What was Canadian fiction
With Stephen Henighan on the end of fiction, our myriad divisions, and whether Fugitive Pieces or The English Patient is the worst novel that Canada gave to the world
Few Canadian writers are as international as Stephen Henighan: in research interests, languages spoken, countries of residence, and the fiction itself. He teaches Spanish-American literature in the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Guelph and is Editor of the Biblioasis International Translation Series. He is the author of a dozen books, his latest The World of After (Cormorant Books, 2021). It’s narrated by a listless young man – think Girls, or Sally Rooney characters, but male – who leaves Montreal and his unhappy relationship and takes up a scholarship to Oxford. The Berlin Wall had recently fallen and the 9/11 was still far away, the western world believing the respite from history would last. The narrator makes some important friendships, hops from bed to bed and country to country, until everybody around him settles down into a marriage, a political project, a profitable career. Everybody but him. I took a train to Guelph the other day to ask Henighan about these characters and some of the issues, literary and political, swirling around CanLit and world literatures.
Kevin the narrator is quite different from you, although you too did your PhD in Oxford?
Obviously some people read it as autobiographical but there are significant differences. One is that I’m really an immigrant. I came to Canada at the age of 5 and we went back to England when I was in my teens… I was born in Hamburg, Germany. My British mother and American father met on a beach in Yemen when they were both working for their respective governments closing down their representation in the crown colony of Aden just before it became independent Yemen. I lived my early childhood in rural north of England, a little bit in central Michigan and then in the Ottawa Valley. We then went back to the UK and then university in the States followed and Montreal for a few years and then back to the UK, and in between very long stays; 7 months in Colombia, and I studied in Romania, I studied in Germany etc.
You didn’t grow up in Canada?
I grew up mainly in the Ottawa Valley. With a lot of interruptions. But my consciousness is very much an immigrant consciousness and especially in southern Ontario. I never know what the right thing to say is, and I can’t get over how repressed and constipated they are and how they won’t express how they feel.
IKR??
Kevin is different from me in that he is a fourth or fifth generation Montrealer… When he goes to England he has to learn things and he’s a klutz, whereas having grown up with a British mother and having spent much of my childhood with a stepfather who is a Scot educated in England, I’m very conscious of every nuance of English accent and class assumption and irony, and Kevin doesn’t get any of that stuff.
And how did your parents end up in Canada?
That’s I guess Canadian academic history. Universities in Canada expanded like crazy in the late 1960s because of the Baby Boom but there were not enough Canadians with a PhD around so they massively imported, Brits and Americans mainly but also some people from other parts of Europe, to work in universities. If you looked at the humanities departments, and probably the science to some degree too, early 1970s you’d probably get 3/4 of Profs that were foreigners and that’s actually what stimulated the rise of Canadian nationalism in universities. We’ve been taught history by foreigners, was the rallying cry.
So what is Kevin’s problem? He’s a man in desperate search of political urgency. Any kind, anywhere.
He’s come out of this commitment to left, which comes from his father who’s sort of an ineffectual leftist. His mother still supports good causes but has decided she needs a regular job, and he has worked for a nationalist think tank at McGill which I can divulge is based on a think tank run by somebody I’ve never met, Kari Levitt, famous Canadian nationalist who wrote Silent Surrender (1970), the book about the arrival of American multinational corporations in Canada after the Second World War. When I was living in Montreal I met somebody who was working as Kari Levitt’s assistant and that’s where the idea came from. Kevin has come out of the campaign in 1988 to try and fight off free trade and that’s the baggage he brings to his meetings with people in Oxford like Leon and Alex.
We don’t even know how Kevin would have voted in the 1995 referendum – and there’s a lot about the referendum in the novel. He’s a little bit empty, I thought. He wanders around Europe looking for… something.
There is a sense of somebody who’s lost. My hope is that at the end he finds something, although that something is pretty modest. He does at least make a decision at the end whereas for much of the book he is being buffeted by circumstance. He decides he’s not going to take over the think tank.
And we never learn what his thesis was about!
We just know it’s a disaster. That’s another way we are different. I wrote my thesis in record time and then actually sat there for another year or so of funding just studying languages… but I knew a lot of people who had Kevin’s problem.
Kevin is the aimless millennial character that we know so well today, although he’s of the 1990s.
My argument regarding that would be that the 1990s is sort of the 1920s reprised. I think at one point Leon says this – the 1990s is the time when the bipolar structure of the world collapses and at least in theory you could do lots of other stuff and you could seek out new directions. I remember there *was* a lot of excitement when I was living in London in early 1989, about the revival of the idea of the Mitteleuropa. People would eagerly consume Timothy Garton Ash’s columns in the Independent… I did a trip in early 1989, just before everything changed. I spent a month in Hungary, a few days in Slovakia, then ten days in Poland and a few days in the Czech part. In Hungary, things had basically changed. It wasn’t official yet, but there was a lot of things you could do that you weren’t able to do a year earlier. I went to a couple of universities and I made friends that I’m still friends with…Czechoslovakia was unbelievably orthodox, still. They flew the Soviet flag next to the Czech flag everywhere. Gorbatchev’s book on Perestroika was for sale in Hungary but not in Czechia. Then I went to Poland, got off the train in Krakow and stepped right into a demonstration. Poland was in the state of utter insanity. There were about to go into the election that Solidarity won.
Meanwhile, Kevin does his misery tourism around war-torn Bosnia, with Catherine. I love that scene in Mostar with the crazy hobo who upsets the oblivious CanadianAmerican duo… while Kevin wants to take a photo of war ruins.
It’s good to talk about the Mitteleuropa part of the novel because everybody just wants to talk about the Oxford bit.
Oxford must look different now, the High table and the rituals.
Yes, I actually went back ten years later to do some research and all of that had changed. The people they hired in the 1990s were people who had partners that they actually wanted to go home to rather than having this life that just consisted of the Common Room. I graduated in 1996 and my college at that stage had 60 Fellows of whom 2 were women. Now I think it must be approaching 50-50. I can only remember one Fellow who was not white, a South Asian economist. That must have changed too. I wanted to write about Oxford among other things because most writing about Oxford is from the POV of an upperclass Englishman, and chiefly about the undergraduate experience. The graduate experience has always been more cosmopolitan.
Isn’t it great that Leon the Marxist marries a wealthy socialite at the end?
He ends up with a house in Muswell Hill!
And isn’t Kevin actually in love with his mate Alex? They date the same women, and there’s a scene in which Kevin is having sex with Alex – by proxy that is Catherine.
Yes, I wanted to write about male friendship and that includes the homoerotic aspect of male friendships. In a way, that’s the one enduring relationship for Kevin. That scene with Alex on the phone I almost cut, I thought maybe that was a bit too blatant, but in the final round of edits the publisher didn’t mention it. The competitiveness of male friendship, it’s something I wanted to get into, but also the way that there is always the veneer of homoeroticism in any male friendship – more so in some than others.
Kevin says at one point, until now I’ve been preoccupied with women, but Oxford has made me extremely homosocial.
It was still a misogynistic place, replete with gay male misogyny which we don’t think about much in North America; we tend to see gay men as allies to feminism. But in Britain there’s definitely a strand of gay male culture that is misogynist and it’s embodied in the upper class, mainly. I arrived there in 1992, a couple of the more conservative colleges didn’t admit women till 1980s and for a lot of the Fellows it was an unwelcome recent event.
There’s that recent book by Richard Lipscomb, Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics, about the Oxford philosophy department during WW2, when the handful of women there had the freedom to actually do philosophy. But then the men returned.
I remember attending Terry Eagleton’s inaugural lecture when he was made a Professor, or was he given a Chair? Anyway, some sort of distinction. And I remember John Bailey and Iris Murdoch coming in, and Murdoch was in early stage Alzheimer’s, it was obvious she wasn’t entirely there.
I can’t believe you were in the same room with Iris Murdoch! Well, some of her in any case.
That’s one of the weird things about having studied there. A lot of people graduate and you hear about them later. I was in a Canadian politics class in which another student sitting next to me was a guy named Mark Carney. He was very silent. Never said anything. At the end of the class turned to me and said You feel really passionately about this stuff, don’t you? I think he had come as a Rhodes but he had stayed on to do his PhD. He was about 28 then, but seemed much older, he came in in a tweed jacket and he was already married with two kids. And there are various people who are now in American politics who were also Rhodes scholars. Who else did I meet… I was at George Steiner’s inaugural lecture. Which was great.
This was when they made him Chair of Comparative Literature, maybe 92-93. The irony of that was that he failed his PhD at Oxford and the report recommending failure of his PhD said “this is a work of comparative literature”… He was supposed to study English literature, or French literature, or German, and of course Steiner being Steiner, could only compare multiple literatures. But I was there during his inaugural lecture. Lectures at Oxford at least in my day and I think it’s still the case were open to everybody, people could wander off the street and listen. It’s only the tutorials that are closed and they are normally one-on-one and one-on-two.
Is the Dean Bess with his gay sex parties based on anybody real?
Er yeah. And the American thriller writer Larry Beinhart who wrote among other things Wag the Dog, he was at Wadham College when I was there, as a visiting mystery writer. And he desperately wanted to write a novel about these parties but I don’t think he ever did.
II.
But Oxford aside, the Eastern European bit of the novel was important for me. All these little countries in the 1990s EE becoming themselves again was seen by a lot of people as a break on all the free trade agreements that sprung up as soon as the Cold War ended. And we thought the diversity of Transylvania or the diversity of Slovakia would give us a lesson in how cultures could interact and mingle etc. but of course it didn’t happen. There was a strong belief in that, and I wanted to put that into motion and that’s what Kevin’s quest is. It’s the quest of what comes after the Cold War. He’s wandering and he’s naïve but I did want to play with those ideas a bit.
For about 10 years we thought, no more binary world. Now we’re going to have a multi-polar world, more democratic one – and Timothy Garton Ash said the period of freedom goes from 11/9 in Berlin to 9/11 in NYC. First couple of drafts I didn’t really know what I was doing but by the third draft I was conscious that I was writing an 11/9 - 9/11 book. In 1988-89 I lived in the UK and worked as a data entry clerk at the Paddington health authority and then I saved up that money to travel in Eastern Europe, just before the Wall came down. There was a kind of revival of Mitteleuropa literature from 1930s happening, with people like Sándor Márai… The travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor, those came into print again. That influenced my view of the world; an extended part of my education was being in London and reading all that stuff.
Does it look quaint to you now, this feeling of ‘nothing will ever be the same’? The end of communism in EE appears a bit swept away by other events. The fact that China’s regime never fell yet it incorporated capitalism.
Yeah, it showed that you could be Stalinist and neoliberal at the same time. And the fear is that that’s where we’re heading.
And Russia is back to where it was in the 1970s and 80s, geopolitics-wise.
In a certain way, yes. There was a hope of it opening. Things you get in Catherine’s letters from Moscow is a certain despair at the sight of these pizza stands and born-again Christians…
And Alex is a bellwether for all things Russian. Now how come he never integrated in Canada?
I think we’ve all had this experience, we meet people who have become very Canadian when they come here, and then we meet people who never really made the effort to figure it out. And there are certain families I know, not necessarily Russian origin but other backgrounds, who still don’t really know what the capital of Canada is and everything is about what’s going on in their country of origin.
No there’s a ton of people who are not interested in integrating. And the American TV is always available so they probably know more about the US anyway.
And sometimes people come here for a temporary job, and a few years becomes ten years and twenty years but they really don’t see it as integrating.
But isn’t it also kinda Canada’s fault? What narratives do we offer them?
Yes. Canada doesn’t insist on much. And is almost weary of insisting on much, so there’s that.
III.
I wanted to talk to you about something else. The Anglosphere fiction, particularly the CanadianAmerican fiction, which is merging sort of into one entity. Merging in voice, merging in awards, merging in content. You read in so many languages, so tell me if I’m wrong. There’s a certain homogenization happening. You know how milk is homogenized? Is it the MFAs? Is it what the media covers?
I think it’s various things. I don’t think we can blame the book reviewing establishment because they hardly exist any more. As long as you know that a book by X is out and you see it reviewed in two or three papers and a couple of smaller magazines, then you have a sense of a national literature. Once your local paper ceases to review your local fiction – and I’m using here of course the Benedict Anderson thesis about nations as imaginary communities built through fiction reading – as soon as all that goes online and you find out about a book on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, then those boundaries break down. When I was writing When Words Deny the World, I tried to see if there are any Canadian writers who moved to the States and remained Canadian in any way. I found an essay by Clark Blaise in which he lists a number of Canadian writers who moved to the States and either stopped writing or became screenwriters. The only two I could find who’d moved to the States and remained Canadian to some extent were Robert Kroetsch and Douglas Glover. Now you couldn’t even list them all. Emily St John Mandel, Emily Schultz, Casey Plett…
But a lot of people don’t bother with Canadian stuff once they leave (mind, many don’t while they’re still in Canada). Patrick deWitt comes to mind.
Even Margaret Atwood who founded Canadian nationalism in the 1960s is now founding this North American literature award named after Carol Shields, who has become the emblem of the cross-border writer.
But to go back to the disappearance of the book review section and the question of homogenization… Nobody is lamenting it now the way they were lamenting in the 1950s and 60s, but the proportion of Canadian books in Canadian bookstores is just shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. We’re losing our own market. That is a huge issue. It doesn’t have to be that way because of technology, but the combination of certain centralizations of the media and the technology have made it that way.
And now with the merger of the PRH with Simon Schuster…
Oh it’s going to be Hollywood. And a lot of publishers like HarperCollins, and McClelland and Stewart which is I think now an imprint of the PRH – have very little in the way of marketing budgets. I was speaking to someone and was very jealous that his book was published by HarperCollins, and he told me he got into a literary festival in Calgary and HC told him We don’t have the budget to fly you to Calgary.
This is all true. But quite aside from the political economy of publishing — we have homogenized the form I think. There’s a total dominance of the realist and psychological novel. I mean, when you read Hispanic authors, French authors…
Yes, it’s different. But there have always been different streams within Anglophone diction…
All dominated by the middle class novel.
But that’s true in a lot of countries. Even in poor countries – basically the middle class writes fiction. I study the fiction of Lusitan Africa and it too is basically written by the middle class.
OK but let’s take my part of the world. Even the wealthier nations don’t have a traditional middle class novel. Hungary. Austria. Find me a classical middle class novelist in Austria…
Hmm mayybe Joseph Roth… Austria-Hungary went in a way from the peasant novel, the novel of the land – straight to the avant-garde. In Eastern Europe that tends to be more the tension: between the urban avant-garde and the peasant novel.
You cover a lot of Canadian novels in When Words Deny the World. And you’re right about most things. The awfulness of the Fugitive Pieces and the English Patient…
I am still not allowed to be interviewed on the CBC because of that.
And I like how you start one essay with the sentence: Nobody will know how we lived. And then proceed to list the most promoted and rewarded Canadian novels of those years and none of them are thematically in any way connected to Canada.
I wonder how that stands up today. Because today in a certain sense people will know too much about how we live.
How do you mean?
We moved to a very narcissistic, confessional mode. And Facebook is the essential paradigm. And that has fuelled autofiction. Autofiction in English is autofiction partly because we’re obsessed with ourselves and with posting our photos on the internet. But the other reason have autofiction at the moment is that people don’t want to try to write the big social novel because you’re going to get censured because you’re going to have to write about a lot of people whose cultural backgrounds are different from yours. So you can’t be Thackeray or Dickens or George Eliot.
Did we have five minutes when that was allowed? Writing across ethnicities?
I think we did.
Zadie Smith still does it.
Zadie Smith can do it because she’s mixed race, but also because it’s easier to do it in Britain. The British have an accepted repertoire of kind of tropes for dealing with their society. She can invoke those and everybody will know what she means. And there’s so ingrained in the society that they work. Whereas here where we’re still inventing everything, if you try to write about a Jamaican life in Kitchener Ontario, not only will you have the difficulty of people saying you’re not Jamaican so how come you’re writing about that, but you also have the difficulty that we don’t have an accepted trope for that, and the language has to be developed… Do we have a way of expressing the difference between the language of the Maritimes and the language of the Ottawa Valley and the language of Alberta?
I would read that.
It would be great if we were doing it. The problem is it’s not a pre-exsting vocabulary so we have to build it and this is a particularly awkward time in which to build it. There’s a hyper-awareness around race and so on.
I’m trying to think of a Canadian multi-ethnic novel… Maybe Dionne Brand’s Love Enough?
And What We All Long For. It’s tricky for an urban writer if they’re not conspicuously member of a particular minority culture. Then people may be offended by their writing about all these groups and how they interact. But we all live these lives. We all live these lives where we have bits and pieces of all the different cultures because we spend a lot of time bouncing off people who are a little bit different from us – but not as different as they used to be. The assumption that people are irredeemably different and that you can’t write about them because you don’t look like them, I think is wrong. I don’t mean that just in a liberal humanist way, I mean in a practical, social way that we all walk around the same shopping malls, we all do the same stuff.
I agree. And we’re all corrupt. Nobody’s pure. Although a very powerful notion in Canadian self-understanding today is the idea of the pure indigenous person. Against the settler system.
I have a lot of contacts in Latin America and in Latin America an indigenous writer is somebody who writes in an indigenous language. If you write in Spanish, you’re not an indigenous writer.
South Americans are more mixed than North Americans, no?
Yes, everybody has a bit of indigenous ancestry. Therefore you have to be a real hard liner to be recognized as indigenous. And the moment you start using Spanish, you’re a mestizo. I see this with Mexicans here who get called white by indigenous Canadians who have less indigenous ancestry than the so-called white Mexicans. And all the indigenous writers in Canada are very mixed. They all have like one Polish parent or one Hungarian parent or something like that.
Not to mention the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon parts or French parts.
So fiction is over for Canada, basically?
At the moment we’re at the stage when it’s very difficult to fictionalize. And I think that’s why so many people are writing memoirs.
And they’re all identiterian memoirs.
A lot of them are, Here is my particular slice of things. But I think that’s exactly the wrong approach. Obviously there are certain memoirs that cry out to be written. But using life as a way of not writing fiction – and the people who are allowed to write fiction are mainly people who come from the most unmixed parts of the country. We allow Lynn Coady or Wayne Johnston or David Adams Richards to write fiction because we recognize they come from the old fashioned white-Canadian parts of the country.
What have they been up to lately?
Interestingly Johnston’s latest novel is actually about -- inevitably -- sexual abuse and he reveals that his wife comes from a family where all the kids were abused, and the novel has at the end like a 5-page memoir how he discovered that all the kids were abused. It’s almost as if you have to legitimize your imagination with reality. Imagination itself doesn’t stand for anything.
I love that you liked the Colony of Unrequited Dreams in your essays; it’s really an extremely local book that achieves sort of universal readerly interest.
I think so.
The Sheila character is unforgettable.
And she, unlike Joey Smallwood, is completely invented. That’s another thing. One reason contemporary fiction is quite wooden is that it adheres too close to reality. In most fiction you find that the characters who were based on reality are the ones who are most wooden and least persuasive ones. The ones who are imagined are the ones who come out believable and larger than life. Anybody who’s ever taught a creative writing workshop has had the experience of pointing out that a scene in a story doesn’t work and the response is always But that’s exactly what my mother said. And that’s always the one part that doesn’t work. It’s totally unbelievable as fiction.
To come back to The World of After, some characters are based on real people and many others are completely fiction. Some people told me “I didn’t know you dated a Japanese woman” and in the book she’s completely invented.
Kevin at one point has three girlfriends! And I am not buying it.
[laughs] That’s also a symptom of the times and his age, and it’s integrated into the structure of the novel in that he is not able to make decisions; he’s casting about and his relationship patterns reflect that.
IV.
When I read fiction from other countries, I realize how limited the experiences in the Anglophone novel have become. We’ve been stable and middle class for so long and we ran out of experiences? Take just two novel in Portuguese, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, or Joseph Walser’s Machine… neither could have come from AmericanCanadian literature. We should read more translations.
Yes, definitely. And doing that I think you begin to se the cracks in the façade, everything isn’t as stable as you imagine it to be and you see that a lot of the complacency that perhaps is fuelling this northamericanization of the Canadian novel is actually very misplaced and dangerous. And it may be a harbinger of grimmer things to come. If Trump comes back in the States, how long can we hold off those things taking root here as well.
I think this is a problem dating way before Trump, though.
The thing is… we’ve discovered and have this huge problem to face, that we committed some sort of cultural genocide against the indigenous people.
Is that quite accurate, cultural genocide?
Cultural genocide I can live with; ‘genocide’ I can’t live with because I work on Guatemala. Even now in Guatemala, yesterday, the Guatemalan army went and burned the whole Kekchi village to make space for a Russian mine.
It’s a cultural genocide in the sense that it was directed at destroying the language. There are only 180,000 people left in Canada who speak indigenous languages to some degree. We talk about the Haida culture in BC as one of the more dynamic Canadian indigenous cultures and yet I’ve recently read that there are something like 13 living people who speak Haida. Which means the language is essentially dead.
On the other hand there is all this funding going to university departments of indigenous languages – I know a Dene scholar, for example, who dedicated her life to that language which left no written traces…
I don’t know how long that can continue. I don’t completely agree that indigenous languages weren’t written languages because there are certain artifacts that sort of have pictogramed stories on them.
But there was no written literature.
Well you could argue there was an oral literature. And certainly there were cultural concepts that were embodied in the language and that way of thinking disappears when the language disappears. And I think that’s particularly true of indigenous languages. But no it wasn’t written in the way that say the ancient Maya language was written.
I get very nervous when people switch from ‘cultural genocide’ to just genocide, and I’ve seen a few indigenous activists do that recently.
Our prime minister has used the word genocide.
I think that is wrong. If I were Jewish or Armenian I’d have questions.
But you asked about the level of comfort cushioning us from imagining social reality. I think I was trying to make the point that we’ve discovered that we did bad things to the indigenous people and that’s become THE issue. In a way it conceals the larger issue which is the fragility of the whole society and things like class difference which you’re never allowed to mention in Canada. Of which I’m aware of because I grew up with a British mother and stepfather who did think about things in class terms. That’s something that’s always very striking to me.
We also tend to forget about the colonization of francophone Canadians and the fact that that’s huge part of our history. And now I see the multicultural activists in Toronto just writing them off as “more white people” without realizing that as recently as the 1960s we had “les nègres blancs d’Amérique”. You read the newspapers in Quebec and often find the words to the effect “but the English still regard as les petits colonisés”. They still have a very acute consciousness of having been colonised. There was a stage in the 1970s when at least the progressive English-speaking Canadians were aware of that. But that consciousness has been displaced by the need to make amends with indigenous people. Rather than being displaced, it should be side by side. It should be recognized that the colonial project involved both of these things.
That’s another thing about your novel: it’s set in an era when Quebec was the centre of attention in Canadian conversations.
I wanted to remind people about that, I guess, because it’s been so swept under the rug recently.
Or, you can make the argument, the Quebec sovereignists achieved all their goals accept own money and own army?
Perhaps. Although I think there is a danger, especially last few years, of resurgence of Quebec separatism; we’ll see. I may be wrong.
How come?
I think one of the effects of homogenization of English Canada with the States is to marginalize the people in Quebec. And also often to show what people in Quebec would regard as great disrespect towards them. I’m thinking here of things like the way in which their history of being colonized is not acknowledged by Anglo-Canadians any more, but also that question during the debate when Shachi Kurl asked the leader of the Bloc how he can support racist policies. Taking for granted from her Anglo-Canadian multicultural perspective that any nationalist policy in Quebec is racist which about 99 out of 100 people in Quebec would say it’s a slur and historically incorrect.
The divide on the secularism bill has been fascinating. A total consensus that it’s “racist” in the ROC, and near total consensus in Quebec that it’s perfectly in line with egalitarian secular republican citizenship.
That’s accurate I think. In a way, both are products of globalization; the secularism thing was never as big in Quebec before but then they got cable television and started getting all their TV from France. And that kind of secularism emerged in France with the Revolution; Quebec was separated from France before the Revolution. It’s not really part of their historical heritage; their French society was a peasant society.
But it’s changed radically.
Oh it changed in 1960s but it did not change in a way that mimics French republicanism. Even now if you’re sitting in a roadside motel somewhere in the Gaspé peninsula and you turn on the TV, there’ll be somebody in France talking about secularism. That’s equivalent to people here turning on the TV seeing “Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter”. And that wedge drives us apart in that way.
Whenever I start talking to the Anglophones about the secularism bill, the shutters come down. It’s a racist law, they insist, and there’s nothing there to talk about.
I mean, there is racism in Quebec. But there is also a lot of racism in downtown Toronto. Generally I think Quebeckers are being ignored in the ROC at the moment. I just reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement David Staines’ A History of Canadian Fiction. The thing that I found shocking about it was that he did not at any point explain what he was doing. The book is called A History of Canadian Fiction, and he doesn’t say at the beginning I’m only going to write about English Canadians. And yet he has a section on fiction in Inuktitut. The 31 000 speakers of Inuktitut get more attention than the 7.3 million speakers of French.
That’s the editor boo-boo, no? The editor should have caught that and said Listen we’re aware of the CanLit in French but we’re only looking at the Anglo history here.
Yes, but I think it’s indicative of the larger picture. Staines is the mouthpiece for the sort of Atwood 1968 Canadian nationalism…
But we still need that.
Yes but when Atwood wrote Survival, she put in a chapter on Quebec. It’s not great and it’s very limited but she did it. Now the Canadian nationalist point of view doesn’t feel it has to do it. I reviewed an encyclopaedia of Canadian writing a few years ago and I was astonished that there were twice as many pages on the indigenous writing in English as there were on the whole Quebec tradition from 1700s to the present. And indigenous writing is no more indigenous than Italian-Canadian or Jewish-Canadian is Italian or Jewish. Because those writers are not writing in Italian or Hebrew or Yiddish.
I teach Latin American cultures and of course I teach the poems of Humberto Ak’abal who is a major poet who writes in the Maya K’iche’ language. I teach them in bilingual editions, with MK on one page and Spanish on the other but in Latin America he’s an indigenous writer. Someone who happened to have had three indigenous grand parents and writes in Spanish, they’re not indigenous. Whereas of course in Canada you have one grandparent who is half-indigenous and you’re an Indigenous writer.
And you are busy inventing yourself as a member of an ethnic community first and foremost.
Part of this is of course postmodernism, which says you can reinvent yourself. But then you have people who write on indigenous issues for say the Globe, like Tanya Talaga, and her father is a Polish immigrant.
I’ve noticed many cases like that. It’s just… bizarre.
I don’t know how we get past this and get back. We need, oddly, the vessel for sort of bringing things more into perspective and that vessel could be the nation, but we’ve become suspicious of the nation because the nation has become Trump or Orban or Putin. But we might want to remember that we have a multicultural nation, and that it’s something that we’ve been trying to build before.
V.
Who are your favourite Hispanic authors?
I’m a bit behind because I’ve been working on an academic book about Angola and for the last 3-4 years everything I’ve read has been about Angola or from Angola. I got obsessed with Angola at one stage. Then I started going there. I’ve now translated three books by younger Angola writers.
We know so little about African literatures.
Yes but we also tend to stereotype them. And once you get into southern Africa all those stereotypes break down. Because most of the writers are mixed race in some way. So this whole narrative of Africa as this place where the African-Americans can seek their identity, which is how it’s marketed in most North American universities, doesn’t work. And that’s one reason why we don’t hear about Lusitan Africa even though it has great literature: it doesn’t fit that paradigm. João Melo, well known journalist and occasional short story writer and poet in Angola apparently caused a riot at University of Oregon when he visited. A colleague of mine invited him to speak at the university and he addressed a joint meeting of students of Portuguese and Spanish and the Africa and African Diaspora Studies students. The first thing you have to understand, he told them, is that there are parts of Angola that were settled by the Portuguese before the blacks got there.
Historically, he’s correct. Once we get to southern Africa, it’s complicated. The Bantus were coming from the north, the Portuguese were coming in from the west. The similar argument can be made about the Boers in South Africa who were going north and met the Bantus who were going south. It’s complicated and it breaks down the narrative of the homeland. A lot of that stuff a lot of African-Americans regard as terribly passé anyway, because it harks back to books like Alex Haley’s Roots.
One thing I stumbled on while doing the research: there was a DNA study done by 23andMe in 2019 that discovered that contrary to the mythology that most African-Americans come from Nigeria or Ghana, most actually come from Southern Kongo or Angola. Which means they come from this environment that’s actually quite different – it was new territory for the Bantus just as it was to the Portuguese. And because the Portuguese refused to send very many white people there, the colony was run by Lusified blacks. And they ran the slave trade and traded their black brothers. That’s a much less comfortable picture than the English speaking people going into Ghana disrupting the cultures that have been there for millennia and shipping people off to Louisiana. Though Accra, Ghana was indeed one of the points of slave trade later and it’s true that a lot of the slaves who were sent to the Caribbean came through Accra, Ghana.
All this to say that: the book I’m writing is very against the current trends because it’s the book on multiculturalism and multiracialism.