Tanya Tagaq at Literature Matters 2019

The fifth edition of the Literature Matters The third annual Literature Matters – the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature Lecture Series featured Karen Connelly, and Tanya Tagaq. Connelly is a renowned novelist, poet and a travel writer, and Tagaq is a Canadian Inuk throat singer, novelist from Nunavut. Smaro Kamboureli, the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature, moderated the program. Connelly read from Handwriting Memories and Tagaq spoke about Unknown Bones.

I have participated in all the five Literature Matters readings and interviews since 2015 when it was launched, and without any doubt, I’d like to say, as emphatically as possible – and without belittling the contribution of the all the authors who have participated in this series to Canadian literature – that Tagaq’s chat with the audience was the most original.

All authors who have participated in this series have all made original presentations that often also included an A/V component. Dionne Brand (2018) and Madeline Thein (2016) were expectedly amazing, and Tagaq this year has set the benchmark higher.

I am producing an extract from her chat below:

I am from Cambridge Bay. I am Inuk. My father is English. He was the product of two World Wars Two veterans. He immigrated to Canada when he was three years old. He was born in England. He immigrated to BC. He went looking for work and ended up doing geological service work for the Government of Canada off an island in Halifax. They offered twice the pay to work in Resolute Bay, which is where my mother was relocated. My mother was born and raised in an igloo upon an island.  And this is what a lot of people don't understand about the colonial processes that the very high Arctic affected people in many ways. So, like notoriously now, Inuk women give birth very quickly, because we have unassisted birth to millennia. And my mother, being raised in an igloo was pockmark until she was 12 years old has full access to the land and the sophistication that comes from that knowledge. She's a magic person.

I love her so much. So, she was relocated by the government along with the people from Northern Quebec, because the Canadian government needed to establish mineral and water rights throughout the Northwest Passage. Without that, we would have been overtaken by other people. So, they needed Inuit or Canadian citizens to be placed into communities. And they did that through the relocation. They did that through killing our sled dogs. They did that by forcing us into Christianity. They did that to ensure their capitalist benefits, which seems to be the demise of society right now.

With our ecological crisis and climate change, this attachment of us from ourselves from our land, who we are, how reluctant are you to turn around to a stranger tonight and bury their heart and confess your mortality? And to ask for help and love? How scared are you to accept yourself? And I think it's this disassociation from the land that has caused us to be living in a state of anxiety and lack of self acceptance.

My mother went on to lie and say she had a high school education and get a Bachelor of Education from McGill University. Fucking badass woman, she is so awesome. And my father moved to Nunavut when he was 19 or 20 and he had lived there ever since.

And this is what I mean about what we're, well what I'm going to monologue about basically is like, how do I cover all this? Talking about blood, and culture, talking about literature, art, talking about how we associate with each other, right now, talking all the time, about reality and how we live and how people judge each other. And what the dominant culture considers sophisticated and help people and Being a replication ultimately of how the universe expands and evolves.

I recently watch a documentary about galaxy – there’s a massive black hole that's sucking all the life back and use it to. And I was just thinking about the inhalation and exhalation of the universe of Big Bang. And what we're all doing here and how we're just this beautiful, perfect extension of the energy of the universe, and how foolish we are to squander it and how ridiculous we are not be thankful of our breaths.

How ridiculous we are to not realize that every single person in here has felt self-hatred, extreme desire, love, shame. Everybody refuses to lean on each other cuz we're just so dreadfully embarrassed of our bodies. Well, you know what? Not me. I'm not. I was put here to eat and birth and come and not be ashamed of my size of my age of myself of my thoughts. Nobody can take this from me because I'm not going to go into the grave ashamed of who I am.

And I was not born in sin and I refuse to think that there's anything wrong with me other than why most ridiculous novels. I am ridiculous. But I love myself so deeply and completely. And if anything, by the end of the night, if I could give you one thing, please just do your best to accept yourself and love yourself and leave this place knowing that you're so very lucky to be alive right now. And knowing that no matter how hard it is, your ancestors didn't survive for you to be ashamed of who you are.

Anyway, I sound like a fucking preacher.

To hear more, click here: Tanya Tagaq at Literature Matters

Tanya Tagaq photo: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/authors/2133411/tanya-tagaq

A decade in Toronto - 26

Let’s continue with the film theme for the last post for 2015. I saw The Best of Enemies at Bell Lightbox; a documentary that’s a feast for political junkies and students of journalism. It’s a documentary on the epic television battle between the conservative William F Buckley Jr and liberal Gore Vidal; a debate that shaped television journalism for the next five decades.

Pico Iyer has moulded global consciousness in many ways, and it was an absolute delight to hear him speak at the launch of Ratna Omidvar’s Global Diversity Exchange. Iyer gave us The Global Soul, a treatise that has shaped our understanding of the immigrant culture that is slowly taking over the world, even if the phenomenon is causing tremendous heartburn in large swathes of Europe and North America, causing political upheavals that has brought the extreme right wing to power in many countries in the developed world.

But the inexorable decline in the population in these parts of the world, and the continuing rise in Africa and Asia will see the "great unwashed" showup at the airports and on the shores, and it’ll be difficult to stop their flow for long.

Pico Iyer believed then that Canada, and especially Toronto, understands immigration.  
He says,
“I came away with a sense of possibility I hadn’t felt as I’d traveled to other of the globe’s defining multicultures, whether in Singapore or Cape Town or Melbourne, on the one hand, or in Paris and London and Bombay, on the other. On paper, at least the logic was clear: Toronto was the most multicultural city in the world, according to the UN’s official statistics and it was also, statistically, the safest big city in North America and, by general consensus, the best organized. Put the two facts together, and you could believe that a multiculture could go beyond the nation—states we knew and give a new meaning to that outdated term, the “Commonwealth.” Add further my sense that Toronto had the most exciting literary culture in the English-speaking world, and you could believe that it not only offered an example of how a country could be even greater than the sum of its parts, but presented visions of what that post-national future might look like.”

Two performances that I saw that year stay etched in my memory – the Swatri Group’s Gujarati play કાય પણ ઍક ફૂલ નુ નાં બોલો તો and the other was a two-part dance ballet Woman: A Search by Mrudanga Dance Academy. 

And in addition to Akshya Mukul’s important book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, I read MG Vassanji’s masterly memoirs, And Home was Karikoo. It’s an insider’s perspective that has an outsider’s objectivity.

Here’s a passage that is especially relevant to most first-generation immigrants:

“…I left the country after high school; therefore, I missed the hardships that others endured in the years that followed. What right do I have to show this outrage? It is easy for me, the comfort of my situation in North America, to condemn the nation’s reliance on foreign aid. To which I answer that leaving a place does not sever one’s ties to it, one’s feeling of concern and belonging. We are tied to our schools, our universities, our families, even when we’ve left them – then why not to the place of our childhood, of our memories? Surely a returnee has some claim to the land which formed him – which is not in some godforsaken corner of the globe but in the centre of one’s imagination. And surely distance lends objectivity, allows one to see a place as the world see it.”

The series Literature Matters was launched in 2015 by Smaro Kamboureli, the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature. The first program featured Thomas King and Naomi Klein, and the subject was climate change. Klein’s epic This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. Climate Change is a book that will continue to remain relevant for a long time, and will become the basis of policy when young people (such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal) take power away from the three generations that have destroyed our home planet’s environment.

Literature Matters - III: Solitude, Mistakes & Creativity

Edugyan (far left), Kamboureli (centre) and Solie (right)

The third annual Literature Matters – the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature Lecture Series featured Karen Solie, and Esi Edugyan, both renowned, multiple award-winning writers. Solie is a poet, and Esi Edugyan is a novelist. Smaro Kamboureli, the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature, moderated the program.

Karen Solie is the author of four collections of poetry. Her third collection Pigeon won the 2010 Pat Luwther Award, Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Griffin Prize. Her most recent, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2015) was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She was the 2015 recipient of the Writers’ Trust Latner Poetry Prize and received the 2016 Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award.

Before the program commenced, the organisers had prepared a slideshow that was presented on the screen of the Isabel Bader Theatre’s stage. It contained extracts from both the poet’s and the novelist’s works, all remarkable in their pithy observations. For instance, the following lines from Solie’s poem from the collection The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out.

My unknown presence

was my weapon. I waited for him

to initiate the next stage

of our lives.

Solie’s subject was On Folly: Poetry and Mistakes. She began her talk by quoting from Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (also known as Erasmus of Rotterdam), most famous work The Praise of Folly, where the humanist theologian and one of the pioneers of the Protestant Reformation asked: What is more foolish? The poet or the poetry? Solie’s tongue-in-cheek answer: People are generally happy when they see a tradesperson – a plumber or an electrician; that is not often the case when they see a poet.  That, she added, had to do with more people agreeing that they hate poetry than on what poetry is.

In a talk that was peppered with quotes from many poets and writers, Solie made the case that follies and mistakes are integral to creativity and that everything that a writer does is no more natural than other things in the world. A writer’s responsibility, therefore, is to remain open, vulnerable, and basically write down everything that’s inside the head on paper.

Solie observed that the definition of word folly has evolved to become narrower; in its pristine sense, it also meant delight, fakery, a dwelling place, in addition to failure or a mistake. She said fear is a necessary ingredient for good writing, and that fear, too, had many shades and connotations, just as mistakes are essential to creativity. During the Q&A later, she said that fear for her is the fear of being terrible in the many ways that one can be terrible.

Solie said poetry is about ‘and’ not ‘or’, and quoted Meena Alexander’s poem Question Time

We have poetry

So we do not die of history.

I had no idea what I meant.

Solie answering an audience question as
Kamboureli and Edugyan listen

Esi Edugyan is a renowned novelist, whose second novel Half-Blood Moon won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction, and the Ethel Wilson Award for the USA’s Hurston-Wright Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Prize for Fiction. It was shortlisted for many other awards including the Man Booker and the Governor-General Award. In 2014 she published her first collection of a nonfiction book, Dreaming of Elsewhere, a meditation on the relationship between home and belonging.

The subject of Edugyan’s talk was The Wrong Door: Some Meditations. She began with the example of the proverbial person from Porlock, who disturbs Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic era English poet, while he was penning Kubla Khan (A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment).

The story goes that Coleridge, in an opium-induced haze, was writing a poem that apparently was flowing naturally and was practically getting itself written, was disturbed by this person from Porlock, who had mistaken knocked on Coleridge's door. By the time this person left, the poem has evaporated from his mind, and mere fragments were of it left.

Edugyan said every writer needs a metaphorical wrong door that intruders may knock on to disturb someone else and leave the writer alone to create. Every writer fears the sudden, thought-scattering disturbance that ruins her work. She said solitude and silence are essential requirements for a writer because only through silence can she cut out the external to hear the internal.

Losing a thought or an idea because of the din that surrounds a writer is commonplace, especially in these days of social media distractions. Edugyan quoted Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost) where she traces the origin of the word ‘lost’ to the Norse word los. Solnit says, “The word ‘lost,’ comes from the Old Norse ‘los,’ meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.”

We must go away to allow ourselves to perform miracles, Edugyan observed. She said even though the writer writes for everyone, she should accept that not everyone will like what she writes and that the role of art and creativity is to depict the world faithfully, even if it is unsavoury. Edugyan also emphasised the significance of privacy. She said that the role of privacy in creation is being redefined constantly, especially in this post-privacy world, a writer should realise that public intimacy turns into banality, and loss of privacy has the greatest ability to destroy the artist. Silence, she said, exists beyond the spectacle and words are within us waiting to be made whole.

A brief Q/A followed the readings, where both Solie and Edugyan stressed the need for solitude. Solie spoke of the eternal conundrum: We don’t write to please people, and yet, we want people to read what we write. Edugyan spoke of the adverse effects of being a celebrity on the process of creativity.

Read about the previous two Literature Matters here:

Literature Matters – I

Literature Matters – II

Literature Matters-II: Memory and Sound

Chong (l), Kamboureli (c), Thein (r)

The second annual Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature lecture series (Literature Matters) featured Denise Chong and Madeleine Thien, and Professor Smaro Kamboureli, the inaugural Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, moderated the conversation between two women of letters.

Denise Chong, acclaimed for her family memoir The Concubine’s Children, spoke about ‘Literature and Rendering Memory’.

Narrating snippets of conversations and reactions she had gathered while researching her creative nonfiction works Stories of Fate and Circumstances (which is a sort of sequel to The Concubine’s Children), Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, and The Girl in the Picture: The Kim Phuc Story.

Egg on Mao is the story of Lu Decheng, a Chinese bus mechanic, now living in Calgary, who protested against the totalitarian Chinese regime by defacing a portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong during the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, and The Girl in the Picture is a memoir of the Kim Phuc, the girl burnt by napalm attack in Trang Bang, Vietnam, and made famous by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut.

In a brief but engaging talk, Chong said the main task of the writer is to mine what resides in memory, and turn knowing into telling. As a writer, she said her job is to discern what is not being told.

She said the word ‘Matters’ in the title of the lecture series ‘Literature Matters’ should be used both as a noun and as a verb.

Chong added that memory matters because it is proof that we matter. As a writer, she said, she makes the choice to pry. She also spoke about appropriation of memory, a concept propounded initially by Oliver Sachs in his essay Speak, Memory (published in 2013 in the New York Review of Books).

In the process of appropriation of memory, there is often an absence of mechanism in the brain to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Chong said in creative nonfiction, there is randomness in collecting and processing facts. She described the relationship between a writer and a reader thus:  “I enrich you with who I am and you enrich me with who you are. I give you my story, and you make it yours.”

Madeleine Thien, acclaimed novelist and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s LiBeraturpreis for her novel Dogs at the Perimeter, made a presentation titled ‘The Field of Sound: JS Bach, China and the Possibilities of Personhood’. A substantial part of her presentation is her research for her forthcoming third novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s.

Thien said in non-western traditions, the connotations of silence is not just an absence of sound. It is often the manifestation of falsehood that societies force individuals to utter, which drives them to silence. She illustrated her argument with short biographies of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), the Russian composer persecuted by the totalitarian Soviet regime, and He Luting (1903-1999), the Chinese composer persecuted during the Chinese Cultural Revolution – a period when it was ‘very hard to be a person’.

Thein then described the oppressive Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, during which time, the Khmer Rouge resorted to destroying the listener to destroy sound. Her presentation was interspersed with musical interludes that accentuated her point of view.

A brief discussion between Chong, Thien and Kamboureli followed Thien’s presentation, and the program concluded with a Q&A with the audience. 

Literature Matters - 1: A new social contract

Keep it in the ground is an evocative campaign that The Guardian newspaper (London) launched recently. Advocating strict policy measures to tackle climate change, the Guardian Media Group divested its entire £800 million portfolio (about $1.4 billion) from fossil fuels, which it will re-invest in socially responsible alternatives. It is urging the world’s two largest charitable foundations — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust — to stop investing in oil, coal and gas companies.

The debate over climate change is the only one that should dominate our century. Nothing else matters. Two recent events in Toronto focussed on the urgent need to focus on climate change not merely from an environmental perspective, but as an economic, social and moral imperative. On April 7, Smaro Kamboureli, the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature, presented Literature Matters that featured Canadian author Thomas King, and Naomi Klein, the author of a series of books on the exploitative nature of capitalist economy, whose most recent book This Changes Everything Capitalism vs The Climate, has comprehensively changed the debate. 

On April 12, as part of the Spur Festival, Imre Szeman, Canadian Research Chair in Cultural Studies and professor at the University of Alberta; and Chris MacDonald, Director of the Jim Pattison Ethical Leadership Education & Research Program discussed the Moral Economy – Canada’s new social contract; the intersection between public permission to operate and important sectors of the Canadian economy. Konrad Yakabuski of the Globe and Mail moderated the debate.

The two events overlapped on several key issues.

Klein believes that we are dealing with a profound failure of imagination, even though nobody is disputing the claim that capitalism is destroying our planet, there is no attempt to find an alternative to capitalism. There is a near-universal sense of defeat. The two prevailing thoughts that have contributed to inertia are: We screwed up, but we’re God’s species, so we’ll eventually fix it. The other is: We did it, and it’s too late to fix it, so we should let it all burn down.

Klein characterised it as either defeat or war. The idea of peace with the planet is not part of the narrative.

She attributed the policy paralysis in terms of tackling climate change to the increasing fundamentalism of market-driven economics. The dominance of capitalism as a determinant of global economics has left us without any alternatives, and this has stifled both debate and action. 

A few days later, at the debate over Moral Economy, Szeman emphasized that the policy paralysis stems from a paradigm shift. It’s not just our economics that is market driven, market philosophy has taken over our way of life, and it has now become an integral part of every human endeavour.

The debate over social licence – the new social contract that governments and corporates need to negotiate with the society – is acquiring dimensions that appear to question even the democratic basis of our societies. Szeman, in fact, stated so rather bluntly. The issue of climate change is no longer about individual choice, it is a collective responsibility. By embracing globalization, western societies have outsourced pollution.

Klein quoted Andreas Malm, who has termed climate change as an “atmospheric expression of class warfare.” Writing in Jacobin, Malm says, “Few resources are so unequally consumed as energy. The 19 million inhabitants of New York State alone consume more energy than the 900 million inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. The difference in energy consumption between a subsistence pastoralist in the Sahel and an average Canadian may easily be larger than 1,000-fold — and that is an average Canadian, not the owner of five houses, three SUVs, and a private airplane.”

The debate also needs to factor the traditional rights of people over their lands. In Canada, it’s the first nations people, who have been systematically deprived of their economic right as their traditional resources have been usurped by the government and the corporates that profit from extractive resource sectors.

The debates were both insightful and disturbing; and Thomas King, the critically-acclaimed Canadian author, gave it a human dimension. The academics and the journalist marshalled facts, arguments and statistics to prove their contention, the author touched the audience’s heart by telling a simple story of the greed for more candles. As part of Literature Matters program, Lee Maracle, one of the first indigenous authors to be published in the 1970s, ‘robed’ Thomas King with a handmade blanket she had woven together from pieces of cloth gathered from around the world. Later, Joseph Boyden paid a tribute to King.