Son of a Trickster, Eden Robinson

North America Project 2022

This is my North America read for September, which is running a bit late as I didn’t do much driving and therefore book listening, for a few weeks. But a trip to the Northern Territory has fixed that, and I’ve even made time to write it up.

[I must have written the para above before I loaded for Darwin four or five weeks ago. But four weeks broken down sees me struggling to get something down yet another month later.

I finally got my truck back on Fri 28/10, loaded Sat and unloaded Sun at Banjo Station again. Today, Mon, I am 1,000 km west, in a motel in Derby (in WA that rhymes with Kirby) hopeful of securing a load home in the morning. And yes, I’ve been listening to Son of a Trickster, at last]

Eden Robinson (1968- ) is a Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations woman from British Columbia (on Canada’s west coast). Son of a Trickster (2017) is her third novel, and the first of a trilogy, and the novel is presumably set in country she knows, though I didn’t get the same sense of place that I did from, for instance, Life among the Qallunaat.

What I did get was the excitement I get reading the best Australian Indigenous Lit.

Son of a Trickster is a fast-paced, edgy, coming of age, with a side of Native American magic – Jared is sixteen years old, in year 10 at high school. His mother is a young, sexy, foul mouthed party girl and drug dealer. We see Jared aged 5 with loving parents, but it is soon clear that the father has left, has another family, and that the mother makes some poor choices replacing him.

When the story settles down, at the beginning of year 10, Jared’s mother has lived with and discarded ‘nice’ white guy David, and has taken up with the scary Ritchie. Jared has been adopted by Ritchie’s bull terrier cross, Baby Killer, but now it is old and must be put down.

Jared is living in the basement of his mother’s house, while the bedrooms have been let to tenants to cover the house payments. He does jobs for the old couple next door in return for small amounts of money and big home cooked meals. We discover that the old woman, Mrs Jax, took him in after David attacked Jared, and Jared’s mum nailed David to the floor with a nail gun and had to spend some time ‘dealing with anger management’ in jail.

Because this is year 10, there is a lot of angst over who is popular and who is not. Jared is an outsider, but has some cool as the baker of cookies using medicinal grade marijuana, and as a notable drunk (whose mother holds the best parties). He is also very smart-mouthed which mostly gets him into trouble rather than out of it.

Life for Jared picks up a notch when Mrs Jax’s granddaughter, Sara comes to stay. She is good looking, weird, has her own problems, likes sleeping with Jared, and might be a witch.

As the story progresses, who is and isn’t a witch becomes a serious problem. Jared’s father’s mother is a senior, and very wealthy witch. Jared’s father who lives in the next town over, loses his job. Jared’s step-sister has a baby. Jared sells cookies to help his father pay the rent. Jared’s mother hates Jared’s father and her ex-mother in law. But is Jared’s father Jared’s father?

Sara takes magic mushrooms, though Jared doesn’t, which sets off stuff which results in Jared having a toe eaten off by sea otters.

Another, older, maybe very much older, witch gets Jared to start attending AA, and, consequently, to resume paying attention to his schoolwork. Jared’s mum stops using meth. Sara cuts herself more seriously than usual, and her mother, whom everyone hates, comes to take her home.

The year comes to an end. A lot of this is very YA, but it has undertones both of grunge and of Indigenous.Lit cum Magical Realism which give the novel more heft. I’m expecting the next part of the trilogy to be Normal People meets Gabriel García Márquez. Of course if you’ve read Trickster Drift you’ll know whether or not I’m right, but that’s the direction, by the end, it felt like Robinson was heading.

I loved Son of a Trickster. Up till now the North American Indigenous authors I tried all had a very documentary style. Robinson doesn’t pretend that ‘Indians’ aren’t oppressed by settlers but, if you accept the spirit element, she has written here a sparkling work of normal everyday dysfunctional life.

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Eden Robinson, Son of a Trickster, Knopf Canada, 2017. 336pp. Audible version read by Jason Ryll. 9 hrs

Life among the Qallunaat, Mini Aodla Freeman

North America Project 2022

Research tells me [Please correct my mistakes!] that there are three distinct indigenous peoples in Canada – First Nations, Metis and Inuit. Mini Aodla Freeman (1936- ) is an Inuk woman which is to say she is a member of the Inuit. The Inuit live across northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland; there are related peoples (‘Yipuk’) in Siberia and Alaska; and a third related people, the Aleut, from the Aleutian Islands between Alaska and Siberia. .

Life among the Qallunaat is basically the memoir of a woman looking back a decade or so on her first venture south, to ‘civilization’, as a young woman. The title has the meaning Life among Whitefellas, or as I live in (Western Australian) Noongar country, Life among the Wadjela.

I subsequently found ‘qallunaat‘ literally means “people who pamper their eyebrows”’. I’ll leave Marcie and Naomi to answer that! (I’m no linguist. The best I can say is that that ‘q’ sounds something like the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’). Incidentally, the author’s name, ‘Mini’, in Inuktitut, means “gentle rain”, and the best I could gather, ‘Inuk’ and ‘Inuit’ mean one human and more than one human.

Towards the end of the book she says she is now – at the time of writing – married to a white anthropologist, so I guess that is where the ‘Freeman’ comes from.

The book was released in 1978 to excellent reviews, but half the print run – around 3,000 copies – was bought up by Northern Affairs and stored away in a basement while they checked it for criticisms, specifically of Residential Schools. It wasn’t particularly critical, and I think now that Freeman wishes it had been, but the government were no doubt happy to stymie sales and the book didn’t take off until it was re-released – with a lot of earlier editing reversed – by the University of Manitoba Press almost 40 years later.

Having listened to it last week, I can only give you my impressions of the work, and of the author. The reader, Taqralik Partridge, has a lovely soft voice which conveys exactly Mini’s shyness and gentleness. We begin with Mini arriving in Ottawa in 1957, aged about 18, to commence working for the Northern Affairs Dept as a translator.

She is driven to a residence for 300 women from where she can walk to work, and her impressions of life and work from there on are conveyed in a series of brief chapters with vivid headings.

The invariable question she gets is “How do you like the weather?” not that Ottawa seems so far south of Moose Factory on James Bay where she comes from – not to me anyway; followed by “Where are your clothes?” ie. sealskins.

Which of course leads to “Eskimos”. Inuit are rare ‘down south’ in 1957. Mini gets called Eskimo without complaining and only later explains that Eskimo is a Cree put down meaning disgusting people (who eat raw meat). They say it something like SquishMo while pulling the appropriate face. Conversely, Freeman uses ‘Indian’ throughout unless she is explicitly talking about the Cree.

Over time, Mini begins to make friends, settle into her work, and to be flown to remote centres to interpret. She discovers that there are dialects of Inuktut, which she hadn’t known, though through moving around northern Ontario and Quebec she is well aware of, and fluent in, a number of dialects of Cree. Through her schooling, especially with French Catholic nuns, she is also fluent in French and English.

After these first two years we return to Mini’s beginnings, and what was looking like being an amusing coming of age in the big city, reverts to an ordinary childhood memoir. That’s an ordinary memoir, it’s a far from ordinary childhood.

Yet, the life Mini describes seems perfectly comfortable, despite the snow and tents (no igloos!) and canoes. She and her brother are brought up by their grandparents, after the death of their mother. The father, who in any case is away throughout the summer as the navigator on a trading ship, seems remote, though he plays a bigger part later, after the grandfather dies.

Throughout, which I keep forgetting, and Mini too, is the young man to whom Mini was betrothed at birth. She is meant to pay him small attentions during their childhoods, then, at around 14, she should be married. Luckily, Grandmother regards the young man as unsuitable, “too lazy”, and sends Mini off to school, and later, to work down south, to keep her out of the way of his family.

Mini goes away to a residential school at Fort George (now Chisasibi) where she is taught by French nuns. She is not always happy, there is a girl she calls ‘the Instigator’ who goes out of her way to make trouble for her, even into adulthood. But the school, as described, seems no better or worse than all the middling boys boarding schools in the books of my childhood. In particular Cree – although not Inuktut – is spoken, and the children have frequent contact with their families.

I do not doubt the horrors of the residential schools system, but I cannot tell from this account whether the relatively small – around 40 pupils – Fort George was an exception, or if Freeman chose not to highlight the worst aspects. School ends at year 8, as it did for most rural people I’m sure, in Australia and in Canada. Mini goes on to a hospital where she begins training as a nurse, which is interrupted by her getting TB. It is not made clear why she goes back to Fort George as a teacher rather than completing her nursing. But there we end, just as Mini is more or less shanghaied into working for Northern Affairs down south.

The closest parallel to Life among the Qallunaat in Australian Indigenous.Lit that I know is Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis’s not very well known Pictures from my Memory: My story as a Ngaatjatjarra woman, which describes her traditional childhood on the border of WA and NT, her schooling at Karalundi mission (850 km north of Perth) and her life as a nurse in Alice Springs.

There are other, better known works – Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence and Sally Morgan’s My Place – both also Western Australian, but neither of which captures the disconnect between remote Indigenous childhood and adulthood in the big smoke.

After its uncertain start, Life among the Qallunaat is now a classic in Canadian Lit. and Freeman is apparently a well known poet and playwright, and of course, Inuit elder.

Next month (later this month) I will definitely read Their Eyes Were Watching God.

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Mini Aodla Freeman, Life among the Qallunaat, first pub. 1978. University of Manitoba Press, 2015. Audible version read by Taqralik Partridge. 14 hours.

see also:
Mini Freeman, The People and the Text (here)
Revisiting a Classic, Atticus Review, 3 June 2016 (here)

Seven Fallen Feathers, Tanya Talaga

North America Project 2022

Seven Fallen Feathers documents the deaths of seven Indigenous high school students living away – a long way in most cases – from home to attend Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School (DFC) in Thunder Bay, Ontario (Canada) in the years 2000-2011.

I listened to it a few weeks ago and then again for a few hours yesterday. I can’t pretend to have retained enough for a proper review, but this is a moving and important story and I will attempt to reconstruct it from the considerable resources of the internet.

Tanya Talaga is an experienced journalist and an Ojibwe woman “with roots in Fort William First Nation… Her great-grandmother, Liz Gauthier, was a residential school survivor. Her great-grandfather, Russell Bowen, was an Ojibwe trapper and labourer. Her grandmother is a member of Fort William First Nation, and her mother was raised in Raith and Graham, Ontario.” (About Tanya)

The book is divided into seven sections, one for each ‘fallen feather’ plus a couple of chapters to wind up. But throughout Talaga winds in background material. Northern Ontario sounds bleak, forests, snow and innumerable lakes, with small remote First Nations communities accessible only by seaplanes, or by long drives when the roads are open.

I gather most communities have schools up to Year 8, but beyond that it’s either correspondence or living away from home – boarding with families, not residential colleges – to attend DFC. Sadly, it is (or was) a condition of attending DFC that the kids come from a remote community. Hence if a parent set up home in Thunder Bay to support their child then they no longer met the condition for attending the school.

Indigenous education fell, and maybe still falls, under Federal Native Affairs (however it is now named) while the education of settler children was a function of Provincial governments. As is the way with Native Affairs bureaucracies everywhere, even if the spending per student was nominally the same, most of it went on (white) administration, and Indigenous schools were woefully underfunded compared with settler schools.

Talaga’s thesis is that the Canadian government engaged in the systematic elimination of First Nations culture – cultural genocide – and for all their good words/good intentions now, that is ongoing. Treaties, which First Nations leaders entered into under duress, were not honoured; the 1876 Indian Act restricted First Nations people to mostly remote reservations and enforced the attendance of of all children up to 16 years at one of 137 residential schools, run by churches, and now notorious for physical and sexual violence, inadequate food and clothing, and rampant disease, especially TB which might easily have been controlled; even with the closure of the residential schools, Indigenous education has been inadequately funded.

To date, according to conservative estimates from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, approximately 4,100 to 6,000 children died amid abuse and neglect while in the residential school system, which ran until 1996.

CTV News, 1 June 2021 (here)

DFC, with 150 students over Years 9-12, was opened by the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council on the site of an old residential school in Thunder Bay in 2000. Within weeks of the opening the first of the seven, Jethro Anderson, was reported missing. His body was subsequently found in the Kam River, bruised and with what appeared to be cigarette burns to his face. In what became an unvarying trend, Thunder Bay police reported, prior to any possibility of investigation, that there was no suspicion of foul play.

The other six are –
Curran Strang, 2005, found in the McIntyre River
Paul Panacheese, 2006, collapsed and died at home
Robyn Harper, 2006, died of acute alcohol poisoning
Reggie Bushie, 2007, found in the McIntyre River. He had been drinking on the banks of the river with his brother Ricki, who came to, in the river, with no memory of how he got there
Kyle Morrisseau, 2009, found in the McIntyre River
Jordan Wabasse, 2011, found in the Kam River

Talaga writes sympathetic accounts of each of the seven and their families. She provides instances of Indigenous kids reporting being beaten up by white kids and of being tossed into waterways. She documents ongoing racist harassment; taunts and rubbish thrown from passing cars; one Indigenous woman dying of injuries from a lump of metal thrown at her stomach. Over and over we run into indifferent police and coroners inquiries with all white juries.

There is clearly a problem with children 14-18, too far from parental love and supervision, with too many opportunities for drinking and smoking. As in Australia, concerned elders patrol the streets at night and do what they can. As in Australia, Indigenous kids out after dark are treated by the police with suspicion rather than compassion or understanding.

Provincial police were brought in to redo the investigations. To no effect. An inquest into the seven deaths made open findings about the causes of the deaths and 145 recommendations. Children are now brought home for a week mid-term; and new, more local schools are opening. I was left unsure about whether there were local Provincial high schools that Indigenous kids might attend.

In 2017, two more dead teenagers—Tammy Keeash and Josiah Begg—were pulled from different parts of the McIntyre River within two weeks of each other.

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Tanya Talaga, Seven Fallen Feathers, House of Anansi Press, Toronto, 2017. Audible, 2018, Read by Michaela Washburn. 9 hours.

Christian Morrisseau, an Ojibwa ‘woodland’ artist, painted Seven Fallen Feathers in about 2016, after the inquest into the deaths of his son Kyle and six other First Nations students in Thunder Bay in the years 2000-2011 (Tanya Talaga, Ojibwa artist paints Seven Fallen Feathers to ease pain, remember seven young lives, Toronto Star)

see also:
Marcie/Buried in Print’s review (here)
Lisa/ANZLL’s Indigenous Lit page/Canada and the Americas (here)

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I don’t get the impression anyone is attempting to read along with my North America Project. Just as well! Next month (June) my review will be of James Baldwin’s Just Above my Head (1979) which I happened on in the library and have already listened to (yes Emma, it was excellent). July WILL be Their Eyes were watching God (1937), Zora Neale Hurston. I already have Life Among the Qallunaat, Mini Aodla Freeman, so that leaves me four more to find (I also have Dhalgren, Samuel R Delany, but I think that’s a project for another day).

Also in June, for Naomi’s Literary Wives Club, I have The Sentence (2021) by Louise Erdrich to read – I know! What a waste to read a book for only one challenge when it might easily cover two or three.

Midnight Robber, Nalo Hopkinson

North America Project 2022

My objective in undertaking this project was to discover who were the North American Alexis Wrights and Marie Munkaras. Ok, Toni Morrison is probably the Alexis Wright equivalent (I don’t think I’ve discovered a Kim Scott yet, and I don’t think Australia has an Octavia Butler or Zora Neale Hurston), but who are all those edgy, angry writers, mostly women in Australia at least, at the boundaries of literature and race and gender relations?

Well one of them is clearly Nalo Hopkinson (1960- ).

Hopkinson “was born in Jamaica, in the Caribbean. I lived for years in Guyana as well, and in Trinidad/Tobago. But the bulk of my life so far has been spent in Toronto, Canada. After about 35 years of that, I moved to the USA for a professorship in Creative Writing.” Nalohopkinson.com/About (in a section titled ‘Powered by ADHD’).

Midnight Robber (2000) is Science Fiction but as with much Women’s SF the SF is just a frame for a story about people. Men’s SF, straight SF, is generally about the SF – a universe is established and it is explored by stick figures. Women’s SF quite often follows the conventions of straight SF, a universe is established and its rules are adhered to, but the purpose is to provide an environment in which the behaviours of one or a few people may be interrogated.

Hopkinson has fun with Midnight Robber‘s environment, making her whole universe one giant Jamaican carnival. I of course missed most of the references but they’re here on Wikipedia if you want them. In brief, Earth is uninhabitable; Jamaicans have established themselves on a new planet, Toussaint; prisoners are exiled to another planet, New Half-Way Tree, in a parallel universe from which there is no return (it has a very 1788 New South Wales feel). The Indigenous people of New Half-Way Tree, the Douen, are smallish, I guess around 1.5m, with lizard-ish and bird-ish characteristics, and they live in trees – very reminiscent of Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest.

At the start of the book, Tan-Tan is a young girl, her father is Mayor and her mother finds ways to fill in her time while Tan-Tan is cared for by AIs – the house, her nurse, the cook and so on – via an implant in her ear. So a lot of the first part of the book is establishing how that works, and how the family dynamics work.

Then Antonio, the father, comes home early to catch his wife and her lover on the sofa; challenges the lover to a duel; in cheating, accidentally kills him; and to forestall being hanged he ‘jumps’ to New Half-Way Tree, accidentally taking Tan-Tan with him.

But wait, you mean you never hear of New Half-Way Tree, the planet of the lost people? You never wonder where them all does go, the drifters, the ragimuffins-them, the ones who think the world must be have something better for them, if them could only find which part it is? You never wonder is where we send the thieves-them, and the murderers? Well master, the Nation Worlds does ship them all to New Half-Way Tree, the mirror planet of Toussaint. Yes man, on the next side of a dimension veil.

Sorry, I forgot to say the whole novel is in patois, hours of poetry that I occasionally lost track of when the thread of the novel was interrupted for a side story.

On New Half-Way Tree Antonio and Tan-Tan slowly build a new life in a rough settlement in which a couple of strong-minded convicts maintain a reasonably fair order. You might think at this point Hopkinson could be making points about the treatment of Douen as inferiors – in fact, the way they are made to work, the way they look down and mumble when addressed is a direct metaphor for slave behaviour around whites – or about survivalism; but her central purpose is to discuss the treatment of young women by men they trust; and all the SF which follows, the “alien contact” as Tan-Tan goes to live with the Douen, is secondary to this central purpose.

This is a powerful and disturbing work written by a woman who is angry about men, about family men. And we should honour her anger by not skirting around the core of this work, as some of the summaries I read, do –

Over a number of years, from say age 9 to 16, with no one to protect her, Tan-Tan is raped.

Eventually she is driven to kill her rapist. In plunging down on her, he plunges down on her knife and dies. For this Tan-Tan knows the town ‘authorities’ will hang her, so she escapes into the forest with a male Douen, Chichibud, on the back of Benta, a Douen who can fly.

For the remainder of the novel Tan-Tan lives in the forest, with a Douen family, and then after her own “tall people” begin seeking her out, with an outcast Douen her own age; sometimes righting wrongs in isolated “tall people” communities, giving rise to the legend of Tan-Tan, Robber Queen. But she does not, cannot, forget that she was raped and neither can we.

This is a great book, a celebration of Jamaican culture and a masterpiece of Women’s SF, exactly the book I was looking for, hoping for with this project.

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Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber, Warner Aspect, 2000. Audible version read by Robin Miles, 13 hrs

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I said I would publish this review at the end of March, but I’m away working for a second or third consecutive week and I’ve run out of draft posts and the time to write new ones. I’ve been reading and listening to  some interesting books so hopefully I’ll knock out a couple of reviews over the weekend.  I’ll name next month’s (April ’22) North American book soon: Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

Rereading Dale Spender

AWW Gen 4 Week, 16-23 Jan 2022

Canadian writer and blogger Marcie McCauley knows that I am a fan of the Australian literature theorist and feminist, Dale Spender, and so she has contributed a piece on her own love for and reading of Spender over many years. Just to get a plug in, I don’t think Marcie has got hold of the book pictured, which was central to my own reading, so my review is (here) but don’t read it until you have read Marcie’s.

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Buried in Print

Bill would want me to state her spec’s clearly, I’m sure. (It’s probably a little late to please him: I’m walking a fine line.) Dale Spender was born September 22^nd, 1943 in Newcastle, New South Wales although she would later be associated with Brisbane. (I wish I had a photograph here: Bill would.) Her aunt was Jean Spender, who wrote Australian mysteries (some of them were racy, according to Wikipedia!) and her uncle was a politician, Percy Spender. Read on …

Dragan’s Back

Journal: 078

There are still wildflowers out in the desert, the last remnants of Spring in amongst the usual grey green scrub and red dirt. But as I never stop to take photos (of flowers, trucks are another matter) you must make do with the kangaroo paw on my balcony which is doing well for a change.

And I’ve been seeing lots of desert. After a blue with the last company I worked for – they booked me for a three day job then ‘forgot’ to tell me it was cancelled – I had a few weeks at home, and in desperation called … Dragan. Sam and Dragan and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the lunchroom swapping war stories and the upshot is Dragan will keep me going with work within WA (and yes, he’s already pressuring me to cross the border to do changeovers. But no way, Jose).

Last weekend I went up to Wiluna, 600 km north of Kalgoorlie and literally the last town on the edge of the dead centre – the Little Sandy Desert or the Gibson Desert – and then 50 km past the end of the bitumen. That was a warm up. As soon as I got home I was off to a mine 100 km past the end of the wheatbelt, past Wave Rock, and then follow the dirt road towards Norseman 80 km, turn north maybe 30 km, and locate the turnoff to a new mine – and if you miss it you’ll be back in phone range in only two or three hours.

This weekend, for a different carrier, I’m going 450 km on a corrugated dirt track out from Kalgoorlie. If I miss that mine … well, I’ll be carrying a satellite phone so hopefully someone will come and find me. (The view from my office window is a bit different from your facebook pic of footprints in the snow in suburban Birmingham. Hey Liz.)

Not driving put a damper on my audio reading, so once I was back on the road I was listening to books without a break in between. There’s some in the list below that I really should have reviewed. Margaret Atwood’s On Writers and Writing was of course for MARM, but I couldn’t get anything from it without notes. She’s a lovely speaker but spent a chapter on ‘my childhood’, then six chapters, from a series of talks she gave somewhere, seemingly on the relationship of writing to religion. Lost me!

I re-listened to Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance so I could comment at least a little bit knowledgeably on Liz Dexter’s review (here) and thoroughly enjoyed it. BIP recommended Cory Doctorow to me some time during MARM. Little Brother is a YA novel of 17 year olds in San Francisco fighting back against the surveillance state and the ridiculous powers awarded in panic to Homeland Security. We have done and continue to do the same thing here (award obscene powers to the security apparatus, that is. No one’s fighting back that I can see). Worth reading. But the best was from the late master, Peter Temple. White Dog is a murder mystery, a tragedy, a tour through Melbourne and Victoria, and a romp around country racecourses.

Of the ‘Currently readings’, ie. books made the old fashioned way with words on paper, These Old Shades was a just a few hours with an old friend. The Young Fur Traders, a very old friend, I have already reviewed; and the other three will be written up sooner rather than later.

My North American Project

I admit I did not use that three weeks off the road to advance this project as far as I should. But, I own Their Eyes Were Watching God, so that will be my January read. I’ll put up a review after AWW Gen 4 Week, probably on Mon 31 Jan. My February read is The Autobiography of Malcolm X. There’ll be a review (from me) and also a guest post from Melanie (Grab the Lapels), at the end of the month, of her experience reading and teaching it.

For March and April I had better see what Canadians I can obtain, through the library system, or from Audible. See the list of books I’m working from (here). I’ve just been re-reading your comments, we might have to make it a two year project!

Let’s say I go with Nalo Hopkinson – BIP, Naomi – help! – which one? Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, Falling in Love with Hominids. And then perhaps both of Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse and Eden Robinson, Son of a Trickster. One of them later in the year.

Back in the US I have on my shelves Octavia Butler’s Kindred, so that’s in, but for the sake of balance I can probably only squeeze in one of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, The Color Purple and Maya Angelou, before we get Louise Erdrich and US First Nations. That gets us to 8 reads, so four to go. Maybe Esi Edugyan (Can), but I’m struggling – I’d really like both an older and a leading edge US First Nations. There is more to do. And more arm-twisting from you, probably.

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Recent audiobooks 

Louis de Bernieres (M, Eng), So Much Life Left Over (2018)
Kate Atkinson (F, Eng), Transcription (2018) – Hist.Fic (WWII)
Anne Tyler (F, USA), Clock Dance (2018)
Margaret Atwood (F, Can), On Writers and Writing (2015) – NF
Peter Temple (M, Aust/Vic), White Dog (2003) – Crime
Cory Doctorow (M, Can), Little Brother (2008) – SF
Janet Evanovich (F, USA), Curious Minds (2016) – Crime
Richard Flanagan (M, Aust/Tas), Death of a River Guide (1994)
JM Coetzee (M, Aust/SA), Elizabeth Costello (2003)

Currently reading

Georgette Heyer (F, Eng), These Old Shades
RM Ballantyne (M, Scot), The Young Fur Traders
Simone de Beauvoir (F, Fra), The Inseparables
Tsitsi Dangarembga (F, Zim), This Mournable Body
John Kinsella (M, Aust/WA), Pushing Back (short stories)

The Young Fur Traders, RM Ballantyne

#MARM2021

For the third consecutive weekend I am home and not working. The problem this causes is that I am not driving, listening to my (second) #MARM2021 read, On Writers and Writing (2015). So for a change, I have commenced listening in the hour between finishing reading and falling asleep.

However, being home does give me the opportunity to re-read, in connection with Canada if not directly with MA, a childhood favourite, The Young Fur Traders (1856), given to me by my paternal grandfather – going by the handwriting of my name on the flyleaf – sixty years ago this xmas. I looked along my top shelf to see if I also have his copy, I don’t, but I do have my father’s, though uninscribed.

According to Wikipedia, Margaret Atwood (1939- ) “spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec, and travelling back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.” This is reflected in the two works of hers that I have reviewed, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing. RM Ballantyne (1825-1894), a Scot, spent five years in Canada, from ages 16 to 21, working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. On his return to Scotland he wrote Hudson’s Bay: or, Life in the Wilds of North America (1848), then around 100 adventure stories for boys, of which this is the first.

We begin with Charley, 15 and his sister Kate, 14 planning their futures on the banks of the Red River – his as an adventurer in the wilds, hers home caring for their parents, their father having that day removed them from school.

In the very centre of the great continent of North America, far removed from the abodes of civilised men, and about twenty miles to the south of Lake Winnipeg exists a colony composed of Indians, Scotsmen and French-Canadians, which is known by the name of Red River Settlement… At the time at which we write, it contained about five thousand souls, and extended upwards of fifty miles along the Red and Assiniboine Rivers… The banks were clothed with fine trees; and immediately behind the settlement lay the great prairies, which extended in undulating waves – almost entirely devoid of shrub or tree – to the base of the Rocky Mountains.

This, I discover via Google Maps, is now the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, on the far side of the Great Lakes from ‘Atwood’ country, but similar sounding in Ballantyne’s descriptions, to the island in Surfacing.

Given Ballantyne’s stated commitment to accuracy I am interested most in his descriptions. So voyageurs were “descended, generally, from French-Canadian sires and Indian mothers [uniting] some of the good and not a few of the bad qualities of both … the full, muscular frame of the Canadian with the fierce passions and active habits of the Indian.” “They were employed … in navigating the Hudson’s Bay Company boats, laden with furs and goods, through the labyinth of rivers and lakes that stud and intersect the whole continent … or in the pursuit of bisons which roam the prairies in vast herds.”

Charley is accepted by the Company and is conveyed up the Red River and across Lake Winnipeg to Norway House. He meets on the way an Indian guide who tells him a story of his first raiding party, with the Knisteneux [Cree] against the Chipewyans. He becomes a hunter and – we skip a year – joins a small party opening a new trading post in uncharted country north of the Sakatchewan. Charlie and an older hunter whose native language was any one of English, French and ‘Indian’ [surely, there’s more than one].

In truth, this is more travelogue than adventure yarn – though there a few of those as we go along – but an extraordinarily interesting one. Nineteenth century Canada seems like an inverse Australia – a vast unpopulated hinterland but (below) freezing cold with great forests and innumerable streams and lakes and of course endless snow to match our red sand, desert scrub and dry creek beds under a blazing sun.

In fact Australia pops up a couple of times – a horse as long-legged as a kangaroo, and an outpost as desolate as Botany Bay.

Ballantyne describes at length the clothing of the hunters and of the Knisteneux; their feasts and their travelling rations; takes us shooting rapids in bark canoes – after teaching us how to construct one; and hunting for wolves, birds, foxes and of course bison.

And where is Ms Atwood during all of this. Talking quietly into my right ear each evening. She has marvellous diction, largely unaccented. Perhaps modern Australian English is more American than I realise. Into my right ear so it can go out my left. Not much is sticking. I am sure she would enjoy the scenery of this novel, home territory for her, if a few hundred kilometres north and west. I wonder if her father or her brother had Ballantyne’s book. Surely every middle class household in the Dominions at least had Coral Island.

I recall no First Nations presence in Surfacing and Cat’s Eye. I wonder why that is. Here the ‘Indians’ are central, not as protagonists, though one is on the edge of the action throughout, and another is assigned the role of villain. They are exotic, colour, as is always the case in travel stories; it is they with whom the Hudson Bay Company trades; but sadly it is not a trade between equals.

There is a hierarchy. Young Charlie is soon a boss, a bourgeois, in charge of a small outpost. Beneath him is a hunter of 40 years experience of French-Canadian and Indian blood, and beneath them are any Knisteneux who have come into the camp for work. The Knisteneux chief is harangued for failing to bring in enough furs to satisfy the trading post commandant.

In all these Boys Own type books, society is entirely masculine. A few men, years away together, enclosed throughout the winter months into small, shared spaces. Perhaps it’s a product of their schools, Eton, Winchester and so on. The voyageurs are fathered by French Canadians, the British don’t do that sort of thing.

Ms Atwood goes on, reading, talking. I wake with a start, I really must review her properly. I hope it gets past I was a cute little girl, I was a beatnik in college. Charley finally gets to go home to his beautiful sister – the language with which they describe each other is nauseating – but luckily, approaching adulthood, her attentions are directed elsewhere. Boys Own writers do romance really badly, but all ends well.

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RM Ballantyne, The Young Fur Traders, first pub. 1856. My edition (pictured) Ward, Lock & Co.

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A discussion we’ve had before: “the canoe entered one of these small rivulets which are called in Scotland burns, and in America creeks.”

Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

November is both Margaret Atwood Reading Month (BIP) and AusReading Month (Brona). But, a week or so ago, it suddenly popped into my head that the month was already under way. So I started reading the book I had set aside for Brona, and, audiobooks being so to speak like signs on a freeway flashing past, I borrowed and listened to Surfacing, which I now must review before it is lost behind the barely glimpsed images of all the subsequent signs, or in this case, a guy-SF space opera.

What is really embarrassing is that all this went on while I was writing the actual date on work stuff every day; and more importantly, I completely overlooked a batch of birthdays coming up at the end of October which required book buying and interstate postage and will now therefore be late.

Yes, I know, I could write today (13 Oct) and hold off till November but I will be desperate for a something to post well before then.

Margaret Atwood (1939- ) is of course Canadian. BIP describes her as the first Canadian author to gain international recognition, as the writer who made Canada a valid subject for writing. I am completely ignorant when it comes to Canadian writing, so that is an argument into which I will not venture any further than to say Canada – or frozen North America anyway – was the setting for a number of boys own type books I owned and read in the 1950s.

Last year for MARM I read Cat’s Eye (1988), deliberately not looking up any explanatory material, including Atwood’s year of birth, until after I had written it up. This year I know a little more, so I will attempt to provide some context.

Atwood’s father was a botanist and the family – MA has an older brother and younger sister – appears to have lived and travelled a great deal in Canada’s forests. Her first vocation was as a poet, though interestingly in both Cat’s Eye and Surfacing her protagonist is a painter or illustrator.

She describes her first novel The Edible Woman (1969) as a work of protofeminism, ie. as predating Women’s Lib. As is frequently the case with Literary Fiction, her early works – judging by the summaries – are all explorations of her own coming of age, early adulthood and relationships, the theme to which she returns, aged nearly 50, in Cat’s Eye. And although I have read her better known fiction, A Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace etc., I am glad I have come to Cat’s Eye and now Surfacing (1972) for a closer look at her.

Surfacing begins with a road trip. The female protagonist, unnamed; the guy she lives with, Joe; her current bestie, Anna; and Anna’s husband David, are all in their late twenties, in David’s old car and as best I can make out, in Quebec, or maybe further west, in Ontario, north of the Great Lakes. Anyway, they’re in Canada, making for a lakeside village in the pine forests where ‘she’ is known, where she grew up on an otherwise uninhabited island out in the lake, where her father is now missing presumed dead.

A local boatman takes them out to the island. They occupy her childhood home, a log cabin without power or running water, in a damp, cold, densely treed wilderness. It might be summer, Anna sunbathes, but for an Australian this is winter, and the winters she remembers, with snow up to the eaves, are just unimaginable.

I use Google Books to get a quote. It’s describing Joe in the car –

From the side he’s like the buffalo on the u.s. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction. That’s how he thinks of himself too: deposed, unjustly. Secretly he would like them to set up a kind of park for him, like a bird sanctuary. Beautiful Joe.

He feels me watching him and lets go of my hand.

David has a grant to make an arty film. Joe, an artist in clay, is his cameraman. They have a hired camera and a limited amount of film. She will show them around. Anna is along for the ride.

On the island, initially for the weekend, then for a week, she is the only one at home – camping, kayaking, fishing – and must take the lead. Apart from day to day living, very little happens. She is afraid that her father will reappear, driven mad by loneliness, her mother long since dead, her brother a geologist in the Outback, presumably Australia, and she too long absent.

There is a Lord of the Flies vibe. Gradually the little party falls apart. Her back story includes marriage and a child, both seemingly abandoned. Joe is convenient but unimportant. He, feeling her slipping away, wants more, and sulks when rebuffed. For a while She and Anna exchange confidences, interestingly, they have both tried the pill and stopped taking it. David asserts his new-age guyness, forcing Anna to pose naked, and then when she gravitates towards Joe, puts the word on ‘her’. She evades him, but he follows her into the bush, “You know you wanted me to.”

Throughout, there are Canadians chopping down trees, damming the lake to make moving the logs easier, and Americans in fast, loud boats who think Canada is their private hunting reserve. “David says ‘Bloody fascist pig Yanks,’ as though he’s commenting on the weather.”

Slowly her own mental condition deteriorates. The week comes to an end, they leave, she stays. For a day she’s naked in the snow. It’s not clear why the story ends as it does.

Surfacing is excellently written. Atwood was clearly a talented literary writer right from the beginning. Here she is exploring not so much feminism as women’s new relation to men; men’s uncertainty about how much of their old roles they are going to have to give up in the brand-new world of the Sixties.

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Margaret Atwood, Surfacing, first pub. 1972. Audiobook read by Kim Handysides, published in Australia by Bolinda. 7 hours.

Butter Honey Pig Bread, Francesca Ekwuyasi

First things first. Butter Honey Pig Bread, ie. the title not the book, is a list and not as I still say it to myself, 3 adjectives and a noun. It’s a list of section headings and apparently of Nigerian cooking’s four main food groups. You could read this novel just for the cooking and the recipes. Though, as a vegetarian, the emphasis on pig meat was not really to my taste.

Francesca Ekwuyasi is a young Nigerian/Canadian artist, writer, filmmaker and Butter Honey Pig Bread (2020) is her debut novel. I see it is now available in Australia from publishers Angus & Robertson, though the copy I have from the library for this review is Canadian

Interestingly, the back cover says “Francesca Ekwuyasi is a writer and multidisciplinary artist from Lagos, Nigeria ..”. Nevertheless, in the various locations in which this book is set – Lagos, London, the south of France, Halifax and Montreal – it is Halifax, which I understand is where the author lives, which is described in far more detail than the others.

The reader of the Audible audiobook I listened to was Amakah Umeh. She was ok, but her accent was, I guess, educated east coast American and her reading relatively flat, which on my checking, accords with the way the book is written. There is very little of the poetry I expect from Nigerian writing. BHPB is the story of twin sisters, Taiye and Kehinde, priveleged, educated, middle class women, an ordinary women’s issues novel, made exotic only by its grounding in Lagos and the strangeness of their mother, Kambirinachi.

The three women narrate in turn; Kambirinachi in third person, Taiye in third and second person, and Kehinde in first person. Kambirinachi’s narrative begins with her parents, who live in the provinces, depositing her with an aunt so that she may attend an elite girls school in Lagos. Kambirinachi is a spirit who is forcing herself to remain in this current body

Kambirinachi hadn’t visited Lagos in her present incarnation, but she remembered it vividly. She had seen it many times. One time before before, she borrowed the body of a taut and agile dancer at Fela’s Shrine in Ikeja.

Her strangeness, sometimes dosed with lithium, and her grief after the sudden death of her husband – which leaves her with a substantial house and the money to maintain it – means her mothering is often distant to non-existent.

Taiye’s and Kehinde’s narratives begin in the present. Taiye is back in the family home in Lagos preparing a meal for her sister from whom she has been estranged, emotionally since the ‘bad thing’ happened when they were 10 or 11, and physically since they finished high school and began university, Taiye in London and Kehinde in Montreal. Kehinde is flying in with her French Moroccan husband, Farouq. They will stay a few weeks then go on to Morocco.

The girl’s stories, and particularly Taiye’s, begin again in their university years, and all the subsequent years apart. We proceed then not so much in parallel as in concentric spirals, circling back to the present within the outer circle of their mother’s life.

Taiye studies chemistry, sleeps with girls, moves on to restaurants, sleeps with more girls, studies cooking in the south of France, ends up in Halifax making bread (and sleeping with girls) from whence she does not visit her sister in Montreal, goes home to Lagos, sleeps with an old school ‘friend’ and neighbour (also a girl). Lots of excuses for cooking and recipes

This is how you make a salted caramel chocolate cake for your twin sister whom you haven’t seen in …
For the batter, you will need as much butter as you can manage without leaving your cake too dense and greasy.. You should use a little over two cups of all-purpose flour, three quarters of a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder – preferably free trade.. a teaspoon and a half of baking powder, a quarter teaspoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon of salt, and three large eggs. You may add a cup of sugar, but Taiye used a cup of honey instead. And finally some vanilla extract.
In place of buttercream frosting, Taiye made honey caramel to pour over the top.
She lit the gas oven and turned the dial to 325 degrees.

Kehinde’s story is more restrained. She begins to draw, meets her husband. Works towards unveiling to us the ‘bad thing’, towards what she sees as Taiye’s betrayal, which set them apart. All three of the narratives provide their different perspectives of the ‘bad thing’.

Joining the sisters’ two stories is a series of letters written by Taiye to Kehinde when Kehinde stopped replying to her phone calls and emails, letters written and not sent, written with no intention of sending, until a girlfriend boxes them up and sends them anyway, so that Kehinde is still reading and dealing with them when she arrives back in Lagos.

Kambirinachi
Taiye has gone into the house and Kehinde will not look at me …
How can I fix this?
The thing that my child experienced is unbearable. And yet she bore it.
‘How can I fix this?’ I ask her.
But she only shakes her head and starts to walk away from away from me.

There are a few more dramas. We reach a resolution. It’s an interesting novel. The writing is a bit try-hard as you might expect from a debut, though if Ekwuyasi has an MFA she doesn’t say so. If you like stories about women’s lives then you’ll like this.

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Francesca Ekwuyasi, Butter Honey Pig Bread, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, 2020. 314pp.

see also reviews by:
Buried in Print (here)
Consumed by Ink (here)

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Lard, Taiye discovered, was much less challenging to make than she’d anticipated. It was in fact a simple matter of using the leaf fat from around the pig’s kidneys, as this particular kind of fat produces a versatile white and mildly flavoured lard …

Did I ever say that it was pig fat, its smell, its taste its essential greasiness permeating all the other food on the plate, that made me a vegetarian.

Project 2022

My project for next year is to read twelve US/Canadian Black and First Nations fiction or memoir, with a review in the last week of each month. I’m starting planning now because a) it’s on my mind; and b) I need time to assemble a list of books which I can access and which I will need to be mostly audiobooks. This is your cue to start making suggestions.

Towards the end of this year I will publish the finalized list for anyone who might feel like joining in. In the meanwhile I might keep updating this post with your (and my) suggestions.

Off the top of my head, I think I would like to read another Toni Morrison (after Beloved), maybe another Zora Neale Thurston (after Jonah’s Gourd Vine) and if I can access it, the autobiography of Malcolm X, highly recommended by Melanie/GTL. Then there’s Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin which I failed to read during my matriculation year. I may even still have a copy. That would no doubt please Emma/Book Around the Corner who has written some terrific Baldwin reviews (here).

Canadians Naomi/Consumed by Ink and BIP/BIP have written and recommended too many Canadian First Nations writers to list (ie. I have failed to note them) but, for example, see Naomi’s two most recent posts (here and here).

I did follow up BIP’s review of Butter Honey Pig Bread by Nigerian Canadian Francesca Ekwuyasi – which inter alia contains some interesting stuff about Black history in Canada – and a review is in the works. May even be my next post if I can get away with not working this weekend. And then there’s her recent post on Black slavery in the Americas (here).

I look at my shelves. I think I may deal with Octavia Butler separately (see Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Sower). I have Kindred waiting which I will get to ‘soon’ like the many other, though mostly Australian, new books I have purchased and am yet to read. In the more formal shelves of my lounge room I see quite a few boys own type books of my own, my father’s and my grandfathers’ – ES Ellis’s Lost Among the Redskins for instance – for the reading of which this project may gave me some context. This is important to me, although to no one else probably, as the noble frontiersman of the US and Canada was the precursor of Australia’s ‘Lone Hand’ bushman (How many years is it now? and I still haven’t reviewed Russell Ward’s The Australian Legend).

It occurred to me at this point in this post that I had read many years ago the memoir of a Black New York science fiction writer, a guy, a gay, not Butler. It was someone well known to me (as an author) and whom I normally did not think of as Black. Searches… Turns out it was Samuel R Delaney of Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand fame, and the memoir was The Motion of Light in Water (1988) which name I do not remember at all, and which I must have read quite soon after publication, not realising because it deals with events a couple of decades earlier – including meeting a young Bob Dylan.

Ok, the next little bit is up to you

Reminder: Lisa/ANZLL’s Indigenous Lit. Week, 4-11 July 2021. Her Indigenous Lit. Reading List includes a section for Canada and the Americas (here).

Suggestions for Project 2022

Author	Work	Year		Rec.
Sherman Alexie	The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian	2007	US	TPe
Andre Alexis	Fifteen Dogs (2 of 5)	2015	Can	CBI
Maya Angelou	I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	1969	US	Liz
James Baldwin	Go Tell it on the Mountain	1953	US
	If Beale Street Could Talk	1974	US	GTL
	Just Above My Head	1979	US
Joseph Boyden	The Orenda	2013	Can	RM
Octavia Butler	Kindred	1979	US	BB
David Chariandy	Soucouyant	2007	Can	CBI
Samuel R Delaney	Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand	1984	US
	The Motion of Light in Water	1988	US
Cherie Dimaline	Red Rooms	2011	US	CBI
Esi Edugyan	Half-Blood Blues	2011	Can	CBI
Louise Erdrich	The Bingo Palace (4 of 8)	1994	US	WG
	The Plague of Doves (1 of 3)	2008	US
	La Rose (3 of 3)	2016	US	BB
	The Night Watchman	2020	US	TPe
Mini Aodla Freeman	Life Among the Qallunaat	1978	Can	BIP
Lawrence Hill	The Book of Negroes	2007	Can	CBI
Nalo Hopkinson	Midnight Robber	2000	Can	CBI
Thomas King	The Inconvenient Indian	2012	Can	CBI
Nella Larsen	Passing	1929	US	BIP
Audre Lorde	Zami: A New Spelling of my Name	1982	US	WG
Terese Marie Mailhot	Heart Berries	2018	Can	KW
N Scott Momaday	House Made of Dawn	1968	US	BB
Toni Morrison	Sula	1973	US	BB
	Paradise	1998	US
Eden Robinson	Son of a Trickster (1of 3)	2017	Can	RM
Tanya Talga	Seven Fallen Feathers	2017	Can	BIP
Zora Neale Thurston	Their Eyes Were Watching God	1937	US	TPi
Richard Wagamese	Indian Horse	2012	Can	CBI
Alice Walker	The Color Purple	1982	US	GTL
Elissa Washuta	White Magic	2021	US	BIP
Jacqueline Woodson	If You come Softly	1998	US	LL
Richard Wright	Native Son	1940	US	TPe
Malcolm X (and Alex Haley)	Autobiography of Malcolm X	1965	US	GTL