Geist 74 Digital Edition by Geist Magazine

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published by The Geist Foundation publisher Stephen Osborne senior editor Mary Schendlinger managing editor Sarah Maitland publishing assistant Michal Kozlowski associate editor C.E. Coughlan executive director Patty Osborne office manager & reader services Kristin Cheung web editor Ross Merriam interns Todd Coyne, Leni T. Goggins, Sarah Hillier, Leah Pires, Kate Reid administrative assistants Deanne Beattie, Erinna Gilkison, Becky McEachern, Emma Myers editorial board Kevin Barefoot, Trevor Battye, Jill Boettger, Marisa Chandler, Carla Elm Clement, Brad Cran, Laurie Edwards, Melissa Edwards, Mary Alice Elcock, Robert Everett-Green, Derek Fairbridge, Daniel Francis, Helen Godolphin, Lily Gontard, Michael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Brian Lam, Sarah Leavitt, Thad McIlroy, Billeh Nickerson, Eric Peterson, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Craig Riggs, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Josh Wallaert, Kathy Vito, Kaleigh Wisman, Barbara Zatyko, Daniel Zomparelli accountant Mindy Abramowitz, cga advertising & marketing Clevers Media cover Rebecca Dolen, Steffen Quong web architects cascadiamedia.ca composition Vancouver Desktop distribution Magazines Canada printed in canada by Hemlock Printers first subscriber Jane Springer managing editor emeritus Barbara Zatyko www.geist.com

Volume 18

Number 74

Fall 2009

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Stephen Osborne 7

Halloween Capital of America

David Albahari 10 Shuttle Survivors Kathy Friedman 12 Tesoro Lenore Rowntree 13 7 lbs. 6 oz. & Beth Rowntree Julie Vandervoort 14 Sewing Cabinet Lindsay Diehl 17 Kuta Beach Susan Stenson 19 Still Visible in the Grain Robert Everett-Green 21 Ordinary Weekly Deaths FINDINGS

Kavavaow Mannomee, 26 Burning Fire; Help Us Destroy Toronto; Martine J. Reid First Peanut Butter; & Daisy Sewid-Smith, Selling Civilization; Mary Leah de Zwart, Nonreaders Write; David Mason, Robert Lanham, Pockets; Bus Cozy; Rob Winger, Magda Sayeg, Hartney, Manitoba; Danny Singer, Tim Lilburn, Into the Land; Monkey Time; Andrew Steinmetz, What Say You Now . . . Brother?; Eadweard Muybridge, Boar Trotting Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas POSTCARD LIT

Monica Kidd 23 Still Life with Blake Jaime Forsythe 25 Wolf and Man COMMENT

Alberto Manguel 63 Dante in GuantĂĄnamo Mary Schendlinger 64 Grey Matters Stephen Henighan 66 Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Support Our Troops DEPARTMENTS

6 Letters The Usual Gang 69 Endnotes Meandricus 87 Puzzle Melissa Edwards 88 Caught Mapping

FEATURES

Memory and the Valley 37 Human civilization in this valley dates back Sandra Shields and David Campion to the time of Mesopotamia The history of the Fraser Valley, the rich floodplain that extends from the Coast Mountains through the Lower Mainland to the Pacific Ocean, is a story of gain and a story of loss. Wall of Shame 52 The Wall is built of sand and stoneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and Marcello Di Cintio rumours, half-truths and bluster Few of the Saharawis, those who live in the refugee camps in disputed desert land near Algeria, have ever seen the other side of the Wall. The Last Note 60 Thanks to Post-It Notes, Petra and David Rhonda Waterfall always knew what to do She opened her date book. One Post-It Note said, Pick up alfredo sauce and the other said, Have sex with a stranger. McPoems 62 Notes and observations from behind the Billeh Nickerson counter at you-know-where Poems for memorable customers: the one who ordered a hundred cheeseburgers, the one who bought three meals a day at the drive-thru, the drunk one in a clown suit . . .

COVER AND PRODUCTION NOTES

The cover design of Geist 74 is the work of Steffen Quong (steffenquong.com), and features drawings by Rebecca Dolen (assemblyoftext.com) and excerpted lines from articles in this issue. The lines are set in several styles and weights of the Nobel (Lettergierterij Amsterdam, 1929) and Quadraat (Font Shop, 1993) font families. Geist is printed on eco-friendly paper with vegetablebased inks. Interior stock: Harbour 40 Offset; cover stock: Harbour 100 Cover.

LETTERS

GEIST

Readers Write

Geist is published four times a year by The Geist Foundation. Contents copyright © 2009 The Geist Foundation. All rights reserved. Subscriptions: in Canada: Individuals $24 (4 issues); Institutions $31; in the United States: $32; elsewhere: $32. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Correspondence and inquiries: subscriptions@geist.com, advertising@geist.com, letters@geist.com, editor@geist.com. Include sase with Canadian postage or irc with all submissions and queries. #200 – 341 Water Street, Vancouver, B.C. Canada v6b 1b8. Guidelines are also available at geist.com. issn 1181-6554. Geist swaps its subscriber list with other cultural magazines for one-time mailings. Please contact us if you prefer not to receive these mailings. Publications Mail Agreement 40069678 Registration No. 07582 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Department, #200 – 341 Water Street, Vancouver, B.C. Canada v6b 1b8. Email: geist@geist.com Tel: (604) 681-9161, 1-888-geist-eh; Fax: (604) 669-8250; Web: geist.com Geist is a member of Magazines Canada and the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers. Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and available on microfilm from University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, usa. The Geist Foundation receives assistance from private donors, the Tula Foundation, the Canada Council, the B.C. Arts Council and the B.C. Gaming Branch. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the Publications Assistance Program (pap) and the Canada Magazine Fund.

special thanks to the tula foundation

www.geist.com

CAUSE A ND EFFECT n “Before Lonely Planet” (Geist 71), Stephen Henighan says that the new type of guidebook “has not only charted the world: it has changed it.” The world of travel has certainly changed, but Lonely Planet is not a catalyst as much as a conduit. When Lonely Planet arrived on the scene, more Westerners were wealthy and valued travel as an essential rite of passage (Britain even has a gap year set aside, it seems, specifically so young twenty-somethings can have a year of mini-colonization and spread their party across the globe). Guidebooks only arrived to service the growing number of travellers, encouraged by cheap flights and a questioning of the Protestant work ethic. This didn’t just happen outside of western Europe or North America, but inside as well: see walrusmagazine.com/ articles/2008.07-ephemera -vice-vagabonds-and-vd. —Crystal Luxmore, Toronto Stephen Henighan replies: Crystal Luxmore is correct that Britain has a GAP year, but incorrect in what she says about it: coming between secondary school and university, the GAP year is the province of eighteen-year-olds, not “young twenty-somethings”; and it usually centres on a pre-arranged work-stay of six months to a year rather than backpacking. By contrast, those who hit the road for extended periods later in life choose their destinations according to available information. There are more backpackers in Mozambique, for example, than there were a few years ago, in part because Lonely Planet published a guide to the country in 2007. This contemporary “domestication” of parts of Africa recapitulates the incorporation of Eastern European countries into the backpacking circuit in the early 1990s.

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That, in turn, leads to a homogenization of accommodation offerings, food service, beach culture, prices, use of English, etc. Lonely Planet is not the only factor prompting these changes, but the influence of its model makes it much more a catalyst than a mere “conduit.” Read Stephen Henighan’s Geist writings at geist.com/author/henighan-stephen. FARTHER REACHES and’s End,” the amazing photo essay by Christopher Grabowski (about memory and west coast resource towns, Geist 73), brings tears to the eyes, and heartache to those who understand what lives the pictures represent. I enjoyed the interview with Grabowski at geist.com, about getting to know people before photographing them or their situation. No wonder the photos are so poignant; we feel what he felt. Thank you for all of the images and truth telling. —Anon, Cyberspace

“L

The stunning and thoughtful “Land’s End” piece is a compelling reminder of how this province began and who suffered the most. History repeats itself, though. I wonder who’s next? —Robin Anne Grier, Vancouver See “Land’s End” at geist.com/lands-end. Read the interview with Grabowski at geist.com/lands-end-interview. Visit his website at mediumlight.com. FLASH CARDS hanks for “Spring Training” (1st prize winner in the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest). Well done! I really like the

Letters continue on page 85

NOTES & DISPATCHES Halloween Capital of America STEPHEN OSBORNE

n the morning of August 19, 1692, in the village of Boxford, Massachusetts, my collateral or putative ancestor Rebecca Eames was arrested and taken in chains to the town of Salem, fifteen miles away, to be interrogated in the presence of three young women purported in the indictment to have been afflicted, tortured, consumed, wasted and tormented in sundry acts of witchcraft performed by the spectral body of Rebecca Eames. She had also been observed consorting with the Devil, a short, dark-complected man wearing a black hat and carrying a book under his arm. Her response to the questions put to her that Friday afternoon was taken down in writing by a local tailor recruited more for his nimble fingers than for his ability to construe a sentence. Rebecca said that for two or three months she had been in the snare of the

photo: parade of lost souls, mandelbrot

Devil—and the tailor, whose name was Ezekiel Cheever, wrote it down—the Devil, who appeared to her not as a man but as a small, ugly black horse; she knew not but that he might come once a day as a mouse or a rat; she knew not but that he persuaded her to follow his wicked ways and renounce God and Christ; she knew not but that she gave him soul and body, but she would not own that she had been baptized by him. She said, and the tailor wrote it down, that she had afflicted Mary Warrin and Timothy Swan by sticking of pins, but would not own that she had signed the Devil’s book when he would have had her do it, although when the magistrate asked, Did not the Devil threaten to tear you in pieces? she answered, Yes, he threatened to tear me in pieces. The escort for the transportation of

witches would often be a pair of constables cautioned by the sheriff to avoid eye contact with witchly prisoners, who might immobilize them with a glance; escorts were equipped with manacles and chain to prevent prisoners from causing tormenting effects at a distance by waving their hands; and they carried muskets with powder and ball to ward off Indian war parties. Rebecca Eames was fiftyone years old and the mother of six living children. We imagine her family fearful and thrown into despair by her arrest, but unsurprised; in mere months 160 women and children, forty men and two dogs had been accused as witches; from the 157 persons dragged into the court of Oyer and Terminer in Salem, fortyfour confessions were extracted and thirty death sentences pronounced. The first to die had been Goodwife Bridget Bishop, accused by twenty-three persons of causing illness and death, biting and choking at a distance and forcing people to sign the Devil’s book; as noted by the Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston in books written by himself and his colleagues, she refused to confess even in the face of such convincing evidence against her. I am no witch, she said, and the tailor Ezekiel Cheever wrote it down; I am innocent, I know nothing of it. She was taken in a cart to Gallows Hill and hanged with a bag over her head from the oak tree at the top of the bluff. Two days later, the Wabanaki with their French allies renewed their attacks in the north, confirming in the words of the Reverend Mather that an army of devils had been set upon the firstborn English settlement suffering the effects of “horrible witchcrafts.” In July, six women convicted for consorting with the Devil (described variously as a dark man, a dark man in Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 7

NOTES & DISPATCHES

black, a man in a black hat), and signing his book, were hanged one at a time from branches of the same oak tree at Gallows Hill, each being led or carried up the ladder and then pushed off the rungs to swing in the air. When they had all stopped breathing, their bodies were taken down and thrown into pits improvised among the rocks. Today, the Friday of Rebecca’s arrest, five more witches were scheduled for hanging at noon in Salem: a woman and five men, one of whom had been a sheriff’s constable until he refused to arrest accused witches.

alem lay three hours away from Boxford by horse and wagon. Did one of the constables in Rebecca’s escort try to hold back the horse or horses in order to spare the feelings of their prisoner? Or did the other one, perhaps wishing to see everything that would happen at Gallows Hill, apply the whip? In either case, the wagon rolled along the Andover Road with its heavy burden, quickly or slowly, through the bucolic landscape of field, farm, village and the distant dark edge of the forest within which lay the Devil and his dark Aboriginal minions. Rebecca Eames had lived all her life in this land, given to the Puritan English by God in a covenant, the terms of which remained obscure after three generations of war and the extermination of the Pequod people, the destruction of the Wampanoags, and the devastation of the Narragansetts; yet nothing had been secured to God’s people, and now a plague of witches threatened to devour their souls. Such were the forces sweeping Rebecca Eames, my collateral or putative ancestor, to her fate in Salem. As they entered Salem by the Town Bridge, Rebecca and her escort were met by a crowd or a mob of men and women on foot and horseback that surged noisily up the road; in their midst was the death cart carrying the newly condemned: four

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men and a woman all standing upright with their hands fastened behind their backs. Many in the crowd or mob were shouting and offering verbal torment. The Reverend Cotton Mather in his black coat and hat rode among them on horseback; he had travelled from Boston to witness the death of George Burroughs, a pastor and convener of the Hellish Rendezvous—in the words of the Reverend Mather—whose spectre had promised Martha Carrier, the single woman in the cart, described by the Reverend Mather as the Rampant Hag, that she should be the queen of hell. Rebecca Eames’s escorts were in one mind about what course to take: they lifted her down from the wagon and installed her in her chains in the rear of Goody MacCarter’s house at the bottom of the hill. Then they ran out to observe the gruesome scene. After the hanging, when all five bodies were swinging from the arms of the oak tree, the Reverend Mather harangued the crowd from his position high on horseback, and Goody MacCarter felt a needle run into her foot. She was standing a short distance away from Rebecca Eames. In the interrogation that followed in the afternoon, the magistrate asked Rebecca Eames if she had seen the executions, and the tailor wrote down that she said she had seen a few folk, and the woman of the house had a pin stuck in her foot, the tailor wrote, but she said that she did not do it. (A look through the Salem Witchcraft Papers held online by the University of Virgina Library reveals that the tailor Ezekiel Cheever had been the accuser of two people who were hanged that day: George Burroughs and Martha Carrier.) The magistrates ordered Rebecca Eames into the dungeon of Salem Prison, a dank, lightless pit where she was chained to the wall alongside the other accused witches, one of whom, Dorcas Good, was four years old; she had been imprisoned in March after her accusers fell into seizures under her gaze.

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Rebecca Eames passed eleven days in Salem Prison, where, as she claimed in a petition later made to the governor, she was harried out of her senses by her accusers “mocking of me and spitting in my face saying they knew me to be a witch and if I would not confess I would be very speedily hanged,” before she was able to provide an improved version of her confession. On August 31 she acknowledged and declared in words written down by the tailor Ezekiel Cheever that she had been baptized three years earlier by the Devil at Five Mile Pond, and her son Daniel, who had been a wizard for thirteen years, was also then baptized, and she had been a witch these twenty-six years. She named Toothaker Widow and Abigail Faulkner, both of whom had already been charged, as sister witches. And the Devil, she confirmed now, had appeared to her as the magistrate had originally suggested: in black, as he had appeared to the other witches, and the Devil required that she sign a paper, which she did by making a black mark. She signed the confession written down in her name by Ezekiel Cheever by placing her mark on the paper: and next to it an additional glyph that might be interpreted as further confirmation of her mark, intended perhaps to indicate that only the mark is hers: the rest may be Ezekiel Cheever’s, or the Devil’s. No record exists of the trial of Rebecca Eames at the Court of Oyer and Terminer on September 17, at which she was sentenced to death; nor do records exist for the trials of the other fourteen people condemned in that month. The indictments and the interrogations recorded by Ezekiel Cheever and other clerks are the only documents that survive. Rebecca Eames lay in prison for many months awaiting execution, while eight more people were hanged as witches and one man was pressed to death (over a period of three days) under heavy stones. Her readiness to

make a proper confession probably saved her life, as confessed witches were often kept alive in the expectation that they might help secure new convictions. She was also spared the further tortures suffered by many who insisted on their innocence (such has having one’s ankles fastened to the back of the neck until “the blood runs from the nose”).

n January the governor put an end to the trials after his wife began to appear in the dreams of some of the bewitched. Those who could pay their lodging charges went home; those who couldn’t remained in jail. Seventeen years later, refunds were paid to some of the victims, and Rebecca Eames sent one of her sons to Boston to take back the ten pounds that she had paid for her imprisonment. Some of the accusers blamed the Devil for having set them on a false path. One of the judges made a public apology. No one was reprimanded. In 1957 the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill clearing the names of the convicted, with the condition that the state be absolved of obligation to their descendants. Sometime during the twentieth century, Salem, Massachusetts named itself the Halloween Capital of America. In the book he wrote about events in Salem, the Reverend Cotton Mather— rather like George W. Bush pondering the weapons of mass destruction— doubts that anything could “be more Unaccountable, than the Trick which the Witches have, to render themselves and their Tools Invisible.” One would wonder, he wrote, how the Evil Spirits themselves can do some things: especially the “Invisibilizing of the Grossest Bodies.”

Stephen Osborne is publisher and editor-inchief of Geist. He is also the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com/author/ osborne-stephen. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 9

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Shuttle Survivors DAVID A LBAHARI

Aha, said the shuttle driver. Croatia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Serbia, Tito

n a recent trip to Paris, I met a young woman from Japan. But this is not a story about a sudden love affair, which one might expect in Paris. I met her on the last day of my short stay there. It was her last day too, and we both took the early shuttle to Charles de Gaulle Airport. She sat down next to me, introduced herself and said that she worked for the advertising department of a television station in Tokyo. I said that I was a writer and that I liked some of Haruki Murakami’s books. She knew the name but had not read any of his work. She knew, however, that a movie based on one of his books was being shot somewhere in Japan. The name of the movie, she said, had something to do with Norway. Norwegian Wood, I said. She looked at me and asked, How did you know? Are you from Norway? No, I said, but I know the song. It is by the Beatles. I know the Beatles, said the young woman, but they are from England. And where are you from?

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I hesitated for a moment before I said, Calgary, Canada. I decided not to mention the war in the former Yugoslavia, my homeland—it would only puzzle her. (It still puzzles me, although I lived there for many years.) Canada is a nice country, she said. Maybe you can tell me, I said, why so many Japanese people go to Banff, in the Canadian Rockies. Canadian Rockies are beautiful, she said. We learn about them in our school. It’s great, I went on, that so many people from Japan visit Banff, but it’s a pity most of them never go to Calgary. What is in Calgary? she wanted to know. What do you have? We have Stampede, I replied, and when she gave me a blank look, I asked her whether she knew anything about cowboys. She said that she loved cowboys. She especially liked John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. They are from America, she added, and then she asked, Do they have Stampede in America? Now, how do you explain what Stampede is? Stampede, I finally said, is a

word that describes a sudden run of a large number of horses or any other animals. She nodded, so I went on and told her that there are many things to see and do during the ten days of the Calgary Stampede. She looked at me with her eyes wide open and said, And all this time the animals are running? At first I did not know what she meant, because I could not follow her perfect reasoning. What do you mean? I asked. Stampede is running, she answered. Stampede is running all the time, no? There was a sly smile on her face as if she had just attained satori and understood the meaning of it all. She turned around. In Calgary, she said to the passengers sitting behind us, Stampede is running all the time. She pointed at me and said, He is from Calgary. Good for him, said a man who was from Salt Lake City. The couple sitting next to him said that they were from Hungary. Then the shuttle stopped in front of a small hotel to pick up two women with enormous bags. The driver, who was from India, helped them put their bags into the shuttle and asked them what terminal they were going to. They did not know, so he asked them what city and country they were flying to. Zagreb, said the younger one. Croatia, said the older one. But the driver still did not know which terminal. The younger woman said to the older woman, in Croatian, The whole world knows about Zagreb except for this lunatic. The older woman told her to shut up and explained to the driver, in English: Zagreb, in Croatia. Croatia, you know—in Yugoslavia. Aha, said the driver. Croatia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Serbia, Tito. It is Terminal 2. What an absurd paradox, I thought. You fight in a bloody civil war because there are people who do not like what Yugoslavia stands for and want to get photo: calgary stampede, david campion

NOTES & DISPATCHES

rid of that name forever, and yet you are recognized only when you mention the name that should have been forgotten. History really likes to play games sometimes. Then we were finally on our way to Charles de Gaulle Airport. It was early in the day and the streets were empty, so Paris looked a bit ghostly but still beautiful. The early morning light somehow made everything sharp like a precise architectural drawing. Travelling through that unpopulated, almost two-dimensional world made me think of writing a story about our group. In this harsh city landscape, it should be a science fiction story in which we are the last survivors of a terrible epidemic in Paris. We are on our way to board the last plane, left unattended on a runway, and we are lucky because one of us knows how to fly a plane—the man sitting behind me, who says, in my unwritten story, I am from Salt Lake City and if you want to live there, you’ve got to know something about planes. I didn’t know whether that was true—I’ve never been to Salt Lake City—but I hoped that we would not end up like the survivors depicted on The Raft of the Medusa. I did not want to write a story with cannibals in it. Our plane, I thought, would take us safely all the way to Calgary, where the Stampede would be in full swing. We would be given white cowboy hats, and the young Japanese woman would be so happy to wear her hat and to dance with some real cowboys. Perhaps it should be a love story after all? David Albahari is the author of twenty published books in Serbian; six have been translated into English, including Snow Man (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005) and Leeches (forthcoming from Harcourt in 2010). He lives in Calgary. Read “The Art of Renaming” (No. 73) and his other Geist work at geist.com/ author/albahari-david.

Fall 2009 • G E I ST 74 • Page 11

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Tesoro K A T H Y FR I E D M A N

At the checkpoint in Santa Maria, tesoro means “treasure,” and refrescos are refrescos

woman puts down her bucket and sits next to me at the police checkpoint, where I am waiting for a ride. “Flies,” she says, touching the itchy bumps on my back. “Muchisimo,” I say. A dog limps by on three legs. He has a fourth, he just won’t put it down. The wind shakes the trees and blows dust up from the road, which widens in front of me into the main square. The buildings in Santa Maria are painted pink, green, cream and blue and have sloping tin roofs. The public bathroom is a hole in the ground with an outdoor sink where people come to wash themselves. A radio is playing somewhere but I can’t make out the words to any of the songs. I ask the woman what her refrescos are called. “Refrescos,” she says. “Oh. Just refrescos?” “Yes. Apple water,” she says. “Is that different from juice?”

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“Yes.” Half the stalls in the market are empty. The others all offer the same thing—bananas and avocado. A van drives by with a tire, a rusted-up bicycle and some colourful sacks on the roof. Dust flies up from the road and from the square. The woman gets up with her bucket, shouting “Refrescos!” Other women stand up as well, offering their buckets to the people in the van. I am still waiting for a truck headed for Cusco. “Solita?” the police ask me. “Sí, solita.” I did have a friend once, but he found another friend and left me to my own quiet hum. A car comes from the other direction. The women in the market offer bananas and avocado. I’ve been here for hours. The checkpoint, a small shack and two posts with a chain slung between them, is staffed by a man in a beige uniform and a boy in jeans and a striped orange T-shirt. When a vehicle comes, the boy lifts the chain to let it pass.

Sometimes the man comes out and lifts the chain himself. From inside I hear voices and television. The man who told me to sit here is wearing a blue uniform. He asks me questions. “You’re going to sacrifice your body just to save some money,” he jokes, referring to the truck I’m hoping to catch. I shrug, agree. Think, how many times have I sacrificed my heart, what’s a few bumps on a road, a freezing cold night through the highlands? A man with his fly open stumbles in my direction, mumbling urgently. I keep repeating that I don’t understand him, getting annoyed, but he flops down beside me. I pick up my things and move around the corner. He stays there for over an hour, head hanging down between his knees. Everyone back home says I should treasure this experience. The man in the blue uniform goes off and talks to the women in the market. No one pays any attention to me. It was my friend who taught me the Spanish word for “treasure.” “It’s what my grandmother used to call me,” he said, and I had to make him repeat it twice before I understood. Now I’ve taught myself a trick to remember the word. Taste the dust from the road. See the dark begin to rise over Santa Maria. Hear the far-off radio and the sound of your own heart in your ears, limping along.

Kathy Friedman’s writing has appeared in Grain, Room and This Magazine. She lives in Toronto, where she produces a zine called Oomska and is at work on a collection of short stories.

photo: en route from puno to lachón, peru, kathy friedman

NOTES & DISPATCHES

7 lbs. 6 oz. LENORE ROWNTREE & BE T H ROWNT RE E

ome things about my sister Beth that I can’t think about for too long without getting sad and confused: 1. The time we went to the Bracebridge Dairy for cherry pie and vanilla ice cream and she took too long in the bathroom, so I kept knocking on the door, and when she emerged she said, “My life is hard, you know.” 2. The time I blew snot out my nose and rubbed it in her hair in front of the boys from down the way who were already afraid of her. 3. The time my cousin said at the family reunion that she ruined everything. 4. The time some kids threw snowballs at us on the way home from school, and the ones they threw at her had stones in them. 5. The time a man gave her an engagement ring that was too big for her finger so it came off during the night in her bed, and the staff at the group photo: beth and lenore rowntree, 1959

home found and returned it to the man, who’d spent his disability allowance on it, and she thought he had broken up with her because she lost the ring, and nobody ever told her anything different. 6. The time I looked in her purse and found nothing but scraps of paper so covered in writing there was hardly any white left on the pages. 7. The time my mother told me she had a normal birth weight, 7 lbs. 6 oz., but an abnormal delivery because a bully nurse shoved her back in and held her until the doctor arrived. 8. The first time she became an outpatient at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and wrote this list to remember the layout: 11th floor Dr. Jeffries’ Office 9th floor 8th floor 7th floor 6th floor 5th floor 4th floor 3rd floor Day Care Centre Ground Floor Chapel 9. The time I found her poem “Lies” in her wastebasket: Happy Jolly Jovial Pretty Funny Beautiful Cheerful, Pleasant Lovely, Sense of Humour Educated, Famous, Smiling Lies, Full of Lies, A Wheat Sheaf Full of Lies. Lenore Rowntree is a Vancouver painter and writer who writes every day. Beth Rowntree lives in a group home in Vancouver, and if she had her way she would never stop writing. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 13

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Sewing Cabinet J U L IE VAND E RVOORT

We agreed that Mom should keep the cabinet, a piece so small you can hardly call it furniture

do it now either, unless I’m standing right by the window with one eye closed. None of us can sew, really. In fact one day my sister tried to push her own sewing machine down the stairs. She sold it shortly afterwards and spent the money on an acupuncture program to quit smoking, for good. But we all agreed Mom should keep the cabinet, a piece so small you can hardly call it furniture. You don’t need deep drawers to hold pins and buttons, even a hundred buttons. She’d get mad if her good scissors were not in the second drawer when she reached for them, or if we had used them as kitchen scissors.

see my mother in the thoracic wing—machines whirring and sighing, her wardmates in the halls having push-pull arguments with tubing, walkers, their own legs. Cylinders of oxygen rolled past like dolls, propped up in wire baskets. After the first few minutes it all seemed normal. Mom was still hoping to go back to the Cherry Hill nursing home, to her little apartment with four emergency pull-cords and ten percent of her things. Page 14 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

To the oil painting of a cabin buried in drifting blue snow (saved) displayed over the mini pullout couch (new), and the photographs (mostly culled). There aren’t many flat surfaces to choose from, to display things, so framed five-by-sevens lean into each other on top of the sewing cabinet, the first drawer of which has built-in pegs for her spools of thread (all saved). She hasn’t been able to thread a needle for years. Half the time, I can’t

hen the house had to be emptied, it happened so quickly that most everything got “pitched,” as people her age like to say. A few things got put into a Julie box and that’s how I came to be here, in Cherry Hill, holding a surprisingly large fistful of my baby hair while sitting cross-legged on the floor. I stay like that for a while with the ache rising in my knees, unsure what to do with what I have in my hands. I put the hair back in the envelope, replace it in the zip-lock bag and put it aside. Reaching into the Julie box, I find Mom’s knitting bag. I’ve never seen it empty like this. I give it a shake and set it on the floor, and it immediately takes on its former shape and lean. If you wanted to get into the third drawer of the sewing cabinet, you always had to bend down and move this bag a few inches round the side. In the drawer on the right-hand side is the Japanese paper and lacquer fan. The fan had belonged to her mother. One of those gleaming pretty objects that are never used, on farms, just kept. I liked to slip it out of my grandmother’s china cabinet, from between the good napkins, enough for sixteen image: karen ross smith

NOTES & DISPATCHES

place settings. At our squished end of the table, we were passed Scottie serviettes from the bag and told to keep it down to a dull roar. A lippy older kid might point out that the adults weren’t setting much of an example, and it was true, there was a lot of racket. Everyone transmitting. Back then, I wasn’t interested in the sensation of moving air so delicately produced by the fan. What I liked was changing the pattern on the back. Folded, half folded, unfolding. I try to open the fan now but it sticks a bit and I don’t want to tear it. Suddenly I want to throw it hard across the room. But how satisfying would that be, with the walls this close? And I might hit one of those pull-cords, set off an alarm. I close the drawer. I consider moving to the couch and looking through the rest of the stuff there. But I don’t like this couch—its stiffness reminds me of a visitor who realizes she has come at a bad time. I prop my back against the sliding glass door and stick my legs straight out, fitting the box alongside my hip. Surely there is nothing in it that can’t be lifted out with one hand. I feel around, and the leather jacket emerges and falls into my lap. I remember when she came back with this. The coveting. I borrowed it carefully when she wasn’t looking, even just to go to the corner store. To get chips, and her cigarettes.

he globe-trotting phase, right after mandatory retirement. Nursing stations in Ecuador and Guatemala, sleeping on church benches, swaying upright in the back of pickup trucks. And when her bones said no more missions, she took fun trips, a cruise for bridge players, a history tour that included Jerusalem and Cyprus. That’s where this is from, this 18-ounce jacket, now soft as an old camp shirt. I sit and hold it. Fall 2009 • G E I ST 74 • Page 15

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And think about how some boxes are anything but, and how time in mid-life is no longer linear but like a button accordion, with ends that stretch farther apart than you thought possible, then everything suddenly folding, bunching up. I’m told that those instruments make one note squeezing in and a different one opening back out. The sound, in other words, depends on whether you are coming or going.

ost of us had music lessons, no one learned to play very well. Or knit. But we’re the same way now, about scissors. Things have a place. I reach into the box and find something I wrote when I was eleven. It got featured in the newspaper, along with, I notice, a seventy-nine-cent special on Kung Fu aftershave. She had kept that,

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the whole page, so she’d know which paper, and when. I move it to my own keep pile. I look up, see that visiting hours are over. The nurses say they don’t enforce that on this ward; I can come any time. I gaze around—this will never feel like a place. You can’t call the sewing cabinet furniture, not really. There isn’t much you can do with it. But we all want it, we’ve already started saying. That one small piece.

Julie Vandervoort was a winner in both the 1st and 3rd Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contests. She is the author of Tell the Driver: a Biography of Elinor F. E. Black, M.D. and essays published in Brick, Grain and Prism international. She lives in Halifax. Read her Geist work at geist.com/ author/vandervoort-julie.

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Kuta Beach LINDSAY DIEHL

Boyfriends are trouble, I said. He leaned over and gave me a high-five

beer, pop, packages of rice crackers and greasy fried potatoes on display. Groups of women crouch in the shade of palm trees, talking in low murmurs and preparing baskets of pineapples, mangoes, papayas and watermelons to carry on their heads. They wrap paring knives in the folds of their sarongs, ready at any time to peel and slice the soft, ripened fruit. A woman with long, slanted eyes and sagging cheeks struggles with a pen and a piece of paper, trying to write something down. I clear my throat and she steps back. It is early morning and the tide is low. The sun sits on top of the waves, rolling lazily to shore. The woman shoves the pen and paper to the side and makes a welcoming gesture with her hand. “Yes,” she smiles. “Something for you?” LOVE SONGS

long the beach, surfboards spring up like bunches of tropical flowers; they lean against wooden posts, their tails planted in the sand. Tanned merchants scamper to and from the ocean, filling plastic buckets with salty water, then they rinse the surfboards clean and run their wrinkled fingers down the smooth photo: tracey tomtene

surfaces. The faded colours are left to blossom in the sun. Men with dark sunglasses and raspy black beards wheel their painted food carts onto the sand and unfold them near the crumbling stone barrier that divides the beach from the street. They flick their cigarettes with their lips and place

is nickname is So Much—what people always say when they thank him. On the day I met him, he invited me to a “bottle ceremony.” He later explained that he was hosting a pot-smoking party at his apartment with a small group of friends. Signs hang at every street corner— cautionary messages in bright, bold letters, translated into several languages, warning tourists that anyone caught purchasing or consuming drugs will be heavily fined; they could even be sentenced to death. “Don’t worry,” he said, patting my shoulder. “This is my country.” He is twenty-four years old and he works as a merchant on Kuta Beach, six days a week from dawn to dusk, renting surfboards and teaching tourists how to surf. “The trick is,” he told me, “you find someone, looking lost.” That’s how he found me, I guess. He led me into the ocean, held my surfboard steady and gave it a push when Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 17

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a wave approached. “Paddle, paddle!” he called after me. “Now stand up! Up!” The next morning he emerged from the water, dark and glistening in the sun, and sat down next to me. “What do you do at night?” he asked me, “Do you go dancing?” He shook his head, flung his wet hair from side to side, brought his finger to his ear. “I don’t like house music,” he said. “I like love songs.” He told me he had a girlfriend from Holland, almost ten years older than he was; he dated her for nearly two years. “Yeah, she comes here, you know,” he shrugged, “stay here with me. It was nice. “She was old,” he said, “But I like Western. Much better way of thinking. Balinese girls,” he shivered, “too jealous.” He put his arms behind his head. “How long you here for?” “Two weeks.” “Long time.” He looked at me. “You come here, every day. Talking with me. Make friends.” SURFER

beautiful surfer boy came and sat by the edge of the sea. He rested his surfboard against his legs, and the waves rolled at his feet. A group of tourists asked if they could have their picture taken with him. I could tell they were tourists by their pasty skin, long pant legs rolled up to their knees, and sweaters tied around their necks. In other words, they looked like I did a few weeks ago. The beautiful surfer boy stood up, knocking the sand from his shorts. He hovered over the tourists and flashed their camera a thumbs-up. Then he lay back down on the sand. He drew his surfboard under his head and used it as a pillow. He lay parallel to the sea and gazed up at the sun. He did not move for a very long time. I know because I was watching

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him from farther up the beach. I was sitting beside the French professor. “He moved,” the professor said. “I know,” I said. “His arm,” the professor said. “It means he’s alive.” I brought my hand to my eyes and shielded them from the sun. “It’s a good sign.” The professor got up and circled the beautiful surfer boy. From time to time, he knelt down and made like he was picking something up. He was pretending to collect shells. I laughed out loud. The beautiful surfer boy drummed his fingers against the sand. “He looks young,” the professor said upon his return. He put a silver piece of shell beside me. “How do you say ‘young’?” I asked. “Jeune.” “Jeune?” “Oui.” “J’aime les jeunes garçons.” “Your French is improving,” the professor said. He stretched out on his blanket and closed his eyes. The sun was sinking. Clouds were streaks of pink in the hazy sky. I looked for him again, but the beautiful surfer boy was gone. “Je pluie,” I said. “Je pleure,” the professor corrected me. “That’s what I said.” “No,” he said, “you said, ‘I rain.’ That doesn’t make any sense.” NU MBE R ONE T HING

“W

rite your name for me, please.” I passed him a pen. “What?” “Write your name.” He flashed a toothy grin and adjusted his baseball cap. “Jaya,” he said, “My name is Jaya.” “Spell it.” “J-a-y-a.”

“What’s your last name?” He fidgeted, made a small mark, dropped the pen. “No,” he said. “That is my only name.” “What does it mean?” “No, it doesn’t mean a thing.” He sat on a foam skimboard next to my towel and dug his toes in the sand. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend? Why are you always alone?” “Boyfriends are trouble,” I smiled. “Boyfriends are trouble,” he repeated. He leaned over, put his hand in the air and gave me a high-five. “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” “I work all the time,” he said. “Balinese girls don’t like me; they don’t like dark skin.” Jaya is from Sumatra. He said, “It is like a garden. Very big trees. Pot grows everywhere. We use it in cooking. We put it in soup—you know soup?” He waved his hand in front of him. “Grows in big patches. Pot. It’s free, not like Bali.” “Why did you move here?” “Three years ago, I moved,” he answered. “Sumatra is full.” “What is your favourite thing about Bali?” He crinkled his forehead and drummed his hands on the skimboard. “Your favourite thing,” I said again. “Number one thing about Bali.” He took his hat off and hung it on his knee. “Surfing?” “No,” he said. “Girls.” He flashed me another toothy grin. I leaned over, put my hand in the air and gave him a high-five. BE L GIAN L OVE R

he man in the room beside me, a doctor in Belgium, had a Balinese girlfriend. I’d see them walking down the cobbled streets, her delicate wrist resting on his hip. He’d turn protectively toward her every time a scooter sped by.

NOTES & DISPATCHES

“The Balinese don’t believe in public affection,” he said, “and everyone around here, they know one another. They are actually quite strict.” “What are girls like in Belgium?” I asked. “They’re great. Most of them have pleasing faces and light hair. I guess it depends on the region. I don’t care for light hair.” He glanced at his Balinese girlfriend. “But sometimes girls from Belgium have red hair and red eyes.” He laughed. “Oops! I meant, green!” He was from Belgium and spoke Dutch and French. She was from Bali and spoke Balinese and Indonesian. They both spoke a little English. They talked with their hands a lot. His hands were pink and fleshy next to hers, tanned and elegant and fluttering through the air like birds. Who knew what they were talking about? I think they were creating their own language. One night I sat outside my room in the hot, moist air. The lamp above me was bare and dim. A small sphere of light encompassed me. Beyond that, I could not see a thing. Pale moths flapped their tired wings. Some burned against the lamp and fell to the ground. The doctor from Belgium stumbled up the stairs. He put his hand against the wall and rested his head against his door. “Are you okay?” I asked. He straightened his back. His face was red. He could have been sunburned; he could have been drinking; he could have been crying. He could have been any of these things. He could have been all three. I couldn’t tell. It was dark out and I was sitting under a dim light. He said, “You know, Balinese families, they often sleep in the same bed. It is their custom. They are used to it.” He sighed. “It gets so they are lonely.

Still Visible in the Grain SUSAN STENSON

Because there are eggs and we have another morning together, omelettes, coffee, cream: the knife, the fork, the spoon, eat. Because I know what you are thinking when you knead the bread, wait for it to rise, to bake. The waffles ready. The fruit, thick. Butter slips into each square and over the top and trickles into the slow soft spaces. We add syrup from one of two provinces we rarely think of except with buckwheat and flaxseed and walnuts and lemon-glaze. No longer merely shadows, welcome maples, all. Because the table is blonde oak from Denmark, the salt marks of the North Sea still visible in the grain. Because our kitchen has two sinks and a window above them. Because arbutus and fir curl in their own time toward the light.

Susan Stenson’s most recent collection of poetry is My Mother Agrees with the Dead. She lives in Victoria, where she is co-editor of the Claremont Review. Read her Geist work at geist.com/author/stenson-susan.

They are frightened, and they cannot sleep alone.” SO MUCH

o Much leaned in close and inspected the love marks on the side of my neck. “Mosquitoes in your room last night,” he said. “Oh no! Mosquitoes in your room last night.” He rolled around in the sand, moaning and laughing, “Where was I? Where was I? I was working! I could not protect you from the mosquitoes in your room last night. “What did I tell you?” He sat up and flicked his hair back. “What did I tell

you? Mosquitoes in Bali are a problem! Oh no, oh no!” He said, “I could not protect you!” We sat on the beach and watched the sun set. A busload of children ran down to the water. They played in the glittering ocean and struck poses in the sun, casting long shadows against the pink backdrop of the sky. A ST ORY

Tuesday

was walking up the beach with my surfboard tucked under my arm; the tail, dragging in the sand behind me, made a thin wavering line, a trail. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 19

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A man with a long, narrow face, pale eyes and a friendly smile nodded at me. He said he had met me a couple nights ago at the Ocean Beach Club, only “We were both very drunk.” At the party at the Ocean Beach Club, there had been an open bar for an hour between ten and eleven o’clock. I had consumed several complimentary cocktails. I remember the flimsy plastic cup filled to the rim with a blue alcoholic drink, swishing and spilling all over my hands; my fingers stuck together and left gooey fingerprints on everything I touched. Where was I? I was on the dance floor. I was spinning, spinning, spinning. And everything was blurred in the neon lights. That’s all I could remember. He was still smiling at me. “You are from Canada, right? I am from Switzerland.” I asked him his name. “Philip,” he smiled. “Nice to meet you, Philip,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t remember the first time.” “That’s okay,” he said. “Would you like to go for dinner—tomorrow night?” “Sure,” I said. He was smiling. And that’s how he walked away: smiling. Wednesday Philip ordered a tuna salad, only he didn’t realize it was a real salad, with lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes and everything. He ate the tuna off the top and pushed the plate aside. “I ordered the wrong thing,” he said. In Switzerland, he said, he had had a girlfriend, and he had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. But he’d broken up with his girlfriend, and now he was trying to quit smoking. He had dark purplish rings under his eyes. He told me that they varied day to day in size and colour. Page 20 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

“I don’t know what they mean,” he shrugged, “I just always have them.” I teased him and said it was because he didn’t eat his vegetables. Later, when he kissed me, I tasted the licorice from his Nicorette gum. Thursday I developed a large bruise on the outside of my thigh, the size of a human fist, glowing deep purple against the dark of my tan. Philip told me I needed to be more careful with my surfboard. “You can get really hurt,” he warned me. “The waves push your surfboard back on you. And the waves can get really strong.” I couldn’t remember getting hit by my surfboard. But then, I never remember things like that. I only realize afterwards, when the pain starts to emerge. He swam out into the ocean, waded next to me and offered me tips on how to surf. By the end of the day, his skin was puckered with goosebumps and his teeth were chattering. “Oh, what do I know?” he said, running his hand through his sandy hair. “There is always something else to learn.” Friday “I love pizza. I could eat it every day,” Philip said. On the way to the restaurant, he asked me, what kind of crust would I like? There are many kinds: thin crust, deep-dish—some are filled with cheese. We were riding his scooter down a crowded street, right beside the beach. On either side of us, groups of shirtless boys and shoeless girls wandered in and out between parked vehicles. We shot through the narrow spaces between idling cars that were stopped in traffic. Rushes of air roared into my ears. “Can’t we decide later?” I shouted against the wind.

Over dinner he told me he had once conducted an experiment with pizza. “People always tell me to bite more,” he explained. “They say, it is much better for your stomach if you bite more, between thirty and forty times. The first few times I try this, everything was fine. But after a while it was disgusting. It was like eating pizza through a straw. “And it was cold,” he concluded. “Sometimes it is better just to do things your way. Who cares what other people tell you?” Sunday Philip saw a kite in the sky and pointed at it. At first I didn’t see it. “Why do you always do that?” he said. “I point that way and you look in the other direction.” At last I saw it, a distant dot of colour fluttering in the sky. I squinted against the sun. I could hardly see anything. Black shadowy splotches clouded my vision. Philip said he would like to bring a kite home with him, but what’s the point? In Switzerland, he said, there is not enough wind. “I guess because you are not by the sea,” I said. I tried to conjure up the map of my high school geography textbook. I blinked again and again. The sun-splotches were still there, dark holes puncturing everything I looked at. “Is Switzerland by the sea?” “Oh yes,” he answered. “We have this little thing called the Swiss Sea— connects Switzerland with America. You must come: you must sail across this sea. I will be waiting for you on the other side.” “That would be the quickest way,” I said. “Yes,” he agreed, “and the easiest.” Tuesday The other night, Philip shook me awake as I fell asleep on his shoulder.

NOTES & DISPATCHES

He said, “How long have we known us?” He said, “Are we going to try and see us again? Or are we dead?” “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m not very good at talking about this sort of thing.” Wednesday I sat in the back of the cab, staring out the window. It was early morning, still half-dark. The local people were opening their shops, rinsing the sidewalks with their garden hoses, lighting sticks of incense, honouring their gods. Something rippled through my body, up my spine and into my throat. I held my breath. I closed my eyes and pretended I was underwater. I knew if I did anything, something might come out: a black bird, a prickly fruit, a lump of sand. My thighs left sticky outlines on the vinyl seats. The cab driver didn’t say anything. He drove. He kept his eyes on the road. At the airport, he overcharged me. He put my bags on the side of the road and held his hand out. I didn’t barter. I didn’t argue. This is something they expect you to do, but I didn’t say anything. I just gave him the money. He folded his hand over the bills and climbed back into the cab. I picked up my bags and walked away. I didn’t look back. Why? I knew the cab was gone. What could I do? I just kept on walking.

Lindsay Diehl’s short stories and poems have been published in Portfolio Milieu 2004 and in Fireweed, Rant, Geist and the Capilano Review. She lives in Kelowna, where she is completing her MFA at the University of B.C. Okanagan. Read “Into the Hills” (No. 68) and her other Geist works at geist.com/ author/diehl-lindsay. image: lenke sifko

Ordinary Weekly Deaths R OBE R T E V E R E T T - GRE E N

If Toronto were like Baghdad, thirty-nine residents would die violently every week

ince the American military invaded Iraq on March 20, 1993, nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died violent deaths. This tally comes from the Iraq Body Count project (iraqbodycount.org), which keeps track of each confirmed incident of violent death among the non-military population. Like all such numbers, this one is not really imaginable. It belongs to that class of quantities that news reporters like to convert into problems of spatial geometry, such as the number of football fields that would be needed to hold all the coffins. A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine examined this number and extracted from it the sum of deaths that couldn’t be attributed to large-scale military action. Subtract the results of the great spasm of violence at

the start of the invasion, and the two sieges of Fallujah, and you’re left with 60,481 civilian deaths in the six years after March 20, 1993. Few of these resulted from the spectacular suicide bombings we read about, the ones that claim dozens of lives at once. Most of these people perished in small batches, fewer than three at a time. In fact, many of the fatal assaults had only one victim. I have no head for football fields, so I tried to imagine what this scale of violence would look like in my city. It’s hard to conceive of Toronto being attacked by a foreign power, though as I write this, divers are trying to find three ships in Lake Ontario that went down during the War of 1812. Nobody expects them to look like ships any more. Almost two centuries of sea Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 21

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change stand between us and our last experience of war on our own soil. Over half of the Iraqi victims died in Baghdad, which in 2004 had a population of 6.5 million. If we apply the same proportion of fatality to Greater Toronto, which is home to about 2.5 million, more than 12,000 people would have suffered violent deaths in my city since March 1993. The toll would fluctuate from year to year, month to month, but for simplicity’s sake let’s imagine that the killings occurred at a steady pace through those sixteen years. Let’s imagine thirty-nine violent deaths in Toronto every week. Of those ordinary weekly deaths, thirteen are summary executions, by unknown people who abduct their victims, shoot them and leave their bodies in the street. Four of these victims are tortured before they die. Almost all of them are men like me. A few years ago, the New York Times published a frontpage story about an Iraqi who died this way, a young man who owned a pet shop and loved birds. There was one photo of this Papageno smiling in his shop, and others of his body after he was found. His wrists were bound with wire. His face and arms had been worked on with an electric drill. He made the front of the Times not because his case was unusual, but because there were so many others like him. If Toronto were Baghdad, and this man and a dozen others died a similar death in an ordinary week, we might put their pictures in the paper, possibly on a page reserved for such pictures, but we probably wouldn’t retain them in our minds, except as a dull repetitive ache. We don’t have enough memory for them all. In May 2003, two months after the American invasion began, Holly Jones, a ten-year-old girl in my part of town, was abducted, raped and killed. Her body was found in pieces in Lake Ontario. The investigation leading to Page 22 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

the conviction of her killer was treated as urgent news for over a year. Graffiti artists covered a wall in a playground near my house with a mural about her; annual community events still celebrate her memory. Her name is never far from the minds of parents in my neighbourhood, who wonder whether they should still keep walking their ten-year-olds to school. We have plenty of memory for Holly, because she died a singular death. She was part of no pattern. We would have an abundance of lethal patterns if Toronto were like Baghdad. Eight people would be dying every week during small-scale shooting incidents or firefights. Most of these happen without warning: the street is peaceful, and then it’s not, and people are running and bodies are falling. We had a scene like that in Toronto on Boxing Day, 2005, when a fifteenyear-old girl shopping on Yonge Street was struck outside the Foot Locker store by a bullet fired by young men exchanging shots in the street. Jane Creba’s killing, in the middle of the day, on the city’s traditional main drag, on the busiest shopping day of the year, ignited a public debate about what was seen to be a surge in gun violence. Fifty-two people died from gunshots in the city that year, a record number. Guns and what to do about them became an issue in the federal election. The prosecution of Creba’s suspected killers remains a subject of dread fascination. As a police sergeant said at the time of her death, “I think we’re going to feel this day for a long time to come.” I try to imagine eight of those shootings every week, on Yonge Street, Queen Street, or my neighbourhood main drag, Roncesvalles Avenue. I walk down that road almost every day, and so do my children. By now, the odds are fairly good that at least a few of the people killed in this way during the past six years would be known to us. We might

also know some of the killers (those who are not foreign soldiers), and may even have seen them in action, though not many of them will ever stand in a prisoner’s dock. Only one-quarter of civilian killings in Iraq are traced to a nameable perpetrator. I still have eighteen weekly deaths to account for. A few people die during aerial or ground attacks, and twelve or thirteen more are killed in explosions of roadside bombs, mortar shells and suicide bombers. A disproportionate number of these victims are women and children. I have a hard time imagining this kind of death in my city. We have guns here, and shootings, but on the rare occasions when something blows up, it’s always a gas line or part of a factory. Bombs aren’t part of our particular culture of violence. For them to become so, and for us to develop a tradition of murder by explosive suicide, we would have to change enormously. We would have to become Baghdad. At this point, I’m thrown back to my earlier state of incomprehension, to the blank number of fatalities and the football field. Who can understand any of this? Would I have any better grasp of it if I lived in Baghdad? The physical and mental effects of it would be forced upon me, but as for understanding it, I think I would merely throw myself against an unbreachable wall of absurdity and horror. But the effort of imagining my own city as Baghdad does give me new insight into a comment by U.S. General Tommy Franks, whose words serve as an ironic epigraph for the Iraq Body Count project. “We don’t do body counts,” said the general.

Robert Everett-Green lives in Toronto within a mile of the spot where American troops began their invasion of Upper Canada in 1813. He writes for the Globe and Mail. Read his Geist work at geist.com/author/everettgreen-robert.

POSTCARD LIT

Still Life with Blake Monica Kidd the way you pretend not to see someone you know in the grocery store when you’re buying tampons. I’ll allow that at seven months pregnant, with my tits and what was once my belly button in some walleyed three-legged race, I may not have been at my best. You try gestating a cat in a brin bag and see how sexy you feel. But cheating on a pregnant woman is low. Leaving your pregnant girlfriend for some skinny birth-control popping little slut is— Well, so very Blake. When the baby came, the doctor asked him if he wanted to cut the cord. “Dad?” she said, offering him the scissors. They’d paged her out of bed and she obviously hadn’t been apprised of the soap opera. He grinned. He took them from her gloved hand, covered with god only knows what, and leaned over my knee to see where she held it out for him. “Between those two clamps there.” In the pause, the song on the radio came clear: “Hurt So Good.” I shit you not. You don’t have to be so excitin’ “Quick now,” I heard the doctor say. The baby still hadn’t cried, and the nurses were closing in. Hey baby it’s you

e said he wasn’t coming. So when he showed up, all skulk and crooked smile, I didn’t know whether to throw my gas tank at him or leap from the stirrups and fall into his arms. I did neither because another contraction was coming and I was suddenly more concerned about ripping from asshole to eyebrow. Him there, hair slicked and gold chain around his neck like some gangster. Like he’d ever been off the shore. Like he ever would. Mother was civil to him. Amazing, considering her long list of ways she’d like to castrate him. She counted me through my pushes. Levelled her hawk eye at me and the doctor, kept him just inside her peripheral vision. Like

postcard: FOTOGRAFIE BEZ NAZVU (1972), rostislav koštál

I watched his face as the blood drained. I watched him turn pasty, watched his eyes lose their focus, watched him swallow as his tongue went dry in this mouth. Come on girl now it’s you And with a skull-cracking thud, he was gone. The doctor grabbed another pair of scissors and a nurse snatched the baby away under a big light and started rubbing the bejesus out of him until he screeched and my heart started beating again, and everything was right with the world because the baby was mine and Blake was in his rightful place, passed out again. “Still Life With Blake” was a runner-up in the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Monica Kidd is the author of four books. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 23

POSTCARD LIT

Wolf and Man Jaime Forsythe

t had been outside for weeks. She knew by the upset milk bottles, the cratered footprints and body casts left in the snow, and the howl looping over the roof at night. She hadn’t managed to spot it, but pictured diamond-sharp teeth and a jaw pilled, crisp, with its frozen exhalations. She sensed its nagging hunger. It lurked just beyond their walls without clear form, like the seed of an idea, a maddening, slippery shadow. She was dreaming of it, its blue and white face, the morning she awoke to find Max gone. The sheets beside her were empty, cool like the cool patches you encounter swimming in a sun-warmed lake. She knew immediately he wasn’t in the house. She counted the missing things: the moan of the tap, the rattle of paper, the scorched scent of a match held to the stove’s pilot light. The daily mug of tea he brought her was not on her bedside table, steeping into a more bitter intensity the longer she slept, sliver of lemon ready to shudder her tongue awake. She remained in bed, barely breathing. It wasn’t a complete shock. Max had been complaining for some time about how there was nothing. No perfect paragraphs falling from his mind, no fleshy images connecting in his imagination. His speech tumbled endlessly, contrasting with his blank pages on a plain desk. The problem, he worried, was that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had all the proper materials, the careful diet, the flaring, brilliant synapses. His descriptions of himself filled her dreams, unfurled into scenes of them both, somewhere green and melting where their ankles rooted in funnelling sand. Three of his black hairs lay on the pillow beside her like careless pen strokes.

postcard: WOLF UND MANN, quint buchholz

She would wait because there was nothing else to do, continue mixing ingredients together and listening to the voices that lived in the radio. Her guess was that he would cross the mile-long icy shell that separated their home from the highway and stick out a thumb. Without looking, she knew the desk would be gone. It was just a small table, really, but he was so superstitious. Her waiting, though—it would not be passive, or limp, airless—it would be an art. When he returned, she would gesture to the rows of preserves, stacked in a gleaming palette of beet and apple shades. She would open the door to the study so that an avalanche of unsent letters spilled out, turning the hallway white. He would see the wolf she had tamed, who circled the house like a guard.

“Wolf and Man” was a runner-up in the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Jaime Forsythe’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Kiss Machine, Exile and the Antigonish Review, and she edited the anthology Transits: Stories From In-Between (Invisible Publishing). She lives in Toronto.

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HELP US DESTROY TORONTO Casting Call From: No Media Kings Updates <jim@nomediakings.org> Date: Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:25 p.m. Subject: Help Us Destroy Toronto

e’re a few weeks away from diving into shooting Ghosts With Shit Jobs, our no-budget faux-doc about Toronto having descended into third world status, and we have a few more holes to fill. Even if you’re not a fit for any of these acting roles, crew, locations, any leads appreciated! And yeah, being a no-budget movie means that no one’s getting paid up front and it’s non-union. Experience appreciated, but often not necessary. Actors The documentarian: An older Asian man, 40+. The restaurant owner: A 30+ Asian man or woman. The down-on-her-luck lady: A 40+ Caucasian woman. The high-flying businesswoman: A 30+ Asian woman. A well-off older gent: A 50+ man.

Extras/Backgrounders: If you don’t fit any of these, we’d love to have you as one of the crowd of doodlefaces. Art Dept./Crew Sound: If you’re available and reliable, we can train you. Lighting: If you like to sculpt with shadows, let us know. Wardrobe: Can you imagine what folks will be wearing in 2040? Know how to customize Value Village finds? Set dec: We have to dress up locations so they look different. Hopefully you have better ideas than “a lot of tinfoil.” PAs: If you’re willing to be an extra pair of hands for the experience. Locations We have insurance. a luxury car/limo a bar a doctor’s office a doctor’s waiting room a convenience store a toy store Get in touch at casting@lofiscifi.com.

IMAGE: BURNING FIRE, 2007. From Kavavaow Mannomee: Drawings, an exhibition that ran at the Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver in June–July 2009. Kavavaow Mannomee is a printmaker whose work will appear in the exhibition Uuturautiit: Cape Dorset Celebrates 50 Years of Printmaking at the National Gallery of Canada, October 2009–January 2010. He lives and works in Cape Dorset, Nunavut. Image courtesy of the Marion Scott Gallery.

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FI R ST PE AN U T BU TTE R Martine J. Reid and Daisy Sewid-Smith From Paddling to Where I Stand: Agnes Alfred, Qwiqwasutinuxw Noblewoman, © University of British Columbia Press 2004. This excerpt is reprinted with permission of the Publisher. All rights reserved by the Publisher. Agnes Alfred told her stories to Martine J. Reid, an independent scholar, and Daisy Sewid-Smith, Alfred’s granddaughter and a cultural historian.

I L IVE D IN A T E NT A ND D RIE D FISH

he people who went to Vancouver stayed in tents. They did not go to hotels as we do now. They would live in tents at the far end of Vancouver at a place called “Union.” The people would live in tents at the foot of Union Street [“Union Street” said in English]. Above them the trains would be travelling. The people would live in tents when they went to Vancouver. They did not go to hotels then. We also lived in tents z ’ [Knight Inlet]. We ’ when we went to D awadiy lived in a tent. There were not that many people who lived in houses. A few people did have houses. They were like smokehouses with a shelter covering them. We would go there to dry ’ camdaq [dried, hard eulachon] and we lived in a tent. These are the things I have seen. I was only told about how they made grease in the very early times; I did not experience it myself. They ’ ’ used what they call kamyaxla [a large grease conw tainer]. They would toss [hax lkala] rocks into the fire and pour water into the grease containers; then they would pour the eulachon into the water. This is what they call samka [boiling out the grease]. They used these huge containers ’ ’ called kamyaxla after the Europeans came. This was when they could obtain what they call z z ’ [tin]. d agad uw e

WORKING A T T HE CANNERY

e would hear the Chinese working all night. They had a machine that made lids and they had to peddle it. They had to peddle it, and we

heard that noise all night. They would make lids all night long. They were making lids for the fish that were going to be canned. They would throw the rejected lids off the wharf in Alert Bay. These were the rejected lids. There were many of these rejected lids under the cannery in Alert Bay. This is what they did in the early days. It was so different in those days. Now everything is so easy. There were many Chinese people working in the canneries. I was filleting fish. We would bring our baskets, so they would put the fish heads in them for us to take home. Also fish tails. I started working when I was still a child. They paid me ten cents an hour. I put cans out for filling and then put them into boxes after they were filled. They paid me ten cents an hour when I worked at the cannery. I received a raise every year as I was growing up. I was washing fish, and they raised my wages to twenty cents an hour. I was transferred to a person named MacTavis. We weighed the fish, and I was now paid twenty-five cents an hour. We had scales to weigh the fish. We set aside the small fish. This is what we did at the cannery. When they were canning fish, I was making twenty-five cents an hour. My wages were a little more than before. That was when I was a child. We put tin lids on the cans; we would cover the cans with tin lids. The Chinese painted the cans. I don’t know why they did this. They would paint them after they had been sealed. The can sealers did not come until later. We could hear the Chinese working all night. There was a machine that made lids and they had to peddle it. And this is the noise we would hear all night long. SHOES

t took me a long time before I liked wearing shoes. I used to go around with bare feet. I remember when we went to Vancouver to keep Bondsound company. He was twelve years old and in prison; he had been charged with murder. They took him to the Supreme Court and he was in prison for such a long time. My mother would send me to buy candles. I went to town barefoot. I noticed that the White people were staring at me. I went to town barefoot to buy candles to take back home. This was when they forbade us Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 27

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to put up tents like we used to. This was when that picture was taken, the one you have in your book. This was the time when they put Bondsound in Oakalla. I WE NT T O SCHOOL

tried [wanula] to receive an education. All I learned was the A, B, C’s. Mrs. Alfred Hall

taught me. They made us say a prayer as soon as we went to class. We would all stand and say a prayer before classes started. We would all have to stand again and say a prayer when classes were over. I got cheated when I was a little girl. This girl by the name of A umul was chewing gum. Abusa [Mrs. Johnny Hunt] was in her teens. Mrs. Hall took A umul’s gum out of her mouth. She did not allow chewing gum in class. Mrs. ’ ’ Hall put the gum on her organ [danxyuw]. When Mrs. Hall played on her organ she would close her eyes. She would play for us when we sang. She asked us to pray, and she closed her eyes while we were praying. The girls told me to go and get the gum. Mrs. Hall opened her eyes and found the gum missing. We found out later she had intended to give the gum back to A umul after class was dismissed. Those brutes [lilal ] denounced me right on the spot. They told Mrs. Hall that I took it. She sent me out of the class and strapped me. I was strapped because ’ of the gum of A umul, Yeqawilas’s younger sister. ’A’umut. was Adolol. e

Beaver Hats From Castorologia by H.T. Martin, 1892. Image provided by the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Archives of Manitoba.

MY FIRST WASHING MACHINE

ell, my goodness, my mother was so old-fashioned. I was the same. I never liked anything my husband did. He bought a washing machine. This was when the first electric washing machines came out. I sure did not like it. I w hired my sister [cousin] G ixsisala, to come and help me wash clothes. They delivered the washing machine but I just kept pushing it back outside. I was thinking about how expensive our electricity bill was going to be. I just kept pushing it out, and that is where it sat. My sister and I were washing our clothes. I was washing the clothes by hand, and my sister was helping me. I finally said to her, “Why don’t we try the new washing machine?” This was the washing machine I just had pushed out of the house, and it was sitting outside our cabin at Yalis. So, we pushed it in and washed our clothes with it. To my amazement, it was wonderful. I thought it would never get the clothes clean. Nulady’ [Mrs. Ben Alfred] had one of those spin washers and it never got the clothes clean. It would spin. The first washing machine I saw was the spin washer. e

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You would spin the handle on the side of it. It was a European washing machine, and it never got the clothes clean. That is what I was thinking about. I thought that the washing machine that her [Flora Sewid’s] father bought me was not going to get the clothes clean. So we started washing clothes with my new washing machine.

’ She also saw this. Billy Assu were with ’Adaliy. was also hiring workers for the cannery. This is the person with whom grandpa [she says “grandpa” in English] was working. They hired workers. That is why they went there. They looked for houses for the workers. That is why we happened to be there when they did this to the Japanese. This was during the war.

T H E FI R S T P E A N U T B U T T E R I S A W

nother thing I did. Oh! I was really old-fashioned. I never knew that peanut butter w was good to eat. I was with K’ alstolil [Daisy Roberts]. We travelled to Namu. This is where we were. We saw these pails. Pails were a big thing in those days. Usually they contained lard. w We saw these cute little pails [qusqak’ a]. They contained, we learned later, peanut butter. w K’ alstolil and I bought some. [Laughter.] We went down to the wharf of Namu and dumped the contents into the water. We just bought it for the little pails. We did not know that peanut butter was good to eat. [Laughter.] THE SE COND WORL D WAR

hat was the first time we went to Steveston. Oh! The poor Japanese suffered! Flora’s father [Moses] was hiring cannery workers for B.C. Packers. He was the boss. He was hiring the people. We were going to look at where the workers would stay. They were really treating the Japanese very badly. All their possessions were piled up outside the houses. The poor Japanese people. They were trying to sell their possessions to us. One Japanese man tried to sell a bed to her [pointing at Flora] father. I think he bought a watch from him. They were being thrown out and ordered out of their houses. We happened to be there when this happened as we were looking for housing for the workers. This was when we first went to Steveston. He was hiring workers for B.C. Packers with Yequlalas [Chief Billy Assu] and ’Adaliy’ [Mrs. Billy Assu]. They also saw the Japanese being thrown out of their houses. The company threw them out. They told them to get out and leave. They were all being asked to get out and leave. Their poor possessions were scattered all over the ground. We

Culinary Detention Responses from students in a grade nine foods class at a high school in British Columbia to “Why did I give you a detention today?” and/ or “How was your behaviour unsafe?” Compiled by the teacher, Mary Leah de Zwart. I guess it was unsafe to close Dave in the cupboard because: 1. he could get sick 2. his feet might have fell off 3. could have grew really really really really long nose hairs 4. he could have died 5. his shirt could have turned a puky yellow 6. could not breath 7. could have ate all the spices 8. break the cupboard 9. could never have children 10. I could have forgotten about him forever. He would have had to live in there. I should not have put Sandi in the cupboard because: 1. I could have broke the cupboard 2. I could have killed her 3. I should have killed her 4. might suffocate 5. break some stuff 6. could have spilled some stuff 7. might die if in there too long 8. break the cupboard 10. germs Writing on someone with felt pens are a bad idea because: 1. it is horseplay in the cooking room 2. could get felt on hands then on food 3. could get felt in food 4. should just use felt pens for their normal purpose

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Little Soldier of Love

S E L L I N G C I V I L I ZAT I O N

Terms for penis, in emails caught in Eve Corbel’s spam filter during spring 2009.

David Mason

rod pack dick power stuff p~enis p3n!s pinis punis pocket mouse dong hammer love wand love luger

love muscle male package little weener little babymaker little soldier of love your boner your banana your cucumber your tool your device your thingy your woody your weapon your meat cigar

Be More Controllive Suggestions from grade ten students on how the teacher can get the class to pay attention. Compiled by Mary Leah de Zwart. For more of de Zwart’s Geist work, visit geist.com/author/de-zwart-mary-leah. When someone is not paying attention you can separate that person. Or you can start yelling loud. Separate the people who talks out. Turn the lights on and off, don’t yell, you’ll lose your voice. Get a vissel and blow it every time. When anyone talks you should send them to the office. Beat the crap out of somebody. Tell them to shut up. Yell! Flick the lights. Separate the guys! Or kick them out. By the way I feel sorry for you. We should have a bell to ring, or a clapping game where the teacher claps and we copy the teacher. I think you should make them write lines and be more controllive. Give us candy if we’re quite. I could improve in this class by sitting alone.

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From “Selling Civilization,” an essay in cnq (Canadian Notes & Queries) 76 (spring/summer 2009). David Mason is an antiquarian bookseller in Toronto.

here was a time, a century or so ago, where any town that had a university, never mind one that had 3,500 or so professors, as does University of Toronto (never mind York and Ryerson), would be a guarantee that used bookstores would flourish. That this is not true now in Toronto invites significant questions. Perhaps someone should explore the question of Professors and their apparent indifference, even distaste, for books. During a recent conversation over drinks with some colleagues we shared opinions about why academics have all but disappeared from the used bookshops. Some interesting conclusions were arrived at. The general consensus was that many academics seldom seemed to be interested in anything outside their specialties. And being spoiled by many years of getting free books from publishers they don’t like to pay for books. Indeed, teachers, especially professors, are number two on the booksellers’ secret list of cheapskates by profession, just behind ministers. While teachers once were ill-paid this is no longer true so their protestations of poverty do not convince. And we, the booksellers on the frontlines, so to speak, can perhaps be excused for assuming that it is really just another indication of dreary mediocrity. But one of my colleagues thought it unfair that the good ones were not being mentioned; meaning those professors who do frequent bookshops. As we dropped names of those professors who do buy books (I refer to North America and Britain) it became obvious that those scholars we were naming were more often than not those whose work was considered the most important in their fields. This pattern was only momentarily surprising to people who believe, as we do, that it is culture that we are selling.

FINDINGS

PRE R E QU IS IT E S

NONREADERS WRITE

Students must have completed at least two of the following.

Robert Lanham From “Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview” by Robert Lanham, published in April 2009 at mcsweeneys.net/2009/4/20lanham.html. Robert Lanham’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Salon, the Washington Post and Playboy, among others. He is the author of several books, including The Hipster Handbook.

eng 371wr: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era m-w-f: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Instructor: Robert Lanham

eng: 232wr—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll lit: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less eng: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking eng: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming eng: 231wr—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance lit: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats lit: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

COURSE DESCRIPTION

s print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers. Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new “Lost Generation” of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.

Pearly Gates A list of plants toxic to cats and dogs, found at the Vancouver Emergency Animal Clinic during a trip there with Cito, the cat of Sarah Maitland, managing editor at Geist. Cito had jumped out a fourth-storey window (one life lost) and then landed on a hydrangea bush (another life lost). alfalfa (multiple exposures) American nightshade apple of Sodom baby’s breath bird of paradise black locust bleeding heart cow itch crab’s eyes crown of thorns elephant ears flying saucers friar’s cap or cowl fruit salad plant garlic and field garlic grapes hydrangea Jack-in-the-pulpit Jerusalem cherry

love apple marijuana mistletoe (European) mother-in-law’s tongue Madagascar dragon tree mushrooms narcissus nipplefruit pearly gates raisins red princess spotted dumb cane string of pearls Swiss cheese plant tobacco (flowering and Indian) tropic snow dieffenbachia trumpet creeper wedding bells weeping fig

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P OCK E TS Rob Winger From Muybridge’s Horse: A Poem in Three Phases, published by Nightwood Editions in 2007. Rob Winger has been published in literary journals across Canada. He lives in Ottawa.

e almost always wore a hat.

He ate raw lemons, kept in the enormous inside pockets of suit jackets, bitten to stay alert, composed. He refused to wear shoes with laces. He feared umbrellas, thinking their ribs would collapse on him. He kept a snapshot of Flora, his wife, cornered in his left trouser pocket, against the thigh.

The watch in his vest’s right pocket wound at 8 a.m. each morning, placed on top of the lungs. When focusing, framing, he tucked the tip of his beard into white chest pockets. While trekking up mountains, he was fond of hiding specialized equipment between his pants’ waistlines and the small of his back, properly hidden under wool and enormous backpacks, layers against a faded hillscape, We never get to know him.

Boar trotting, by Eadweard Muybridge, as shown by instantaneous photography with a study of animal mechanics, 1882. Picture Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Muybridge (1830–1904) was the British photographer whose The Horse in Motion series proved that all four hooves of a horse leave the ground when it gallops. Page 32 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

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BUS COZ Y Magda Sayeg From Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti, published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009 and written by Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, who live and knit in Vancouver and at yarnbombing.com. Magda Sayeg, a.k.a. PolyCotN, co-founded the first yarn graffiti crew, Knitta (knittaplease.com), and covered a bus in crochet in Mexico City in 2008. For more images from Yarn Bombing, check out geist.com/74/yarn-bombing.

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H A RTN E Y, M A N I TOBA Danny Singer

From Canadian Towns—Summer. Danny Singer creates large-scale photographs of small-town Canada. His work will be exhibited at

I N TO T H E L A N D Tim Lilburn From Going Home, a collection of essays published by Anansi in 2008. Tim Lilburn is the author of several award-winning books of poetry and essays, and he teaches writing at the University of Victoria.

o to Leader, Saskatchewan, and stay at the hotel across from the elevators if it’s too cold to sleep on the river flat just north of the Estuary townsite. Estuary is west and north of Leader— you’ll have to pass by it eventually: only five houses or so left, two last summer with trucks parked in the yard, another one, a white bungalow, set off to the west nearer the river, owned, rumour has it, by an American hunter who turns up every fall or so. Anyway, the Leader hotel. It’s old, smells of cigarette smoke climbing through the ceiling from the small bar below; you could read the paper through the sheets. On the weekends, they have a buffet in the evening and morning. The town is doing well; a number of people there work at the Petro-Canada plant at Burstall, a forty-five-minute drive southwest. If you arrive on a Friday night, visit the Swiss owner of the men’s store the next morning

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before you set out: lots of stories and some interesting merchandise aimed at Hutterite colonies in the area. Come down into the river valley past the old Estuary cemetery and the abandoned town: the large cement rectangle rising out of the grass with the square hole is the old safe of the Standard Bank. To the west is Bull’s Head, an oddly shaped, high bluff facing the confluence of the Red Deer and the South Saskatchewan Rivers, deep water at the base of it, good for fishing. I’ve heard talk that this is where Big Bear had his vision in the 1800s. The ferry runs irregularly; if the man is on the other side when you get there, he’ll see you and come over. Turn right when you’ve risen out of the valley and the valley’s elm thicket and follow that crooked road east into the sun—just as it bends north you might see some clouds of white dust heaving up in the distance, winds coming off a large alkaline plain. That’s where you’re headed, Cabri Lake. You’ll have to walk from the road, a long walk, cropped land, pasture, marsh, then a stretch no one seems to be doing anything with—I saw a huge coyote there last year: its head at first made me think it was a sheep. If you do manage to get into the land around the lake and talk to anyone about this, keep your directions to the place as vague as these.

FINDINGS

Gallery Jones in Vancouver in October 2009. For more Canadian Towns photographs, see geist.com/author/singer-danny.

MONKEY TIME Andrew Steinmetz From Eva’s Three Penny Theatre, published by Gaspereau Press in 2008. Copyright © Andrew Steinmetz, 2008, reproduced with permission of Gaspereau Press, Printers & Publishers. Andrew Steinmetz’s previous book is Hurt Thyself, a collection of poems published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He lives in Montreal.

my monkey time! Now we start. For years and years when I was asked for my birthday wish, or if there was anything special I wanted for Christmas, I always said: the best thing for me would be a monkey. A monkey? What would you feed him? Where would you keep your ape? Everyone laughed. I was a joke. What did I know? It was impossible. They treated me like a special, stupid girl. Even if I hadn’t seen a real monkey before, I wanted a monkey. Then the day came and I saw my monkey in the pet shop. That was marvellous. He was definitely the monkey I was looking for. In a wood box, standing in the corner. There was a small sign. African Monkey. Tanganyika. He was

alone. This is Germany, I said. Here in Germany we have winter and snow. He was bewildered. Everything was new. He didn’t know what he was doing, in a packing crate, with nothing but a bowl of water—poorest thing, he had no clue. I stayed in the shop one hour and before I left told him, Don’t give up! I’ll come back to get you! I told the shopkeeper my birthday was coming. He offered me a candy from his apron. No, I said. Does the monkey make music? I was thinking of an organ grinder’s capuchin. Not yet, he answered. Then I went. Straight away I returned home and I cried and cried, until my brother found me. Hermann Hans was the authority. He was the eldest. Anneliese was next. My younger sister Romy and I were nothing. Hermann Hans agreed to help. Maybe he could create something—just give him some time, he was on my side. A day went by, a week. It all depended on Hermann Hans. I waited. There was nothing I could do but blow on my fingers. Finally Hermann Hans went to Father and told him these three things. Eva has her birthday. Eva found a monkey. And, third, he thinks, Eva should get that monkey. I got that monkey. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 35

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W H AT SAY YOU N OW . . . BROTH E R? Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas From Red: A Haida Manga, published in October 2009 by Douglas & McIntyre, an imprint of D&M Publishers Inc. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is the creator of Haida manga, a hybrid art form that combines classic Haida design and storytelling with Asian manga. See the whole book and his Geist piece “re me mb er” at geist.com/author/yahgulanaas-michael-nicoll.

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Memory and the Valley Sandra Shields and David Campion

The concrete-and-glass city we know as Vancouver sits in the delta of the Fraser River Valley on village sites that date back to the time of Mesopotamia

he Fraser River rises in the Rocky Mountains in eastern British Columbia, then runs 1,400 kilometres in a giant S shape: north, then south, and finally west from the town of Hope to the delta known as the Lower Mainland. The flood plain along this stretch of the river is known as the Fraser Valley. A few years ago we moved to a farm on the side of this valley, about 100 kilometres east of Vancouver. The farm’s hand-hewn timbers, stone fence and mountain view with no human beings in sight, all made us curious about the past— first about the farm itself, and then about the forest that surrounds it and the people who had walked these mountain paths before us. “My River of Disappointment” is what the fur trader Simon Fraser called the river in 1808; later it was given his name by his friend, the explorer David Thompson. Fraser didn’t do much naming. He was travelling with Natives and they told him what the places were called. The people of the valley called the river Stó:lo, and their lives were so shaped by it that they called themselves by the same name. The salmon runs were like nothing else in the world. On shore there were elk and deer, roots, berries and greens in the early spring. In a single day, the current could propel a canoe the same distance it would take a week to walk. This land and climate are so generous the people who lived here could spend most of the winter in ritual and celebration.

map: kate reid

According to archaeology, the story of settlement in the Fraser Valley begins ten thousand years ago when the glaciers pulled out and the people moved in. In the memory of those whose families have lived here through the ensuing 350 generations, the story that begins with Simon Fraser is one of loss: first there was smallpox, then the land was taken and their children seized. For the millions of us who moved here after Fraser, the story is one of gain: trees the circumference of ten men, rich black soil, ocean views. Throughout the valley, these opposing narratives are written in the rocks and flowing in the river.

BRITISH COLUMBIA

Vancouver Victoria

Stave Lake Hope

New Westminster

Nicomen Mission Island Fort Langley Sumas Mountain

Chilliwack

FRASER RIVER

Sumas Prairie

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SXWO:YIMELH

New Westminster In the 1850s, the old Kwantlen village of Skaiametl was chosen as the location for the capital of British Columbia because its position on a steep hillside overlooking a deep harbour offered military advantages in case of an attack by the United States. New Westminster, which served as the capital for eight years (1858–66), sits on the north bank of the Fraser River, 20 kilometres east of Vancouver in what was once dense forest. This is where the Fraser River splits into the North Arm, the southern border of Vancouver, and the South Arm, the boundary between Richmond and Delta. According to Stó:lo oral traditions, it was at a New Westminster May Day celebration in the 1860s that a promise was made by colonial officials: when lands outside their reserves were sold, British Columbia would receive a third, the Crown would receive a third, and the Stó:lo would receive a quarter of the proceeds. Today there are no reserves in New West; the few that were set aside were taken over by the government in the early 1900s.

NEW WESTMINSTER

tó:lo villages stood on opposing banks at the last easy place to cross the water. After that, the river

split; each arm made its own way to the sea, and the boggy land in between was prime for birds and great for cranberries. The village on the south was called Qayqayt (pronounced “Kee Kite”). The one on the north was named for a great warrior turned to stone whose spirit lived on inside the rock that stood beside the water. Trees sixty metres high pressed in on the stone, and the forest rose steeply. These trees were the first to fall in the clear-cut that became Vancouver. Stump City, it was called. Gold had been found during the previous spring, thousands of prospectors had flocked to the mouth of the river and already a miner could buy boots, booze and a shovel in the wooden shanties and tents between the massive cedar roots. The colonel charged with clearing the townsite wrote to the governor and reported incessant rain, half-thawed snow in the woods, thickets so close and thorny they made trousers into rags, thorns as big and strong as sharks’ teeth. The colonel mourned the loss of what he called “most glorious trees,” and he had a park set aside in a glen adjoining a ravine. The Europeans in the new capital were enthralled with Queen Victoria, then in the middle of her seventy-year reign. They named the glen Queen’s Park, and on her majesty’s birthday in May 1864,

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the governor threw a party with food and canoe races and five hundred dollars in prize money. Stó:lo families from all along the river spent the night in the forest a few kilometres away, and in the morning seven hundred Salish canoes pulled up to the wharf. Speeches were made, presents given. Each chief got a hat with a golden stripe. Students at St. Mary’s Mission got ties. That was the same year that the local newspaper complained about “decent people” being subjected to the “intolerable nuisance” of having “Indians as next door neighbours.” Between then and now, smallpox came again, thinning out the young and the weak. The government quarantined a nearby island and sent Natives there from up and down the coast. Two other reserves were set aside: one at Qayqayt, another near Queen’s Park. Canada claimed both parcels of land early in the twentieth century after the last couple living there died. Their orphaned daughter in residential school in Kamloops came back to New West, and lived in Chinatown and married there. She hid her past until one day her grown-up daughter asked the right question. Then the truth came out and her children and grandchildren eventually became again the Qayqayt First Nation, the only band in the country without land. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 39

QW’Ó:NTL’AN

Fort Langley When the Hudson’s Bay Company built the fort in 1827, 50 kilometres from the mouth of the river, the border between Canada and the United States was not yet settled. This first colonial settlement in what is now known as the Lower Mainland was established on the south shore of the Fraser River to ensure that the British could claim both sides of the river. A Kwantlen chief located his village nearby to facilitate trade. With the gold rush in the late 1850s, Fort Langley’s importance as a shipping and administrative centre was soon usurped. Today, the fort has been rebuilt and many of the buildings in the surrounding village have been restored, making it a popular tourist destination and filming location for TV and movies. The main Kwantlen village is still here, located on an island across a narrow channel from the fort.

FORT LANGLEY

n a sunny November day in 2008, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, his cabinet and the television

camera crews walked into the Big House at Fort Langley, where B.C. had been proclaimed a colony

exactly 150 years earlier. These days Fort Langley is a tourist attraction, rebuilt in remembrance of how European settlement began, staffed by men in top hats and women in long dresses who know the price of a blanket in beaver pelts. Only one original building, a storehouse, remains. Its thick timbers are whitewashed inside and out, and tanned hides hang from the ceiling. This is the oldest building in B.C., they used to say, until it was pointed out that all over the valley archaeologists have unearthed pit houses built thousands of years ago. The fort sits here, in Kwantlen territory, because this was the farthest upriver that ocean-going ships could sail. In 1828, the Hudson’s Bay Company put twenty-five men ashore in dense forest armed with trade goods: blankets, metal tools, rope. Within a year, they had married Stó:lo women and enmeshed themselves in the network of wealthy families who managed the territory. A Kwantlen chief took ownership of the fort just as Stó:lö families always took ownership of resources like a good berry patch or a rock that was well situated for fishing. He charged a toll when other tribes came to Page 40 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

trade. His daughter married Chief Trader James Yale.

It was beaver that brought the hbc men—beaver hats were in great demand in Europe—but it was salmon that kept them here; that and the good growing season. The hbc was a multinational company and the fort became a depot supplying butter to Russians in Alaska, cranberries to gold miners in California, and peas and potatoes to forts in the interior of B.C.—from which furs were carried back. Then they were pressed tightly together so mice wouldn’t get in during the voyage, and were shipped to London. The Stó:lo generally couldn’t be bothered to trap beaver, but they were happy to trade salmon. In late summer the river ran so thick with fish that you could almost cross on their backs. Barrels of salted salmon made their way to Peru and Australia but most went to Honolulu, where an idyllic bay was being transformed from a few grass huts into a busy port in which whalers and fur traders took on provisions and crew. No matter how much fish the Stó:lo brought, the hbc men asked for more, and the newcomers came to be called Xwelítem (pronounced “Whu-lee-tum”), the ones who are always hungry. The Xwelítem named their fort in honour of Thomas Langley, a Hudson’s Bay director who never set foot in North America. For more than a hundred years, until they returned to their traditional name, the Kwantlen were known as the Langley Indians.

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SXWÒYEQS

Stave Lake The Stave River flows from its source in Garibaldi Provincial Park, down through the Coast Mountains and into the Fraser River near Fort Langley. It once provided the Kwantlen people with a route into the mountains to the north. The river valley drops rapidly from steep forests into the rolling hillsides east of Mission. Today, the river is blocked by two dams and the lower river runs free only in its last two kilometres before its confluence with the Fraser. A note on Halq’eméylem: The language that first named these places is spoken fluently by just a handful of elders these days, although many younger people are learning it through a language revival program that started in the 1970s and has expanded into Halq’eméylem programs in schools and evening classes at band offices throughout the valley. First Nations that had been given English names have returned to their ancestral ones. Halq’eméylem appears on street signs in the trailer park. With the help of Naxexelhts’i, a Stó:lo cultural advisor also known as Sonny McHalsie, I have labelled the places in this essay with their original names as well as their more recent English ones. The Halq’eméylem words with accents are standardized Halq’eméylem spellings now in use; the others are the more colloquial or English-derived spellings that have been and continue to be in common use (such as Kwantlen as opposed to Qw’ó:ntl’an, and Skyuks as opposed to Sxwóyeqs).

STAVE LAKE

his valley, which cuts north from the Fraser River into the Coast Mountains, has two names, nei-

ther of them the ancient one that nobody knows any more. The Kwantlen call it Skyuks: the place where everyone died. It was smallpox that took them: the disease passed from settlers to Natives in distant parts of the continent, then travelled along trade routes and arrived in the valley thirty years before the first white man; and it killed two out of every three people. Skyuks was hit hard. The valley was abandoned, its name was forgotten and its neighbours knew it only by the tragedy that had claimed its people. Stave is what the Hudson’s Bay men called the forest across the river from their fort. They went there to take the white pine, then floated the logs back, cut them into strips, and turned trees into staves and staves into barrels. They filled the barrels with salmon bought from the Kwantlen, then salted and sealed and shipped them to the Sandwich Islands. The fort shipped so much salmon that soon the stand of white pine, rare so close to the sea, stood no more. Stave was the name the settlers used for the valley they logged, the river they put sawmills along, the waterfall that plunged down to

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join the Fraser and the dam built in 1911, one of the first in B.C. Water turned into electricity—it was a novelty, according to ads in the Fraser Valley Record: a great convenience requiring only the turn of a switch. “Children can do it. Safer than matches, no foul odours, costs less than kerosene, candles or oil.” Today the old generating station is a tourist attraction, and downstream three newer powerhouses continue to make electricity. Early in the spring, before the snow melts, there is still a time when the reservoir drops and the drowned forest comes up for air. Each year for more than a dozen years now, the Kwantlen have come here when the reservoir is low and walked over mud scored with 4x4 tracks to pick up tools laid down thousands of years ago. Carbon dating puts these sites among the oldest in Canada. The artisans who shaped these stone and bone tools were well fed on deer and elk, a dozen kinds of berries, fish most months. The archaeologist Duncan McLaren says this was once a well-travelled river valley, a route to the north that gave access to hunting grounds and to patches of high mountain berries that ripen under the summer sun.

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PE K W’ X E : Y L E S

St. Mary’s Mission Mission sits on the north bank of the Fraser on a hillside that looks across the valley into the United States. The tidal bore of the river ends here, a hundred kilometres upriver from the sea. The city takes its name from the mission established by an Oblate priest a few years after the gold rush of the late 1850s. He chose the location for its lack of settlement, colonial or Aboriginal, in his determination to counter both the sway of the miner’s alcohol and the influence of Stó:lo traditions. Today the mission and the residential school that operated there for more than a hundred years exist only as foundations visible in the well-kept lawns of the Fraser River Heritage Park.

ST. MARY’S MISSION

ive generations of kids passed their childhoods in the mission school atop a bluff in the middle of

the valley. Instead of waking to mothers’ voices, they woke in dormitories and listened to orders from Oblate fathers who silenced them when they spoke the language of their parents. The Oblates practised a hard-working, love-the-poor Christianity with a sense of theatre—a flair for drama in ritual— shared by the Coast Salish. For about fifty years, many nations travelled to retreats at St. Mary’s, where the high point of the year was the Easter re-enactment of the last days of Jesus. In 1894, the same year the town formed the Mission City Fruit Growers & Canning Association, a thousand dugout canoes converged below the bluff, filling the river from shore to shore. Only the stone foundations of the mission remain today. The bluff has been turned into a park with tidy lawns and a complicated past. At the information centre an aerial photograph shows the old school, the barns, the fields, the tennis court and the new school built in the 1960s when the old one was closed—used mostly as dormitories for Native kids from rural reserves who were attending the high school in town. In Mission, the city that grew up around the corner, lacy

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suburbs stretch into the foothills. The downtown core is rough around the edges, especially on a Friday night in the blocks around the bank machines. Everyone who walks between the carved cedar poles that mark the entrance to the Friendship Centre on Main Street has been touched by residential school. Imagine the government showing up and taking your five-year-old son away. A mother in despair, a dad in the bar. Pain is something you pass on to your kids. The centre teaches parenting skills and holds weekly wellness workshops. The bluff originally known as Pekw’xe:yles has a grand view of the river. To the south stands Mt. Baker (named for one of Captain George Vancouver’s officers) and to the east lies the mountain the settlers call Cheam (“strawberries” in Halq’eméylem)—two peaks that stand like signposts orienting those who live in or visit this stretch of the valley. For a few days every summer, thousands come to the bluff to sit in the sun and listen to folk music. In the heat of the day, they retreat to the shade among the old stone foundations. As the temperature rises, smog piles up and Baker and Cheam disappear into the yellow haze.

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L E Q’Á : M É L

Nicomen Island Nicomen Island lies just east of Mission between the communities of Dewdney, named for the early road builder, land speculator and eventually Member of Parliament Edgar Dewdney, and Deroche, named for the Québécois mule skinner who swam his oxen here from across the river in Chilliwack in the 1860s and began pasturing them on the island’s lush grasslands. The first rural post office in B.C. opened on Nicomen Island in the early days of the colony, when the river was a highway and anyone could hitch a ride on a steam-driven paddlewheeler by tying a white flag to a tree. Today, dairy cows graze between fields of corn.

NICOME N ISLAND

he men who have fished around Nicomen Island all their lives can recall how, as kids, they could

reach into the river and pull out handfuls of eulachon (pronounced “hooligan”) as the fish fought the cur-

rent to get back to their spawning grounds in nearby gravel bars. These skinny flashes of silver were so saturated with oil they could be lit like candles when dried. They began running in the Fraser River in April and peaked in May. Nicomen Island is sandwiched between the Fraser River and the first wild stretch of backwater sloughs east of Vancouver. This area, where the slow waters lie snug against the mountainside, is a favourite haunt of waterfowl and destination for spawning salmon that brings bald eagles by the hundreds. With the slough on one side and the Fraser on the other, Nicomen Island is visited regularly by men from the city with fishing poles and hip waders; “sporties” the Leq’á:mél fishermen call them. Peace between the two groups is a sometimes uneasy affair. Today, the Fraser River eulachon runs are nothing like they used to be, so low as to be labelled “depressed” by the government workers who regulate fishing. The salmon are depressed too, and the Native fishermen, sitting in their powerboats, keep close watch on their nets to prevent the circling seals from grabbing the fish before they can. The area around Nicomen Island is where Halq’eméylem was born; the language spread to Page 46 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

become the tongue spoken up in the mountains, down in the delta and across the strait in Nanaimo, Chemainus and Cowichan. Cedar plank houses would have stood on the slough side of the island: the waters here are calmer than those of the river, making the slough ideal for travel, and it was less exposed to the dangers of raiders from coastal tribes, who came in big war canoes in search of slaves and goods such as the winter’s supply of dried fish. The meadow between the slough and the river often flooded in the spring and grew lush and green in the summer. The riches of Semá:th Lake lay a short paddle away on the south shore of the river. It was a tribal hub—a natural place for families from up and down the river to get together. The spring floods became a problem once settlers arrived, built farms and planted fields. The flood in 1894 put the entire island under water, and the same thing happened again in 1948. Since then more dikes have been built, and the riverbank has been stabilized with rip-rap to keep more land from washing away. The slough is likewise constrained. People who grew up here in the 1960s remember when the waters of the slough ran fresh and everyone swam in them during the summer. Trumpeter swans still winter here, salmon still spawn, but no one swims in the slough any more. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 47

SEMÁ:TH

Sumas Prairie During the last ice age, glaciers retreating from the Fraser Valley left behind a shallow lake in the lowland west of what is now the city of Chilliwack. The place and the people who lived around this rich ecosystem were called Semá:th, which refers to the big level opening of the lake and its surrounding grasslands, an opening that extended across what is now the border between Canada and the United States. Nineteenth-century settlers named this area Sumas; the lake itself covered four thousand hectares and drained into the Fraser River; every spring when the Fraser was in flood, the flow reversed and the lake tripled in size. In the 1920s the lake was drained, and the lake bottom was turned into farmland and renamed Sumas Prairie.

SU MAS PRAIRIE

n the summer of 1858, when the men in the survey crew that was dividing Canada from the

United States got to the lake called Semá:th, they learned just how bad the mosquitoes could be. They camped in the tall grass meadow along the shore. Deer were everywhere, and the men went out for an hour at dusk and bagged forty ducks. Until June it seemed like a second Eden, but then the mosquitoes hatched and the place became a living hell. “We ate them, drank them, breathed them,” wrote one surveyor. At night they got no rest. The only escape lay in the middle of the lake, because mosquitoes prefer land, so the surveyor sought the hospitality of the people he called “wily savages,” those Stó:lo families who, during mosquito season, lived on scaffoldings built over the shallow waters left behind when the glaciers receded. They moored their cedar canoes to the scaffolds and climbed up ladders of twisted bark to platforms where they fished, visited, ate and slept in mosquito-free comfort. “A North American Venice,” as the historian Keith Carlson says.

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The survey crew drew their line just south of the lake. Sixty years later, an Abbotsford politician named Honest Abe declared the lake a public nuisance. Another politician named Honest John agreed. “It breeds mosquitoes,” they said. They were both farmers who must have imagined the wealth of the lake bottom. Rivers were diverted and dikes built. Twice they failed, but finally, after the biggest pump in the commonwealth pumped for a year, the lake was drained, leaving behind hundreds of hectares of soil. Plows broke ground in June, and the first hops were harvested in September. The kids who lived along the vanished shore weren’t the only ones who missed the lake that summer. Salmon couldn’t spawn. For years, huge flocks of ducks landed amid rows of potatoes. According to local lore, farmers plowing the marshy edges of their new fields more than a decade later still hit upon buried sturgeons, giant fish that were still breathing ever so slowly, grey ghosts in the residual murk.

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TS’QÓ:L S

Hope Hope sits at the top of the Fraser Valley, surrounded by the peaks of the Cascade and Coast Mountains. At this spot, after surging south through a steep-walled canyon, the Fraser River makes a wide bend to the west and enters the broad flood plain that extends 160 kilometres to the sea. In June 1808, the fur trader Simon Fraser canoed through here and stopped at a Stó:lo village, where he and his men were fed plenty of salmon, roots and raspberries. Fifty years later, when gold was discovered on the river above Hope, the village site became a busy transit point for miners and supplies. Today it is a quiet town of seven thousand people, beside the three highways that lead to the interior of B.C.

HOPE

housands of gold seekers hurried upriver. Sternwheelers billowed smoke as they struggled

against the current. Canoes went by—lots of canoes, some manned by Stó:lo guides. Every day more men arrived bent on digging up every gravel bar they could, with no thought to where the salmon would spawn. They even dug the land out from under Stó:lo homes. Stories were told of Stó:lo women raped, of children shot at for target practice. B.C. Governor James Douglas came to keep the peace, pointed north toward a mountain peak, swept his arm to the west and declared that land reserved for the people of the river. Today, a gas station stands where miners once bought supplies from the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Hope. Nearby a car dealership operates on the spot where a cluster of longhouses once stood.

The salmon-spawning grounds that lie upstream made this large village a popular place to camp. Traffic on the river was heaviest in the summer months, when Coast Salish families from as far away as Vancouver Island navigated cedar canoes to the steep-walled canyon, where the water was rich with fish and the hot winds could air-dry even the thickest sockeye within a week.

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Traffic through Hope is still heavy during the summer, only it’s not on the river any more but on the highways that converge here. The riverfront property that was promised to the Chawthil is lined with expensive houses behind cedar hedges. When a doctor dug his swimming pool he found remnants of the ancient village in his backyard. The only reserve in town is a campground on a sliver of riverbank down the street from the gas station. Here tourists sleep to the sound of rushing water. If they look closely at the far shore on a summer afternoon, they can still see Stó:lo families netting salmon at the same spots their families have fished for a very long time. The award-winning writer Sandra Shields and photographer David Campion have collaborated on many projects, fusing text and images in a unique style of storytelling. They are authors of two books, The Company of Others and Where Fire Speaks (winner of the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize), and many shorter works in Canadian Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Maclean’s, Adbusters, the Globe and Mail and other periodicals. An installation of the work featured here can be seen at the Chilliwack Museum (chilliwack.museum.bc.ca) until November 12, 2009. Visit Shields and Campion at fieldnotes.ca. To see their other Geist work, go to geist.com. “Memory and the Valley” is part of the Geist Memory Project and is made possible by assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 51

Better to kill in the desert than to die at the wall.

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Wall of Shame For centuries the Saharawis have called the desert home, but they don’t belong here. At least not on this side of the Wall.

Marcello Di Cintio

he Wall is built of sand and stone, but also of rumours, half-truths and blus-

ter. It is the world’s longest and oldest functioning security barrier, and it runs through disputed desert land between Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. Near Tindouf, on the Algerian side, lie several large refugee camps whose residents are Saharawis—the name means “people of the Sahara”—and they don’t belong here. At least not on this side of the Wall. They are from a patch of sand called the Western Sahara on most world maps, its borders drawn with tentative dotted lines. The Spanish called it the Spanish Sahara. The Moroccans call it their southern provinces. For centuries, Saharawi camel herders called it home. Now it is the “occupied zone.” The oldest among the refugees arrived in the camps during the 1980s, when the war with Morocco over the land was at its peak. These old men and women sit cross-legged and talk about the French-built fighter jets that doused the fleeing refugees with napalm. Most of the people in the camp, however, were born here. Few have ever seen the land on the other side of the Wall. The only home they’ve known is these tents and mud-brick shacks. There may be a hundred thousand refugees in the camps, but no one knows for sure. With a United Nations ceasefire holding and guns lowered, counting has become an act of war: each side exaggerates or understates their numbers. Even the Wall itself cannot be measured. No one knows exactly how long it is—some say it stretches for more than 2,700 kilometres—and no one knows how many Moroccan soldiers stand atop it, or how many land mines hide in the sand along its route. photo on previous page: saharawi refugee camp, algeria, marcello di cintio

Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 53

WE ARE SAHAR AWIS. WE SAVE OUR WAT E R FOR T E A .

The Saharawi refugee camps were established on land given by the Algerian government in a show of solidarity with the Saharawi cause and a thumbed-nose at Morocco. The Saharawis are grateful, but the land itself is not much of an offering. The few plants that survive on the Hamada du Drâa, a rocky limestone plateau, grow armed with thorns. Like most of the Sahara, this land is far from imagined desert scenes. There are no sudden green oases, no slow shift of curving dunes; only pallor and the whip of cold winter gales.

MOROCCO

Ber m

ALGERIA

Western Sahara

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Tindouf

MAURITANIA

The Saharawis themselves interrupt the paleness. The men walk through the camps in blue or white robes that crinkle like tissue, embroidered with gold thread and fragrant with tea steam and tobacco smoke. The women swaddle their bodies in bold reds and tie-dyed blues and greens and purples. The colourful fabrics keep the skin beneath cool and colourless. Pale skin, pale as the desert itself, is prized among the women here.

alainin Lakhal fetches me from the Protocol, the whitewashed complex where foreign visitors are housed. He is tall and thin, wears glasses and speaks in a whisper. He is the secretarygeneral of the Saharawi Journalists’ and Writers’ Union and speaks internationally at conferences about life in the camps and the Saharawi struggle for independence. Outside the peeling walls of the Protocol, the morning air is still cool and the sky sallow and overcast. Old shipping containers and wrecked cars lie on the sand. Wind tosses the trash while Red Cross trucks sit idle; the refugees could not survive without international aid. A half-dozen taxi drivers wait for fares inside their cars, but hardly anyone else is around. We enter a small shop that sells essentials: cooking oil, canned fish, detergent, tea, a bin of wrinkled potatoes, and a few bolts of cotton on the counter for lithams, the long turbans the Saharawi men wear. “Choose a colour,”

map: kate reid

Malainin says. I take olive green and the shopkeeper measures out a couple of metres. Malainin drapes one end of the cloth over my head, pulls it tightly over my chin and wraps my head with the rest. “You can pull it over your mouth when the wind blows,” he says, tugging on the flap of fabric beneath my chin. He buys a black litham for himself. “I am always losing my turbans.” Then Malainin asks me what I want to do in the camps. “I want to see the Wall,” I say. The world’s walls are supposed to be coming down. We speak of globalization, international markets and global villages. Barriers to trade keep falling, and it is now possible to communicate instantly from nearly anywhere in the world. But just as these virtual walls come down, real walls rise. In 2003, Israel built a cement barrier around the West Bank. The United States flirts with a wall along the Mexican frontier and turned Baghdad into a labyrinth of vertical concrete. India is building fences along its borders with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma. Economics and electronics may link us, but we are increasingly divided by bricks, barbed wire and steel.

alainin was an agitator for Saharawi independence and known to Moroccan police in El Aaiún, the largest city in the “occupied zone.” He endured two months in prison in 1992, then spent the next few years working as

a human rights activist collecting information on Moroccan abuses of the Saharawi people. The Moroccans arrested and interrogated Malainin many times. The situation in the region intensified. In the wake of mass arrests and the “disappearances” of known activists, Malainin was forced underground in his own hometown. The Saharawis had been battling the Moroccans for independence since the “Green March” of 1975, when King Hassan marched 350,000 volunteers into the Western Sahara and claimed the area for Morocco. The region was part of the Spanish Sahara at the time, but the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was dying in hospital and had little energy to resist. The U.N. insisted that the Saharawi people be allowed a referendum on sovereignty, but Generalissimo Franco signed a secret document that divided the Spanish Sahara territory between Morocco and Mauritania. The Sahawari resistance, known as the Polisario, declared war. They easily pushed the Mauritanians back to their border in the south. Then, although the Moroccan troops outgunned and vastly outnumbered the Saharawi soldiers, the Polisario troops circled and destroyed the Moroccan units one by one in daring guerrilla operations. The Moroccans were forced to change their tactics. With the help of France, Israel and the United States, Morocco devised a new strategy based on desert walls, or berms. Each time they

photo: moroccan soldiers on the wall, marcello di cintio

“YOU ARE A R E FU GE E . T H E Y HAVE A COUNTRY. YOU D O NOT.”

Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 55

ONCE YOU COU L D BU Y A CA ME L FOR A CU P OF D RY T E A L E AV E S

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gained a swath of territory on the eastern front, they built a wall to secure it. By the time the U.N. brokered a ceasefire in 1991, six walls had been built. They extend eastward like ripples in a pond, and their combined length stretches to over seven thousand kilometres, longer than the Great Wall of China. Only the last wall, the longest wall, is still manned by Moroccan troops and watched over by U.N. peacekeepers. It was completed in 1987 and it runs north-south along the Algerian side and east-west along the border with Mauritania. The Saharawis and their sympathizers call it the Wall of Shame. And in the summer of 2000, after eleven months in hiding, Malainin decided to cross over it. At the time, he couldn’t even see his parents for fear of implicating them: activists leave a stain of suspicion on everyone they touch. He and his brother Salama, and another activist named Massoud, decided to escape to the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria. The three men chose to cross over the Wall on the Mauritanian side. They had heard there were fewer land mines buried in the south. Malainin and Salama met with their father the night before they left their homes in El Aaiún. It was a serene meeting. “Be good men,” their father said. “And follow the Milky Way. In the summer it will always lead you south. Remember, too, that we are Saharawis. It is better for us to die in the desert than in a Moroccan prison.” He gave his sons two hunting knives in case they needed to kill someone. Massoud carried a teapot and some loose black tea. Malainin and his brother held the knives. They each brought along a single bottle of water and their derahs, the long slit-sided tunic of the Saharawis. Though they were all heavy smokers—Malainin smoked three packs a day at the time—no one brought cigarettes. They only carried essentials. The men hired a smuggler to drive them within twenty kilometres of the berm. They would walk the rest of the way in a few hours, wait for dark, then take their chances crossing the mine field to climb the Wall. They planned to reach Nouadhibou, a city on the Mauritanian

coast, before noon the following day. The men could rest with friends in Nouadhibou before making their way across the Algerian border and into the camps. Malainin knew they could cover the twenty-kilometre distance in a little more than four hours. After five hours they had not reached the berm, and after eight hours they knew something was wrong. They kept walking. The sun set, and the men followed the Milky Way south just as their father had instructed, but they still didn’t reach the Wall. The sun rose. They walked through the morning and into the heat of midday. In spite of the scorch of the August desert, the men never drank their water. “We are Saharawis,” Malainin says. “We save our water for tea.” The men learned later that their smuggler was a poor judge of distance. He had dropped them over a hundred kilometres from the berm, and it wasn’t until the evening of the second day that the men spotted it on the horizon. They had intended to save the tea until they crossed over the Wall, then drink it as a sort of celebration. But reaching the Wall after their thirtysix-hour march was reason enough to rejoice. They hid behind a rock, built a small fire and drank tea. The men waited until dark to cross the mine field. They unwrapped their turbans and each man held onto an end of the cloth so they were all a turban’s length apart. If there was a problem, they could communicate with each other by tugging on the fabric. And if one of them stepped on a mine, the other two would be far enough away to survive the explosion. They were a few metres from the Wall when they saw the soldier. Half his face flashed into view in a spark of orange light from his cigarette lighter. Linked by strips of black cotton, Malainin and his brother slid the knives from their sheaths and stepped quickly across the sand. There was no moonlight to glint off the blades and betray them. Ahead of them, somewhere in the blackness, a soldier smoked. Better to die in the desert than in a Moroccan prison. Better to kill in the desert than to die at the Wall.

alainin is a poet. He writes verses about jasmine buds, doves, and hearts that bleed and blush: She came to me with memories of the feel of sand Of her beauty when we made the desert our bed. Do you remember the colour of my eyes when the moon is full? Do you remember the poems You sang for our parting on those sleepless nights? It is difficult to imagine Malainin a murderer. It is difficult, too, to imagine the Moroccan prison cell where he was forced to stand for two days, then was beaten and tortured with electric shocks for eighteen days more. Still, I ask him if he really was ready to kill. “I was ready to walk across a mine field,” he says. Nobody died that night. By the time the men reached the spot where they had seen the lighter flash, the soldier had moved along. The lingering scent of cigarette was too faint to follow. “We were all lucky,” Malainin tells me. “We didn’t have to kill anyone, and he didn’t have to die.” The nearest part of the berm is a metre-high sand wall lined with flat rocks. It is designed to stop vehicles rather than people, and the three men climbed over easily. Then they crossed a half-kilometre of no man’s land to a second wall, this one about three metres high. Once over this second wall the men were safe, but they did not stop moving until they reached the railway that links Mauritania’s iron ore mines in the north to the port at Nouadhibou. They sat on the side of the tracks, put on their derahs and brewed tea again, this time in true celebration. They had made it. They found a transport truck mired in soft sand on the other side of the rail line. The driver offered to take them to Nouadhibou if they helped him. It took two days for the men to unload the truck, dig it out of the sand, and reload it. When the men reached Nouadhibou, Malainin and his brother gave the driver the knives. “We didn’t need them any more.”

bdulahe, a friend of Malainin, takes me to a hill overlooking February 27 camp, named for

the day the Polisario declared the formation of “YOU CA NNOT the Saharawi “nation.” From here we can see the ASK HE R T HAT,” tents rising between the houses like white sailboats on a sand sea. In Hassiniya, the Saharawi A B D U L A H E SAYS. language, the word for “tent” is the same word as “SHE IS A MOT HER.” for “family.” Abdulahe points to the tent where he was born. “When I travel from here I miss the tent,” he tells me. “The tent makes me feel my roots. My nation. I was born in a tent. Grew up in a tent. You know, it means a lot to me.” When Abdulahe was a boy, his parents sent him to a boarding school in Algiers; many of the refugees study “abroad,” some as far afield as Spain and Cuba. “I remember my mother telling me I was a refugee, but I never knew what that meant until I went to Algiers,” Abdulahe says. “The Algerian students had money. They had sweets and toys and bicycles. The Saharawi students at the school had nothing. Not even a house to live in. When I came back to the camps in the summer I asked my mother why the boys in Algiers had so many things that we did not have, and why they lived in houses and I lived in a tent. My mother told me, ‘It is because you are a refugee. They have a country. You do not.’” We descend the hill and take lunch in the tent of one of his relatives. The tent is cool and spacious, with a few blankets piled in one corner and a sewing machine in another. A wire runs from a television to a solar battery outside. Two cell phones are strapped to the central tent pole, which acts as an antenna and improves the reception. Inside the tent we are welcomed by three young women, Abdulahe’s cousins. One lays out a blanket for me to sit on. Another dribbles lemon-scented perfume on my head by way of greeting. The third fetches a charcoal brazier, which she fans with a flattened milk carton, and brews tea. Abdulahe’s mother, whose face is as round and inviting as ripe fruit, asks me if I find the desert too hot. “It is snowing in Canada right now,” I say. “I like the heat.” She points to the door flap of the tent where the noon light pours in and asks if I would rather sit in the sunbeam. Abdulahe’s uncle Mohammed joins us and we all eat from the same platter of lamb couscous and curried camel kebabs. My hosts push the Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 57

SA L E K L AU GHS AT ME FOR BE ING AFR A ID OF L A ND MINE S

best morsels of lamb over to me. They fill my glass of apple Fanta before it is finished, and when I mention how much I like the camel, the rest of the kebabs are saved for me. There is nothing separating the visitor from the Saharawis. There are no social protocols to meander through, and it takes no time to earn their trust. Every family I visit is the same. I need only appear and their world opens to me. The moment I sit, a glass of tea is placed before me and a pillow comes for my head. Laughter is immediate. I am invited to rest, to eat, to sleep. There will be bread in the morning. Sterilized milk from a box. A can of berry jam. These rations come from international donors, and they are precious. After we eat, Abdulahe, Mohammed and I stretch out on the blankets while one of Abdulahe’s cousins brews more tea in the corner. Mohammed tells us about fighting the Moroccans as a Polisario soldier in the 1970s, when the war was at its fiercest. I turn to one of the cousins. She is in her early twenties and was born in the camps. She has never seen the land her father fought for. “What do you think the Western Sahara is like?” I ask. She turns her eyes upward. “El Aaiún is very pretty,” she says. “There are real streets and buildings. Lots of cars. The ocean is nearby, and it is a huge distance filled with water. You can swim in it, and there are fish. And it can rain there for days.”

n the Saharawi tradition, tea is a trinity. The tea ceremony is a refrain of three holy essentials, each beginning with the Arabic letter jim. Jama’a is the gathering. To drink tea alone is to waste it. J’jar is slowness. Proper tea cannot be brewed in haste. Jmar is the charcoal. Tea demands burning and boiling. At another house, I don’t know whose, in Auserd camp, Abdulahe and I take tea with Kamal, his mother Damaha, and a cast of Abdulahe’s relatives who come in and out of the room at random. A considerable jama’a. Kamal splashes a stream of hot tea into a row of glasses and tells me about the Scottish trader who first

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brought tea to the Sahara in the nineteenth century, and how you could once buy a camel for a cup of dry leaves. Then he tells me about his mother. Damaha was already a fighter before the Wall. She was a regular face among the protesters in the town of Tan Tan who agitated against the Spanish colonizers in the years before 1975. Damaha had little education, but the leaders of the resistance tutored and inspired her. By the time the Moroccans replaced the Spanish as the region’s occupiers, Damaha had given birth to Kamal and divorced her husband. Her home became a Polisario safe house, where Damaha hosted activists to discuss strategy and raise money. “Everybody gave what they could,” she says, eager to add to her son’s account. “I know one woman who stole her husband’s revolver to give to the soldiers.” One morning, in the winter of 1978, Damaha was at home, hosting a monthly committee meeting, when an out-of-breath Polisario official pounded on the door. “There will be a battle today. Our soldiers are ready to attack Tan Tan. Be ready to assist the soldiers with whatever they need.” The soldiers attacked Moroccan army positions at midday. They held the town for four hours, during which time they released prisoners from the jails. The streets were in a panic. Three Land Rovers drove up to Damaha’s house in the early afternoon. Polisario soldiers came out. “It is no longer safe here. We are collecting all the activists and taking them to the refugee camps.” Damaha had known this day would come; Saharawi activists in the Western Sahara may cling to hope but not illusions. She already had a bag packed. But Kamal was not home. He had gone to play with his cousin that morning and had not returned. She called for him but he didn’t answer. There was no time to look for him. She said a prayer that Kamal would find his way to his father’s house, boarded the Land Rover and escaped to the camps. Almost a year passed before Damaha heard that Kamal was alive and safe. “It was October 14th,” she says. The date hangs at the front of her memory. Twenty more years passed before

Damaha actually saw her son again. They reunited in the camps in 2001. I want to ask her how she could leave her child behind in a city at war, but Abdulahe won’t translate this question for me. “You cannot ask her that,” he says. “She is a mother.”

ur driver remembers to stop for cigarettes. And he stops for camel meat, which he buys out of a white van holding a butcher and two swinging carcasses. He remembers his cigarette lighter just in time. But he forgets to bring a functioning jack. When a tire blows out he spends an hour digging a hole around the offending wheel to remove and replace it. We drive to a Polisario border-control post, where we pick up a soldier to act as our military escort. He wears army fatigues and plastic sandals but has no gun. I’m finally going to the Wall. We stop near some thorny bushes about three hundred metres from the berm. This is much closer than I predicted. Salek walks toward the Wall and waves me to follow him. “What about the land mines?” I ask. “The mines start fifty metres from the Wall. We are safe to walk a little farther.” Many of the decades-old anti-personnel mines planted near the berm that continue to kill Saharawi civilians and livestock were made in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, countries that don’t exist any more because their composite states have since gained independence. It is a callous irony. I follow Salek, walking in his footsteps and staring at the ground in front of me. Salek laughs at me for being afraid. I can’t see any mines, but I find the perforated end of a machine gun muzzle in the sand. The detritus of war. Salek warns me not to touch it. For the Saharawis, the berm defines their struggle and keeps them from going home. It is a prison wall. But the Wall itself is not impressive. I expected towers and barbed wire and steel. I expected hard edges. Instead it is built with the same rocks and sand as the surrounding desert. It could have grown out of the hamada itself. A massive version of the sand ripples made by the wind, more natural than sinister.

And perhaps, after so long, the berm is an organic thing. Though they may dream of the sea, an entire generation knows no other boundary than this. The Wall has evolved from a military barrier into a symbol of Saharawi identity. It is the curved spine of a nation that doesn’t exist. Two Moroccan soldiers stand on top of the berm. I can see them clearly with the zoom lens on my camera. Both are dressed in drab army fatigues and are clean-shaven. One wears an olive green cap, the other a helmet. They are smoking cigarettes and watching us. A radio stands between them in case we do anything worth reporting, and they must be happy we showed up. At least they have something besides the emptiness to look at for a little while. A small belt of rusted machine gun shells hangs on a thorn bush near our camp like a macabre Christmas decoration. Our driver snaps a few branches from the bush to build a fire and our soldier brews tea. The camel meat gets hacked apart with the driver’s knife and is laid on the embers next to the teapot. Salek and I make tuna sandwiches and eat green olives while the camel roasts. We drink tea, wave flies away from the charring meat and stare at the Moroccans staring at us. Our driver stands up and calls out to them, sarcastically inviting them for tea. Someone told me that after independence, whenever it may come, the Saharawis would keep the Wall as a souvenir. But I wonder how quickly the desert will reclaim this land. Winter floods, like the one in 2006 that destroyed much of Smara camp, could melt away the sand berm in a few seasons. Sandstorms would grind down what is left. The hamada will renew itself. The desert will forget the Wall.

SOME ONE TOL D M E T H AT A F T E R IND E PE ND E NCE , THE SAHAR AWIS WOU L D K E E P T H E WA L L AS A SOU VE NIR

Marcello Di Cintio, writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary, is the author of Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into the Heart of Iran (Knopf Canada), Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa (Insomniac Press) and other works about his travels in Africa, India and the Middle East. “Wall of Shame” won the 2009 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award. Di Cintio’s most recent piece in Geist was “Burying a Chief” (No. 46). Visit marcellodicintio.blogspot.com.

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The Last Note Rhonda Waterfall

hen Petra got home from work, she found a Post-It Note in her date book. It said, Kill David. David was in the bedroom where he had just discovered a Post-It Note stuck in the novel he was reading. It said, Kill Petra. So when Petra entered the bedroom with a gun in her hand she found David holding a gun aimed at her. Petra remembered how long it had taken them to find the right shade of taupe for the bedPage 60 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

room walls. David noticed that Petra’s hair was lighter and straighter than usual. He wondered if she had been to the salon. They pulled the triggers at the same time and both fell dead on the new carpet. David was at the post office when he found the Post-It Note that told him to crash his car. His palms were moist. He went out to the parking lot and ran his fingers over the red paint of photo: WE WERE BLIND (328/365), katherine elizabeth

They pulled the triggers at the same time

the sports car he had bought in his early twenties. He revved the engine harder than usual and then drove out of the parking lot. The tires spun and sent threads of rubber and stones into the air. The palms of his hands throbbed against the steering wheel. He picked up speed and twisted the wheel. The car slid sideways. He pushed harder on the gas. Trees and houses blurred. He went through a stop sign and pumped the air with his fist. He had never felt so alive. The tires left the pavement and spun on gravel. The car hit a curb and lifted up into the air. I’m flying, David thought. The car crashed into a row of trees, the hood buckled, windshield glass shattered. David told the police that a dog had run out in front of him. He struggled to hide his delight. Petra wiped down her desk and phone with disinfectant and then she blew out the keyboard with canned air. She put on her coat and opened her date book. One Post-It Note said, Pick up alfredo sauce and the other said, Have sex with a stranger. She wondered if David might have written the second one. She went down the street to a bar and ordered a pear cider. A gentleman in a charcoal suit sat at a table by himself. Petra picked up her drink and joined him. She stuck her Post-It Note to his hand and explained that this was what she had to do today. He dropped a fifty on the table and took her hand. On Saturday Petra took a Post-It Note from the fridge that said, Do something new. She sat down at the kitchen table, flipped through the newspaper, and sipped her coffee. Something new, she thought, what more is there? In the travel section there were deals to Nepal and Barbados, but she had gone to both those places last year. There were cheap flights to Germany, but she was tired of countries where they didn’t

speak English. There were no movies she wanted to see in the entertainment section, and besides, she didn’t think that seeing a movie was anything new. She found an ad for Chinese watercolour painting lessons and dialled the number and signed up. She went into the den where David had most of the wall torn down and told him about the painting class. That is new, he said. David’s Saturday Post-It Note said, Home renovation. He checked the cupboards in the kitchen for faulty hinges, he pulled drawers out and slid them back in. He went out onto the deck and stepped on boards, but none of them were in need of repair. He stopped at the wall in the den and asked Petra what she would think if the wall were two inches to the left, would it open up a whole new space? Petra agreed that moving the wall would change the room dramatically. David took out his toolbox and started to hammer away at the drywall, relieved that he now had a task. Each morning Petra and David checked the Post-It Notes stuck to the fridge. They were divided into three categories: tasks for David, tasks for Petra, and activities and tasks for the weekend. And so they would take Post-It Notes that said things like Pick up salad fixings or Drop off dry cleaning and place them into their date books. As the tasks were completed they would crumple up the small rectangles of paper and toss them away. Petra and David liked to know what had to be done. Rhonda Waterfall studied creative writing with the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. This story is from her short-story collection, The Only Thing I Have, published this fall by Arsenal Pulp Press. Read more of her Geist work at geist.com/author/waterfall -rhonda. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 61

McPoems Tongue-burning pies and late-night drive-thrus

Billeh Nickerson

Drive-Thru

The Lottery

ame guy at 7 a.m. for breakfast, a little before noon for lunch, once again while you work overtime and he orders dinner. Some days he drives through a fourth time for dessert, pretends he doesn’t know you, you don’t know him.

Halloween

drunk clown demands free French fries tells you to hurry the hell up and don’t forget the ketchup. Superman complains his burger is cold, Luke Skywalker asks for more salt. After her third hot fudge sundae you realize Wonder Woman’s bulletproof bracelets can’t protect her from everything.

100 Cheeseburgers

n elderly man you recognize as someone who moves slowly and pays for everything with change scrounged from his pockets surprises you when he pulls out a wad of bills and orders 100 cheeseburgers. You get him to repeat himself a couple of times, 100 cheeseburgers, 100 cheeseburgers he says, tells you he intends to freeze them, they’ll get him through the winter, no need for pesky walks on cold days, no danger of slipping and breaking a hip. 100 cheeseburgers will keep me going for a little while longer, at least, I don’t need much.

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t starts off with the woman who you predict—correctly— will order a garden salad and diet coke though you also know she’ll ask for two packets of the super fattening dressing. All that day you know who’ll order fish burgers, chicken nuggets, hamburgers with or without the cheese. A co-worker begs you to concentrate on that week’s lottery numbers, asks you to do it for his newborn daughter, but no matter how hard you focus, you can only tell that in a few moments he’ll want a strawberry shake.

Local Attraction

hen the tour group of non-English speakers arrives you find yourself acting out the orders, flapping your arms for chicken, mooing for every burger, re-enacting an epic struggle with a fishing pole whenever someone orders a filet. For those few minutes you are the centre of the universe, more important than French fries, more important than mascots, extra napkins, multiple dipping sauces. For the first time in your life you understand what it’s like to be a celebrity, a local attraction, the most photographed thing in the room.

Billeh Nickerson is a frequent Geist contributor who divides his year between Vancouver and Toronto. These poems are excerpted from his new book, McPoems, published this fall by Arsenal Pulp Press. Read more of his Geist work at geist.com/author/nickerson-billeh.

COMMENT

Dante in Guantánamo When Dante tortures the sinners, Virgil says nothing

Alberto Manguel

few months ago, U.S. President Barack Obama took the controversial decision to release documents concerning interrogation practices in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib. At the same time, he decided not to order the investigation of the men and women involved in carrying out those practices. The issue seemed to me serious enough to draw loud and intelligent worldwide protest, but after a few voices were raised here and there against his decision (and also for it), the question seems to have faded away. I believe it needs to be raised again. In the past few decades, after the French war against Algerian independence and the military dictatorship in Argentina, for instance, I’ve heard the practice of torture being justified “under certain circumstances” or criticized so mildly that the question remained ignored and unanswered, and I believe the decision to forgo the trial of the Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib torturers constitutes a serious and troubling precedent that will be invoked in future cases. Discussing the matter with a friend, I was reminded of a much earlier instance in which, as occurred in the States, a legal system was used to justify torture and the torturer was not condemned for his actions. It occurs almost at the end of Dante’s descent into hell, in Canto xxxii of his Commedia. After following Virgil down through the various infernal circles, Dante reaches the frozen lake where the souls of traitors are trapped up to their necks image: ann noël

in ice. Among the dreadful heads that shout and curse, Dante thinks he recognizes one, a certain Bocca degli Abati, who had betrayed his party and taken up arms on the side of the enemy. Dante asks the bowed head to tell him his name and, as has been his custom throughout the magical journey, promises to bring the sinner posthumous fame by writing about him when he

returns to Earth. Bocca answers that he wishes for the exact opposite, and tells Dante to get lost. Furious at the insult, Dante grabs Bocca by the scruff of the neck, threatening to tear out every hair on his head if he doesn’t give his name. “So snatch me bald,” Bocca taunts (in Deborah Digges’s translation). “Go on. I swear/ I will not tell you my name, nor show you/ my face. Go on. Pound my head a thousand times.” Dante then pulls “yet another fistful,” making the sinner howl in pain. All the while,

Virgil, Dante’s heavenly appointed guide, remains silent. Virgil’s silence can be read as approval. Several circles earlier, in Canto viii, as both poets are ferried across the River Styx, one of the souls condemned for the sin of wrath rises from the filthy waters, and as usual Dante asks him who he is. The soul doesn’t give his name and says that he is merely one who weeps, for which Dante, unmoved, curses him horribly. Delighted, Virgil takes Dante in his arms and fulsomely praises his ward with words used by Saint Luke to praise Christ. Dante, taking advantage of Virgil’s encouragement, says that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to see the sinner plunged back into the ghastly swill. Virgil agrees, and the episode ends with Dante giving thanks to God for granting his wish. Over the centuries, commentators have tried to justify Dante’s actions as instances of “noble indignation” or “just anger,” not a sin like wrath (as one of Dante’s intellectual masters, St. Thomas Aquinas, maintained) but the virtue of being roused by the right cause. The problem resides in the reading of “right.” In the case of Dante, “right” refers to his understanding of the unquestionable justice of God: to feel compassion for the damned is “wrong” because it means setting oneself against God’s imponderable will. Only three cantos earlier, Dante was able to faint with pity when the soul of Francesca, condemned to whirl forever in the wind that punishes the lustful, tells him her sad story. But now, advanced in his progress through hell, he is less of a sentimentalist and more of a believer in the higher authority. According to Dante’s faith, the legal system decreed by God cannot be mistaken or wicked; therefore, whatever it determines must be just, even if the Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 63

COMMENT

human mind cannot comprehend its validity. Dante’s deliberate act of inflicting pain on the prisoner tortured in the ice, and his prurient desire to see the other prisoner tortured in the mire, must be understood (these critics say) as humble obedience to God’s law and acceptance of superior judgement. A similar argument is put forward today by those arguing against the investigation and prosecution of the torturers. And yet, as almost any reader of Dante will admit, however cogent the theological arguments may be, these infernal passages leave a very bad taste in the mouth. Perhaps the reason is that if Dante’s justification lies in the nature of divine will, then instead of Dante’s actions being redeemed by faith, faith is undermined by Dante’s actions. In much the same way, the implicit condoning of torturers, merely because their abusive acts took place in the unchangeable past and under the superior judgement and law of another administration, instead of encouraging faith in the present administration’s politics, undermines that faith and those politics. Worse still: left unchallenged, the old excuse “I merely obeyed orders,” tacitly accepted by the Obama administration, will acquire new prestige and serve as precedent for future exculpations. Gilbert Keith Chesterton once observed that “clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.” The same can be said for a society that refuses, under any circumstances whatsoever, to investigate and condemn the brutality of torturers. Alberto Manguel is the author of hundreds of works, most recently the novel All Men are Liars and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography. To read more of his Geist work and to comment on this piece, go to geist.com/ author/manguel-alberto. Page 64 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

Grey Matters It all started with a zesty little book about getting old

Mary Schendlinger

arly in 2008, Geist received a review copy of Somewhere Towards the End (Granta), Diana Athill’s memoir about getting old. She was hitting her nineties and I was hitting my sixties and we are both editors, so I took the book home and read it right away. A few years ago I had devoured and loved Stet (2000), Athill’s account of her life editing books, not just because good stories about editing are so hard to find but because Athill’s writing is such a satisfying blend of tasteful and scrappy. In Somewhere Towards the End, Athill looks back from a greater distance. Her professional life is well behind her now, and although it still informs her spirit, she meditates on other matters: the prospect of giving up her car, the differences between religion and faith, her memories of her mother’s deathbed and her thoughts about her own, and the pleasures of gardening, drawing, reading and writing. In the cover photo she looks smooth and wise and a bit mischievous, and she wears the chunkiest, most in-your-face necklace I’ve ever seen (in an author photo, anyway). This is an elegant, eccentric, feisty woman (I won’t say “spry,” which she isn’t and which only comes up in condescending descriptions of old people) who comes alive on the page through her choice of what details to report, in what words, in what order—in other words, through good writing. Prose written by editors (and by writers who don’t argue with their editors) is often a bit too correct, too controlled, and Athill’s is no exception. But that is a minor quibble—the book is smart, funny and joyous. It took

me a year and a half to begin writing about it, though, because every other bit of reading that came to hand—print or digital, new or archived—seemed connected, and I felt compelled to work it all in. For instance, an article in the Guardian on Fay Weldon, who also happens to be an old nonconformist woman writer, and her latest book, What Makes Women Happy, carried the headline “Lie Back and Think of Jesus,” and an antiflattering portrait of Weldon and implied that after forty years of writing novels, essays, stories and screenplays encouraging women to be angry, Weldon was now flip-flopping and advising us to be good girls. Could this be true? Easy enough to find out—the library’s single copy sat undisturbed on the shelf. Yes, she does tell women to be good, but good as in generous, not good as in doormat. Happiness is not what you think; nature is not your friend; and more along those lines. Whew! For a minute there, I was afraid Fay had gone over to the other side. Then I came across an interview from a few years ago with Grace Paley (1922–2007), who wrote The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and other brilliant and subversive short narratives. Poets & Writers (pw.org) asked Paley why it had taken twenty or thirty years to find a way to tell some of the stories, and she said, “Well, that’s just me. I’m willing to let it go until it happens.” Athill and Somewhere Towards the End won the Costa Prize for Biography in early 2009—not long before Margaret

COMMENT

Drabble, age sixty-nine, announced that she would write no more novels. What?! Why not? “The older I get, the more I find myself repeating things,” she said to the Telegraph. Her readers over fifty understand this, but we don’t mind—if we even notice. This bit of news prompted me to reread the press on Doris Lessing, from fall 2007 when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, including her very moving acceptance lecture (nobelprize.org) about people who do not have books. And an article I saw a few years ago about Alice Walker, who turned sixty and travelled to Korea, and people there told her that age sixty is “eggy, which means one becomes like a baby, or child, again.” And a piece on Joy Kogawa, who wrote Obasan, the novel that kick-started the Japanese Canadian redress movement in the 1980s, and who at age seventy-four is working on a new memoir, Gently to Nagasaki. And a cbc Radio One interview with Mavis Gallant, who published Going Ashore: The Uncollected Stories at age eighty-six. And a new story by Alice Munro, who won the Man Booker Prize at seventy-seven—such good news that I could almost forgive the judges, who said (however obliquely) that Munro is a great writer even though she isn’t a novelist. At the end of April I opened my mailbox and out came the May issue of Literary Review of Canada, with the cover line “The Grey Wave?” and an article by Wayne Grady on The Social Behavior of Older Animals by Anne Innis Dagg. Why do old animals live on, once they are finished reproducing? Because they are rich repositories of cultural knowledge: where to find the best food and water, for example, and how to make decent art. Elephant herds that include old- timers have more reproductive success and better mental

health. (One wonders how this set of data was measured, but anyway . . .) My great big thematic convergence is over now. It started with the Athill book, it gathered steam in the months surrounding my sixtieth birthday, and it was over by last summer, when I walked along a street in London, noticed that it was called Old Broad Street and had a good belly laugh. In print and podcast, Diana Athill is a fine advertisement for becoming venerable. She seems genuinely calm and cheerful about the effects of aging, and she still radiates supreme generosity of spirit. She worries less and less about what people think of her. She confesses that she is lazy and given to the “tribal smugness” of the white middle class, but on the whole she has no regrets. She rather likes the uninvited but salubrious slower pace of old age, and the fuller enjoyment of everyday things. Here’s how Penelope Lively put it in “Corruption,” a short story she wrote at age fifty-one: “Both Richard and Marjorie had noted how the satisfactions of life have a tendency to gain intensity with advancing years. ‘The world gets more beautiful,’ Marjorie had once said, ‘not less so. Fun is even more fun. Music is Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 65

more musical . . . One hadn’t reckoned with that.’ ” A younger person might have sat down and written up a concise evaluation of Somewhere Towards the End, with a few succulent examples, in early 2008 when it first came out in Canada, and the piece might have been published in time to join the wave of publicity that turns into book sales. But for me, here in late middle age, nothing is short and everything is connected—a condition that I think would be understood by Diana Athill, who in this (sort of) new book thinks out loud, backs up, plunges ahead and generally makes old people look smart and generous and complicated and interesting. Mary Schendlinger is Senior Editor at Geist and the author of short and long non-fiction, including the children’s book Prepare To Be Amazed: The Geniuses of Modern Magic. She also teaches writing and publishing courses at UBC and SFU.

COMMENT

Don’t Support Our Troops Catchy slogans can shut down public debate before it starts

Stephen Henighan

wo summers ago, while lying on the grass at a music festival in southern Ontario, I heard the American folkfeminist icon Ani DiFranco sing a song that contained the line, “And I can’t support the troops . . .” The Canadian crowd burst into a roar that nearly drowned out the rest of the song. Afterwards, DiFranco commented that no other audience had responded positively to this line. When she sang the song in the United States, even progressive audiences became uncomfortable or hostile at the confession of her inability to “support the troops.” DiFranco concluded her remarks with laudatory comments about Canada that elicited another roar. In the heat of the moment, it was easy to accept the ecstatic response as evidence of Canadian enlightenment. In retro-

Page 66 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

spect, it seems more like a sign of Canadian desperation. Since 2006, when the mandate of the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan was changed to focus on a combat role based in Kandahar, a majority of Canadians have opposed our military presence there. The proportion of those opposed has ranged from 54 to 65 percent, depending on how the question is asked and which organization is doing the polling; when Canadians are asked whether the mission should be extended, the proportion of those opposed often rises to over 80 percent. My purpose here is not to rehearse the arguments against or for Canadian participation in the invasion of Afghanistan, but to explore how language has been manipulated to exclude the view of the majority of the population from the public agenda. It is a symptom of the disintegrating

democratic structures of a society in which fewer and fewer people vote that no extended public debate on this issue has occurred. Public debate requires visible proponents of contending points of view, and on the question of Afghanistan, no prominent Canadian has advocated the view held by the majority. The leader of the opposition, whose role is to provide alternatives to government policies, has failed to endorse the majority opinion for reasons that stem from both political strategy and personal ideology. The leader of the ndp says little on the subject. Neither of our two national newspapers, both broadly conservative in orientation, represents the views of most citizens. (This is one reason why reading newspapers, like voting, is an activity that fewer and fewer people— particularly young people—consider worth their time.) Television news, geared to covering “breaking stories,” inculcates passivity by leaping from one frenzied event to the next without stopping to ponder deeper questions, such as why young Canadians in uniform are in Afghanistan. Internet users, to a large extent, ghettoize themselves in sites visited by co-religionists rather than engaging with their fellow citizens. The withdrawal of large sectors of the populace from civic forums, such as formal politics or daily newspapers, diminishes the possibility of the kind of public discussion in which the majority view might not only be acknowledged as such, but might influence government policy. No wonder the crowd at the music festival howled when they heard DiFranco singing the truth that dares not speak its name. DiFranco went to the heart of the matter by addressing the pernicious slogan Support Our Troops. This mantra is a perfect illustration of how language is used by twenty-first-century governments and their allies to stifle public debates before they can occur. The

image: detail from JAID-E-MAIWAND IN 2003, christopher grabowski. see full image at geist.com/64/great-game

COMMENT

prime example of this, and arguably the keyword to our era, is terrorist, which guarantees a predetermined outcome to any conversation in which it appears. The moment this word is uttered, analysis is discarded, most policies in the habitual democratic repertoire are dismissed as impractical, and only authoritarian, often anti-democratic solutions appear credible. In a public culture swayed by sound bites, authority grows less from the old politician’s dictum of “definition and repetition” of one’s policies than from popularizing verbal riffs that preclude the expression of opposing views. People who choose not to vote, one might argue, may simply be understanding that we live in a political culture that is incipiently authoritarian, in which many pivotal debates are ruled out of order by our political class and those who fund their campaigns. Support Our Troops is the most obvious, and odious, example of the strategies employed to achieve this goal. Bumper stickers bearing this slogan, handed out by the Royal Canadian Legion and similar organizations, are everywhere. It’s almost impossible, except in Quebec, to enter a Canadian parking lot without spotting them. The sentiment expressed by the slogan is patriotic: patriotism, Samuel Johnson observed, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. A policy such as sending Canadian troops to fight in Afghanistan, which will not withstand informed, rational debate, has no other refuge. Unable to win a battle for the mind, it must play on the chords of the heart. Merely murmuring the words Support Our Troops makes questions about policy dissolve into threnodies of bagpipe music, sobbing mothers and waving flags. Above all, the slogan is coercive, implying that anyone who fails to rally to the cause is betraying brave young people who face great danger, not questioning the eminently safe, well-paid politicians who

put the young people in harm’s way. These young people are “ours”: in metaphorical terms, therefore, anyone who denies an identification with the policy that placed them in Kandahar Province is abandoning the offspring of the nation. Anyone who tries to argue policy finds that rational debate has been disabled, and that promoting its renewal has become tantamount to treason. In this way, democracy is curtailed and the majority opinion is suppressed by jingoistic cant. If the structures of our political system and media are no longer conducive to democratic debate, we must enter the sound-bite sandbox to try to restore this enfeebled conversation. By parrying one slogan with another, one may hope to set off an interplay of language capable of developing into a comprehensive discussion. The best example I’ve seen of challenging the bumper-sticker slogan was a poster I glimpsed in a shop window in Regina that read: Support Our Troops! Bring Them Home! Myriad related possibilities suggest themselves. My own favourite is: My Canada Doesn’t Include Kandahar. A bumper-sticker counterattack is not, initially, a very satisfying response to such an urgent issue; but it could kindle a debate that has the potential to expand into a wider conversation that would allow the majority of Canadians who oppose our participation in the invasion of Afghanistan to articulate this view in public. In order to win back our democratic culture, we must subject to unsparing scrutiny the slogans that stifle public debate. The first step is not to support our troops. Stephen Henighan is the author of A Grave in the Air (Thistledown, 2007) and A Report on the Afterlife of Culture (Biblioasis, 2008). To read more of his Geist work and to comment on this piece, go to geist.com/author/ henighan-stephen. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 67

ENDNOTES

Reviews, comments, curiosa

War of Independence

Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917–1918 (Viking Canada). In these works,

World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what a cost

Cook presents a detailed account of Canada’s infantry from the creation of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (later the Canadian Corps) in 1914 to the armistice in November 1918. Even for someone such as myself, who is usually uninterested in mili-

Daniel Francis

tary history, the books are a stunning

he night before going into battle on the Somme in September 1916, Hart

Leech, a young subaltern from Winnipeg, wrote a letter to his mother. “I am ‘going over the parapet’,” he told her, “and the chances of a ‘sub’ getting back alive are about nix.” Perhaps thinking that he had allowed himself to be too frank, Leech did not send the letter. Instead he tucked it into his paybook, and the next day he became one of the 60,661 Canadians killed in the war. In the aftermath of the battle, a British officer who had come forward into the line found Leech’s body and, preparing to bury it, searched the dead man’s pockets. He took the letter, planning to mail it at the first opportunity. But he was wounded the next day and his belongings were sent home to England. Twelve years passed before he found the crumpled scrap of paper and mailed it to Hart Leech’s family in Winnipeg. One can only imagine how they felt upon receiving such a message from the past. Stories of the so-called Great War are a bit like Hart Leech’s letter to his mother. They arrive belatedly and stir up all sorts of

conflicting emotions and opinions. At the time it was fought, the war was seen as a great crusade to preserve civilization from the barbarity of “the Hun.” Then, as events faded into the past, a reaction set in. Instead of heroism in a noble cause, the war seemed more like an inglorious waste of a generation of young men led to the slaughter by callous generals and calculating politicians. More recently the revisionist wheel has taken another turn and the war seems almost heroic again, not in its motivations or its conduct but in the sacrifice made by the young men and women who fought in it. Talbot Papineau, a charismatic young officer from Quebec who died at Passchendaele, once explained in a letter to his mother why he chose to return to his regiment on the front lines rather than remaining safely at a desk job in London. “Better to share in the making of history than in the writing of it,” he wrote. Most of us understand what Papineau meant, but he was wrong. Events were made by the soldiers, but history is made by historians. One of them is Tim Cook, First World War historian of the Canadian War Museum, who has recently published two large volumes: At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914–1916 and Shock

achievement. Cook’s re-creations of the various battles are thorough and briskly paced. His explanations of tactics, strategy and weaponry will satisfy most armchair generals. And his judgement of the leading personalities seems fair-minded: even Sam Hughes, who most people thought was mentally unbalanced, gets a fair shake. Most of all, though, it is Cook’s empathy for the common soldier that impresses the general reader. From the profound— how soldiers dealt with the constant fear of death, to matters of light housekeeping— how they hunted down the lice that infested their clothing and their bodies, Cook amasses a vast amount of detail about life under fire in the trenches. He seems to have read every diary and letter produced by anyone who served at the front, deploying this personal testimony liberally and with powerful emotional effect. He has a keen eye for an interesting fact—e.g., at one point 28.7 percent of the Canadian army had a sexually transmitted disease, and for the illustrative anecdote—e.g., the soldier who survived a tremendous shell blast that blew his uniform right off his body, leaving him dazed and buck naked, but alive. (A comrade Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 69

ENDNOTES

standing next to him had all his teeth blown out by the same explosion.) There is so much death and suffering that it is diffi-

1914–18 conflict was our “war of independence,” in the sense that Canada emerged

BLACK IS BACK

from it with a new stature as an independent

Todd Coyne

cult to read these pages with a dry eye, not

country, not the subservient colony it had

something that can be said about many books of non-fiction, but Cook is never

been when the war began. Afghanistan notwithstanding, Canadi-

maudlin or manipulative.

ans do not like to think of ourselves as a

The Great War occupies a special place in Canadian mythology. For a long time,

warrior nation. We would rather make peace. Yet Cook’s books make clear that in

people claimed that it united Canadians in a

our first real call to arms, Canada’s citizen

moral crusade that proved our maturity as a

soldiers turned themselves into a superior army. With experience, our troops on the

nation. Nowadays historians are more likely to emphasize the negative impact of the war on the home front. Canadians were far from unanimous in their support for the war. Anti-war activism was widespread, especially once conscription was introduced, and not just in Quebec. Electoral politics were shamelessly corrupt. The rights of minorities were ignored. Profiteering was widespread. Still, Tim Cook argues that the

Western Front came to be regarded as “the most effective strike force in the Allied armies.” In the last two years of the war, Cook writes, Canadian soldiers never lost a set-piece battle and “punched far above their weight as a combat formation.” This is not to glamorize the war, or to minimize its cost in bodies maimed and lives lost. Cook does not argue that the experience was “worth it.” He is far less interested in theorizing the war than in capturing its awful immediacy for the men who fought it. A few years ago in his polemical Who Killed Canadian History?, Jack Granatstein complained that military history was neglected in Canada. If that was true then, it certainly isn’t now. Books about various military campaigns spill off the remainder shelves at the chain bookstores. Not to mention the extensive television coverage of important military anniversaries, the endless war documentaries on the History Channel and, most recently, Paul Gross’s $20-million movie epic, Passchendaele. So much has been written and broadcast that we may be in danger of overdosing on war memories. But before we do, let me recommend Cook’s two volumes as the perfect antidote. Daniel Francis is a writer and historian. His latest book is Operation Orca: Springer, Luna and the Struggle to Save West Coast Killer Whales (Harbour, 2007). Read his Geist work at geist.com/author/francis-daniel, and his blogs at historywire.ca and knowbc.blogspot.com.

Page 70 • G E IST 74 • Fall 2009

n the beginning there was black, and

good Christians have had it out for this troublesome colour ever since. At times synonymous with death and the devil, at others with fertility, paganism and power, black has suffered a dubious history on the colour wheel—occasionally even

getting

ban-

ished to the peculiar fringe of the “non-colour.” In Black: The History of a Color (Princeton University Press), Michel Pastoureau charts a European social history of the most symbolic and evocative colour on earth, inviting black back into its rightful place in the chromatic palette and interrogating the superstitions that Western civilization has erected around the colour of sleep, burial and dangerous night. But despite the campaigns waged against it, black has always had its dusky devotees. This book catalogues some of the most fanatical black-backers and uncompromising chromophobes who ever lived: from a pair of shadowy fashion-forward fifteenth-century dukes named “the Fearless” and “the Rash,” to Henry Ford, who to his dying day was puritanically opposed to producing automobiles in any colour but black. Drawing on archaeology, art history, religion and science, Pastoureau illustrates just how much subjective leeway informs our perceptions of colours and their shifting cultural meanings. He reveals that in Europe and the Middle East, the “opposite” of white was long considered to be red—early chessboards reflect this—and that during the Middle Ages, red and green were considered so alike as to be essentially

ENDNOTES

interchangeable. One of the book’s

A MOVEABLE BOOK

more sweeping claims is that the relatively modern black-and-white media of print and photography have been so prominent in our culture that our tendency to think in these binary terms distinguishes us from civilizations past.

Thad McIlroy

n late June, Motoko Rich, the doyenne

of book coverage at the New York Times, wrote an article about a new ver-

For someone like me, who still has diffi-

sion of Ernest Hemingway’s Paris mem-

culty believing that the world didn’t

oir, A Moveable Feast, which was published several weeks later by Scribner

actually used to be sepia-toned, as it is in early photographs, this little psychology lesson will strike a chord that

in an edition of 16,000 copies. The main

resonates long after the book is read

ingway, a grandson of Pauline Pfeiffer,

and put away.

Hemingway’s second wife, who is por-

progenitor of the new book is Seán Hem-

trayed poorly in the original version. Adding some complexity to the tale,

USURPED

scholars widely accept Rich’s assertion

Stephen Osborne

that “Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth and final wife, was the one who edited the first edition . . . cobbling it

oleskine fetishists around the world are suffering a collective

crisis of conscience with the appearance of the much more unpronounceable LEUCHTTURM 1917,

which comes complete with acid-free paper properly lined (not too wide) and slightly creamy in colour, and the pleasant black covers, elastic strap, bookmark ribbon and envelope at the back so beloved of Bruce Chatwin, et al.—but then, when you open the leuchtturm1917 (one senses that the only pronunciation possible must be in all caps), what do you find? Page numbers. Date fields. A do-it-yourself table of contents! A sequence of perforated pages at the back. and: labels for cover and spine, with instruction: “please use . . . for labelling the spine of your leuchtturm1917 agenda when you want to archive it.” The bookmark ribbon, however, is too shiny, a tawdry imitation of the (already bygone) real Moleskine thing.

together from shards of the unfinished manuscript he left behind.” Rich quotes Seán Hemingway to the effect that “I think this edition is right to set the record straight . . .” Fast forward nearly a month to July 19, 2009, when the Times offered an article by “Op-Ed Contributor” A. E. Hotchner, a well-known American writer and one-time close friend of Hemingway. In his article, titled “Don’t Touch ‘A Moveable Feast’,” he declares that he is not, to say the least, pleased by the new edition and he presents some credible evidence to besmirch it. “In 1956, Ernest and I were having lunch at the Ritz in Paris with Charles Ritz, the hotel’s chairman,” Hotchner writes, “when Charley asked if Ernest was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room, left there in 1930. Ernest did not remember storing the trunk but he did recall that in the 1920s Louis Vuitton had made a special trunk for him. Ernest had wondered what had become of it.” Well, the trunk

Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 71

ENDNOTES

apparently contained the notebooks that were to be the source of A Moveable Feast. Hotchner then tries to set the record straight about Mary Hemingway’s involvement with the book: “Because Mary was busy with matters relating to Ernest’s estate, she had little involvement with the book. However, she did call me about its title. Scribner was going to call it ‘Paris Sketches,’ but Mary hoped I could come up with something more compelling. I ran through a few possibilities, but none resonated until I recalled that Ernest had once referred to Paris as a moveable feast.” Hotchner goes on to state clearly: “These details are evidence that the book was a serious work that Ernest finished with his usual intensity, and that he certainly intended it for publication. What I read on the plane coming back from Cuba was essentially what was published. There was no extra chapter created by Mary.” And then Hotchner delivers the punchline: “As an author, I am concerned by Scribner’s involvement in this ‘restored edition.’ With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in ‘A Moveable Feast’ about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor. All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work. There is always the possibility that the inheritor could write his own book offering his own corrections.” I agree.

EBB AND FLOW Eve Corbel

argaret Drabble’s novel The Sea Lady (McClelland & Stewart) takes place on land, but it’s all about the

Page 72 • G E IST 74 • Fall 2009

ENDNOTES

EXPLORING THE GLOBAL URBAN WILDERNESS Michael Hayward

allpaper* (the * appears to be

mandatory) is a high-end monthly magazine of “design, interiors, fashion, art, lifestyle”; in other words a kindred spirit to Geist itself. And while the aesthetic of Geist and the lifestyle of its editorial board members may be slightly different from that promoted and documented by Wallpaper*, it does give us all something to aspire to. The Wallpaper* City Guides (Phaidon) offer David Marshall working on his sculpture Seated Woman, 1972. The photograph appears in The Life and Art of David Marshall by Monika Ullmann (Mother Tongue Publishing Ltd., 2008), the first book in a new series, Unheralded Artists of B.C. Marshall (1928–2006) was a prodigious carver and sculptor who lived and worked in Vancouver for more than fifty years. In this modest but handsomely produced volume, Ullmann surveys his work and milieu, and offers insight into questions of why the legacy of such an accomplished artist “is known to only a few collectors, fellow sculptors and curators.”

sea. The story opens as Humphrey, an old man and eminent marine biologist,

references to the sea. Humphrey meditates on “the ebb and flow of schools and

speeds along in a train toward Finsterness, England, where he has been invited to give a speech at a university. He wishes

disciplines and reputations”; he remembers a lover and a night during which he “drank the brine from her body,” and later he “relives his entire life with her, like a drowning man.” He tries to overcome ungenerous thoughts about a colleague that “lurk, fathoms deep,” and even when he doesn’t have a sore throat, “his eyes fill with water more easily these days.” And so on—all so perfectly right that the watery words are imperceptible until one goes back and studies Drabble’s language to see how she did it. Water is the element associated with dreams, feelings, the subconscious; the sea is soothing and healing, but it is also dangerous. Drabble’s imagery is reminiscent of her novel The Waterfall

he had refused: this is the first time he’s been to Finsterness since he was a boy and the place has some memories for him that he’d just as soon not dip into. Or maybe he longs to dip in, or even to submerge himself in them; maybe that’s why he’s going even though his throat hurts and he feels achey. Meanwhile, Ailsa, a flamboyant singer and actress about Humphrey’s age, also prepares to make a presentation at Finsterness, where she too has a past. By now the reader has settled in, willing to be carried along by the currents of memory and love and fate, in language rich with photo: marj trim, collection of mavis vaughan

(1969), whose first sentence reads: “If I were drowning I couldn’t reach out a hand to save myself, so unwilling am I to set myself up against fate.”

“a tightly edited, discreetly packaged list of the best a location has to offer the designconscious traveler.” Pocket sized, the City Guides are determinedly “modern” in design (think sans-serif with a smidgen of Bodoni) with tabbed sections—Landmarks, Hotels, 24 Hours, Urban Life, Shopping, Architour (“a guide to iconic buildings”), etc.—for the convenience of the design-conscious traveller, who evidently has little time to spare while jetting between Bangkok and Reykjavik. Three Canadian cities—Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal—are included in the Wallpaper* series of city guides, rubbing shoulders with other “world class cities” such as Marrakech, Mumbai, Antwerp and Dubai. I yearn to join this exclusive club of design-conscious travellers, but I doubt that my current wardrobe (mainly cotton) is up to the demands of perpetual international travel, which surely calls for fabrics with a more exotic provenance. What better guide to my sartorial transformation than the Wallpaper* City Guide Vancouver’s section on Shopping (“The best retail therapy and what to buy”)?

Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 73

ENDNOTES

I feel more confident now, knowing that a host of servile clerks are out there somewhere, eager to initiate me, waiting patiently in their ghostly retail halls, those temples of conspicuous consumption where “raw concrete walls contrast with polished concrete floors, Corian meets reclaimed spruce, and a wash of light pours over exposed brick.” On the evening of October 12, 1979, Charles Bukowski—the bard of the Los Angeles racetracks, the “poet laureate of Skid Row”—was in Vancouver to give a reading at the Viking Hotel on East Hastings Street. I was one of the 650 people present, with a seat in the front row, left side, nursing my beer and waiting for the literary action to begin. It was a perfect venue: a seedy hotel on the fringe of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and the crowd was raucous, taunting Bukowski with good-natured insults. “You’re a capitalist,” one of them shouted, to which he responded, “Yes, but a very minor one; I hope to get better and better.” By 1979 Bukowski was (as he put it) “half-way rich,” the owner of “a bmw with a sun-roof”; he’d come a long way from his L.A. Skid Row room. Bukowski clearly enjoyed the verbal sparring, and made his way through two bottles of red wine (and only a handful of poems) before the break (“It may be a three-bottle reading,” he warned.) The entire evening, insults and all, was filmed by Dennis B. Del Torre, the local promoter of the event, and the film sat in Bukowski’s archives for twenty-five years. The footage has finally been released on dvd as There’s Gonna Be a God Damn Riot in Here! (mondaymedia), and it’s great to have a record of the proceedings.

Page 74 • G E IST 74 • Fall 2009

ENDNOTES

I thought I glimpsed a shadow of my

most people can name a favourite poet

younger self moving through the frame just as the reading gets underway; if I’d

or two, and Don McKay is one of mine (endnotes on McKay’s Deactivated West

known then that I’d be checking in on

100 and Strike/Slip were published in

myself thirty years down the road, I would have waved.

earlier issues of Geist). For this reason I was pleased to see The Muskwa Assemblage, McKay’s new book, pub-

Harvey Pekar describes The Beats (Hill

lished by Gaspereau Press in Nova Sco-

and Wang), a graphic history of the key players in that literary

tia, well-known for their attention to tasteful design and for their practice of

stew better known as “the Beat Generation” in which he played a major part, as “a comic art production with no pretension to the depth of coverage and literary interpretation presented by hundreds of scholarly books in many languages.” Pekar is best known for the 2003 movie American Splendor, based on his multi-volume graphic autobiography of the same name; for The Beats, as for the print version of American Splendor, Pekar selected different graphic artists to illustrate the text. All of the usual Beat suspects are covered: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, et al.—but there’s also a good seasoning of the “lesser lights” (back Beats?), such as Philip Lamantia and Tuli Kupferberg, and Pekar expands the scope to include figures on the periphery of the Beat scene, such as the artist Larry Rivers and the poets Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth. Pekar is obviously a fan of the era, and this breezy overview might be the best starting point for anyone curious about, but new to, the Beats and their milieu: think of it as a Beatniks for Dummies. Poetry is the most personal of the literary arts; laureates notwithstanding, few poets enjoy national stature nowadays, and fewer still are known beyond the boundaries of their native land. But

printing

and

binding

their

books

in-house). The Muskwa Assemblage is “a formation inside the MuskwaKechika wilderness which stretches from the Toad River area in the north to the Tuchodi Lakes in the south.” According to McKay’s introduction, the region (in northern British Columbia) is one of the very few areas “in which a wild ecosystem remains virtually intact.” The “Assemblage” refers also to “a group of artists working in different media, and out of a variety of traditions” who gathered in the Muskwa-Kechika wilderness in August 2006 in a kind of “art-camp,” to experience and explore the area through their work. In The Muskwa Assemblage, McKay is particularly fascinated by the relationship between language and landscape. While pondering “the nameless mountains and nameless creeks” around him, McKay considers how “language abhors a vacuum,” as he feels the “impulse to supply names” becoming active in him, connecting him to the early scientists and explorers who “left their names—or those of their heroes, friends, wives, mistresses or pets—attached to the species and landforms they encountered,” naming being an act that apparently satisfies “some primal urge in the hyperlinguistic species like ours.”

Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 75

ENDNOTES

country with his admitted ignorance

A LIBRARIANIST LIFE Stephen Osborne

about the Jewish-Palestinian conflict in tow, Garfinkel struggles with Judaism and with everything he learned about

“T

his afternoon at 4:55, a stout female

Palestine and the birth of Israel as a stu-

patron, having spent several minutes exploring the contents of her purse, pulled

dent at the Bialik Hebrew Day School in Toronto. His quandary

out a small object . . .” So begins Incident

is mirrored in the slow

Report 4 in The Incident Report, the masterful new novel by Martha Baillie

decline of his relationship with his partner:

(Pedlar Press) and possibly the first novel

she is fervent and com-

in Canada to include in its acknowledge-

mitted in her attach-

ments Thomas Bernhard’s equally masterful The Voice Imitator. The 144 Incident

ment to her new-found Jewish identity; he is

Reports in The Incident Report are kept in

ambivalent. As described by Garfinkel,

the drawer of her desk by a librarian who has a knack for the terse narrative and the

Israel is a land of big-screen hd tales and he is an uncomfortable tourist. People

pungent detail. From where she sits at her desk, the library resonates with librarianism, an insu-

chain-smoke; even the tourist takes up

lar world exposed and vulnerable to anyone who comes through

also bad for the health. Lovers threaten each other and then f**k like mad. Each non-Jew in an oversized garment is a

the door. Life itself, for this librarian, is contingent, pulsing or

potential suicide bomber. Life is today and yesterday, with very little tomorrow. The more closely Garfinkel focussed his

not pulsing, just past

narrative lens on his personal life, the more uncomfortably voyeuristic I felt. Discomfort is not always bad, though. Garfinkel felt it when confronted with the reality of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, so different than what he had grown up learning. Discomfort contains revela-

the limits of peripheral vision. Baillie has written a book that gives new life to the Canadian novel. Anyone who loves a library will love reading and rereading the Incident Reports. As for the small object reported in Incident Report 4, “it lay in the plump palm of her hand.”

smoking, while admitting it’s bad for his diabetes. Coffee is taken dark and sweet,

tion and, for Garfinkel, understanding of issues that continue to fuel the conflict.

AMBIVALENT

In the 1800s, Dr. John Rae was a cele-

Lily Gontard

brated explorer of the Arctic. He travelled in small vessels with small crews; he adopted the ways of the Inuit to survive the winters; he ate local food; he wore fur. He is also remembered as the man who returned to England in 1854 with the news that the members of the Franklin expedition were dead, had committed cannibalism and had failed to discover the Northwest Passage. For this, he was

n Ambivalence (Viking Canada), a travel memoir, the playwright Jonathan Garfinkel packs up all his confusion and conflict about his Jewish faith and travels to Israel. His plan is to find a mythical house in Jerusalem that Jews and Palestinians supposedly share, and to write a play about it. As he journeys through the

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ENDNOTES

virtually tarred and feathered by Lady Franklin and her influential friends. In his film Passage, the director John Walker sets out to defend and honour Rae. He travels to England to trace the story of how Rae became involved in the search for Franklin, taking along his cast and crew, as well as Tagak Curley, an Inuit descendant of the people who discovered the remains of the expedition. Walker’s trip to Britain is also an attempt to correct history: he meets with the great-great-grandson of Charles Dickens, who was enlisted by Lady Franklin to slander Rae and the Inuit, and who claimed the Inuit were cannibals who had attacked the defenceless expedition. The encounter between the descendants exemplifies the importance and effect of a heartfelt apology, and Passage melds documentary passages and fictional re-enactment very smoothly. Watch for the appearance of Ken McGoogan (author of the book Fatal Passage), dressed in a fine-looking fringed leather jacket as he joins the modern-day adventurers. Early in the movie, upon seeing the statue in London honouring Franklin’s posthumous discovery of the Northwest Passage, Tagak Curley deadpans something to the effect that Franklin wasn’t a great explorer, he just got lost. Too true. It is Dr. John Rae who deserves a statue; he was the real deal.

THE JOB IS YOURS Marisa Chandler

verqualified by Joey Comeau (ecw Press) is a collection of satiric cover letters handcrafted to make any hr worker cringe and every job seeker smile. Ranging from pithy and heartwarming to

Fall 2009 • G E I ST 74 • Page 77

ENDNOTES

darkly funny and bizarre, the letters sparkle with the inappropriate use of unabashed personal honesty in a traditionally dry and humourless form. They were originally conceived and presented as an online project, and I’ll be honest—I read this entire book online before it ever went to print. But Overqualified is better than just another internet fad or office diversion; it’s beautifully executed satire, perfect for anyone who needs a good laugh (like the unemployed). As someone who is perpetually hunting for work and rewriting her resumé to eliminate jobs like “cat sitting” and “landscaping,” I like these offbeat cover letters. They appeal to my own passive-aggressive desire to give employers the finger or blurt out something insanely personal during an interview, instead of claiming that being a “perfectionist” is my worst trait and creating fictional scenarios where I “resolved workplace conflict.” Comeau is also one-half of the duo (with Emily Horne) that creates the bittersweet online comic A Softer World (asofterworld.com), which is composed of photographs and cut-out captions.

FAILED EXPERIMENTS IN THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING Thad McIlroy

ow that Amazon has rekindled the notion that reading is kind of cool, and participation in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter has exploded, a slew of Internet startups are trying to bring writers and readers together into communities of mutual

Page 78 • G E IST 74 • Fall 2009

ENDNOTES

interest. HarperCollins Publishers, one of the largest English-language publishers with sales over $1 billion, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Last January it launched authonomy.com, where authors can submit ten thousand words or more from an unpublished or self-published book, and the devoted and literate members of the authonomy community can read it, comment on it and rate it. HarperCollins editors say that they will keep an eye out for the “most popular” submissions and decide whether to make publishing offers to the authors. July 9, 2009, marked the publication of the very first book to result from the experiment. According to a press release from authonomy, the book is The Reaper, written by Steven Dunne. It is described on the website as a “combination of Silence of the Lambs and The Poet set in Derby. A long dormant serial killer strikes again and the hunt is on.” Apparently the book “was picked up by hc late last year,” so with the speed typical of traditional publishing houses, in took seven or eight months to get it into print. Well, I for one don’t think it worth the wait, nor a strong indication of authonomy’s promise. The first page of the first chapter (available to read on authonomy’s site, tinyurl.com/mam16c) was sufficient to discourage me from any further exploration. And exactly one month after publication, its status had reached the dizzying heights of number 2,381,842 on Amazon.com’s sales ranking. Like most large publishers today, HarperCollins no longer accepts unsolicited manuscripts directly. What is to be found there, in lieu of the famed “slush pile” of yore, is a website where the unpaid public are invited to read through the slush for

Fall 2009 • G E I ST 74 • Page 79

RECEN T TI TLES F R O M

Canada’s new independent publisher

Ken Kirkby: A Painter’s Quest for Canada Goody Niosi

Arrows Fiction by Luisa Maria Celis

Path of Descent and Devotion Poetry by Ilya Tourtidis

Requiem of the Human Soul Fiction by Jeremy R. Lent

We pay double royalties to the year’s best-selling author. 604.838.8796

ENDNOTES

HarperCollins, and the company can pray that a few bestsellers emerge. The one aspect that would qualify as social networking is that all of the folks who voted for chapter 1 of The Reaper are strong prospects to purchase the finished book; and, feeling a certain ownership of the process whereby it was published, will read it and recommend it with more generosity than I can summon.

FAMILY MATTERS Patty Osborne

ynthia Flood’s new collection of

linked short stories, The English Stories (Biblioasis), reminds me of the British boarding-school novels that were all the rage when I was a girl, but The English Stories are about real life: the girls who have power cruelly enforce their own class system on the weaker girls, who, in their turn, torment those who are worse off than they are and everyone, including the teachers, grapple in secret with their own demons. It’s the 1950s, and Amanda, a young Canadian girl, is living with her parents in the Green House, a residential hotel in Oxford, England. When Amanda isn’t trying to fit in as a day-girl at a boarding school (it’s a frock not a dress, and sweets, not candy) she’s getting to know but not often to understand the eccentric occupants of the Green House. These include the seventy-year-old twins Milly and Tilly, who, in a hilarious exchange, solve the New York Times crossword puzzle without writing anything down; and the incontinent retired Professor McGeachie, who spends his time writing monographs and negotiating with the maid for a chance to fondle her breasts. Flood’s

Page 80 • G E IST 74 • Fall 2009

ENDNOTES

writing is rich yet compact, and as

book February by Lisa Moore (Anansi),

Amanda and the adult characters narrate their stories, a multi-layered picture

you pretend that you’re coping, and after

emerges of lives limited by the class system and standards of propriety. In contrast, Amanda and her Canadian parents seem open and straightforward while they are in England, though the opening story, which takes place before they leave

you’ve pretended for long enough you realize that you are coping, and after you’ve coped for long enough and your kids are mostly grown, you realize that you want to make a life for yourself. This should be a sad story but it’s not, or at

Ontario, provides a good look at the

least it’s not all sad, mostly because Helen, wise mother that she is, holds her

Canadian social order as well.

tongue but lets us in on her thoughts about her children’s outrageous behav-

Okay, it’s true that Angel Tungaraza, the main character in Baking Cakes in

iour, about her boss—who, when he isn’t crying on her shoul-

Kigali by Gaile Parkin (McClelland & Stewart) reminds me of Precious

der over his failed

Ramotswe of the No. 1 Ladies Detective

marriage, refers to her as “the old bat,” and

Agency, but that doesn’t mean Angel doesn’t have anything to add to the story. She’s a middle-aged Tanzanian woman

about Barry, the guy who’s painting her house and who she’s

who lives in Rwanda, where she runs her own cake-baking busi-

beginning to lust after. Reading this book will loosen up

ness and, with her husband, raises their five grandchildren. Her

your innards (in a good way) so you can cry and laugh and then laugh again.

everyday life includes the aftermath of genocide, fallout from the aids epidemic and a country filled with poverty. Angel is not overtly political or rebellious or even angry, but her unspoken philosophy seems to be that the personal is political, and in her interactions with her clients, her friends and her family she is sometimes able to initiate small changes that make a difference. This book is filled with humour, sadness, custom-made cakes covered in brightly coloured icing and— surprise, surprise—a Canadian character who’s not at all nice. What would you do if you were a pregnant mother of three whose husband, one day in February 1982, dies when the oil rig he works on, the Ocean Ranger, sinks? If you’re Helen, the main character in the

LIGHT AND SHADOW Mary Schendlinger

he Quarry by Bill MacDonald (Borealis Press) is a novel set in Alabaster

Bay, a remote community on the northern edge of Lake Superior. Like any small town, this one has nice people, not-nice people and a few secrets. Like any small town in a story by Bill MacDonald, this one has residents with names like Eulalie Spittlehouse, Pastor Snorri, old Dr. Schlepko and the widow Muncaster, and adventures to match. Since the local gypsum quarry closed down, Alabaster Bay is growing even smaller as people leave for greener pastures or any pastures at all. Enter Maurice Micklewhite and Ozzie Tilman, “shiny-faced men in business suits” who talk loudly and shake hands all around and propose a magnificent

Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 81

Two Great Workshops — One Great Weekend

Saturday October 24 – Sunday October 25, 2009 Visit geist.com for details Co-sponsored by the Listel Hotel and by the Creative Writing Program at UBC

ENDNOTES

Ponzi scheme involving an abandoned

staining when the inevitable drunken

silver mine, which never gave much and has taken at least one life. Meanwhile,

sloshing of red wine occurs? The effect

two

boys

while

away the summer in the woods and the quarry; but in

was that the entire crowd looked funeral-ready, and ready to get smashed. During the evening we tried sparkling wines, whites and reds with a variety of flavours: almond biscotti, toasted coco-

life as in books, kids like a plot, so

nut, wet sand, peo-

they set out to dis-

mushrooms

lodge a huge boul-

manure. As the evening went on, the

der at the edge of a cliff, with unexpected results. (No, really.) MacDonald has written ten books and scores of stories in this category, several of which have appeared in Geist. His narratives are as straightforward and naturally funny as tales being told over a cup of tea—reminiscent of the work of Garrison Keillor, but with less artifice. At the same time, a shadow lurks in each of MacDonald’s

nies, Parmesan, feet, and

lights got dimmer and the faces got ruddier. Although there were spit buckets everywhere, most people downed their wine as quickly as it was poured. It is quite an experience watching hundreds of people getting drunk at the same velocity, careening around or lingering in front of the tables in violation of the huge signs instructing you in bold caps to STEP BACK

stories, a sinister echo or mirror image that could change everything. In this book, that shadow has to do with the

after your wine has been poured. The room gets crowded fast at Winefest, and

other, more dangerous meaning of the word quarry, and by the end of the book, both reader and protagonist have had a

once it gets crowded it gets hot, which seems to amplify the effects of the alcohol. Soon I was light-headed and starting

good look at the dark side of the moon.

to get The Fear, as the drunks around me got louder and more grotesque, as they started to exude that inevitable longing of the intoxicated—the desire for Something to Happen. But nothing was going to happen, except more drinking, so we bought a couple of bottles and went outside and walked along the waterfront, as though we weren’t ourselves but rather characters in a movie about ourselves, and took in the view: the bloated pink carcass that is the old Convention Centre, the glass behemoth that is the new Conven-

WAITING FOR THE APOCALYPSE, DRUNK Leah Rae

hen we arrived at the tasting room at the International Wine Festi-

val, the annual fundraiser of the Vancouver Playhouse, it was already busy. Less than an hour later you could barely move. My friend and I wore black, as the website recommended. Why, I’m not sure, as you never need to tell Vancouverites to wear black—they seem to wear nothing but. Perhaps to prevent

tion Centre, and the huge glowing Esso station floating out on the dark ocean. Everywhere excess, everywhere impending disaster.

Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 83

a r t i s t s i n th i s i s s u e Quint Buchholz is a German author and illustrator best known for his awardwinning work as a children’s book illustrator.

Ann Noël is a painter, graphic designer, printmaker, photographer and performance artist in Berlin. Visit her at ann-noel.com.

Katherine Elizabeth is pursuing a bfa in creative photography. More of her work is at katherinelizabethphotography.com.

Kate Reid is an illustrator and half of the writing duo Best Liz & k8. She lives in Vancouver and at bestlizandkate.com.

Christopher Grabowski is a frequent contributor to Geist. More of his work is at geist.com/author/grabowski-christopher.

Karen Ross Smith is an artist who sells her crafts and handmade jewellery at thejunkinmytrunk.com.

Rostislav Koštál is a photographer who lives in the Czech Republic and exhibits internationally.

Lenke Sifko is a visual artist in Vancouver who uses both traditional techniques and digital media. She creates illustrations, large-format images and videos. Visit her at pixelink.ca.

Mandelbrot is Stephen Osborne, the publisher of Geist and the author of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World. Visit his website, phototaxis.ca, and see more of his work for Geist at geist.com/author/ mandelbrot.

Page 84 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

Tracey Tomtene has exhibited photography in Canada and New Zealand. Her book Encompass: A Photo Collection: 2006–2008 is available at Blurb.com. Visit traceytomtene.com.

LETTERS

Letters, continued from page 6

details. One question: Why is Grandma holding her arm when she comes outside? Did she have a stroke? Did Grandpa grab her hard? I like the mystery. —Kathy Murphy, Hong Kong “Spring Training” is cute, but not that great. I don’t understand why it won first prize. It starts strong but ends abruptly, and not in a good or interesting way. —Rachel Gurstein, Brooklyn, NY I was so moved by “The Two-Slice Toaster Move” (3rd prize), I couldn’t read it aloud to my husband. —Jane, Cyberspace

be interested in ‘bolstering Canadian pride’—at least I hope not”? That’s as stark an expression of cultural immaturity as you’ll find in the rhetoric of any idealistic evocation of the last spike, triumph at Vimy, etc. etc. Do you suppose that historians have no opinions? Do you suppose that they shouldn’t, or that they shouldn’t express them in writing? Why bother reading, if not to discover a unique, subjective portrait of a given subject? If you’re not interested in reading prose with an agenda, be it ideological, political, aesthetic, moral, etc., I have a lovely book of stereo instructions you may like. Other than that gross slippage of myopia, I quite liked the piece. —Aaron Keeler, London ON Read Daniel Francis’s Geist writings at geist.com/author/francis-daniel.

“Wolf and Man” (honourable mention, posted at geist.com June 2009; p. 25 this issue) is perfect. It’s a postcard, but leaves you with the feeling you’ve read a good book. —Ursula Twiss, Vancouver So why could you just not call the thing a wolf? —Tim Taylor, Cyberspace Visit geist.com/postcard-contest to read more winning stories and to enter the 6th annual contest. ABSENT FRI ENDS he poems of “Into the Fire” (Geist 73) are simply beautiful, one and all. There is no one else writing poetry like Evelyn Lau. —Anony, Cyberspace To read more of Evelyn Lau’s work, go to geist.com/author/lau-evelyn.

SERI OUS H I STORI ANS aniel Francis (“Writing the Nation,” on Brian McKillop’s biography of Pierre Berton, Geist 72) “can’t imagine that any serious historian, academic or otherwise, would

Megan Dietrich reads Geist beside the word on the East Side Gallery, which is the longest part of the Berlin Wall still standing. GEIST

THAT “THE” n writing about whether Yukoners say “Yukon” or “the Yukon” (“The Definite Article,” Geist 69), George Fetherling can’t assume what we all think in the Yukon to support his argument. I for one prefer the “the,” although in philosophical terms I think its link to the pioneer/frontier mentality might be a good thing to dump. That is, it sounds ridiculous to my ears to say “I live in Yukon.” Only

politicos say that—those who want the Canadian government to see how serious they are to be taken, especially when we depend utterly on federal transfer payments to survive, not to say it’s anyone’s fault. It was only a few years ago that “Premier” Dennis Fentie was able to use that title, and I suspect the the-free “Yukon” is mostly political and tied to that title. (To clarify, if it were “Main Minister” or whatever it had been, there would have been no reason to say Yukon is to Saskatchewan what Premier x is to Premier y.) Maybe people are being converted to “Yukon” through the clever efforts of the Yukon Party government. Or maybe “Yukon” is taking root more indirectly, just as Hotmail and Facebook—both American—redline anything spelled in the British/Canuck way, thereby boosting American spellings and Yanking the uninformed. Maybe it’s just natural change. The Yukon is still a place where librarians are housewives, where birders rip by on atvs, and where every tenth pickup proclaims “Eat moose—10,000 wolves can’t be wrong!” (My grain retort is coming!) For my part, I’d gladly sacrifice my “the” if we could toss the redneck image that comes with it and lets us set ourselves against the wilderness (or is that just “wilderness”?) and rip it with Earth-haters (“quads” and snow machines, or “sleds”). The plethora of band names being hacked out of the wilderness such as Caribou, Grizzly Bear, Deep Dark Woods and so on underscores the clear-cutting going on—of both complex earlier spellings that had, ahem, colour and honour—and of places such as the threatened Peel River watershed and anyplace worldwide with intact wilderness. —Murray Munn, Whitehorse Read George Fetherling’s Geist writings at geist.com/author/fetherling-george. Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 85

LETTERS

GEI ST G REENERY e love Geist, but we can’t stand the plastic wrap it comes in. We won’t be renewing our subscription unless you tell us this is changing. It’s unsettling to read your blurb about “the new, greener Geist” (No. 73) through a layer of plastic. We’d rather it arrived a little scuffed, like every other magazine we’ve ever subscribed to. Let us know. And keep up the good work on the magazine itself! —A. and G. Robertson, Vancouver The polybags in which copies of Geist slip through the mail to subscribers are 100 percent biodegradable. —Ed.

Lyle Grisedale reads Geist at an altitude of 2,400 meters on Christiana Ridge in Glacier National Park.

DREAMS AND NI G HTMARES nlike the dreamers in Sheila Heti’s “The Obama Dreams” (Geist 72), I can’t say I’ve had too many dreams about politicians, but I did meet Sarah Palin!—or rather stalked her around Juneau for a half hour, until I ran out of breath. She is fast. —Stephen Winton, Dawson City YT

SWEET EVERYTHI NGS fter I read “Eve Corbel’s Guide to Geo-Literary Desserts” (Geist 73), in which Nanaimo Bars are said to have originated in Nanaimo in the 1970s, an exercise in recipe forensics was called for: I phoned Mom and asked where she got her recipe. “It was 1961,” she said, “in

Page 86 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

Lloydminster. I was watching tv and they demonstrated it.” She couldn’t recall the name of the show or the host, or whether it was a Saskatchewan or Alberta station, so I still didn’t know why our family favourite of nearly fifty years had a pastry base so different from what the rest of the world calls Nanaimo Bars. I unearthed the recipe that won the Nanaimo Bar Recipe Contest in 1986 and compared it to Mom’s, and yes, there were similarities. Perhaps a resourceful prairie resident returned to Lloyd after a visit to the west coast and MacGyvered a recipe based on recollection alone, then broadcast it without fact-checking, unaware of the confusion this could cause half a century later. I imagine that voyager relying on the make-do mentality that comes with having been born into the dustbowl Depression, and opening kitchen cupboards and scratching his (or her) head, musing, “She took something from a shelf and crushed it. And sweetened it. Then added nuts of some sort . . .” Or maybe that was Mom, caught without a pen while the show ran on, and having to remember the details later when the kids were asleep and the dishes were done. Either way, I like Mom’s version best, and she was making them well before the 1970s. —Shelley Kozlowski, Vancouver In 1992 I edited A Century of Canadian Home Cooking by Carol Ferguson and Margaret Fraser, who were food editors at Canadian Living magazine, and who had this to say about Nanaimo Bars: “Recipes for this no-bake treasure appear in countless cookbooks as Chocolate Fridge Cake, New York Slice, Miracle Bars, Ribbon Squares and many other names, but the origin of Nanaimo Bars is still a hot topic of debate . . . The recipe appeared under the name Nanaimo Bars in the Vancouver Sun in the early ’50s and in

the B.C. Women’s Institutes’ Centennial of B.C. Cookbook in 1958 . . .” So you see, this delicacy is actually ancient, stretching way back to the ’50s. I can attest that they were pretty hot then in small-town Saskatchewan. —Kathy Vanderlinden, Victoria Wikipedia identifies a published recipe from as early as 1957, and suggests that the dessert has been around since the 1930s and may even go back to the nineteenth century. Bakery Nanaimo bars are usually too sweet and not very flavourful. If you want to impress people, take some homemade Nanaimo bars to a social event. They are rich and dark, with that nice undertone of menace that chocolate, uncut by too much sugar, can convey. Just don’t hold back on the butter. —Paul Denham, Saskatoon Read more of Eve Corbel’s work at geist.com/author/corbel-eve. BOBBI NG A LONG n the Geist map “Bob’s Your Uncle” (No. 72), was it oversight or simply disdain for the obvious that caused you to exclude Bobcaygeon, Ontario, from the map? Tsk, tsk—how unHip! —Victor Emerson, Ottawa For a wacky, GPS-free view of Canadian geography, go to geist.com/maps.

SEND YOUR LETTER S TO:

The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com, Fax 604-669-8250, #200 – 341 Water Street Vancouver BC, v6b 1b8 Letters to Geist may be edited for clarity, brevity and taste. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist Map, suitable for framing.

CROSSWORD

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword Prepared by Meandricus Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #74 GEIST 341 Water Street, #200 Vancouver, B.C. v6b 1b8 The winner will be selected at random from correct solutions received and will be awarded a one-year subscription to Geist or—if already a subscriber—a Geist magnet. Good luck! ACROSS 1 While it was still light, did a lord buy a time-share to work out his holiday? (2) 7 Sounds like a little lamb asking for a yeast cake 10 Sounds distressingly like John’s widow might be wacky 11 When she doesn’t go with the flow, there could be a recession 13 When it rains, smelly opening can make your throat sore 15 Use your thumb to gear up that horse for zigzagging 16 Regal stare can draw attention 17 When you arrive there you might become wet 18 Store those test dikes before they get floppy 22 Comic but frightened cry: “Peace out” 23 In the middle of Fred’s primitive but joyful outburst, Vincent applied his bad colours 26 Nebula can’t find the power 29 At the ball game I figured out the point of that writing 30 Beginning of colourful model was printed in teal 31 One Dec. 25th I got an enigmatic message from the crypt 32 That party certainly rolled out the barrel 33 He’s nobody—he goes around with his teeth hanging out 34 I went after school to sort it out but there was no dinette on hold there 37 As a last resort, in spring the minerals run like sap 39 That essay they printed is really off the wall, isn’t it? 41 My mom, the queen, loved As and Bs but Fernando just loved to dance 44 I love the other reindeer that likes to eat near Greece 45 It’s common for one of them to be unwashed 46 U.S. travel group likes to show appreciation beforehand (abbrev) 47 That composer wrote a verse but he doesn’t know it 48 What’s the point of all that power when you can just chat while you draw on board? (2) DOWN 1 Did the new dog kneel when you gave him three instead of two off? (2) 2 That Turner girl was quite compulsive but she got straightened out

16 17

22 23

33 34

39 41

45 47

46 48

3 Where did the bear go when it got cured by the leaves? 4 Don’t pet us if it disquiets you 5 He went out in bell-bottoms so we could only estimate his age 6 She still hasn’t arrived at the present time 7 Spreading firm not airing in Columbian area (abbrev) 8 What price do you expect when you pose the question? 9 Teacher’s fall treat bad for medical system 12 One bag full could result in manipulative treatment 14 Beginning of fairyland always makes me angry 19 It’s routine for the young ones to think the hollow organ to be fashionable (2) 20 Before 12 she’s fine but after 12 she spends all her time on the phone 21 Why is that Serb parking beside that water source while she takes a breather? (2) 23 Single toddler meal can get very noisy 24 It’s a gas to conduct in the car 25 Breast images displayed in the underground for idiots in containers (2) 27 Finding no further opposition, I bid you farewell 28 It’s time for my little gal to slow down 29 You’re not honestly determined to play for the other team, are you? 33 If it’s heads, you win the count 35 In a fit of pique she agreed to outfit the team 36 It’s reptilian the way he changed his jeans and went undercover

37 Doctors with pocks should listen carefully to children 38 My buddy would like his fair share of the capital over there 40 George hated the vile ones who are always doing it 41 The senior clergyman is a real copycat 42 When you finish that shorthand, would you like one of Francis’s famous green sandwiches or a love apple? (abbrev) 43 First, one of the three basic principles of letters The winner for puzzle #73 was our old friend Bill Kummer of Newmarket ON. Congratulations. A B U D N T L H E R O E C M A M A B L B A B Y S A T

A L E G O G O N G G E T O W O R E N T

H A B I N O N E A F S F N T O W H U E J A B D E A S A C A R H S E B D S A L S T

R E X P E R E Y S S T W A R Y U R A A D L I

Y O N G A D E R M A S E T B E V E R I T S A

E S S A Y E R

A R D O E C D O N E D I F F V O O G N G I T S

Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 87

CAUGHT MAPPING

Badlands t h e c a n a d i a n ma p o f o u t l a w s an d e v i l d o e r s by Melissa Edwards

modified Geistonic projection

Page 88 • G E I ST 74 • Fall 2009

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