Susanna Moodie, pioneer author, Anne Cimon, XYZ Publishing, 2006.

Of the many immigrant groups that streamed into Canada, none is so curious and interesting, as the Victorian gentry emigrating here. Susanna Moodie arrived in 1832. Educated, impecunious, idealistic, her story reveals much about the misconceptions these 19^th century people had of the New World.

Susanna (née Strickland), at 29, recently married to John Moodie, an ex-army captain, along with their first child, Katie, all arrive at Coburg, Ontario, to claim his officer’s land allotment. Thus begins the couple’s saga at eking a living from a wilderness farm. In her genteel yet modest Suffolk youth, Susanna had published poetry and she thought she would host literary teas in her adopted country.

The reality proves very different. Susanna struggles against adversity, thriving for a time, but virtually homeless at age 82, at the end of a remarkable life that encompassed a wealth of experience few ever achieve. During her ‘bush years’, as she refers to the wilderness, she and her family rely on presents sent from England to save them from perdition. Luck sometimes blesses her. Her sister, Catherine Parr Traill, settles nearby. Susanna talks about the cleaving of one’s soul in leaving one’s homeland.

Anne Cimon, a Montreal author with several acclaimed collections of prose and poetry, spent five years researching and writing her biography. Cimon felt drawn to Susanna’s resolve, and her belief in a ‘psychic link between people’. Cimon credits her spiritual presence as providing her with solace during her own life crisis. With a fluid, intimate style, Cimon gathers the length and breadth of Susanna’s reversals and occasional good fortune as a pioneer author defining the quintessential Canadian settler experience.

She bears four children during the seven years that she and John farmed the land. Captain Moodie resumes his service during the 1837-38 Rebellions, and Susanna is left alone to battle poverty and isolation. Despite this, she writes ceaselessly by candlelight, nurturing her hopes and dreams of establishing a better life for her and her family, struggling for a life of the mind,  a quest that is difficult as the forbidding ground.

She is visited by hardship, disaster, sickness, rejection and personal tragedy that would fill volumes. Cimon distils her narrative with a raconteur’s blend of interesting and significant detail. In 1852, Susanna publishes ‘Roughing It In The Bush’, a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. However, inadequate copyright protection translates into scant improvement in her financial circumstances.

Eventually, by pluck and sheer determination, she and John prosper, moving to a stone house in Belleville. Rebellion turmoil and partisanship embroil their lives, the more so as John is sheriff. The Moodies befriend Robert Baldwin, also a Belleville resident. An accomplished poet, the Reform prime minister admires Susanna’s writing. The Moodies name a son after him.

Susanna’s arduous efforts (using her new china tea service) at creating an intellectual circle are spurned by the self-righteous, ignorant ladies in her community. Her dashed hopes are echoed in Lord Durham’s 1839 Report, which scathingly decries English provincial philistinism.

Aided by literary allies like Montreal publisher, John Lovell, Susanna carves out a niche for herself. Travelling, her poetic freshness opens onto the disappearing wilderness. A trip to Niagara inspires: ‘The Falls…flow down upon your vision like moving mountains of light.’ Her peregrinations include a visit to the Toronto Lunatic Asylum, and Kingston Penitentiary where she meets infamous murderess Grace Marks.

Her love relationship with John is strengthened by their travails. But their trusting natures spawn trouble. Dunbar, their son, besotted with an adventuress, bilks them of their home and savings. Lifelong scrounging has Susanna trying her hand at virtually anything. She reveals herself as an accomplished painter of nature studies that augment her income. Susanna’s creativity is evident amongst her brother and sisters, all published writers (more venturesome Brontës?). Even John publishes a book on his South African sojourn.

The publishers include an appendix with a handy historical timeline but unfortunately don’t include a footnote about the seminal Reform movement that so shaped the times.

This delightful, well-written, biography of an intrepid and thoughtful woman, set in the era of burgeoning rail travel, would make a thoughtful gift for any young adult. Both giver and recipient will end up discussing this treasure.

Rope, A Tale Told in Prose and Verse by Louise Carson.  Broken Rules Press, 2011, 53 pages

I first heard of Louise Carson’s new work, Rope, when she read the opening scene at Twigs and Leaves, the monthly open mic event held in Ste-Anne-De-Bellevue.   The audience, composed mostly of poets and other writers, was drawn to attention like a family of wolves lifting their keen noses, appreciatively and curiously, to a new scent blowing in.   Rope opens with a medieval hanging, an unusual birth, and a surprise, but, amid the positive commentary, one scholar raised an important historical note going to the heart of Carson’s tale: a pregnant woman would be able to plead for her life, on the basis of her condition, delaying her hanging until after the birth or until it was evident she was not with child.  But the question, “Why didn’t she plead her belly?” hasn’t been Carson’s stumbling block.  Instead, she has incorporated it into the work, alongside the mysteries, superstitions, songs, and revelations that make up this “tale told in prose and verse”.   Carson knows when to plait, coil, apply a twist, and keep the work taut, but also when to let it unwind, or fly in an unexpected direction.  Carefully chosen archaic words support the storytelling without distracting, giving the reader the pleasure of being drawn into a historical time almost as if it was one’s own recollection, or as if such characters could be met at the end of some recently forgotten path through a nearby woods.  These characters, necessarily living at the margins of their society despite fulfilling acknowledged roles, resonate with us today, along with the themes of judgement, fate, hope, work, and recompense.  The simplicity and craft of the writing is complemented by the equally inspired design by Broken Rules Press, which features medieval woodcut illustrations amid Carson’s episodes of prose and bursts of poetry.  The text is set in a legible font based on 17^th Century typefaces, giving the impression of a treasured antique volume.  Carson’s protagonist  would hardly have been pleased with less attention to detail.  As he remarks on his own handiwork, he notes, “The thin rope is more trouble, requires more delicate splitting of the widdies and tighter braiding.  It’s a pretty thing my thin rope when it’s finished.”   There is much to take pride in, in this small yet exceptional book.

 
Canadian literature is as rich as its native children such as Joseph Boyden, who, Through Black Spruce, has allowed city folk to breathe in the heady scent of aboriginal life in the north, Hugh MacLennan, who bridged the gap between Two Solitudes and Gabrielle Roy, who made us understand that Bonheur d’occasion really translates as unhappiness for  the Montreal  St. Henri District working class during the difficult forties.  And there are many more. So many that it could be said that Canada has one of the highest ratios of writers to reading public. And that is saying a lot in a highly literate population.  Could the Canadian Council for the Arts and its hitherto encouraging policies have something to do with it? Perhaps.  Are you listening, Mr. Harper?

Canadian cultural horizons, however, have been vastly broadened and made more cosmopolitan by the contributions of Canadian writers born elsewhere, bringing in  their experiences, culture and unique perspectives. Once again, there are so many that to mention just a few would be doing a disservice to the unmentioned many. As they say in Spanish, to get an idea of a row of buttons, one sample suffices.

Montreal Serai has chosen The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje, as a sample of excellence in Canadian literature.

“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.” Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table.

Where does the title come from? The cat’s table is the one farthest away from the Captain’s table in a passenger ship. That’s where you get the scraps of society if not of food.  Distinguished passengers seated at more privileged tables take turns, upon invitation, to sit at the Captain’s table but that will not be the fate of Michael, our 11-year old hero who sits at the cat’s table, with an assortment of misfits and eccentrics. And this is because he is a pesky child travelling alone with a nominal guardian in the higher decks.

And herein lies the story. The plot is simple. A Ceylonese (the country’s name had not yet been decolonized) boy travels from Colombo to London to meet his mother whom he hasn’t seen in several years. The setting is the early fifties. (The publisher lets us know that Ondaatje, who shares the same first name as his hero and who made a similar journey at a similar age, has not meant to be autobiographical in spite of the autobiographical techniques resorted to in the novel. Crafty Ondaatje, he will leave us forever wondering!) He is apprehensive but not enough to not enjoy some escapades with his young  comrades-in-arms. On the threshold of sexual maturity, he manages to get into scrapes for which he is cut down to size by the ship’s authorities. He has two sharp eyes and two keen ears which allow him to take in the comings and goings of the adults around him.

This fascinating narrative raises many questions.  Was there a murder on board? Was there accidental manslaughter? Who is the mysterious prisoner taking in fresh air at night whose manacles and anklets scraping against the ship make him sound like a ghost? Is the furtive couple hiding in one of the life-boats an unlikely  pair of lovers or Whitehall spooks at work? And what about the messenger pigeons and weimaraner pedigreed dogs? Who paid for Asuntha’s passage? Has the tailor lost his vocal chords? Will there be more burials at sea?

Ondaatje weaves in and out of these sub-plots and time frames with the consummate  ease of a well-lauded writer. He manages to keep his readers hooked from beginning to end and somewhere in between he throws a curved ball  hitting them hard  in the chest,  as deep and hard as the waves that make the cat’s table dip and swell.  It is for this skill and insight and many more reasons that Ondaatje  has been awarded the Booker Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award (five times!) and the Prix Medicis, inter alia, we should add, for good measure.

Read this book if no other.   Canadian literature at its best, eh?

[Media reports dated  October 2011 state that Michael Ondaatje asked to be withdrawn from consideration for the Governor General’s Award for The Cat’s Table to give other writers a chance. Alas, it did not win the recent Giller Prize. ]

IN THE WRITERS’ WORDS Conversations with Eight Canadian Poets, Laurence Hutchman, Guernica Press, Toronto-Buffalo-Lancaster (UK), 2011

The1950s in Canada were energized by a group of young poets who were on a mission to create a national literature. Their hard work and dedication, and not the least, their brilliant poetry, continue to have impact today. In the Writers’s Words records the literary experience and vision of Ralph Gustfason, George Johnston, P.K. Page, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Al Purdy, Anne Szumigalski, and James Reaney.

Poet and teacher, Laurence Hutchman, made it his mission in the 1990s to interview these senior writers in their homes. The intimate setting no doubt facilitated the “conversation.” Hutchman’s introductory description of their dwellings helps to further bring the poet’s character to life. This is what we find in this accessible book: a group of poets who wanted to share what mattered in their time, the creation of a poetry that was fresh and imaginative and could be called Canadian.

There is a cozy warmth in In the Writers’s Words, but also the snap and crackle of fire from these opinionated and well-connected authors. Al Purdy was humorous as he recalled his friendship with Milton Acorn, another major Canadian poet; Louis Dudek was cantankerous when discussing Marxism and how it had infiltrated all the universities and could lead to the “death of the author”; Anne Szumigalski expounded on the ills of feminism.

Though politics change, the time lapse doesn’t matter as much when Hutchman guided the poets back to their interest in language and craft. George Johnston, who taught Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse for thirty years at Carleton University, and became  internationally known for his translation of  The Faroese Islanders Sagas, stated: “I am interested in the syntax, that is, how words relate to one another. Translating forces you to get down to the exact relation of words.” And Anne Szumigalski, who emigrated from England to the prairies of Saskatchewan, and was a founding editor of Grain magazine. said that for her, punctuation was “the most difficult part of writing poetry.” Dudek, for his part, stated in a “for dummies” tone: “Unless you find the right word, you haven’t got a poem, everyone knows that.”

Louis Dudek, who returned from his studies at Columbia University in New York City to teach at McGill in 1951, was a leader in the creation of our national poetry. “It was not just for myself that I was going to do the work, but for this city and this country…I had studied modern poetry there (in New York City) …I was full of the sense of what the modern is, and the transformation that modernism must bring to poetry and to life. So I came back and a friendship was renewed with Irving Layton, and we began to publish together.” Dudek asserted that it was the launch of presses such as the McGill Poetry Series that established Canadian literature.

Fred Cogswell, born and based in New Brunswick, authored more than thirty poetry collections. He possessed extraordinary literary energy and published over 300 writers when he established Fiddlehead Poetry Books. Hutchman, who is himself the author of eight books of poetry, and teaches at the Université de Moncton, Edmunston Campus, New Brunswick, skillfully questioned Cogswell on the influence of rural life and his Acadian roots on his writings.

All the poets interviewed have something powerful to say about their relationship to poetry and Canadian literature. Al Purdy, who won the Governor General’s Award for his volume Cariboo Horses, and published over forty books of his poetry, along with essays and an autobiography, defended his style: “I have always been accused of being elegiac, and I guess I am. But it seems to me that elegiac quality is an area in which you can write very well because we mourn the past continually, I think.”

In the Writers’ Words should be accompanied by the reading of some, or all, of these writers’ poetry. On a personal note, as a young bright-eyed poet in the late seventies, I had the privilege to attend readings given by a few of these major poets including the gracious P.K. Page, who was the last of this group to pass away, in January, 2010.

When I reread  ”After Rain” in an anthology, I fell in love again with her words::

“The snails have made a garden of green lace:

broderie anglaise from the cabbages,

chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils -

I see already that I lift the blind

upon a woman’s wardrobe of the mind.”

The Art and Science of Healing Since Antiquity. By Daya Ram Varma, MD, PhD. www.Xlibris.com, 2011.
***

Why should a book on the history of medicine be reviewed in a magazine mainly dealing with the arts, culture and politics?  Because this book has it all: an insight into the art of healing, an understanding of how culture can advance or hinder medical science and a mordant analysis of how politics can affect, for better or for worse, the health of a nation’s citizens.

First of all, a word about the author. Indian-born Daya Varma is a Professor Emeritus of McGill University in Montreal, world renowned medical school. He is best known for his research in pharmacology and for his scientific and humanitarian work involving longitudinal studies of the survivors  of the Union Carbide tragedy in Bhopal, India, which killed thousands of people. He is also known for his political activism which, as far as he is concerned, should never be divorced from his work as a scientist. His book reflects these concerns.

The initial chapters explain how medicine, being both an art as well as a science, branched into different schools,  a phenomenon not seen in other scientific disciplines. Dr. Varma also traces the influence of sociopolitical determinants on medical advances.  He emphatically differentiates what he calls  “witchcraft” from what he calls materialist medicine, but fails to make a feminist analysis of how  witches in medieval Europe were persecuted, not because they might be poor healers,  but  because of the threat they posed to a patriarchal and ecclesiastical political order.  Women who could not only heal, within the limits of the knowledge of their times, but also provide contraception and abortions, were a threat to male authority.

The author also lumps major alternative healing systems such as  Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and acupuncture, homeopathy and Unani-Tibb or Islamic medicine under the generic term of witchcraft, which is an extreme  simplification of a very complex reality.  After all, there are many modern scientific studies validating the benefits of acupuncture in pain management and anesthesia, the blood-pressure lowering effects of meditation and the possible benefits of  the blood-thinners present in the saliva of leeches for the treatment of strokes. Varma is rather dismissive of all alternative therapies and seems to allow no room for the mind-body connection in healing, which is rather strange considering that he recognizes that medicine is both an art as well as a science. On the other hand, he does a wonderful job of explaining the therapeutic mechanisms of pharmacological substances in a manner which a lay person can easily grasp. And his warning against being seduced by therapies that are not evidence-based is a point well taken.  He also warns his readers that natural substances can be as toxic and harmful as their synthetic counterparts. Varma very rightly concludes that people resort to charlatans and unproven remedies  because mainstream medicine might not be easily available to them or because the limits of science have failed them.

One of the postulates of this richly-documented book is that modern medicine did not start with the Greeks, but actually had its birth before that, in ancient civilizations like the ones that thrived in the Gangetic Plain, the Yang-Tse River Basin and the Nile Valley. For Varma, the true birthplace of modern medicine is Egypt, not Greece. The author, however, explains that there are gaps in the evolution of modern medicine, most probably due to the material conditions prevailing then. For science to be able to develop, a capitalist mode of production is necessary, and that requires going beyond feudalism. This explains why, according to Varma, Europe produced so much in terms of scientific discovery when it outgrew its feudal economy  and why the United States, with its importation of European brains and the absence of a feudal past, has become a leader in medical research and technology. However, Daya  Varma is quick to point out that in spite of being such a rich country, the United States has failed to look after the health of all of its citizens unlike Cuba, which has one of the best public health systems in the world.

Another important message contained in The Art and Science of Healing Since Antiquity is that countries can, and should, mobilize their resources in looking after the health of their citizens the way they mobilize resources during natural disasters or catastrophes.

This richly-documented book is a treasure-trove of information on the history of epidemics, diseases, discoveries, medicaments,  theories and myths. It is also a brilliant collection of memorable quotes, paired in opposites, opening each chapter. Einstein, Marx,  Engels and Shelley are equally pressed into service to illustrate the novel ideas of  a book which is a delight to read and difficult to put down. The author’s humour and originality trump the minor errata and typos apparent in the preliminary version available to this reviewer. These will, however,  be eliminated from the final edition.

In the age of neo-colonialism, media are conveniently used to convey intentional messages. For example, in Guantanamo Bay certain images of prisoners in orange suits, with a mask on their faces, were allowed to be distributed since the message intended to be spread by the police officials was: “This is what will happen to you.”

Mirzoeff explains that what we “see” is not what we  “perceive.” That is to say that vision is not part of visual culture until it becomes visuality. And visuality is what represents history as visible through the eyes of powerful States. Visual culture is being exploited into being an autocratic system itself, even though the makers of visual culture may feel they are choosing to be  democratic.

In the case of Abu Ghraib, the pictures that were taken were distributed around the world. One wonders about the purpose of such an act? On the one hand, it sends out a message that in the present era of digital media, every event, every move needs to be captured. On the other hand, is it worth capturing the helplessness of humanity? The dehumanization of fellow beings? Is it worth recording through these images that represent the torture as well as the sadistic pleasure experienced by first-hand the torturers and second-hand via the representation itself?

“Visuality visualizes conflict.”

So imitating “the fetishism” of soldiers by displaying the bloody pictures of war is really a way to rationalize their killings.

The message is that once on the field of war, it is only natural to mercilessly inflict pain on the so-called enemies. Another message that is given out is that a soldier fights and protects the country, therefore what he “expects” in return is what he “deserves.” The relationship between porn and a soldier is shown to be legitimate since it is the right of a soldier to have a naked woman for sex as a reward.

However, “the exchange of sexualized looking for modern warfare has now become virtual.” The use of pornography, and the way female interrogators in Guantanamo Bay touched the prisoners in a sexual way to get information, further highlight the use of digital media in the horrific war zone.

The US Government uses visual culture meticulously. They make sure that every person absorbs every bit of information that they deliberately rotate in the media through TV, Cinema, ubiquitous advertisements, and  biased and filtered news channels. A good example would be the license plate of Pat Dollard that read “US WINS” when the Bush administration launched its “global war on terror.” These images instill fear among people and sow the seed of destructive imagination in their minds. The magnitude of what they see is quadrupled and the constant danger to life becomes a major priority.

The US government has been reduced to a strictly military nature and that was evident when hurricane Katrina struck. A lot of assistance was being rejected since it did not meet security standards. However, “national and international media” were allowed to cover the catastrophe.

To the US and European point of view it seems as if the whole world is a spectacle in which there is a compulsion to keep a record of every move that is made. Almost like keeping a record of one’s “accomplishments,” be it the charred body of an Iraqi or a lynching in Colonial times. These events have been flashed with pride in the form of pictures.

We live with the “Banality of images,” and a person in the 21st century is all too used to seeing gory images of dead people, pictures and videos of  people being tortured, raped and killed, so that now the emotional feelings of humans have become immune  to such trauma.

In order to understand why we should care to read the memoir of a friendship between two writers who were born in two different continents, we must first realize that Kamala Das left a gaping hole  in the world of Indian literature when she exited this earth to hopefully attain the paradise that her  conversion to Islam promised her.

Kamala Das was a poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer and would-be politician who wrote fiction in her native Malayalam and poetry  in English, the medium of her education at the hands of her great uncle, a renowned man of letters. Her father  had been a journalist and her mother a well known poet.  In 1984 Das was short listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature along with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer. When she died in 2009 at the age of 75, throngs of  Hindus, Muslims and feminists,  who had  alternately  admired her and vilified her, attended her state funeral in her home province of Kerala,  South India.

Merrily Weisbord is an award-winning Canadian journalist, filmmaker and broadcaster whose decade-long friendship with Das, several visits back and forth between the lagoons of Kerala and the Laurentian lakes as well as copious transcripts provide the material  for this one-of-a-kind book.

What inspired Weisbord to undertake this circuitous literary journey? First it was Das’ work, which she found stunning,  then her intriguing personality  and finally the friendship born out of what prima facie appeared to be a contrived experiment in mutual revelation for literary purposes. Take a look: to begin with, Merrily receives a faxed-in love letter written by her companion back in Canada and reads it aloud to her friend. Then Das urges  one of her lovers to profess his love to her in Merrily’s  presence. Mutual revelations about their sexual experiences, motherhood  and the writing process are encouraged and recorded. The writers follow each other around in their quotidian lives. Doesn’t the Heisenberg effect warn us that observation alone changes the behavior of the observed?  But then this staged setup starts gathering  momentum and  art and life merge blurring the boundaries between both. Not that it matters because in the end the reader is caught up in this compelling  narrative and cannot put the book down.

Kamala Das forged her English on the solid anvil of the classics but was considered uneducated because she failed in mathematics so she  was married off at 15 to a man more than double her age. He was a homosexual, but by her own account, subjected her to sexual practices which she found distasteful until she gave him an ultimatum. “I want the freedom of my private parts”. With “permission” to be celibate she was able to write at night while the children slept in order to support the family during difficult financial times. Her highly eroticized poetry, her fictional denunciation of social ills like child abuse and her newspaper columns on anything and everything earned her a large readership, the opprobrium of a very traditional society, the admiration of feminists and the lustful fantasies of hypocritical males.

As Kamala and Merrily bonded like sisters in “the same tribe of writers” many of the poet’s contradictions confounded her friend.  Kamala claimed to have suffered greatly at the hands of her husband yet in later years lauded him as her best friend and supporter. This might just have been true when she emerged as a well-known and highly respected writer which prompted her husband to act as her manager and protector until his death. She also claimed to dislike sex yet she was a  devotee of  Krishna,  revered by Hindus as the embodiment of divine love in a human body.

Kamala Das’ boldest action was her conversion from her matrilineal Nair Hindu caste to Islam at the behest of a young Muslim lover with whom she fell madly in love at 65. Whether this young Muslim  prompted Das to convert with the offer of marriage out of love for her or love for the one million dollars that the Saudi Arabians supposedly paid him (according to “a family friend”) is not clear. What is absolutely clear is that her apostasy earned her the disaffection of  her family, death threats from Hindu extremists as well as from Islamists who forbade her to  abjure Islam and return to Hinduism. It also disappointed feminists who view Islam as a patriarchal institution. Towards the end Kamala would admit to Merrily that religion was nothing but a garb to be shed when the time came. When her time came, she was buried near the mosque where  she had  converted to Islam. If there is an epitaph on her tombstone, it could well read as follows:

“First I will strip myself of the clothes and ornaments. Then I will peel off this light brown skin and shatter my bones. I hope at last you will be able to see my homeless, orphan, intensely beautiful soul, deep within the bone, deep down under, beneath even the marrow…will you be able to love me, will you be able to love me someday when I am stripped naked of this body… Ente Katha (Malayalam version of My Story)

Merrily Weisbord’s memoir of her friendship with the Love Queen of Malabar has not solved the riddle of Kamala’s  many contradictions but it has achieved what she  unambiguously wanted out of life: to be loved, not just as a writer but as a warm, courageous woman who dared to be herself.

N.B. This book provides a complete bibliography of her work in English and Malayalam and is liberally sprinkled with memorable quotes.

Ilustrado. By Miguel Syjuco, Hamish Hamilton Canada, an imprint of Penguin Group, 308 pp.,  Toronto 2010.

Miguel Syjuco (pronounced See-hoo-koh), with Ilustrado, has achieved what Salman Rushdie achieved with  Midnight’s Children: a brilliant irruption into the literary scene. He also triggered a tsunami of interest in the history of a country known to many in Canada more for its ubiquitous care-givers than for its multilayered history. Syjuco received the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and  the Palanca Award, Philippines’ highest literary honour,  for the unpublished manuscript of Ilustrado. Rushdie, as is well known, received the Booker Prize and the Booker of Booker’s for Midnight’s Children. Both wrote about the post-colonial experience and both are voluptuous and highly literate writers  worthy of a Maharaja’s gem collection or should we say, of  Imelda’s shoe collection. But enough of comparisons, except to say that we augur young Miguel Syjuco a career as interesting as Rushdie’s, minus the fatwa, of course, although he must have stepped on a multitude of Pinoy toes with this exposé of corruption in the Philippines.

During the Spanish occupation of the Philippines ilustrado, which means enlightened person in Spanish, was the moniker given to the Filipinos who went to Europe for their education and returned to their country with a desire to better it. Miguel Syjuco, the main character in this book (yes, he is the author’s namesake who also shares some of the author’s biographical details leading the reader to speculate that he is some sort of alter-ego) is a young would-be writer who returns to the Philippines to research famous writer Crispin Salvador’s background for an upcoming biography of his mentor who has recently been reported dead. In this sense, the story line of Ilustrado is similar to the plot of many books written about exiles or descendents of people from the mother country who return in search of their roots. What he discovers there, or rather what he does not discover, provides the author with the narrative underpinnings to delve into the history of the Philippines in the last few decades, roughly coinciding with the author’s/alter ego’s age and circumstances. The author meant the book to be both fiction and non-fiction and left the reader the task of sorting out which is which.

In an interview Syjuco, our Montreal-based author, not his literary alter-ego, explained that the narrative structure of Ilustrado is based on Philippine textiles which at first glance appear to be common patch-work, but are in fact intricate designs with a clear thread of continuity. For this, the author resorted to letters, emails, blogs, memoirs, newspaper articles, poetry and other apparently disparate pieces of writing and wove them together. This  strategy  presented him with the well-known  “challenges of literary bricolage” but it somehow worked. In fact, the different styles and typeface help the reader identify point-in-time, location, mood and narrative voice. A warning, however, this is not for the lazy reader, although it is difficult to be lazy with such engaging writing. In fact, Syjuco’s style can shift from the sublime to the absurd, passing through jocosity and self-deprecation. Apparently Syjuco took hold of many manuscripts from his creative writing student days, including his thesis material, and cut and pasted them together, for which he betrayed  his Luddite inclinations and put his computer to good use. He also took this opportunity to streamline his work.  As a reader I was enthralled, moved, informed and entertained and above all, made to think about the larger questions of life. In fact the lyrical beauty of some passages made me want more of those and less of the others, but as the author explained in an interview,   such monolithic material might have become boring.

I will wind down this review here, not because there isn’t much more to be said, but because there is a lot more to be said about Ilustrado, and Syjuco, the author  and his  literary alter-ego have said it better than anyone else can.

Ilustrado is a thriller, a coming-of-age story, the political analysis of a country and a cautionary tale for those who face the dilemma of either betraying class and clan or society at large. Most importantly, it is a damn good read. Read it and find out why. In fact, read it and you might become an ilustrado.

 PS. Whatever you do, resist the temptation to read the ending first.

Canada and Israel – Building Apartheid by Yves Engler, a co-publication of Fernwood Publishing and RED Publishing, ISBN: 9781552663554,  Publication Date: Feb 2010, Pages: 168

Right off the bat, let’s take an excerpt from a blurb on the book issued by – Gabor Maté, Physician and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction. 

 ”Yves Engler’s meticulously researched volume refutes, for anyone who still believes it, the myth that Canada is or ever has been an honest broker in the Middle East. Reading Engler’s work leaves one with the inescapable and sad conclusion that the essence of Canadian policy has always been support for the establishment and continued dominance of an expansionist Zionist state in the territories that now comprise Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. As a former Zionist youth leader, I thank Engler for setting the record straight and can only lament our country’s historical and ongoing contribution to the tragedy enveloping the long-suffering peoples of the Promised Land, Arab and Jewish.”

In the debate on the Middle East, the authenticity of the voice has become a critical element. Even Chomsky’s record on certain issues tends to get pretty sullied and Chomsky has also blurbed on Engler’s previous book which was reviewed in Serai.  There is a rather interesting interview of Gabor Mate.  This doctor, whose grandparents perished in Auschwitz , is a well-known authority on ADD and has published a few books and is well known in the Vancouver area for working with HIV positive drug users. I state this, because  there are voices amongst independent Jews that are becoming increasingly audible and distant from the monolithic  presentations from the community.

Now, back to the book itself.  Any data that is irrefutable, any historical record that cannot be undone, speaks volumes for the authenticity of the researcher and his publication. Engler is  such a person. He does not leave too many stones unturned. That there has been a historical basis for Canadian support for Israel, especially amongst the Christian Zionists, is not very well known. In fact Engler has unearthed that Henry Wentworth Monk, a Canadian , long preceded Theodore Herzl, the Austrian founding father of Zionism, in proposing to the British Empire to establish a “Dominion of Israel” similar to the dominion of Canada.  In fact, Monk sent off a similar proposal letter to A J Balfour, who twenty years later fathered the Balfour Declaration. Engler, in one of his forwarding statements attests to the atmosphere in which Jewish Zionism grew.  “British imperialism, Christian Zionism   and nationalist ideology were all part of this country’s ideology.”

Canada, as a nation, has historically played a key role in determining support for Israel and its policies. It is not necessarily a new –found politique, as some of us tend to believe. There has been no “reversal”. There has only been continuity. A continuity that far exceeds the role the US has played.    In fact Canada has been a mastermind in undermining the role of the UN in all matters related to Israel and has never been an honest broker on the Middle East.  Right up to 1967 Canada did everything in its capacity to speak from both sides of her mouth, it seems, de-emphasizing or sabotaging the role of the UN and at best supporting individual Palestinian rights and not collective rights.  While Pierre Trudeau may have criticized the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, there has been a continuous complicity in the country’s cabinet to secure support for Israel by any means. Engler very deftly establishes that successive governments in Canada, from Chretien and Martin to Harper have essentially maintained this intrinsic argumentation to align with the Jewish state, as opposed to giving any leeway to a non-Judeo-Christian Arab state. In fact Trudeau and Chretien “garnered more support from the Jewish community than either Harper or Mulroney.” It is no wonder that during one of the recent election campaigns, the Conservatives launched a rather lurid campaign to suggest that the Liberals were backers of the Hizbullah and Hamas. And the desperation seemed to have worked.

The major contribution of Engler’s meticulous documentation is that it lays bare Canada’s historic commitment to Israel, as opposed to fairness to Arabs and Palestinians, because of a confluence of religious and colonial affiliations.   This is an eminently eloquent document that needs to be read for its well-researched position on this continuity. Engler concludes one of his chapters with a very succinct upgrade to the current context. “How long Israel will continue in this geostrategic role for the US empire is unknown, but so long as it does, there will be a powerful force pushing Canada to be one-sidedly pro-Israel.”

I am a Japanese Writer. By Dany Laferrière. Translation by David Homel. Douglas & McIntyre, 2010.

I am a Japanese Writer is a novel about a writer who is neither Japanese nor speaks Japanese, but is actually Black and hails from a sun-drenched  country full of turmoil. Dany Laferrière, its author, in fact comes from Haiti and is best known for How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, a novel that was turned into a movie and translated into English. It has been said of this novel that it is funny, honest, critical, witty, deep and daring. I have not read it but I can certainly say that these same qualities are very much present in …Japanese Writer but we have to add the word surreal to the mix. Because …Japanese Writer is certainly surreal.

For starters, the main character doesn’t have a name, and if he does, it has escaped my notice. His voice is heard in a first-person narrative about a writer who has been paid a considerable retainer to write a novel with that catchy title. The novel never gets written but the title is so catchy that it garners the attention of the Japanese Vice-Consul  who in turn contacts his government back home where the non-novel and its elusive author become an overnight  sensation. In the meantime, the protagonist, who has already spent his retainer in paying long-standing debts, makes the acquaintance of some Japanese girls whom he meets in Café Sarajevo, an artistic watering hole close to Carré St. Louis. Our hero also spends a lot of time trying to avoid his landlord who knocks on the door once a week to collect the rent. He also has to deal with tragedy, comedy and the absurdity of life. We don’t quite know what to make of this putative author or the people who court him with food, praise and other unearned gifts but we certainly understand that in many ways this character is the alter-ego of a Dany Laferrière who might have faced a similar life before he became a famous author.

Be it as it may, I am a Japanese Writer, in spite of its fractured story line, or perhaps because of it, is food for serious, very serious thought. By making us laugh and by drawing us into this world of writers and artists and precarious livelihoods, he has made us ponder about the deeper meaning of art and identity and the self. Most importantly, Laferrière has taken us on a journey with Basho, the Edo-period Japanese  Haiku poet who journeyed on foot in winter in search of  a full moon over a frozen landscape.

PS I forgot to comment on the quality of Homel’s translation because it reads like an original version!