My life in books

Although Winona LaDuke's novel, Last Standing Woman is written as fiction, the author states in a note that "the circumstances, history, and traditional stories, as well as some of the characters, are true, retold to the best of my ability." Indeed, Last Standing Woman tells with a sometimes searing truthfulness the history of the White Earth Anishinaabe people from the 1860s to the present, through seven generations, including three women named Ishkwegaabawiikwe, or Last Standing Woman.

The story of the White Earth people's resistance to racism, oppression and attempts at assimilation is told in an episodic fashion, tracing first the loss of identity and then the struggle to reclaim it despite such obstacles as land swindling, missionaries and their boarding schools, government housing projects, and alcoholism and sexual abuse.

As if to demonstrate the survival of her people, LaDuke writes the final chapter of the book - which deals with the vision of the newest woman to be named Ishkwegaabawiikwe - in Anishinaabe, declaring to the world that despite all the years of struggle, her people's language and culture survive in the young and will survive into the future.






.

Sherman Alexie's young adult novel, The Absolutely True Adventures of a Part-time Indian is by turns hilarious and heart-breaking. And while it may be fiction (though based at least in part on Alexie's own early life), it rings absolutely true.

The narrator is Arnold Spirit Jr., a young boy growing up on a Spokane reserve. He is charmingly geekish, isolated by his intelligence, his fondness for drawing cartoons, and the physical consequences of being hydrocephalic - seizures, an ungainly appearance with an overly large head. As narrator, Arnold speaks directly to the reader, sharing his sometimes funny, sometimes angry, often poignant observations about his life and the lives of his relatives and neighbours on the reserve. There is no sugar coating here; Arnold sees the ways in which his people are trapped in destructive patterns and second-class lives:

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.

Early in the book, Arnold thinks about what his parents might have been like under different circumstances:

Seriously, I know my mother and father had their dreams when they were kids. They dreamed about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams. Given the chance, my mother would have gone to college. She still reads books like crazy. She buys them by the pound. And she remembers everything she reads. ... Given the chance, my father would have been a musician. When he gets drunk, he sings old country songs. And blues, too. And he sounds good. ... But we reservation Indians don't get to realize our dreams. We don't get those chances. Or choices. We're just poor. That's all we are.

But Arnold does get a chance, and a choice, when he is suspended from the reserve school for throwing a book at his (white) teacher. (He has reason for his anger - he has just realised that he is studying from the same textbook his mother used in school, that no attempt has been made to give the Indian students an up-to-date education.) His teacher, despite his own anger at having his nose broken, sees in Arnold's anger a deeper emotion - hope. And the urges Arnold to "take your hope and go somewhere where other people have hope." For Arnold, that means the white school, 20 miles away, and there he determines to go, even though he must walk to school and back each day because his parents cannot afford the gas to drive him there.

Attending an off-reserve school brings with it many additional problems; to the white kids at school, he is an outsider - at least, until he displays an unexpected talent for basketball - while to his former friends on the reserve, he is a traitor - especially when he plays basketball against them. But he perseveres, takes this rare gift of a chance that has been denied to so many others, and makes his choice.

Keri Hulme's novel about damage and redemption, The Bone People, is at once the story of three broken people who must be stripped down to the bone before they can begin to heal, and also a vision of the need for a cultural renewal for New Zealand's peoples that brings white and Maori together.

Set in rural New Zealand, the novel centres on the relationships between three people. Kerewin, mostly white with some Maori heritage, is an artist who has lost her ability to create; she has broken all ties with her family and lives by the sea in a tower (a Rapunzel who ultimately must cut her hair and tear down the tower she has built of her own volition, for the princes who come are too much in need of freeing themselves to free her as well). Joe, mostly Maori with some white heritage, has been damaged by childhood traumas, by the loss of dreams, and by the death of his wife and biological son; gentle when sober, jovial when drunk, with a core of violence that is unleashed by frustration and his sense of failure. His adopted son, called Simon Peter (a fragile rock to build anything on) is the only known survivor from the foundering of a small vessel off the coast, near the small town where Joe lives and where Kerewin has built her tower; a precocious white child of perhaps seven or eight, he is unable to speak (though not for any medical reason), and difficult to deal with, as he often skips school, roams the country side, steals, has seemingly irrational fears that send him into hysteria, and reacts to the frustrations of being misunderstood and unable to communicate with outbursts of violence.

When Simon breaks into Kerewin's tower, and Joe must come to retrieve him, a bond is formed among the three of them, and their interrelationships will ultimately result in stripping all three down to the bone and forcing them on journeys both physical and spiritual through which they may find the paths to healing, redemption and renewal.

Hulme does not hold back when dealing with the ambivalent nature of relationships - however loving - between people struggling with isolation, fear, frustration and loss. Both Kerewin and Joe abuse alcohol, a coping mechanism that Simon attempts when possible. All three resort to violence - in both word (or sound, in Simon's case) and deed - when pushed too far. And yet, with a wisdom that today's more simplistic models of behaviour have forgotten, she knows that when people are badly broken, violence and pain can co-exist with love, that when people are not whole there will be much that is bitter in the midst of sweetness.

What can redeem such relationships is finding the way to heal and be whole, and Hulme gives us some ideas about how that can happen, for individuals and for a people - through finding one's roots, one's centre and one's self, through spiritual renewal and reinvigorating old traditions in newer and more inclusive ways, through ending isolation and embracing family and community.

As someone from a white settler culture living in a country where, like New Zealand, the aboriginal people have been marginalised and in many cases divided from their roots and traditions, the portrayal of the Maori peoples and their relationship to the white settler culture in this novel was of particular interest to me. Hulme, who is herself biracial and identifies with her Maori heritage while also embracing her European background, seems to me to be making a bold proposal for healing and community in settler nations - instead of assimilating aboriginal peoples into the primarily European culture of the settlers, assimilate the settlers into a vibrant and growing aboriginal culture that can incorporate both settlers and aboriginal peoples into one whole and healed community.

(For more thoughts on The Bone People, may I suggest checking out Jo Walton's review at Tor.com? http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/03/maori-fantasy-keri-hulmes-the-bone-people)

Everything is genre these days. Literary fiction is a genre now. While some of the novels I read that I'm calling literary fiction have some highly fantastic elements, I think they are more this than that.

Margaret Laurence, This Side Jordan
Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel

I've been re-reading Laurence's works over the past few years, those that I had read before, and reading the handful I had somehow overlooked in the past. The Fire-Dwellers and The Stone Angel are old friends, part of Laurence's Madawaska sequence that culminates in one of my favourite books, The Diviners. This Side Jordan was new to me, despite being her first published novel. Set in colonial-era Ghana during the lead-up to independence, it looks at the contradictions in the lives and thoughts of both the Ghanese people - torn between their tribal pasts and ancient traditions, their circumscribed and subservient present as second class citizens in their own land, and their varied dreams of an independent future - and the white colonists who are at home neither in the colony they have come to work in nor the Europe they have left behind. in this, her first published novel, Laurence has already become the adept unraveller of inner struggles and social conditions that are so much a part of her oeuvre.


A. S. Byatt, Possession

I saw and loved the movie that was based on this book and always knew I'd get around to reading it. And having done so, I am impressed and delighted by it. There's sonething delightful about the uncovering of a dark literary mystery and the politics of the academy that surround the adventure that deeply appeals to me, and the past that is so revealed, the story of two poets who have a brief affair, and how it affects their lives, their work, and their partners, is well told and strikes true. But the best part among so much goodness was the way that Byatt creates all the primary documents - letters and poems - in the varied voices and styles of the poets and their associates. It was exciting to be able to read the poetry of the two past protagonists and see, not just told, how they influenced each other's work, to examine for myself the little clues to their shared history in their writing.


Barbara Gowdy, Mister Sandman

Gowdy's work is often surreal, and Mister Sandman is no exception. But as surreal as it is, it is a profound examination of the liberation that comes from being truthful and honest to one's self, and those close to one.


Hiromi Goto, Kappa Child

Goto's novel about a Japanese-Canadian woman from a profoundly dysfunction family who, through a fantasy pregnancy in which she bears the child of a kappa, or water spirit, also bears and re-births herself, is both funny and moving, and very, very good.


Jo Baker, Longbourn

As an Austen fan, I was really looking forward to this book - a revisioning of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of those at the bottom of the social ladder, the servants, the enlisted soldiers. And my anticipation was rewarded. Baker looks closely at the lives of those who toil from sun-up to sun-down so that Austen's gentlemen and gentlemen's wives and daughters can live lives of luxury. By introducing a black servant into the Bingley house staff, Baker also lets us examine issue of race in the era of Austen. Much richer and more rewarding than the last big-nane Austen hommage, Death Comes to Pemberley, Longbourn made me look twice at much I'd simpky taken for granted in Austen's novels, and put them into a class perspective. Highly recommended.

After watching the first of the CBC's movies based on Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne books earlier this year, I decided that it was time to re-read the ones I'd read several times before - the first four - and to finally read all the others.

I'm not sure why I had never read the whole series before. Perhaps to a much younger and very single me, the idea of Anne with husband and children didn't appeal. Anne and Gilbert were ready to enter upon their happily ever after at the end of Anne of Windy Poplars, and the younger me wasn't all that interested in the details.

But this time I was more than ready for the domesticity and all the children, the joys and sorrows, large and small, of a maried couple's life. And I enjoyed all the books.

I must say, though, that my favourite of the later books is Rilla of Ingleside. I did not know before starting it that it is the only Canadian novel dealing with the WWI era from a woman's viewpoint written by a female author during that era. Well worth reading.



L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
L. M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars
L. M. Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams
L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside
L. M. Montgomery, Rainbow Valley
L. M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside
L. M. Montgomery, Chronicles of Avonlea
L. M. Montgomery, Further Chronicles of Avonlea

Sarah Schulman, People in Trouble
Sarah Schulman, The Child
Sarah Schulman, The Mere Future

2011 was the year in which I discovered Sarah Schulman. Her work focuses relentlessly on the lives of lesbians and gay men, and she tackles hard subjects with uncompromising honesty. Her work can be stylistically difficult, and is often controversial, but I have found the three novels I of hers that I have read so far to be both compelling and rewarding.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Winterson's classic examination of relationship did not draw me in quite as strongly as some of the other books of hers that I have read, but was still in my mind worth reading.


Laurie R. King, The Language of Bees

My Sherlock fetish, let me show it to you again. I found this volume of King's Mary Russell/Holmes mysteries to be harder to get into than earlier books in the series, but it did start to pick up at the end. And being essentially the first half of a much longer mystery, and thus incomplete, I suppose that makes some sense. On to God of the Hive!


Margaret Atwood, Good Bones

oh my, was this a fun book to read. A slim volume, full of very short fables and vignettes, all of them overflowing with Atwood's delicious and acerbic wit. There is a great deal of critical social commentary and trenchant feminist analysis buried in these small gems.

As Constant Reader has probably noticed, I don't read a lot of mainstream fiction, but I do read some. The remaining books in this category to be recorded in my reads for 2009 are:



Tracks, Louise Erdrich - I enjoyed this thoroughly. Erdrich tells a most engaging story and writes compellingly of the circumstances of First Nations people forced to live under the oversight of white settler law and authorities.


Feminist Fables, Suniti Namjoshi - A collection of short - often very short - narrative pieces that are a combination of keen observation informed by feminist vision, and adry and delightful sense of humour.


Bird in the House, Margaret Laurence - another collection of shorter, linked narratives, set in the fictional town of Manwaka which serves as the nexus from many of the characters in Laurence's fiction.


One Good Story, That One, Thomas King - collection of short stories that explore the relationships between First Nations and settler peoples and their perceptions of each other, told with King's trademark piercing humour and truth.

Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje

Anil Tissera, the focal character in Michael Ondaatje’s award-winning novel Anil’s Ghost, is a Sri Lanka born, Western educated forensic anthropologist returning to her homeland after years of living and working abraod. As the representative of a human rights organisation invited by the Sri Lankan government, under pressure from the West, to investigate allegations of organised campaigns of disappearance and murder, Anil has seven weeks in which to uncover as much as she can of the truth of these charges. Working with her is the government’s appointed liaison, Sri Lankan archaeologist Sarath Diyasena – someone who may or may not share her desire to reveal the truth, or her belief that there is a truth to be revelaed.

Anil knows that seven weeks is not enough time to conduct a full investigation, to build a clear picture of the patterns of violence, to establish a clear case. But she clings to an axiom passed down to her from her teachers: “One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims.” Anil finds the trail that will lead to her one victim in a shard of bone found among the remains from Sarath’s most recent excavation, a shard that is impossibly new, hidden among other bone fragments dating from the Sixth century.

As Anil, with Sarath’s help, painstakingly traces this shard of bone back to a name of a man who has disappeared, so does Ondaatje – Sri Lankan born, educated, and settled in the West, like his central character – slowly uncover through the lives and memories of Anil, Sarath, the people in their own pasts and the people they encounter during their search, the multiple and complex layers of meaning in Sri Lanka’s tragic, war-torn present and its rich traditions and history. Running through the many strands woven into this novel are repeating themes of truth, discovery, memory, deception, concealment, and identity.

This is a moving, complex narrative that speaks powerfully of the horrors and survivals of a specific time and place as well as the vulnerability and fragility of identity and the human condition.

This is the year I discovered Thomas King. King is a First Nations author and a professor of English and Theatre at Quelph University in Canada. He has been writing since the 1990s and has produced a number of novels and several collections of short stories, and in 2003 he was the first Native Canadian to deliver the Massey Lectures, which were published under the title The Truth about Stories, which I read earlier this year.

King has said that "Tragedy is my topic. Comedy is my strategy.” He writes about the Aboriginal experience in white North America, which certainly has many of the elements of tragedy, and at the same time, his work in the short stories I have read – from the volume A Short History of Indians in Canada - is so wisely and wittily funny even as it eviscerates the assumptions, attitudes, perceptions and actions of white North Americans toward First Nations and Aboriginal peoples that this white reader can only thank King for such a happy course of instruction, correction and illumination.

Reading the stories of King the author, and then reading the lectures of King the teacher on what story is and means and does in Aboriginal tradition, has been most rewarding, and I look forward to reading more works by this person who is so kind as to use his talent to make me laugh and think and learn.


.

We So Seldom Look on Love, Barbara Gowdy

This collection of eight unsettling tales of life at the extremes of human existence, of love and longing and desire and damage, is not easy reading, but it is worthwhile reading. In these stories, the reader will meet people whose lives and circumstances, in lesser hands, would be tales of lurid sensationalism or gushing sentimentality. Instead, we meet these scarred and broken people head on, as real human being, with all their pain and all their potential, however warped by the experiences of living, for despair and desolation, joy and love.

I do not recommend reading all these stories at one sitting, but I do think that there’s a great deal to gain from reading them.

While I don’t often give specific recommendation, I think that anyone who enjoyed Jennifer Pelland’s collection Unwelcome Bodies would also find this volume of interest, and of course, the opposite would be true as well.