfare policies, practicing sustainable stewardship of the land and building a future where new generations of Indigenous children can assert their identity and self-determination and live free, healthy and joyful lives.

Far from being dry, Simpson's writing is a vital, vibrant and ultimately life-affirming fusion of personal experience and academic analysis, collective narratives of the past and visions for the future. Many sections are directly transcribed from talks with Elders, whereas others, such as the chapter "Breastfeeding and Treaties," are explorations of what children and infants can teach adults about how to have equitable political relations with other people and be respectful of the natural world.

Using examples from her own Nishnaabeg culture, Simpson explains the diverse ways in which resistance, love, mobilization and equality are and always have been inherent to Indigenous lifestyles and philosophies. Traditional Nishnaabeg society, she writes, was defined by principles of non-authoritarian governance and leadership, respect, mutuality and constant progressive change. Even the Nishnaabeg language contains this essence of fluidity, using verbs in a greater capacity than it does nouns. These principles and government structures are not concepts that are lost, she explains, so much as they are concepts that need to be supported and strengthened.

Often speaking from the reference point of parenthood, Simpson places passionate emphasis on how important healthy family dynamics and traditional child-rearing practices are to the future of Indigenous resistance and well-being. To build a cultural and political resurgence, relationships between parents and children must be a microcosm of the larger social structure: non-hierarchical, non-violent, non-coercive and non-condescending. In this way, parenting can be one of the most politically transformative acts: children raised today with positive models of how to relate to others without dominance and coercion will be naturally responsible leaders of tomorrow's resurgence.

Simpson's narrative style is as much a testament to non-hierarchical philosophies as the actual content she explores. In an expressive style reminiscent of some of the most emblematic writers of feminist and Indigenist thought—from bell hooks to Subcomandante Marcos—Simpson defies constructed divisions between the personal and the political, the past and the present, the spiritual and the empirical. Dancing On Our Turtle's Back opens the door to a world where a woman's role as a mother, aunt or daughter is no less revolutionary and political than her role as a front-line activist; where age-old creation stories are no less relevant or critical than yesterday's parliamentary decisions; and where the opinions and thoughts of children are taken no less seriously than those of learned adults. These are fighting words as much as they are loving words, standing as a direct challenge to the empty consumerism, individualism and disconnection from each other and the environment so widely accepted as normal states of being in neo-colonial culture.

The resurgence of Indigenous nations, Simpson asserts, is something that must move “beyond resistance and survival” to a flourishing state of joy, strength and self-sufficiency—a centuries-old process that is and will continue to be carried out with or without the acknowledgment of non-Indigenous social movement theory, the popular support of Canadians or the respect and permission of the settler government.

Kelly Pflug-Back is a writer, poet and activist in Toronto. Check her out at www.kellypflugback.wordpress.com.

Dancing on Our Turtle's Back cover

A Disappointing John

Martin Lukacs — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:31:51 +0000

Brown's "Paying For It" misses its potential

Paying For It: A Comic Strip Memoir about being a John
Chester Brown
Drawn & Quarterly: Montreal, 2011

This summer, Chester Brown’s new graphic novel Paying For It—a memoir about his encounters with a string of Toronto sex workers over the past decade—is being snatched up faster that ribbed jimmy-hats at a bodacious bawdy house.

Brown’s work gives us the voice of the john, a person often scorned and usually silenced. He is heard now; he is calling for understanding, for open mindedness, for the acceptance of a different sexual lifestyle, for the rights and protection of sex workers. I think we need to listen.

Having sworn off dating after a break up with long-term girlfriend Sook-Yin Lee of Much-Music fame, Brown decides one day to look for a sex worker. He doesn’t appear terribly suave as he stumbles nervously through the uncharted territory of brothels and call girl advertisements, but he never for a moment looks prudish or ashamed of himself either.

The sharp black and white artwork of the 227-page graphic novel is interestingly composed and the story is honest, intimate and to the point. But I have to say, it didn’t entirely meet my expectations.

I expected the memoir of an intellectual john speaking in defense of his lifestyle, to emphasize awareness and responsibility. I expected him to say, "See? People CAN pay for sex without abusing or exploiting anyone. So let’s stop being prudes about it!"

Instead, I read about Brown picking up women who sometimes appeared to be strung out on drugs, women who he hoped but wasn’t sure were 18 and women who seemed less than willing or distraught about what they were doing—and there wasn’t much compassion coming from him.

In one chapter, Brown finds himself having sex with a woman who hides her face during intercourse. He thinks to himself, "She’s ashamed, she doesn’t want me to be able to see her face while I’m screwing her," rather than reflecting on what forces brought this young woman to do this job she finds loathsome. He thinks "I feel bad for her, but not so bad that I’m giving her a tip," and later reflects, "I’ll have to give her a bad review on Terb (Toronto Escorts Review Board)."

In his introduction Brown prepares readers for an almost complete omission of women as characters. He explains that he left out the sex workers’ perspectives and never shows their cartoon faces for the sake of protecting their privacy. He claims to have genuine affection for the women—a sentiment that doesn’t come through in the scene described above.

One wonders why he couldn’t have used creative liberty to allow the sex workers a voice while still protecting their identities. This certainly would have lent much to his writing.

Canada may follow the lead of a number of countries in fully decriminalizing sex work. In the face of that, this memoir provokes a much needed discussion. No conversation on this topic can be productive without the voices of those involved in the industry.

While Chester Brown provides us only one side one of the account, he still manages to offer us insights and set an example of unabashed openness that I think is essential to any discussion of sex work and the law.

Melissa McCabe is an intern with The Dominion.

PayingforIt

Teenage Punk-Rock Vampire Novel & Prose Poetry on Plays

hillarybain — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 05:16:10 +0000

New works by Krilanovich, Ball

The Orange Eats Creeps
Grace Krilanovich
Two Dollar Radio, 2010.

The minute you tell someone you’re reading a novel about teenage vampires these days, you’ve got a lot of assumptions to recover from. Tell them it’s a teenage punk-rock vampire novel full of “narcissistic gypsy-slut shitheads” and “slutty teenage hobo vampire junkies,” and then they might get an idea of what The Orange Eats Creeps reads like. This novel is like notorious punk-rocker GG Allin showing up at a Green Day concert. And that’s not to say Grace Krilanovich is simply out to shock, although she shocks in almost every paragraph she writes. The shock comes in equal doses of blood, sadness and Robitussin, as she chronicles a crew of vagrant vampire punks that kill, steal and fuck their way around the northwestern United States.

All this overlapping blood, sex and death becomes both unsettling and normal as you get fired through this short novel. The evocative prose keeps the gore constantly in focus, yet the teenage narrator emerges as a reflective traveler lost in her own thoughts, in her own flesh. Then, every few pages, she is almost irrevocably lost in someone else’s flesh: either devouring or being devoured, and finding affirmations of life somewhere below the skin. The vampire motif is a perfectly morbid metaphor.

Although it sounds like an elaborate teen-angst allegory, the endless creepy details of bodily destruction in The Orange Eats Creeps act as a warning against literary deconstruction. This is a vampire novel: an unapologetic, bloody and brutal vampire novel. But somehow it doesn’t matter if these kids are supposed to be real vampires, or if their death-obsession is a nightmarish reflection of their crumbling insides. The novel is also a well-crafted memoir of a punk scene that has never quite found a literary voice. Anyone who even vaguely encountered the punk scene rooted in Washington and Oregon in the 1990s will chuckle as Krilanovich recounts the unintentional hilarity of interwoven Krishna Punks, Rockabillies, and riot grrrls. The vampire punks are just another clan of kids heading to Oregon to find death or life or whatever they can find.

Krilanovich draws from these scenes to build characters that most other first-time novelists wouldn’t dare attempt, and she writes it all in unrestrained profane language that you wouldn’t expect from someone garnering serious mainstream praise. This nervy novel is emblematic of the work coming from the excellent Ohio-based publisher Two Dollar Radio. This is fiction defined by its distaste for moderation. It is also fiction that’s guaranteed to offend and alienate many readers, but I’m sure Krilanovich would be happy to lose those readers to an entirely different kind of popular vampire novel.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Clockfire
Jonathan Ball
Coach House, 2010

The actors reveal, for a small audience, the significant world events of the next fifty years. The audience listens, absorbs everything. When the play ends, all return home, silent. Now it is the audience's turn to act.

An exercise in formal cross-pollination, Jonathan Ball’s excellent new book of prose poetry describes a series of plays, theatrical experiences, and surreal art happenings that never (and in many cases, could never) occur in reality.

Written in weighty but never overly serious free verse, the book often induces a feeling of darkness and horror (“The play hollows them. What they once were bleeds out.”), and reads with a pleasingly antiquated tone, like a collection of literary feuilletons by Robert Walser or Peter Altenberg. The pieces are organized one per page, and the quickly shifting focal point of each poem—the audience itself, the strange happenings on stage, the effect produced afterward—is as stimulating as it is unsettling. If art is the result of the imagination’s confrontation with a series of material restrictions, what happens when those restrictions are lifted?

The actors improvise a scene. Then they improvise another. Until nothing is left to improvise. All possibilities are exhausted, put to bed.

Like the film Synecdoche, New York, in which a theatre project grows so large that its rehearsal period threatens to exceed the lifespan of its author, the poems in Clockfire find meaning in the gap between the practical realities of stagecraft and the infinite scope of what can be dreamed up on the page. Ball’s voice—peculiar, dark, and cultivated—is a welcome one.

—Robert Kotyk

Robert Kotyk reads and writes in Montreal. Shane Patrick Murphy co-edits The Dominion's Literature & Ideas section.

The Orange Eats Creep

Clockfire2

The Cost of Free

Moira Peters — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 05:45:03 +0000

What does charity do for a local economy?

VANCOUVER—“Thirty years of development aid and the basic nature of poverty hasn’t changed,” said Pablo Recalde, the head of the United Nations World Food Program for Zambia, as we travelled the country’s sandy roads.

I was part of a press convoy hitching a ride in his decked-out UN land rover to a rural medical outpost called Makunka Health Centre. Only 30 kilometres from Livingstone, the third largest city in the country, the journey took over three hours over non-existent tracks.

My Zambian colleagues and I were covering a standard aid photo-op. Godfrey Mpende and Angela Mutale were two notable Livingstone journalists making the salary of a top reporter: US $150 per month.

Clinics serve as community centres in the bush. Makunk was the size of a small elementary school gymnasium with two wards—one for men and one for women—with a recent paint job. Two nurses worked on staff. At the medical station, toddlers had the fat of their arms measured with tailor’s tape to judge if their gaunt bodies qualified for emergency bags of pounded maize, the staple food in the country.

Sixty-five per cent of the country lives in rural areas like those surrounding Makunka. On this particular day about 30 mothers trickled in from surrounding areas to receive enough maize for two weeks, after which time, if available, they would return again to the clinic. Many of the mothers were farmers themselves and most were in their teens or early twenties. Only 10 years ago life expectancy in Zambia was a paltry 33 years of age and there is a noticeable lack of elders in the country. Grey hair is about as common as a paved road. HIV/AIDS nearly wiped out an entire generation.

Poised for success at independence in 1964, in 2006 Zambia was drowning in debt before the bulk of this crippling foreign debt was erased. Now Zambia is the poorest non-conflict country in the world.

The youthful mothers watched patiently as their children were measured and weighed, their names given a checkmark on a written ledger after which they received their share of nshima (pounded maize). Their share was calculated on the same scale that weighed the child. The absurd display of weights and balances is an unfortunate part of development projects ensuring that “aid” reaches the deserving and not swindlers.

As Dambisa Moyo’s groundbreaking 2009 book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa shows us, the international development industry has entrenched a destructive class in Sub-Saharan Africa, making close oversight one of the many strings attached to foreign aid.

Pablo Recalde oversaw the feeding of three million people each day and was in charge of yet another UN development scheme, this one called “Production for Progress.” The idea was to give small-scale farmers a guaranteed market for their crops and prevent the surplus production from rotting in isolated silos.

Encouraged to grow grain for profit, a guaranteed market for goods is an entrepreneur’s dream and can break the nightmare of poverty and aid dependency.

But it has achieved neither. Selling food to aid agencies is not a real economy. Where is the demand for local grain when everyone in the country is fed through aid handouts?

In the rural south of Zambia chronic malnutrition was rampant in 2008 when news broke that small land holders were selling all of their maize at the end of harvest season leaving no food for their own families through the arid months. The story made me chuckle since it was one of many constant and absurd experiences of the NGO world. As the hot season bleached their fields the farmers knew the aid agencies would feed them. They had become fluent in the economy of aid—the biggest employer in the country. Welfare fraud by any other name, you would be hard pressed to find a person anywhere in the world who would not do the same given the circumstances.

Other than copper exports for which multinationals pay almost zero tax to mine (companies use instability and unpredictable property rights in the region as a bargaining position), Zambia has no economy to speak of.

Nevertheless, I witnessed the greatest economic ingenuity I have ever seen: street kids pooling their pennies to purchase a single newspaper and rent it to readers; illegal gas stations selling watered-down fuel at a discount (gas was US $3 per litre in 2009); women buying up bread at the grocery store to re-sell it after hours on the same grocery store steps; little girls selling individual cigarettes for seven cents (a two-penny mark up); old men in “phone booths,” which consisted of a cell phone, a cardboard sign, and three minutes’ worth of talk time; farmers selling all of their maize on the presumption that aid agencies would give it all back.

To understand the nature of poverty in Zambia it is worth revisiting Pablo Recalde’s observations: 30 years of development aid had not changed the basic nature of poverty in the country. That aid is the problem in Zambia is the premise of Zambian economist Moyo’s bestseller Dead Aid.

“...Over $US 1 trillion of African aid, and not much good to show for it,” she writes.

How could good intentions go so wrong? Everyday community groups, governments, NGOs, rock stars, churches, school groups and others throughout the West raise dollar after dollar to send in response to the fetishization of aid in support of inflicted and uneducated and starving Africans as seen on TV. Without thinking about the consequences of charity glut few who donate their dollars ever realize that “free” can have disastrous and costly consequence.

Take clothing as an example. In Livingstone I saw a man wearing a Winnipeg Jets jersey. If the consequences were not so dire such clothing might deserve a second smirk. But that hockey jersey under the hot sun bears no irony.

Having a shirt is a luxury in many parts of Zambia. Having a job is an even greater luxury. Unemployment in the formal sector is well above 50 per cent and those with an income have the incredible burden to provide for endless dependants. While a “free” shirt solves a short-term need the shadows cast by the shuttered doors of Livingstone’s former textile factories point to the real problem: a once vibrant, though small, fabric industry has gone bust. It cannot compete with free.

Donated clothing generally comes in massive containers shipped from rich countries. I once helped fill one of these containers. I have since seen several of these “donated” bins unloaded into massive piles in third world market squares thus squeezing out local textile producers. I have even seen Value Village tags still on the sleeves of clothing in Zambian bazaars. Moyo rightly notes that “free” comes at a cost since it disrupts nascent economic channels and keeps even the smallest of indigenous businesses from developing.

Moyo describes the eroding aspects of charitable mosquito nets which have the ultimate impact of putting local net makers out of business. She states:

Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who rallies the masses and goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets to the afflicted region, at a cost of a million dollars. The nets arrive, the nets are distributed, and a "good" deed is done. With the markets flooded with foreign nets, however, our mosquito net maker is promptly put out of business.

Moyo calls this the micro/macro paradox: the sacrifice of long-term growth for short-term gain. If local investment were supported instead of the guilt relieving cauldron of “free,” the village would be able to produce its own mosquito nets. That mosquito net maker would then earn enough money to feed his family and send his kids to school, rather than rely upon aid agencies for every aspect of his existence. This phenomenon is one of Moyo’s primary arguments against development aid. This view is compounded by her assertion that aid rarely, if ever, gets to those it is intended for.

More than 85 per cent of direct foreign aid is misallocated, says Moyo. What is worse, the most chronic offenders of misappropriation are never punished. In hopes of retaining past loans, donors re-finance loans to the worst offenders.

Although most African states claim to be democracies the reality is that rulers have very little need for the people other than as leverage to access more foreign aid. Leaders are more accountable to donors and companies because their budgets do not come from taxing the people, notably the middle class, which is scant in Zambia.

“Aid effectiveness should be measured against its contribution to long-term sustainable growth, and whether it moves the greatest number of people out of poverty in a sustainable way. When seen through this lens, aid is found to be wanting,” writes Moyo.

The nail in the coffin of her addicted-to-aid argument is the example of Chinese investment. Much to the chagrin of European states still basking in their colonial fiduciary ties as former empirical masters, Moyo has titled an entire chapter, “The Chinese are our Friends.”

Chinese investment will fill the hole that aid has been poorly filling since the 1950s and offer Africa what it most desperately needs: investment and employment. The reason, she says, is that China offers trade, not aid. Something the West has yet to do on such scale and without charity.

Darren Fleet is a master's candidate at the University of British Columbia. He has reported from Zambia and Thailand.

Cost of Free

July Books

Moira Peters — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:19:39 +0000

Non-fiction by Prince, graphic novel by Hill

The Politics of Black Women’s Hair
Althea Prince
Insomniac Press: London, ON, 2009

Black women’s hair has always possessed a certain sort of magnetism that attracts (often unsolicited) pats and tugs, as well as inquiries about its properties and care. However, recently the hair of Black sistas has been drawing unusual attention, and not just on The View. Between Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair, Tyra Banks reveal of the hair that lies beneath her weaves, and general fascination with Michelle Obama’s fashion sense—hairdos included—Black women’s hair has become quite a “hot topic.”

To provide further insight into the phenomenon of “Black women’s hair”, sociologist and novelist Althea Prince presents readers with The Politics of Black Women’s Hair, a brief anthology that analyzes the complex relationship that women of African descent have with their tresses, through the use of the personal essay form, interviews, excerpts from the media, and observations.

Prince begins by tracing the subject back to the negative historical depictions of Black people, as seen in the late nineteenth-century Golliwog and Little Black Sambo storybooks, which caricatured stereotypical “Black” features, such as pitch-black skin, huge red lips, and woolly hair. She argues that the mainstream beauty ideal, reinforced by such imagery, was internalized by Black women and girls and has “dictated” their hairstyle choices ever since. Natural black hair has thus been equated with “political” hair. This notion, which is addressed throughout the book, is highlighted in a chapter dedicated to the significance of the “relaxed,” and therefore relaxing, nature of Michelle Obama’s hair.

Prince also features personal essays by Black mothers and daughters from Canada, the US, the UK, the Caribbean and South America, providing a glimpse into the Black female hair experience from a diasporic perspective. Their stories illustrate the psychological and sociological impact that attempting to measure-up to the “yardstick of mainstream beauty”, namely the European aesthetic, has had on Black women. The essayists speak about how their efforts to attain the beauty ideal (by straightening their hair with chemicals and hot combs), or their lack of desire to do so (by opting to go shaven or wearing it in its natural state), has affected both their personal and professional lives.

The Politics of Black Women’s Hair could have benefited from expanding its scope to include the perspectives of African women and Black men (whose perceived views are mentioned frequently in the text). Given the author's intention to write a "little book," Prince successfully outlines the complexities of a topic that can get rather hairy. The Politics of Black Women’s Hair achieves its purpose: to establish that Black hair is beautiful and assist Black girls and women with learning how to embrace that fact.

—Ndija Anderson

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book
Gord Hill
Arsenal Pulp Press: Vancouver, 2010

Comics aren't always known for treating serious subjects, but Gord Hill's The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book adds a dose of reality to the genre.

Hill, of the Kwakwaka'wakw nation, has taken the topics of dispossession, genocide, and the colonization of First Nations in the western hemisphere and, surprisingly, pulled off a rendering in comic book form. The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, presents in black-and-white panels the history of the overseas invasion by Europeans and the resistance of Indigenous peoples.

As a medium, comics have many attractions. They engage visually. They give information in bite-sized chunks—ideal for the modern reader's short attention span. They are fun.

Much of colonial history in the Americas has been sanitized—indeed, current Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper denies colonization ever occurred in Canada. Today, the European invasion of Indigenous territories is often depicted in popular culture as the settlement of an untamed wilderness, a terra nullius, not the homeland of sophisticated civilizations who often fiercely contested Europeans' claims to their lands.

Hill seeks to visually combat this narrative. “The story of our ancestors' resistance is minimized, or erased entirely," he writes in the preface. "This strategy has been used to impose capitalist ideology on people, to pacify them, and to portray their struggle as doomed to failure.”

Knowledge is key to fighting an oppressive system. “When we know and understand this history of oppression, we will be better able to fight the system it created,” he writes.

One way to counter the colonial depiction of history is to “always call things by their right name" as enjoined by Philip Deere, a Muskogee-Creek involved with the American Indian Movement. For instance, Hill places British Columbia within quotation marks, thereby questioning the legitimacy and morality of so-naming unceded First Nations territory. 500 Years of Resistance does this unevenly, though; Hill and Ward Churchill in his introduction use inaccurate designations for Indigenous peoples: “American Indian,” “Mohawk” instead of “Kanienkehaka,” “Huron” instead of “Wyandot.”

500 Years of Resistance roots invasion in the voyage of Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus, who encountered the Taino people in the Caribbean during his infamous 1492 voyage from Europe. It continues through to 1890—describing the Incan Mapuche, Pueblo, Pontiac, Seminole, Apache, Lakota, and Pacific Northwest Indigenous resistances to the colonists—and the fight to maintain their lifeways on their territories—at which point Hill signals the end of military Indigenous resistance. Millions of Original Peoples had been wiped out, many by warfare, but mostly by European-introduced diseases. The treaty process then picked up (a process noticeably absent from much of "BC"), and assimilation took over.

Hill tells of colonizers imposing slave labour, of barbarity, of disease epidemics, of greed for gold, of land theft and of the insinuation and imposition of the capitalist system during settling of the "New World." To maintain the dispossession of their land and resources, the invaders tried to assimilate the remaining Original Peoples into European ways of being through religious conversion, the Indian Residential School system, and the imposition of the capitalist economic system.

Despite diligent colonial efforts to break them away from their identities—so closely tied to their land—Indigenous peoples persist in struggles for self-determination. Hill captures this graphically—from war on the Pacific Northwest coast, to the '68 rebellion and Wounded Knee, Oka, Chiapas, Ts'peten, and Aazhoodena. 500 Years of Resistance is a well-drawn comic book that resurrects the history “erased, replaced by the occupying nation.”

—Kim Petersen

Kim Petersen is Original Peoples editor with The Dominion.

Ndija Anderson, a law student at McGill University, was a 2006-2007 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, which allowed her to travel to seven countries to research the practice and aesthetic of hair braiding and locking in various cultures.

The Politics of Black Women's Hair

500 Years

April Books

hillarybain — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:27:15 +0000

New works by Xiao and Carson

The Cave Man
Xiaoda Xiao
Two Dollar Radio: Columbus, Ohio, 2009.

For Ja Feng, the protagonist of Xiaoda Xiao's autobiographical novel The Cave Man, the physical hardships he endures during a stint in a Maoist prison camp are overshadowed by the emotional turmoil that follows him, unshakably, out of captivity.

Convicted on a trumped-up charge of associating with a "counterrevolutionary organization" (i.e., a small group of friends), Ja Feng finds himself inexplicably sentenced to eight years in a camp. Soon afterward, following a complaint lodged in protest of another prisoner's murder, he is placed in solitary confinement—"the stone womb," as one prisoner remarks—for a total of nine months, the state in which we find him as the novel begins:

He could not sleep at night, and grew nervous during the daytime, watching through the food hole to see if soldiers or prison officers passed by. When they did, he would beg them to let him out, and shouted curses at them when they ignored him. Finally he got tired, and grew too weak to shout. It was then that he began to get used to sleeping with his body coiled. His dreams always lasted a long time, sometimes two days, sometimes three or four. They would continue even in the daytime when he was awake, so the old warden poked fun at him and said he looked like a madman.

Only the first 20 pages of the novel take place within the dank confines of Ja Feng’s solitary confinement cell, but like childhood, its influence stretches far beyond release from the condition itself. And like children who suffer abuse at home, the remainder of his life is spent reacting, in tragic hindsight, to the memory of a time when the sum of his experience was defined by the cruelty of his keepers.

Released after his brother-in-law calls in a favour, Ja Feng is stricken with nightly screaming fits and terrible nightmares. He moves from relationship to relationship, job to job, occasionally escaping into nihilism and finding comfort in the thought that "in less than a hundred years none of them would exist in the world."

Xiao himself was imprisoned for seven years for accidentally tearing a poster of Mao. The story of Ja Feng, he writes in the novel’s preface, is based partly on this experience, and partly on the lives of other camp survivors in his acquaintance, who “had expected that they would be able to enjoy the remainder of their lives freely when they stepped out of the iron gate, only to find themselves living in another prison camp larger than the one they had survived.”

Despite the intensity of its emotion, The Cave Man advances with a calm, straightforward candor that seems at once appropriately stripped of post-modern gamesmanship and somewhat lacking in narrative or artistic guile. But only within the book’s last quarter does this unambiguous style becomes its strength. Eventually, Ja Feng seems to find his metier as an artist and teacher in America. A reader is tempted to assume the protagonist-as-obscured-version-of-the-author has finally caught up to the present. Xiao, we know from the preface and author bio, made it to America after his release and became a writer. At this juncture in the novel, one imagines Ja Feng will find some form of fulfillment after all, teaching art and speaking about his experiences to groups of sincere undergraduates.

But Xiao has a skill for lining up his characters on trajectories that play on our need for narrative cohesion—a success story, a triumph over adversity—only to pull the rug out from under his reader by moving along, as life does, to a new chapter. Ja Feng's last years are as fraught as his first ones outside of prison, but when he returns to China for the last time, the tragedy of his adult life after prison comes into full relief. In the end, success, love and geography are all just illusions, or feel that way, compared to the reality of remembered pain.

—Robert Kotyk

Nox
Anne Carson
New Directions: New York, 2010.

A reticent professor who taught Classics at McGill for several decades, Anne Carson has found a surprisingly broad audience of devoted and adoring readers who would generally be more likely to read David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk than Sophocles and Sappho. Even though she operates in an obscure genre that straddles original poetry and literary translation, Carson's readers elevate her to mythic proportions. I would have never believed a cult could arise from such an assuming writer, but I've met several people willing to tattoo their bodies with her words and travel several hours to attend her readings. In universities she has always maintained her academic credibility, but she has successfully shaken off the potential stigma of an esoteric scholar by bringing poetic voices and individual passions to the forefront of her work.

Nox, Carson's latest and most personal writing yet, powerfully demonstrates her ability to radiate beyond a specialist audience. Two challenges run parallel throughout the book. First, she sets out to lament the death of her brother, a man who removed himself from his family as a young man and rarely connected later in life. Second, Nox documents Carson's struggle to translate an elegy written by the Roman poet Catullus to mark the death of his own brother. Through tracing her own losses, the act of translation becomes unflinchingly personal. As a poet, translator and scholar, Carson wields all her tools in Nox to painfully tie literature and mourning together.

While Nox blurs the lines between translation and original poetry, it is barely presented as a book. Packaged as a "book in a box," each page folds out like an intricate accordion. Words are laid out among family photographs and colourful prints to form a collage of Carson's life and work.

By the last page and picture, the translation of Catullus's elegy is an unfinished blur. Nox provides no conclusion to Carson's own elegy or her translation of someone else's. Coping and poetry both appear impossible tasks, but Carson's genius has never been better demonstrated than in the attempts she makes here.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Robert Kotyk reads and writes in Montreal. Shane Patrick Murphy co-edits The Dominion's Literature section.

Xiaoda Xiao Cave Man

Nox

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.

August Books

Moira Peters — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 05:26:53 +0000

New works by Steinberg, Comeau

We Could Be Like That Couple...
Sarah Steinberg
Insomniac Press, 2008

Picture a paper plate. On the plate you’ve got some bite-sized quiche, a little cube of cheese, and fingers of tooth pick-skewered meats. You’re looking at a plateful of mini-meals. Sarah Steinberg’s tip of the iceberg collection, We Could Be Like That Couple... is like this dinner of hors d’oeuvres—her stories are Spartan, salty. They’d go well with booze.

The title of the first story, "We Could Be Like That Couple From That Movie That Was Playing Sometime” sets the tone of the book: wistful, colloquial, ironic. And it spoke to me immediately: “Do you know how it feels when you need a certain taste in your mouth and instead you have, like, the opposite of that flavour in your mouth and all you want, in that instant, is whatever it is that’s going to satisfy that craving?”

Having one thing but wanting another makes wanting a kind of having all its own. We Could Be Like That Couple’s parade of characters express their desires and dissatisfaction slant-wise. They don’t gripe, they just notice how things are off, how routine details take up so much space in their lives that their expectations get blurred.

The narrators consistently fit their stories: in the tragi-comedy “You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This,” Rhonda, who lisps, appears “hand shoved deep inside the mouth of her purse,” rummaging for a tissue. She’s at a vernissage and her eyes are leaking. She’s hot for a teacher, who’s there, coincidentally. Maybe Rhonda’s stalking him, maybe she’s imagining they’re having a relationship. Professor Halle asks if Rhonda’s all right. She answers—with a line that puts Dirty Dancing’s “I carried a watermelon” to shame—“It’th okay. I jutht can’t control my eye excrethionth.”

Uncomfortable, long-suffering, judgemental and moving, Steinberg writes with a sharp, strong voice. Her stories often end with a shift from specific details to big ideas—a horizon, vertigo, loss, or a near-miss. There’s a breathing pace to the collection, and the way text is set on the page—sparse paragraphs with justified margins all cut by an asterisk—gives the prose room. It looks like a René Gladman text but reads more like Mary Gaitskill or Joyce Carol Oates.

We Could Be Like That Couple... is one scrappy, skinny book. I’d like more. This won’t hold me ‘til suppertime.

–Melissa Bull

Overqualified
Joey Comeau
ECW, 2009

Cover letters are a consistently depressing form of writing. After I finished a master’s degree, I spent almost a year finding new ways to say, “Choose me! I’m good! And desperate… horribly desperate!” Eventually I found work in parking lots, mail rooms, and a cowboy-hat factory before giving up and retreating to law school.

And that style of writing was all I really expected from Overqualified, a collection of cover letters by Toronto writer Joey Comeau. The angst and misfortunes of job searching can be amusing and predictable. But Comeau doesn’t get bogged down in the usual cover-letter routine beyond a few introductory lines to each letter. Instead, he spills out bits of autobiography, dreamscapes, perversions, and generally unleashes his id in a manner guaranteed to never land him a job of any sort.

Comeau takes the structure of a cover letter and completely removes himself from the job-searching context. We don’t learn much about what Comeau does for a living or if he’s looking for a job at all. We learn in gritty detail that his brother Adrian recently died in a car accident, his Acadian grandmother refuses to speak to him in French, and he’s got a girlfriend named Susan who he feels reluctant and relieved to love. He’s a self-confessed pervert who wouldn’t trust himself with a webcam. His dreams mix sex and violence. On top of that, John Wayne apparently calls him crying in the middle of the night.

A novelty act? Well, sure. The idea of making a book out of cover letters isn’t a grand innovation. But Comeau’s skill is to weave his life story, including its neurotic undercurrents, around a literary structure that encourages us all to sound like duller people, not to mention dull writers. These rambling cover letters are utterly bizarre, but they also present their author’s genuine complexity. Overqualified never unravels into an angst-soaked diary, even when it comes close. There is a compelling tension behind each letter which makes the book consistent and weirdly enjoyable.

–Shane Patrick Murphy