By Katherena Vermette, 2016

A first novel, this book by a Winnipeg writer was nominted for the Governor General’s Literary Award. In terms of language, characters and structure, it is about as close to perfect as a work of literature can be.

On a bitterly cold night in Winnipeg’s North End a thirteen-year-old girl named Emily goes to a party with her best friend hoping for a first kiss from a boy she knows from school. The girls have no idea the home is that of a gang leader, and no inkling of the evil they will encounter. As she flees the party, Emily is raped with a beer bottle in an empty snow-covered lot known as the Break. This violent act intertwines the past, present and future lives of the characters.

Emily’s stunned and loving family gather around her in the hospital. In some respects they are like any family keeping vigil. They are, however, indigenous, and thus subject to many unique stresses and prejudices. Her mother Paulina is usually referred to as Paul and her aunt Louisa as Lou. These masculine-sounding names reinforce the fact that they are women mostly raising children without men and that they largely assume the roles of both mother and father.

The shock of Emily’s attack brings back memories of the death of Rain (Lorraine), sister of Paul and Lou’s mother Cheryl, and the mother of Stella. Left motherless as a young child, Stella is struggling to live a normal life. She happens to live beside the Break and, while up in the night with her teething baby, to witness the attack on the girl she does not recognize as her cousin.

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By Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015

This is one of the best novels I have read in a long time. After reading it twice, I am in awe of the writer.

The bulk of the novel is the written confession of a double agent. A committed though mostly undercover communist, he escapes Saigon with the General and Madame and others of their entourage just as the city is falling to the Viet Cong. The General was the head of the secret police, and the narrator (whom I will from here on refer to as N.) has participated in—at the very least observed—the torture of prisoners. His communist masters send him to the States on the understanding that he will transmit intelligence on the refugee community.

An American university degree and near perfect command of English qualify the General’s intelligence officer to pose as a cultural attache. The General masterminds a plan to invade Vietnam and take it away from the communists. N. goes on this hare-brained expedition, partly from a death wish and partly from the desire to save the life of his blood brother Bon.

Back in Vietnam, N. is caught up in the contradiction of many devout communists sent abroad. He has to be reeducated to cure him of the foreign ideas and attitudes he picked up while serving the cause of the party abroad, on a mission the party sent him on. His confession is central to this reeducation.

N. is the product of the rape of a Vietnamese teenage servant girl by a Roman Catholic priest. This rape is symbolic of the division and subjugation of the nation by its French and American masters. The boy is spurned by both the whites and by his mother’s Vietnamese relatives and is raised in poverty and isolation, feeling that he belongs nowhere except with his powerless poverty-stricken mother. She assures him, “You are God’s gift to me. Nothing or no one could be more natural.”

Childhood bullies taunt him that the union of his parents was like the mating of a cat and a dog. This prejudice may be expressed more kindly in his later life but it is always there. As an adult he finds solace in alcohol and promiscuous sex and by becoming flawlessly fluent in the language of Americans.

As a person between cultures N. sympathizes with everyone’s point of view but has no real self. Two halves do not in this case make a whole. His two blood brothers—Bon, who is one of the invading force, and Man, who judges his confession– represent the two sides of his divided, non-existent self. In classes taught by his father, N. is never addressed by name, only as “you,” and throughout the novel he remains the man without a name, the man who is only a pronoun.

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By Anita Rau Badami, 2006

Anita Rau Badami is an author I keep coming back to.

Years ago I read Tamarind Mem in a book club and remember no details, only that it was gripping, beautifully told story. Last year I was so impressed by the discussion of The Hero’s Walk on Canada Reads on CBC Radio that I read that book in two days. In my opinion, it is a much better novel than The Illegal, the book that won.

I found this bestseller by Lawrence Hill to be an overwrought potboiler I was unable to finish it. It’s not surprising the book won, because Clara Hughes (a person I greatly admire) was defending it. “Clara Hughes never loses,” one of my book club friends said.

My experience with The Hero’s Walk made me eager to read more by Badami. This book, like the other two novels I have read by her, does not disappoint. They all have engaging characters and beautiful language.

Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? begins as a a fairy tale. For the sake of family honour, a homely older sister must be married off before a younger sister. Unfortunately for the older girl, all of her suitors fall in love with her more beautiful sibling and want to marry her instead. The younger girl is dying of boredom in a backward village in the Punjab and longs for a more exciting life.

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Like many readers, I have been following the discussion resulting from the findings of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network (APTN) that literary superstar Joseph Boyden has no verifiable indigenous ancestry.

Any person whose ancestors have lived here for a century or more likely has at least some aboriginal blood. Of course all human blood is the same colour, and what we are really talking about here is ancestry. Identity and ancestry are related. The former is flexible, the latter is fixed.

The news about Joseph Boyden seems to have upset non-aboriginals much less than aboriginals. This is understandable because of our colonial past, and because indigenous people are working to free themselves from a history of oppression. They don’t want someone to benefit from falsely claiming to be one of the oppressed.

As a fair-skinned blue-eyed middle class woman, I belong to a privileged class. However, I will never be as privileged as middle or upper class white males, and as an aging woman I have had some encounters with discrimination. I am sure, however, that these have been nothing compared with the prejudice non-whites experience.

The concept of status is, of course, government imposed. The correct status grants all sorts of rights and privileges; the lack of it may exile one to a shack on a road allowance.

In my years at the public library when I was issuing library cards, I saw Status Indian cards from people who “looked” no more Indian than I do. This fact reinforced the arbitrariness of status and the extent to which it may determine the course of our lives. Continue reading →

By Catherine Merridale, 2006

Around half a million Allied military personnel died in World War Two. These Allied personnel had the advantage—or disadvantage in some senses—of dying far from home. The corresponding number of Soviet deaths was about eight and a half million, and much of the war was fought on home ground. Many of the Soviet deaths were the result of lack of preparedness and of Stalin’s harebrained or malicious policies and of the climate and geography that defeated Napoleon and other invaders.

The numbers are staggering. It is difficult to contemplate death on this scale, but Merridale takes the reader on that journey.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 found its citizens ill prepared for war, as it was a violation of the non-aggression pact signed by Stalin and Hitler in 1939. The country had been weakened militarily by civil war, famine (mostly intentional– as a means to the collectivization of agriculture), and rapid industrialization, and by the Great Terror of the last half of the 30s.

Red Army soldiers went into battle without proper clothing or footwear, without weapons, having not eaten for days. They went into battle starving and ill equipped but knowing that winning or being killed were the only options. They went into battle knowing that being taken prisoner was seen as treason. Survivors were mostly either murdered—directly by shooting or indirectly through neglect—by the Germans, or if they did manage to get home, shipped to the Gulag. Stalin refused offers to exchange his son or pay a ransom for him. Like President Donald Trump, he could not abide losers.

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James Daschuk, 2013

A couple of years ago I was led to this book through Candace Savage’s A Geography of Blood. After the emotionally draining experience of reading these two takes on the same tragedy, I had to turn away for a while to more cheerful reading or at least to horrors that happened farther from home. Spending time in Eastend in southwestern Saskatchewan — the area where the worst of the events chronicled by Savage occurred—made me turn to Daschuk’s book again.

Both of these books make clear that the starvation to death of native people, many of them children, was the result of deliberate policy implemented by the government of John A. Macdonald. Our National Dream of building the railway and settling the west takes on a nightmarish aspect when you know this. Macdonald’s goal was to clear the plains of their original inhabitants by barely keeping them alive until they died out.

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By Rithy Panh with Christophe Bataille, 2013

The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh lived through the Khmer Rouge nightmare as a boy between the ages of 13 and 17. In this book scenes of his boyhood are interspersed with adult commentary about and interviews with Comrade Duch as a prisoner on trial. Duch was the commander of a prison where thousands were tortured and killed.

It is difficult to understand why Duch allowed Rithy Panh such access. Perhaps it was to break up the tedium of life in a prison much more humane than the one Duch ran, perhaps it was to justify himself. In fact the words coming out of his mouth utterly condemn him. He shows no compassion for his victims and no understanding of his actions. He is not haunted by his crimes and he never dreams of his victims. His conversion to evangelical Christianity seems to have made him more rather than less comfortable with his sins.

Rithy Panh embarks on this project not to understand—it’s pretty clear he feels the actions of Duch and other Khmer Rouge are beyond understanding—but to know what happened. In Rithy Panh’s words, “I didn’t try to understand Duch, nor did I care to judge him; I wanted to give him a chance to explain, in detail, the death process of which he was the organizer-in-chief. “

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By Richard Wagamese, 2014

Great Expectations, Fugitive Pieces, The Lizard Cage and Bel Canto are among my favourite novels because they depict an adult taking on a parental role with a child who is not biologically related. Richard Wagamese’s book deals with this same theme.  

Medicine Walk is the story of a boy named Frank who is loved and raised to young manhood by a foster father. The boy is native, the father is a white man who teaches the boy what he needs to know to survive on the land. It is heartening that a white man teaches Frank how to be an Indian, to some extent atoning for the crimes of other whites.

Franklin’s biological father Eldon is an alcoholic who fought in the Korean War and whose own father died in World War Two. Eldon is temporarily saved by a native woman, the woman who becomes the mother Franklin never knows, who has her own issues with alcoholism and racism. I found Franklin’s mother and Bunty and Eldon’s great love, Angie, to be a somewhat unbelievable character. Certainly she is an idealized figure. Often she seems too good to be true, but perhaps this is how such a character is remembered.

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By Eric Lomax, 1995

Apologies for my long absence from this blog. Besides being busy with gardening and grandchildren, I have had months of computer problems. These have been alleviated by having Windows 10 removed from my computer and going back to Windows 7. I hope this is the beginning of a return to more frequent posting.

I first read The Railway Man about 20 years ago for a reader’s advisory workshop at the library. The story it tells has haunted me ever since, so I was thrilled to find a copy in a second-hand bookstore in Las Vegas a few years ago. I don’t know the name of the store because its business card fell out of the book during my fevered rereading. The book drew me in even more swiftly the second time, because I have travelled to Asia half a dozen times in the last decade and visited Malaysia and Singapore this year.

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