April, May & June 2022 In Books: What I've Been Reading

As always, I've been reading older books, although Akwaeke Emezi, Kacen Callender and Elizabeth Acevedo have all published new works in May that I'm looking forward to reading.

Thanks to colleagues clubbing together to buy me a gift certificate, I now also have Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi and If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin.

In paper form I finished reading the five tales by Nikolai Gogol. In the end, The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, maybe also Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt, and The Overcoat were my favourites: the scene-painting, the emotions, and even the discomfort of seeing the social inequalities and imperfections that must have been full-blown tragedies in everyday reality.

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Vaguely I remembered reading Lebanese Australian journalist Rania Abouzeid's posts on Twitter during the early years of the Arab Spring. A decade later, it turns out that she wrote at least two books about her experiences: living in Syria with middle-class families, and interviewing protesters and militants across an impressive spectrum.

Sisters of the War (2020) focuses intimately on the lives of two girls and their families: one, from a pro-Assad, Alawite family — the other, from a revolutionary family. Perhaps it is written more for a younger audience, and the intention to draw attention to our shared humanity breathes through every page. I listened to an audiobook that helpfully offered the proper Arabic pronunciations.

Cover of Sisters of the War (Scholastic Publishing)

No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (2018) follows adult Syrians as they negotiate their path amongst various anti-Assad groups, culminating in being either witnesses to or also perpetrators of intense violence and in one case even sympathy with Isis. Abouzeid makes an unusual decision not to speak about rape, except when an al-Nusra militant alleges that Alawite prisons perpetrate it against women. While Sisters of the War also proves if proof were needed that she thinks the women's perspective is just as important, the book is guided largely by masculine points of view.

She uses the book to bust myths about the Syrian Arab Spring, and finds the leading threads in the entanglements of different revolutionary groups, al-Qaeda, the Turkish government, foreign intelligence agencies, etc. knowledgeably. (I was following the news at the time and recently rediscovered a diagram I'd drawn of which group or party was linked with which other group or party.)

The food scarcity, cut-off water supplies, self-interested diplomacy, disappearances, technological makeshifts, and bombing of residential areas, in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine; the torture and other abuses that Abouzeid describes in Syrian government prisons that will not have ended with the war; and the legacy that Syrians today still carry —these many open ends and tragic parallels make No Turning Back and Sisters of the War still feel urgent years later.

No Turning Back [W. W. Norton & Company]

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Public Service Announcement: I'd like to take the opportunity to link to the resources at the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. They take a modern approach, founded in mental health best practices and a care for the wellbeing of any journalist, source, and assistant, to understanding, acknowledging, and counteracting the risks of war reporting. On a personal note, I've cribbed some of the ideas here to help cope with work stress unrelated to war.

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Tilly and the Crazy Eights is a fictional novel that addresses another traumatic history — colonial and post-colonial treatment by Canadian government authorities of Indigenous people. 

Monique Gray Smith had already written about Tilly, the youngest of the core cast of characters and a registered nurse who is tasked with caring for her elderly cohort, in another book that I haven't read. In this sequel, she introduces a knitting circle of elderly Indigenous ladies. They decide to travel to the southern United States in a bus, and to try to address something in their own 'bucket lists' — lists of things they would like to have done before they die.

Along their journey they carry their nightmares. For example: often sexually abused in Canadian residential (boarding) schools, many of the elder characters were forced to repress their own language, and taught that their cultural traditions were inferior and wrong. A few older and younger characters are trying to mend broken relationships; one older character has also survived cancer, and another is living with diabetes. In one case, an elder is personally affected by one of the thousands of unresolved murders and disappearances of First Nations women that are rarely prosecuted in Canadian courts.

I appreciated that the author included an Indigenous woman who came out as a lesbian during the feminist Second Wave in urban Canada, a perspective which one doesn't read about that often and is well (if sparingly) presented here.

Gray Smith guides the plot perceptibly with magical realism and other devices to the conclusions that she wants. I'd argue that a firefly that zooms in during a crisis moment like a B2 bomber, is not really a fair analogue to the coincidences and talismans that we sometimes look for as guideposts in life, for example. Some of the humour is maybe a little corny — realistic for the cast of characters, and yet I did feel the urge from time to time to stick a fork in my eye.

But I loved the genuine warmth in Tilly and the Crazy Eights.

The road trip itself — a writing challenge to the greatest literary genius and the 'merest plodder' alike — is well executed. Gray Smith gives tastes of the scenery and locations at just the real pace and depth of highwayside observation, not weighing down the book with pedantic exposition about historical, geographical or cultural minutiae.

Cover of Tilly and the Crazy Eights (Second Story Press)

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Lastly, I read Efrén Divided, by Ernesto Cisneros, and some of The Ghost Squad, by Claribel Ortega. The first book — which explores the effects of American immigration law enforcement in the 2010s on Latino-American families from a teenage boy's perspective — especially is wonderful and a 'tear-jerker', not necessarily just for tween and teenage readers. The publication year of The Ghost Squad is a little unfairly positioned chronologically, between the Harry Potter books, which also deal with magic, and were published before Ortega's book, and the film Encanto, which also deals with magic, and was released after Ortega's book. If you're interested in imaginary young people doing fun magic for good causes, I recommend Encanto.

Canada Reads 2020: From the Ashes

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.

"From the Ashes is a remarkable memoir about hope and resilience, and a revelatory look into the life of a Métis-Cree man who refused to give up," runs the introduction of Jesse Thistle's publisher, Simon & Schuster.

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.

Canada, First Nations, and Residential Schools

On June 21st, which is National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, I read a Twitter message by Shelagh Rogers that related to First Nations authors. (Shelagh Rogers is a former radio host for a Canadian national broadcaster, and now Chancellor of the university at which my father used to work.) So it made me curious about First Nations literature, which is — surprisingly, since I lived in Canada for 15 years — 'terra incognita' to me.

Speaking of which, Canada's literary magazine The Walrus is also running a series of short-form fiction, of non-fiction essays and of artwork by First Nations authors and artists: Terra Cognita.

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Cover, Sugar Falls
Artwork by Scott B. Henderson
Highwater Press, 2012

Aside from David A. Robertson's graphic novel Stone, described in this blog post, I also read Sugar Falls yesterday. (A few of Robertson's books are on the book subscription website Scribd, so I will be reading still more.)

Sugar Falls is a look at a real-life story of a Cree child's life in a 20th-century residential school in central Canada, after she was taken from her parents to be educated according to government guidelines. It is not for the faint of heart and it describes the abuse she went through.

I'd say that the book stands for itself. A large part of its power is that it tries to hew closely to the life story at its core, which was shared with the author by an elder, Betty Ross. This restraint is almost an ideological statement, when it is so easy to adapt someone's testimony to suit one's own artistic interests and opinions. To be frank, I prefer Sugar Falls a bit to Stone, although it's even harder reading. So I want to imitate the author's example, by not over-paraphrasing the story, and not running the risk of misinterpreting reality.

Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story [Highwater Press]

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To digress, reading online sources about the Residential School that's mentioned in the book was enlightening. It underlined that an undeserved self-complacency — although that's easy for me to say, since I'm of a younger generation that doesn't directly carry this moral burden — still exists in the communities that founded and ran these schools. A website run by the United Church of Canada (which operated the residential school after 1925) writes rather harmlessly of Norway House:

The church rebuilt in 1952, with room for 120 students in two dorms housed in separate buildings in order to minimize the risk of fire. The half-day system was abandoned.

By 1964, there were 138 children in residence at Norway House IRS and 242 day students who lived in their own homes in the community. Margaret Ann Reid recalled her experiences as a young teacher of the grade 2/3 class: "Progress was slow for many of the children—this was partly due to the language barrier —schoolwork was in English—the students were accustomed to talking and thinking in Cree. There were no restrictions on speaking Cree outside the classroom." Reid also noted that attendance continued to be very fluid in the school, as children frequently stayed home to care for siblings or to accompany their families on trapping and fishing excursions.

In other words, the Church's summary denies that children were held apart from their parents, or that children were punished for speaking Cree (at least 'outside the classroom'). Also, it does not recognize the sexual abuse that is alleged to have occurred,* nor does it mention the drowning death of a girl — described in Sugar Falls — who tried to escape the school. [Edited to add: That said, the graphic novel speaks of a Roman Catholic school, whereas Norway House was Methodist/United Church. Perhaps this was the only detail that was changed from real life, or perhaps other details have also been changed to reflect First Nations children's experiences in other schools as well.]

In the meantime, a report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated residential schools, describes the view of another teacher, Dorothy McKay, who taught there in the 1960s:

I think about the first week, you’d hear the children crying themselves to sleep, but the other side of that is I can remember we would go to the plane with them when it was time at the end of June for them to go home [they were] crying [...]

Implicitly contradicting Ms. Reid's representation, Ms. McKay concludes that the children's tears do not reflect mere love for the school. Rather, they reflect the traumatic experience of many months' separations from their families:

[T]hey no longer knew about their homes, they’d been away for ten months [...]

Sugar Falls [Goodreads]
Norway House Indian Residential School [United Church of Canada Archives]
Canada's Residential Schools: The History, Part 2, 1939 to 2000: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Vol. I [Google Books]

* e.g. To cite another case: In her memoir Back to the Red Road, a woman recounts that she taught at Norway House in the 1950s when she was 19 years old, and found out years later that one of her pupils had been abused during his time there. A summary of the book can be found in:
"The New Victims" by Jula Hughes. In Power Through Testimony: Reframing Residential Schools in the Age of Reconciliation. Brieg Capitaine and Karine Vanthuyne, ed. (Vancouver: UBC Press) p. 191 [Google Books]
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Stone: Linking the Present and the Past for Modern-Day Cree

After realizing that I haven't read many First Nations authors despite living in Canada for ~15 years, I did a little research to find a few names, and started today with a short graphic novel by David A. Robertson.

Living in the province of Manitoba, he is a member of the Norway House Cree Nation. He has written many other books that also thematize the Cree community. For example, one was about Helen Betty Osborne, who was murdered when she was only 19 years old in 1971, and whose murder was only resolved after 16 years after investigations that were reported to have been undercut by racism and sexism.

It, and his series 7 Generations, were censored in school systems in the province of Alberta. In the case of 7 Generations, it was alleged that the series contained "sensitive subject matter and visual inferencing of abuse regarding residential schools."

David Alexander Robertson [Goodreads]
David A. Robertson [Twitter]
"Edmonton public schools to review its ‘books to weed out’ list due to concerns" [Global News Canada] by Colette Derworiz, The Canadian Press (September 25, 2018) [Read July 11, 2020]
"Alberta government 'censored' Indigenous book, undermining reconciliation in schools, author says" [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio] by Amara McLaughlin (November 23, 2018) [Read July 11, 2020]

*Note: 20th century Canadian residential schools for First Nations are in fact notorious, not just for 'inferences' of abuse, now. "About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were taken from their families and forced to attend government schools. The last school closed outside Regina in 1996," wrote Bill Graveland, of the Canadian Press, in 2018. These schools had a history of "physical, sexual and emotional abuse," and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission "estimated at least 6,000 children died at the schools."
Source: "Online course that asks about positive effect of residential schools 'a slap in the face'" [Global News Canada]

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[Disclaimer in advance: Maybe this review isn't a very profound insight, because I read the book for the first time today and likely many facets haven't sunk in yet. Also, it's part of a series.]

In Stone (Highwater Press, 2010), the first book of the 7 Generations series, David Alexander Robertson's protagonist is Edwin, a present-day man who attempts to kill himself and sends a despairing message to his mother. The young man's mother rushes to his hospital bed and asks him to look to his ancestors to guide him out of his crisis.

Faith in ancestors is a little sentimentalized. Maybe a few ancestors were awful people who'd give awful advice. But I think that for First Nations, searching for and understanding one's forebears is a necessity of life if, because of colonialist policies, the line of tradition and of family history has been interrupted.

"Cree Camp on the prairie, south of Vermilion (Lat N. 53 Long W. 111 nearly) Sept. 1871."
by Charles Horetzky (1838 - 1900)
Library and Archives Canada
via Wikimedia Commons

In flashback scenes, Edwin sees the life of a warrior ancestor Stone whose brother has been killed by the Blackfoot nation. Struggling to come to terms with the death, the 19th-century warrior finds that he is finally permitted to avenge his brother, and he is able to find a new life with a young woman who loves him.

"Wanuskewin Heritage Park" c. 2008 by K. Duhamel
via Wikimedia Commons (License: CC BY 2.0)