In mid-July, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.
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| Simon & Schuster (Canada) |
In 2019, the memoir first came out and it became a bestseller. Jesse Thistle was born in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, where his Cree maternal grandparents lived. His parents split when he and his two elder brothers were small, and their father took them into his care. Plagued with drug abuse, he left them on their own for days on end, found food in garbage cans and through shoplifting; their experience then was Dickensian; and I was baffled that this was possible in 1970s Canada.
Then their father never returned. Their white grandparents rescued them from foster care, where they had been maltreated. After that they raised the grandchildren to the east in suburban Ontario.
The grandparents loved them. But they were set in their ways and raising three hungry, traumatized children challenged them. Their grandfather — an elevator engineer — was raised in a tough school. He handed out bruising beatings.
The 'cultural mosaic' Canada didn't exist in the boys' schools; the schoolyard appeared to be divided along ethnic battle lines. Thistle felt uncomfortable accepting a First Nations heritage he barely knew, when it was despised by his classmates. And the brutal social dynamic seemed to turn him off his school work.
Aside from keeping in touch with his parents, his cultural heritage could have been a steadying influence, I think adult Thistle is hypothesizing. I think (or hope) that the child welfare system might agree with this more now than in the 1970s.
I found the childhood scenes, although my siblings and I saw no abuse whatsoever, very relatable. [Edit: Although this is more my narcissism than because the experiences were alike.] The precarious feeling of being raised by just one parent for a while — if nothing else — and of children being left to improvise themselves while that parent was busy doing something else (in my father's case, it was just computer programming!), was familiar. In my father's case I also think there was an air of misery, and self-discontent when he felt that he wasn't managing to do everything quite as well as he intended.
When he was still a teenager, I think, Jesse's grandparents found him with a bag of cocaine. Especially because the drug abuse and imprisonment of Jesse's father had hurt them so that they weren't willing to take any more, he was kicked out of the house. He became homeless.
Briefly the author set up camp in Vancouver with a friend. In Vancouver I've heard of drug use and ridden by a crime scene, but I had no idea it was possible to live so miserably there. Malnourished and freezing and shelter-less, Jesse and his friend almost died there, before Jesse decided to escape and hitchhike back to Brampton, Ontario.
I reflected that it was incredible how much illness, poison, and unhappiness the human body and spirit can take. It was also interesting here how much the feeling of being at home, even if that home was not ideal, seemed to matter.
In my view, the big redemption for the author came after two acquaintances embroiled him in the murder of a cab driver. It was a 'rock bottom' moment for Jesse, where he finally put his foot down on venality and reported the acquaintances to the police.
The family of the dead cab driver was clearly given some closure when he reported who had done the crime. But the horror of the crime itself, the stress of being suspected of the crime himself when the main piece of evidence against the acquaintances wasn't found, and the retaliation amongst the homeless and drug-using community against him for his 'treachery', led Thistle to a mental health spiral.
I don't think the author sees it like this himself. But to me his willingness to testify against the murderers showed that he was independent and that he wasn't as unworthy as he thinks he is. (I cringed a bit that he attributed his later success to his wife, and depicted himself as morally beneath her.)
Jesse Thistle began to rotate in and out of prisons. It was partly voluntarily, because after he injured himself after falling off a building, his leg was wounded and became chronically infected. He needed treatment and rest, and was not getting it.
He writes mostly about the first prison he was in. He explains social rules amongst prisoners, for example, keeping a drug supply equilibrium so that gang wars would not set in — this depends on the prisons, though, because in one prison there appeared to be an elaborate balance and in others an anarchy. He also paints the psychological horror of the involuntary withdrawal experience he had, when his access to drugs was cut off there and he forgot to ask for Valium.
A veteran prisoner with whom Thistle talked said (to summarize broadly) that one thing that differentiates someone who is genuinely hard or criminal from a one-timer in prison, is if the person has a Bible or other religious text next to their bed. Someone who is relatively innocent or hasn't yet figured things out doesn't see the need for religion. But someone who feels guilty, steeped in blood or otherwise, turns somewhere to try to find forgiveness. Quite purposely, I think, there is no proselytization in the book; Thistle went to a Christian rehabilitation centre, but preachiness appears to make him uncomfortable. I found this really insightful and plan to keep it in mind when I read prison memoirs or fiction in future.
That said, these 'hardcore' criminals are also depicted redemptively in the book. I liked that the book didn't seem to try to make the author look better at the expense of other (former) drug users or prisoners. His family members, even when negligent or abusive, are depicted with indulgence, too.
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In Canada Reads, one or two panelists saw the book as 'trauma porn' and did not enjoy the repetitive nature of Jesse's petty crimes and 'poor decisions.'
The cycle was [edit: something I could vaguely comprehend because of personal experience], however. The times I've been in poor mental health and the suffering repeated, until I reached rock bottom and consciously took a new direction, or escaped a damaging environment — these came to mind again.
I also felt that 'trauma porn' was the wrong term. A few passages make clear what the psychological or emotional appeal of drugs can be, for example. The scene where toddler Jesse ate expired meat that was 'only a little green around the edges' had a self-conscious pathos. But even then, in my view, there was nothing enjoyable or glibly sensational about the harder chapters of the book.
That said, I agree with the idea that a few people might need to avoid the memoir. This book's themes can be tough on readers, for example if they have known addiction in their family.
But the book isn't all misery, even at the beginning. Jesse Thistle finds a life raft in academia ('of all places'); and he finds anchorage in the basic support, love and acceptance of family and friends, whether alive now or long dead.
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