Shazia Hafiz Ramji, port of being

Heat

Birth from our own skin

Concerns over devaluation

Body that hangs and holds

Mushroom halos of work

Dark faces glow in oil

At the back of the room hands wait

To be held in court

To speak a warm fabric of lips

Gaze that hangs and holds

Scholar alone in the office

Ports open for syntax

Decoys of chat and lovers

Hands that hang and hold

Faces of men and women

In the night of a still life

Circuitry to collect heat

From our whispers

Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s debut full-length collection, winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, is port of being (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018). Hers is a collection composed as a book of dislocations, implications and accumulations via short lyrics that explore borders, violence and human connection. The poems in port of being are deliberately constructed to keep the reader off-balance, employing sequences of fragments that layer upon layer into something unsettling, writing on violence, distant wars, social media, internet cables, death, borders and the horror at an increasing disregard of facts. port of being writes from the slippages of what was once actual or presumed solid ground, writing from a series of negative and positive shifts, from what hadn’t been acknowledged before, to what never should have occurred. As she writes to open the poem “Heat”: “Birth from our own skin // Concerns over devaluation // Body that hangs and holds [.]” Ramji writes from a dangerous place, one that comes from knowledge and acknowledgment, attempting to articulate how one might navigate in such a landscape, such as this fragment, from the middle of the poem “Secret Playground”:

It doesn’t make sense to ask

if words will ever stop failing me

but I want to ask it. What does it take

for a three-year-old who lived on M&Ms

and barely escaped the Gulf War

to call the first part of her life

“simulacra”?

I didn’t tell you

because I still don’t believe it.

In Toronto, I read a poem

about another part of my life,

one I still find hard to believe

when I’m not with myself.

Ina recent interview posted at Train : a poetry journal, she spoke to the difference between compiling the poems in her chapbook Prosopopoeia (Anstruther Press, 2017) and this debut full-length collection:

Prosopopoeia brought together some poems I'd written over the years. It's not necessarily unified, though themes and connections emerged after seeing the various pieces in conversation with each other. The chapbook clarified my obsessions with surveillance, geography, time, and relations between people and objects, and it began to couple those with more personal experiences of loneliness, addiction, and clinical depression. Recognizing these connections in the chapbook was crucial for the book. When I was writing Port of Being, I constantly jostled with the weight of these personal experiences and a sense of responsibility to facts, history, and the experiences of other people. This struggle was intensified when, a few years ago, a thief who stole my laptop followed me and had knowledge of my whereabouts. It was a traumatizing experience that made the more removed preoccupations with surveillance and space far more personal and immediate. The book has a clear arc (at least to me) that moves into the lyrical. I should clarify that the book isn't about me being stalked, though. I've preferred to tell it slant (thanks to Emily Dickinson for the wise words!). It began with research, which led me to undertake a kind of surveillance (after Vito Acconci's Following Piece) in return, and this gave rise to the first part of the book. The process of putting together the book was like following a trail of myself in the world and mapping it all together. I learned so much about the world (for lack of a better word) when writing this book and that makes me feel okay.

One might think she writes for the same reason as Dany Laferrière’s narrator, “Dany,” in the novel Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1994), offered for writing his own first novel: I wrote this book to save my life. Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s poems, while betraying the occasional exhaustion, exasperation and frustration, don’t fall entirely into hopelessness, providing a glimmer of something beyond mere survival. “In the morning we consider ghosts.” she writes, to end the poem “Nearness”: “I feel the sun settle on my ear.”

my list of ten books that have stuck with me, via facebook;

As tagged by Mr. Stephen Brockwell via Facebook, I've been asked to list ten books that have "stuck with me." I posted mine on Facebook a few days back, and replicate such here. My list sits in no particular order (and, you might note, more than ten). I'm sure if I spent more time on this, I could extend this list to fifty, or even a hundred. So there:

1. Delayed Mercy and Other Poems, George Bowering

2. King of Egypt, King of Dreams, Gwendolyn MacEwen

3. Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2
(In case you're wondering why this is here: following the events of The Avengers King-Size Annual #7, this 1977 issue featuring Spider-Man and The Thing stuck with me for a couple of reasons. As a kid (I was seven years old when the issue appeared), I always identified with Spider-Man, and latched onto, for some reason, the line Thanos says to Ben to describe Spider-Man: "I like your friend, Ben, he's a schemer.")

4. Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages, Stan Dragland

5. Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, edited/translated by Norma Cole

6. Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person, Erín Moure

7. The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, Richard Brautigan

8. So Far, Fred Wah

9. That This, Susan Howe

10. Why must a black writer write about sex?, Dany Laferrière

11. The Collected Books of Jack Spicer

12. John Thompson, Collected Poems and Translations

13. Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, Sarah Manguso

The World is Moving Around Me, Dany Laferrière

Musical Chairs

People move through the streets, hoping to come across a family member, a friend, a neighbor, or even an acquaintance: someone to legitimize our claim to be among the living. We’re zombies until someone calls our name. The person no one has seen could well be dead. Meanwhile, that other person thinks you’re dead, though he hopes to see you alive. There’s no way of knowing where death was waiting when you were at that particular place. Some people did all they could to show up at the meeting. Others walked away from the fatal spot a few seconds before. And to think we had no idea we were playing heads or tails with our lives. I left Télé-Ginen to get back to the Hôtel Karibe by five p.m.—but it could have been the other way around. A game of musical chairs the entire city was playing. There were a lot more people than chairs when the music started. You had to find an empty chair when it stopped at exactly 4:53 in the afternoon.

It would be impossible not to be moved by The World is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013), Montreal writer Dany Laferrière’s first person account of the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti and its aftermath. When the earthquake struck, Haitian-born former journalist Laferrière had just ordered dinner in a restaurant in his hometown of Port-au-Prince, and he ends up note-taking observations of the following two days, before the Canadian embassy flies him back to Montreal. It is a terrible thing to see one’s own country torn apart, but Laferrière’s memoir, however brutal in description, includes incredible accounts of bravery, sadness, optimism and grief. Written in a sequence of short vignettes, The World is Moving Around Me is a deeply personal account of the tragedy, and the surrounding histories of Haiti, which I hadn’t realized I knew so little about. Laferrière writes about friends lost and found, and the heartbreaking tale of his friend Marcus, who loses his wife, but heads immediately back to work, to cover the story.

Laferrière is adept at writing the tragedy in real time, exploring the way his countrymen weathered such tragedy with grace, and how international media held on too tight to the desolation, catching little to nothing of the spirit of the people. Translated into English by David Homel, who has translated a number of Laferrière’s fourteen novels, the book was originally published in French as Tout bouge autour de moi (Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 2011). The English edition also includes a forward by Michaëlle Jean, former Governor General of Canada and Special Envoy for Haiti for the United Nations Educational,Scientific, and Cultural Organization, herself Haitian-born. As Laferrière writes near the end, “I agreed to open up a little about what happened so that other people wouldn’t feel alone with their emotions.” Laferrière gives life and breadth to the tragedy the way few others could, given his knowledge of his homeland, providing an account that should be required reading.

City of Calm

In the end, there never were those chaotic scenes that some journalists (but not all) no doubt wanted to see. I could just picture the front page of a major daily paper if looting really had broken out. And the televised commentaries from the instant experts about this barbarous country. Instead, people saw a dignified nation whose nerves were steady enough to resist the most terrible deprivations. When you understand that people were hungry long before the earthquake, you have to wonder how they managed to wait so calmly for help to show up. What did they live on during the month that preceded the distribution of food? And the sick who wandered the streets of the city without treatment? Despite all that, Port-au-Prince never lost its cool. We saw people standing in line, waiting for bottled water in the slums, the same districts that a few months earlier were considered danger zones where the government’s laws had no effect. So what happened? What can these changes be attributed to? Was this the shock the country was waiting for to wake up and halt its dizzying descent? We’ll have to wait a while longer to understand the true impact of such a tremendous event on the nation’s destiny. In the meantime, let’s enjoy the calm. Especially since we know that explosions of another kind (social, this time) are on the horizon.

Given the status of Douglas and McIntyre over the past few months, his usual English-language publisher in Canada, is Laferrière’s shift to Arsenal Pulp Press a temporary one, or something more permanent? Arsenal Pulp has produced a graceful paperback, and one only hopes that more books between the two might be in the works. Near the end of The World is Moving Around Me, Laferrière does talk about the book he was supposed to be finishing, composing this one instead of working final edits to the manuscript of a book on writing: “Notes to a Young Writer in Pajamas.” One only hopes the translation is already well underway, and publication is already in the works.

ACSUS Conference, November 2011, Ottawa: Ten Canadian Novels You Should Be Teaching (and Reading): a collaborative paper between rob mclennan and Steven Hayward

On Thursday afternoon, I presented a co-written paper between myself and writer Steven Hayward at the Association of Canadian Studies in the United States’ bi-annual conference at Ottawa’s Westin Hotel. It was a strange event, one Hayward couldn’t attend himself due to other conflicts, corralling me into participation but two weeks prior. I was to present a paper while on a panel with another presenter, and moderate the whole; maybe we should, Hayward suggested, co-write the paper as well? I said sure, fine, okay. I haven’t much experience presenting papers, but for the paper I wrote on Camille Martin’s Sonnets for Margaret Christakos’ Influency a few months back [see the note I wrote on such here; and the paper itself], and a panel I moderated at a conference at Grant MacEwen College back in spring 2008, during my Alberta period.

The presentation went well enough, despite the small crowd [see them here, clapping: including Peter Midgley from the University of Alberta, and Cynthia Sugars from the University of Ottawa], despite a paper I didn’t feel entirely finished yet, despite the other presenter cancelling her appearance earlier in the day. Toni Holland, from the University of Alberta, was to present a paper on “US and Canadian Poets Laureate: A Literary and Cultural History.” I wanted to hear this paper for a number of reasons, not only for the fact that I’ve been arguing for years that Ottawa should bring back the position (we were, possibly, the first in Canada to host the position back in 1980, and are now possibly one of the rare few without) but for the fact that I was on the League of Canadian Poets national council when we first came up with the idea for a National Laureate and started pressuring the Federal Government.

Since announcing that I was presenting such a paper, more than a few have asked for my list (our lists), so I thought I should at least present those. We’re planning on cleaning up the paper for publication, so hopefully a larger version of such, including our explanations for our respective choices, for the sake of increased clarity, but for now, you get only the barest list. I’m shocked, one woman offered, that neither of you have Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro on your lists. Another asked, does Hayward teach his list in Colorado? It’s one thing to think a book great, but another to be able to teach it. A worthy point, and one I couldn’t answer. I’m interested to see where this conversation might further.

Steven Hayward’s list:

Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion.

Toews, Miriam. A Complicated Kindness.

Vanderhaeghe, Guy. A Good Man.

Chariandy, David. Soucouyant.

Ricci, Nino. Origin of Species..

Bezmozgis, David. Natasha and Other Stories.

Bellow, Saul. Herzog.

Eliott Clarke, George. Execution Poems.

Quarrington, Paul. Home Game.

rob mclennan’s list:

Dany Laferrière, How to Make Love to a Negro (without getting tired).

John Lavery, Sandra Beck.

Aritha van Herk, Restlessness.

André Alexis, Despair, And Other Stories of Ottawa.

Ken Sparling, Hush up and listen stinky poo butt.

Lisa Moore, February.

Thomas Wharton, Salamander.

Matthew Remski. Dying for Veronica.

Lynn Crosbie. Paul’s Case.

Marianne Apostolides’ Swim: a novel.

Martha Baillie, The Incident Report

Dany Laferrière, The Return

As soon as I open my mouth, vowels and consonants pour out into a disorderly mess and I have stopped trying to control it. I discipline myself enough to try writing, but after a dozen lines I stop out of exhaustion. I need to find a way that doesn't demand too much physical effort.

When I bought my old Remington 22, a quarter century ago, I did it to adopt a new style. Tougher, more intense than before. Writing by hand seemed too literary. I wanted to be a rock 'n' roll writer. A writer of the machine age. Words interested me less than the sound of the keyboard. I had energy to burn. In my narrow room on Saint-Denis Street, I spent all day typing feverishly in the dark. I worked, the windows closed, bare-chested in summer's furnace room. With a bottle of cheap wine at my feet.

In Montreal author and Hatian ex-pat Dany Laferrière's fourteenth novel, The Return (trans. David Homel; Vancouver BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011), he continues his explorations blurring the lines between novel, memoir and essay, blurring fact with the intensity of the truth. Originally composed in French and published as L'énigme du retour (2009), the book follows Laferrière's narrator, the semi-fictional Dany Laferrière, through the discovery of the death of his exiled father in New York, a man who left Haiti in the 1960s, and continues as the two return to the country they had both left behind. Journalist Dany Laferrière infamously left Port-au-Prince suddenly in 1976, after one of his friends, a journalistic colleague, had been killed by Baby Doc Duvalier's regime, ending up in Montreal where he started writing. A book, he once wrote, to save his life, later published as his most well-known work, Comment fair l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), which appeared as a film, was translated and published by Coach House Press as How to Make Love to a Negro (without getting tired) (1987), recently reissued by Douglas & McIntyre.

We want to retrieve the suitcase my father deposited at the Chase Manhattan Bank. Since I have the same first name, the employee gives me the key to his safety deposit box and asks me to follow him into the bank's vault. I step inside quietly with my uncles. That quality of silence exists nowhere but in a bank, a church or a library. Men fall silent only before Money, God and Knowledge—the great wheel that crushes them. All around us, small individual safety deposit boxes filled with the personal belongings of New York, city of high finance and great misery. The employee leaves us alone. I open my father's box and discover an attaché case inside.

I try to open it before realizing I need the secret code. Numbers and letters. We try everything: his birth date and his different given names, my birth date and my pseudonym. My uncles give me all sorts of possible leads, even the date their childhood friend met a violent death. As a last resort, we try his last telephone number before his mind went adrift. Nothing works. In the end, the employee returns, and we have to put the suitcase back. I could not have taken it with me without first answering a battery of questions that would have unmasked me. I slip the suitcase back into the safety deposit box. The employee closes the great vault of the Chase Manhattan Bank behind us.

My uncles stand in disbelief

in front of the iron door.

I feel light

not having to carry such weight.

The suitcase of aborted dreams. (“The Suitcase”)

For those unaware, Laferrière has been one of my favourite writers for years, ever since Coach House Press released English translations of two of his novels on the same day, way back in 1994, his Dining with the Dictator and Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? His prose has always had the ability to wrap itself around the reader's organs and take hold, slowly at first, before becoming a part of the body. This novel is no different, digging deep through a minefield of emotional and physical detail with compassionate honesty. There are emotional connections that Laferrière has always managed with his prose that bring the reader immediately in, done so well that it makes most other writing appear distant, even false. How does Laferrière manage to bring one in so quickly? Instead of his usual straightforward (comparatively) prose of all of his books save one, the poetry collection A Drifting Year (Vancouver BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997), The Return uses poems and prose to tell an extended narrative of the explosion of emotions around the death of an absent father, and the return to a homeland and family long left behind. But again, anyone who has read any of Laferrière's previous works knows that he might have left Haiti, but he certainly never left it behind. But does that make a return for the narrator/author Dany Laferrière easier or that much more difficult? This is, as one of the blurbs on the cover attests, a stunning and breathtaking book, and is easily one of his best.

Every family has its absent member in the group portrait. Papa Doc introduced exile to the middle class. Before, such a fate was reserved only for a president who fell victim to a coup or one of those rare intellectuals who could also be a man of action.

I took all possible precautions

before announcing to my mother

that my father had died.

First she turned a deaf ear to me.

Then took it out on the messenger.

The distance is so slight

between lengthy absence and death

that I didn't take enough care

to consider the effect the news would have on her.

My mother won't look at me.

I watch her long delicate hands.

She slides her wedding band

on and off her finger

and hums so softly

I have trouble understanding the words of her song. (“My Mother's Song”)

Dany Laferrière, I Am a Japanese Writer

I first started reading Haiti-born Montreal writer Dany Laferrière through the publication of not one but two of his novels translated into English from French in a single day, the day Coach House Press released his Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (1994) and Dining with the Dictator (1994), following on the heels of Coach House Press’ volumes of An Aroma of Coffee (1993), Eroshina (1991) and, of course, his infamous first novel, How To Make Love To a Negro (Without Getting Tired)(1987). Through his novels, there was the sustained, confident voice of a narrator, usually unnamed, but one that had very many similarities to the writer Dany Laferrière, with other features included: originally a journalist from Port-au-Prince, escaping from Duvalier’s Haiti to Montreal in 1978, who writes novels in French, loves women, and prefers to spend his days in bed, reading. Now author of over a dozen novels translated into English, his most recent is I Am a Japanese Writer (translated by David Homel; Toronto ON: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010) follows along the same rough path, following the narrative voice of many of his first-person semi-(seemingly)-autobiographical works of the writer Dany Laferrière, writing about a writer who may or may not be a fictional variant on the writer Dany Laferrière (this is something he shares with New York novelist Paul Auster as well, twisting around the idea of the fictional self).

Another early consideration I noticed while reading his works in the mid-1990s, was his interest in Asian women (in Eroshina, naturally), his oddly-surreal bent, and his clear first-person voice writing out novels through shorter self-contained and titled sections, much like another one of my early favourites, the late American novelist and poet Richard Brautigan. With I Am a Japanese Writer, his focus is on a group of Japanese women, those he is drawn to, and drawn to him, as he spends his days as a writer preferring to spend his days in bed, reading. In this book more than many, I could even feel Brautigan’s influence through the chapters, finally rewarded by the author himself in the chapter “Richard Brautigan’s Cowboy Boots,” and reference to one of Brautigan’s own Japanese works, his short story/novel, The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980).

While exploring the poetry of Basho, the narrator tells his publisher that his next novel will be titled “I Am a Japanese Writer,” and immediately receives an advance, but doesn’t get around to starting to work on the book. Somehow, the media catches wind, including the Japanese consulate, Tokyo news media and, seemingly, everyone around him, each approaching with their own opinions, concerns, excitements of his novel (which he hasn’t started) or his claim (which he didn’t claim). Much like the novel Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? claimed to be a novel about writing a novel that most knew the title of, and had plenty of opinions of, but hadn’t actually read (a reference to his How To Make Love To a Negro (Without Getting Tired)), I Am a Japanese Writer is about the book he hasn’t written yet and might not, and how much claim an author really has about any work, any text, or even any idea, moving through the nature of fame, identity and meaning, all wrapped up in his usual considerations and concerns with cultural/sexual politics. And yet, perhaps this is even the work itself, the story of how he didn’t write this novel we are reading. His previous novel, Heading South (translated by Wayne Grady; Toronto ON: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009), was a vibrant, long-awaited return to Laferrière’s English-language career as a fiction writer, but I Am a Japanese Writer somehow brings out that extra potency of his lyric cadence, his narrator’s deep, considered movement through the world as a sizzling thinking and sexual being, exploring what he does best, women, culture, ideas and ideas of women. I would rank this among one of his finest.

The Nippon at The Eiffel Tower

I’ve never owned a still camera. That’s because I’ve never quite figured out their purpose. If it’s just to take pictures I’ll never look at, then it has to be the stupidest invention ever. Anyway, I have one that works very well: this skull where I’ve stored fifty years of images, most of them repeated until they’ve become the fabric of my ordinary life. This day-to-day life made of a series of tiny explosions. An electric life. I’ve been told that these images belong to me only, and that other people can’t access them. That’s not exactly true—I can describe them with such precision that, in the end, they become visible to other eyes. Even better: I can transform these pictures into feelings. I can relate a moment without describing the people who were there, simply by bringing forth the energy that gave life to the event. In a photo, we rarely see the emotion that creates the story unfolding before our eyes. Except, maybe, in birthday photos, where we see the child’s enchanted eyes behind the lit candles. Of course, sometimes a whiff of nostalgia rises up from a picture yellowed with time, especially when almost all those who looked into the lens are dead. I keep all those photos in my head, and they have taken root there, the images falling one over the other, all wanting to surge to the front. As for the Japanese man, who never stops photographing the world: what does he see? He doesn’t even see the two elements he is trying to capture, his traveling companion and the monument that the companion is blocking out. The Eiffel Tower is there to show that this guy spent a day in Paris. But by cracking the same wide, impersonal smile in front of every monument on the face of the Earth, he is destroying the intimate nature of the moment. The Japanese man becomes as timeless as the tower itself. You’d think that the Eiffel Tower was being photographed as a backdrop for a smiling Japanese guy.

Broken Arrow: Why must a Scottish Presbyterian Canadian write about sex?

Was that how I wanted to end up, I asked myself. The question was a variation of the one that still nagged at me: Why did I come to New York? In one of my somber, soul-searching talks with Paul Goodman, I phrased it still another way: “I don’t know what I want to do with my life.” This made him pull on his pipe. “That is one of the most beautiful problems you can have,” he said, portentiously. Easy for him to say, I thought, since it was a problem he doubtless never had...
— Joe LeSeur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara

I sit on the airplane to Edmonton, toward a woman I’ve seen but twice in the space of ten months. Third time the charm. A bag filled with paper, optimism, quiet desperation. The beginnings of one thing. In my carry-on, Elizabeth Smart’s The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, Dany Laferrière’s Why must a black writer write about sex? Two completely different novels, writing the lyric from real experience, writing novels that weren’t novels. Novels that were other kinds of books in disguise. Essays, each a treatise on how we treat each other, how exactly we should.

Both writing books about sex, the halting essentialness of coupling, physical and emotional. How does the Presbyterian “I” manage to keep self together through such talk?

Walking from my daybreak empty street to the bus stop, a grey hush illuminating downtown Ottawa. This part of the city is barely awake, array of crows and pigeons and Canada geese criss-crossing sky between here and what clouds. The steps of my waiting, longing, my hurt. My restraint.

This is a story that keeps telling. I originally began in Edmonton with Elizabeth Smart and I end here, with her. Ending one journey by starting another. If there were endings. There seem only beginnings. This woman of breeding, good grace and refinement from my same certain capital, some six decades before me, who came to resent and revile the provincialism of her home country. Making good her escape. How can one run away from what is bred in the bone? Did she ever manage it? Still. This is a woman who knew about borders. She was constantly fighting to cross them. Returning finally a senior to Canada, a country she was still so ahead of.

To keep, what is held. To hold what is kept, saved. A continued vision of restraint. How to explain what is best kept, only comes through release, through letting go? My own parents, as I used to joke, that I had no evidence they had even consummated their marriage, my sister and I adopted. The unthinkable. We never want to admit that our parents, or even our children, have sex. Perhaps less so our friends. What our house never discussed. My own daughter, old enough now to drink in Quebec and to vote, and I, still waiting for my father to give me “the talk.” Good thing I’m no longer waiting.

Reading Dany Laferrière and Elizabeth Smart, flipping through pages and paragraphs as I wait to board, expectantly. How do I read two at once? Practice. “Let’s each write down what we’d like to do,” Smart writes in her piece, “and draw lots out of a hat.”

A ripple of festivity went round.

We all wrote down what we wanted most to do.

‘Go to a nightclub.’

‘Drive to the next town.’

‘Go to the casino.’

‘Dance.’

‘Bathe.’

Then, there was a pause. The one who was drawing the papers out of the hat blushed, and handed it on. No one knew where to look. What is it? What is it? Uncle Amos reached across and looked. He turned away. The little bit of love was drained from his cardboard face. He got up and went out. The doctors paid the bill. It was all hushed and strained.

Haven’t I talked enough about these myths of the west? Perhaps this has nothing to do with that. How the west was won and, as Michael Stipe sang, where it got us. Where did it get us? At least not like the Americans, we tell ourselves, who stood facing west from the thirteen colonies with rifles, firing as they walked a straight line. Manifest destiny. Not as bad, we tell ourselves. I’m sure there are those who would beg to differ. Plead, and insist. Myths of the west and the north, and these tales we would tell to abscond, pillage, plunder. Trading manifest destiny for family compact.

I head west to see her again, my lover who waits for me, weeks before our Toronto begins, preparing herself for a Master’s Degree in Literature at Ryerson. Where are the myths she might hold? The oldest daughter of Lebanese immigrants who escaped into Ontario just in time for her arrival. As she emerged, head first, in factory-laden Windsor, far away from her new father, working to provide them a home and a future, Toronto. What were the stories they told themselves as her parents left behind origins, their home country, and moved another continent, into Trudeau’s multicultural dream? As John Ralston Saul wrote, multicultural stories coming out of the stories that had long formed by the beginnings of European occupation, our Canada made out a Metis foundation. They myths of the two founding cultures since appended, corrected, pointing out English and French and Aboriginal, writing Canada at the source a Metis nation.

No sex please, we’re Canadian. A country they tell as invented by Scots. Scotland’s revenge on the English. There are stories we tell ourselves and keep telling, and go no further. In the United States under Bush, the best defence a head buried in sand, teaching abstinence and the dangers of condoms, and the new slate of teen pregnancies that quickly respond. How could they think that informing a population is therefore allowing permission for wild, wanton ways? The bunkers we hide ourselves in, hide ourselves under.

Mirimachi novelist David Adams Richards, who once wrote an essay referencing his son, then a year old. That he’d rather his son watch adult movies when old enough, than the Canadian classic Porky’s. How sex shouldn’t be hidden, or stolen. An open, shared experience, and not something tricked through a hole in the wall of the girl’s showers.

Sex as hidden, furtive. What my house never discussed. The “talk” my father never gave. In my grandmother’s house, the Playboy calendar all the boys snuck upstairs to our uncle’s bedroom to peek, Dorothy Stratten, 1980. What month was she? I remember Dorothy Stratten, the beautiful blonde model from Vancouver, brutally murdered by her jealous boyfriend. Where did that Hemingway woman fit in?

Elizabeth Smart, who wrote her mother and her father and her Canadian childhood behind her from England. She, who could never completely leave. And Laferrière, who could never completely enter. Laferrière, who knows of and writes his America, but is better suited to Canadianism.

There is the Ottawa Valley, and what I learned while back on the farm. There is Ottawa, where the naive farm boy adapted, and became something else. Learned a few things. And then there is Edmonton, where the layers of eastern Ontario self melted back and furthered. And then there was her.

When I was twenty-six, it was my first foreign destination, leaving Ottawa Valley for the wilds of Toronto. Do I even count the day I spent there at eighteen, a failed exam writing for Ryerson in the computer department? What was I thinking? Our American city, they say, although Calgary could be that close second, more Americans per capita than anywhere in the country. What does it matter now, in these days of bled borders, and cultural internationalism. The man on the airplane beside me watching Slumdog Millionaire, with time enough on this flight to add Baz Luhrmann’s Australia as well. Here we are, made up of us and of them; here they are, made up of themselves and of everyone else.

I have begun to leave my own books in airports. I wonder what might happen to them there. In Toronto, where I used to leave poems on the subway, on the seat just beside. Do they ever get picked up, or do they fall to the floor, tramped on and swept up at the end of another long endless commuter day?

Dany Laferrière, perpetual outsider. A journalist who escaped Haiti during Papa Doc’s brutal regime, twenty-four hours after a friend of his murdered, to end up in Montreal. His first novel, How to make love to a negro (without getting tired), was so brilliant because everyone in Montreal feels an outsider, whether English, French, Cree, Haitian, Mohawk, European, black, white. The Jewish population. Everyone is a minority. There is no majority in Montreal, even if there is. How perfect, for him to emigrate to a country where so many feel lost, as though they don’t even belong, the 1970s and 80s of Trudeau’s multiculturalism, the echoes of the same simple (yet complicated) question, of just who we are. Who are we? Laferrière writing the same “America” that Don Delillo does in his Underworld, the abject wealth of an expanding myth, the overwhelmingness of such, but writing out of that essential same question.

Everyone who read that first novel (if they read it at all, able to get past the provocative title) could see themselves reflected, there. How are the rest of us to compete? Not that this is a competition, one might say. No, it isn’t. Not when you’re winning. Not that anyone would mistake this for winning.

I am no longer here, I have already entered her Toronto. Ours.

In an hour or so I will land. I will tell her the books I am reading.