Category Archives: Margaret Thompson

First Nations voices powerful

We are Born with Songs Inside Us:

Lives and Stories of First Nations People in British Columbia

By Katherine Palmer Gordon

Harbour Publishing, 2013

246 pages,  $24.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

As its publisher suggests, Katherine Palmer Gordon’s sixth book, We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us, is particularly timely. Regrettably, Canadians have grown accustomed to finding First Nations issues in the headlines. The long litany of grievances—poverty, inadequate housing, addiction, disproportionate suicide and imprisonment rates, abuse of women, not to mention the toxic legacy of the residential schools—has created a sad and negative climate for Aboriginal people. This is where Gordon’s book is most timely, for it challenges those negative stereotypes and offers a truly optimistic view of First Nations people.

Gordon interviewed hundreds of individuals, but presents profiles of sixteen in her book. Their backgrounds and occupations are as varied as you would expect in any group: they are teachers and artists, entrepreneurs and politicians, doctors and actors, athletes and councillors, lawyers and chiefs. Some have seen their way clearly from the beginning; others have struggled to overcome disadvantages. What they have in common is success and a powerful belief in the value of their cultural heritage.

In her Introduction, Gordon  describes the role of father birds in teaching their offspring the full range of their characteristic songs. “A baby bird that does not have the opportunity to hear its father sing will never learn its proper song. It will remain bereft of its complete identity, and the single most important characteristic governing its ability to take care of itself, be independent, communicate and relate—not only to members of its own species, but to all other creatures.”

The analogy with First Nations people is persuasive. The residential schools set out deliberately to erase that identity. Many of the individuals profiled in this book are the children of the generation so damaged by that policy. They see clearly that they need to go back to first principles; as Trudy Lynn Warner says, “I know we have been and continue to be guided on our path by our ancestors,” and Clarence Louie states firmly,”My basic mantra is: make sure you keep your cultural identity.” Some strive passionately to preserve their languages, seeing in them the key to that identity; “After all,” says Mike Willie, “if you don’t know who you are, you’re just roaming this world, lost.”

The individuals whose voices are heard in this book are quick to point out that there is no stagnation involved in returning to ancestral ways. They see that the strength acquired by knowing exactly who they are enables them to move forward, whether that involves creating a business, perfecting new art forms or negotiating a treaty. Clarence Louie added to his basic mantra: “…if you want to prosper, get an education, work hard and throw everything you can at economic development.” None of these individuals stands still; all of them share Beverley O’Neil’s strategy for marathon running, aiming not at the finishing line, but past it.

Gordon’s subjects know they have a long way to go, but their conviction and enthusiasm is impossible to downplay. The voices of these young, articulate First Nations people convey boundless optimism for the future. How astute Gordon was to get out of the way and let them speak for themselves.

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cukoo’s Child, will be published in Spring 2014

Family conflict captures pain of past

The Widow Tree

Nicole Lundrigan

Harbour Publishing

312 pages; $22.95

 

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

Nicole Lundrigan’s fifth novel, The Widow Tree, is a complex tale of hidden wrongs, of stillborn plans, of betrayal and fatal misunderstandings. Above all, it is about consequences and the long arm of the past. The author chooses a perfect setting for this unsettling story, abandoning the East Coast background of previous novels for a small village in 1950s Yugoslavia, a country which no longer exists, torn apart by festering ethnic and religious resentments after the death of Tito and the collapse of Communism.

The first chapter takes us far back to a military encampment in the Roman province of Pannonia. A centurion dreaming of home and retirement is uneasy, and acting on his premonition, he buries a pot filled with the legion’s pay: “You will be a man’s future, he thought.” The night brings a barbarian attack and the coins lie in their grave for almost two thousand years until they are dug up by three children half-heartedly participating in a student work day in the fields.

Such is the disarmingly simple beginning. The three children, Dorján, János and Nevena, are lifelong friends: the two boys plan to study engineering together; both admire Nevena, but János is determined to marry her some day. The discovery of the coins, though, immediately sets them at odds. Nevena wants to hand them in to the authorities; János wants to keep them. “We’re filthy rich,” he says. “Never again will we live under the frog’s ass.” The two boys decide to bury the coins in a tin containing a little money they have acquired.

The crack in their relationship caused by this dispute is the start of a relentless disintegration. János disappears, and so do the Roman coins. The mystery fosters jealousy and suspicion and terrible guilt. It unravels official brutality, old grudges, reprisals dating back to the war, a menacing litany of corruption and social inequality concealed behind the hierarchy and codes of the isolated village.

Lundrigan also shows us the other side of the coin. We see the fellowship of the women of the village, their strength in the face of adversity, through the relationship between the widow Gitta and Zsuzsi, Dorján’s grandmother. Tibor, a handicapped boy with good reason to hate János, is revealed as a kind neighbour. Even Komandant Dobrica, vile as he is, shines as a parent compared to his snobbish wife.

There are no winners in these conflicts and revelations, just survivors. Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in the irony of the scene where Gitta, János’ bereaved mother, unaware of the havoc he has wrought in her life, walks with the Komandant in the orchard at his ruined childhood home. Gitta thinks nothing will really change: “If they waited long enough, she was certain, everything would be back as it was before.” She is partly right; deception and betrayal have a very long half-life.

The author draws us through the labyrinth of village life, directing our attention to different characters in turn as their pasts collide with their present to mangle their future. The reader follows the dissection of these lives with a kind of fascinated horror—there is little comfort to be found—but the telling is so intense and the writing so compelling there can be no question of setting it aside before the end.

Margaret Thompson is a retired English teacher and past president of the Federation of BC Writers.  Her seventh book, a novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Child, will be a Spring 2014 publication.

 

Children’s insights poignantly captured

Rupert’s Land
Meredith Quartermain

NeWest Press, 2013

296 pages, $20.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

The title of award-winning poet Meredith Quartermain’s first novel immediately summons up Charles II’s land-gift to the nascent Hudson’s Bay Company, but this is no fur trade story. What is important about Rupert’s Land in this context is its immensity, and the hint of limitless possibility in its emptiness. In different ways, this is what both of the novel’s child narrators are desperate to find.

The story is set during the Depression in the small prairie town of Stettler. Cora Wagoner feels constricted by society’s expectations and paternalistic attitudes. She yearns to wear dungarees, study science, go to university and emulate the independence of her aunts in Toronto—“she knows she isn’t just a girl, she can be anything”— but she is trapped by the demands of religion and gender and has little to look forward to but subservient domesticity.  She comforts herself with notions of a different life, an idealized “Indian” existence that owes far more to reading “Hiawatha” than any reality. Hunter George on the other hand is a Cree boy living that reality. He is equally trapped: his family is loving and supportive, but cruelly impoverished; his parents, victimized by the Indian agent; his only prospect, separation from his family and exile far away in residential school. He too takes refuge in his imagination, in the mythical stories of Wîsahkecâhk told by his grandmother. Inevitably, the children’s paths cross when Hunter runs away from the school after his friend dies from neglect, and the pair set off on a borrowed horse to try and get Hunter back home.

Quartermain brilliantly evokes the dustbowl setting and its effect on her characters. Riding across country, Cora observes:

“Whirlwinds of dust skitter towards them across the open, treeless land bringing its blind emptiness of skeletons and abandoned houses—emptiness silting in the whole of Canada—swallowing up tractors and farms and Dad’s job in the store—swallowing up Edmonton and Toronto, and even Aunt Beulah and university.”

This world is not empty, though. It is peopled by the marginalized: hoboes, some good, some crazed and violent; dispossessed families on the move; defensive and hostile farmers. The children kill ducks and a raccoon to survive—“We’re turning into animals, she says”— and are themselves hunted by men with guns, as they traverse a landscape pocked with campsites and garbage dumps, rail lines and highways.

The background of despair is familiar from writers like Sinclair Ross, but the way Quartermain brings an age to life while staring unflinchingly at its attitudes and injustices through the eyes of children is reminiscent of To Kill A Mockingbird. The same innocent intelligence that characterizes Scout in that novel informs Cora’s and Hunter’s acute observations, conveyed in a blend of pitch perfect dialogue and inner voices. The device allows us to experience the frustration and yearning of the main characters, and at the same time to recognize the deadly ramifications of oppression, especially the toxic influence of the residential schools—a modern understanding that makes the novel’s ending all the more poignant.

 

Margaret Thompson is the author of six books, most recently Adrift on the Ark: Our Connection to the Natural World.  Her new novel,  entitled The Cuckoo’s Child, will be published in Spring 2014.

 

Quiet novel offers subtle pleasures

The Insistent Garden
by Rosie Chard

Published by NeWest Press

320 pages; $19.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

Once upon a time, in a sleepy town in the Midlands, there lived a sad girl called Edith.  Rosie Chard’s debut novel, Seal Intestine Raincoat (NeWest, 2009), which won the 2010 Trade Fiction Book Award, is a tense portrayal of social breakdown. By contrast, any description of  Chard’s second novel, The Insistent Garden, is likely to sound like a fairy tale. This is no accident, for the elements are all there: the bereaved household; the father distracted by obsession; the wicked female, in this case an aunt; the neglected daughter; sundry outsiders whose role is to enable the heroine to break free of the spell that binds her.

The dysfunctional family mired in secrets has an ancient history in fiction. Edith’s family is very odd indeed. She lives with her father in a semi-detached house, and Cinderella-like, spends most of her time as an unpaid housekeeper, often ignored, but relentlessly harassed by her dreadful Aunt Vivian, who descends like a blight every Tuesday. Edith’s father pours his energies into building a wall in his garden as a bulwark against a hated and permanently invisible neighbour. To reinforce that defence, he also plasters layer after layer of wallpaper on the party wall. Edith is forbidden to go into the attic, and finds privacy and consolation only in the cellar, where she reads her dead mother’s books of poetry in the middle of the night. Essentially, she is a prisoner of habit, ignorance, and the past.

But fairy tales, as Bruno Bettelheim observed, are road maps to adulthood and Edith’s story is no exception. There are breaches in the defences: cracks appear, literally, and a loose brick in the wall creates a spyhole; a magazine drops through the letterbox; a receipt falls out of an old book. All are messages from the outside world, and Edith has allies out there, too, who appear when necessary—sometimes, like Dotty Hands, even arbitrarily— to point the way. For the most part they help Edith realize her dream of a garden, her first independent aspiration, but they also lighten her darkness as she moves towards the truth.

This is a quiet novel, restrained as its narrator, but it has many subtle pleasures. We see the bizarre through Edith’s sheltered eyes, but there is a counterbalance offered by the ordinariness of Jean’s chatty letters. The language reflects Edith’s poetic sensibility, especially in descriptions of the growing plants and changing seasons, and the garden itself, from the first few seeds to the hop vine rioting over the wall, is a powerful symbol of Edith’s redemption. The novel is populated by baroque characters, vivid in their oddity, but they are not allowed to distract us from Edith, for this is the story of a lonely, marginalized individual in transition, the beginning of the rest of a life. There will be no “and they lived happily ever after,” for that has nothing to do with reality, but with the revelations at the end, the prison walls crumble and there is satisfaction in knowing that Edith is free to make a start.

Margaret Thompson is past president of the Federation of BC Writers, She is the author of six books, most recently Adrift on the Ark: Our Connection to the Natural World. Number seven, a novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Child, will be a Spring 2014 publication.