Category: Prose

11/6/2020

PROSE: MICHAEL MARANDA

EXTINCTION CHRONICLES

1662
In 1662, the crew of Volkert Evertsz’s ship was marooned on Mauritius.

Spotting a plump bird, he grabbed the bird by its left leg. The captured bird let out a cry which attracted more of the birds. The entire flock was taken and subsequently eaten by the stranded Dutchmen.

Five days later, the crew was picked up by a passing ship, leaving behind the well-gnawed bones of the last documented sighting of the Dodo.

1800
In 1800, the Giant African Snail was imported to Mauritius by Governor General François Louis Magallon de la Morlière as a potential food source. From there, it spread eastward: to Calcutta in 1847 by W. H. Benson; to Ceylon in 1900 by Oliver Collett; to Taiwan in 1932 by Kumaichi Shimojo; and to the Caroline Islands by Junki Miyahira and Palau Island by Shoichi Nishimara in 1938. By 1967, it had reached as far as Tahiti.

It soon became apparent that the Giant African Snail was, in truth, an agricultural pest, so the predatory Rosy Wolfsnail was introduced to many South Pacific islands as a method of biological control. Instead of preying upon the Giant African Snail, however, the Rosy Wolfsnail preferred endemic tree snails to devastating effect. Since its introduction to Tahiti, for example, 71 of that island’s 76 species of Partula snails have become extinct.

1826
In 1826, the HMS Wellington made port in Lahaina, Maui. Sailors, rinsing out water barrels in a local stream, introduced mosquitoes to the Hawai’ian islands. The introduction in turn allowed for the spreading of avian pox and avian malaria.

As a result, the Oahu Thrush, the Oahu O’o, the Oahu ’Akialoa, the Kioea, the Oahu Nukupu’u, the Lesser Koa Finch, the Ula-ai-hawane, the Oahu ’Akepa, the Lanai ’Akialoa, the Kona Grosbeak, the Hawai’i ’Akialoa, the Greater Koa Finch, the Hawai’i Mamo, the Greater ’Amakihi, the Black Mamo, the Lanai Hookbill, the Laysan Millerbird, the Laysan Honeycreeper, the Lanai Thrush, the Hawai’i O’o, the Lanai Creeper, the Laysan Rail, and the Bishop’s O’o were all extirpated from the islands.

1840
In the mid 1840s, the three Icelandic sailors Sigurdur Ísleifsson, Ketill Ketilsson, and Jón Brandsson were asked to collect a few Great Auk specimens for the Danish natural history collector, Carl Siemsen.

On the 3rd or 4th of June, 1844, the three sailors arrived at Edley Island. There, Brandsson and Ísleifsson each strangled a bird. There being no other birds about, Ketilsson crushed an egg under his boot.

These were the last of the Great Auks.

1894
In 1894, David Lyall was appointed assistant lightkeeper on the recently inhabited Stephens Island. In June of that year, Lyall’s cat, Tibbles, started to bring him carcasses of a previously unknown bird, the soon-to-be-named Stephens Island Wren.

By 1895, Tibbles had hunted the Wren to extinction.

1900
On March 24, 1900, Press Clay Southworth saw a bird eating corn in his family’s barnyard. Unfamiliar with the strange bird, the 14 year old shot and killed it.

Several years after the shooting, the state museum in Ohio determined that this was the last authenticated record of a Passenger Pigeon in the wild.

1902
The Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore is legendary, primarily for the Singapore Sling, first concocted there by Ngiam Tong Boon in 1815.

Less well known is the Billiard Room where, in 1902, Charles McGowan Phillips, the hotel’s general manager, shot a tiger which had sought refuge under a billiard table. It was reported that, in the process, Mr. Phillips ruined his coat. Not reported, however, was that the tiger was the last on the island.

1918
By the end of the nineteenth century, settlers had managed to exterminate only four species of bird endemic to Lord Howe Island: the White Gallinule, the White-throated Pigeon, the Red-fronted Parakeet, and the Tasman Booby.

In 1918, the Makambo, mastered by Captain ‘Stinger’ Rothery, ran aground on Ned’s Beach, allowing black rats to invade the island. These rats managed to exterminate the Vinous-tinted Thrush, the Robust White-eye, the Silver Eye, the Tasman Starling, the Grey Fantail, and the Lord Howe Gerygone. In addition to these outright extinctions, the rats also extirpated the local populations of the Kermadec Petrel, Little Shearwater, White-bellied Storm-Petrel, and Pycroft’s Petrel.

In the 1920s, the Masked Owl was introduced in an attempt to control the rats. The owl managed to exterminate the endemic Boobook Owl, but not the rats.

1936
The Thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian Tiger and Ka-Nunnah, was one of the few marsupial predators.

In 1824, Thylacine discovered that sheep were easy prey. This resulted in a private bounty being established by the Van Diemen’s Land Company in 1830. The VDLC bounty was supplemented by a government sponsored one in 1888. The government bounty was cancelled in 1912, while the VDLC bounty persisted another two years.

In the summer of 1936, the Thylacine was proclaimed a protected species by the Tasmanian Government. Alas, the last Thylacine (named Benjamin) had already died of exposure at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart on September 7th of that year.

1943
In 1943, one of the last refuges for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana was slated for logging by the Chicago Mill Lumber Company.

Asked by the Audubon Society to aid in setting aside a preserve for the bird, James F. Griswold (chairman of Chicago Mill’s board) responded by saying, “We are just money-grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.”

The last confirmed sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana was in April of 1944.

1954
At one point, Lake Victoria contained well over 500 unique species of Furu, also known as Cichlid.

In August of 1954, J. Ofula Amaras (a Kenyan fisheries officer) introduced Nile Perch into the lake by means of a bucket. This was done with official sanction in the interest of increasing the value of local fisheries.

For 30 years, the Nile Perch (a voracious predator) co-existed with other fish, having a relatively benign effect on the local ecology. In the early 1980s, however, a slight increase in the number of Furu led to a population explosion amongst the Nile Perch. Within a few years, over 90% of the total species of Lake Victoria Furu had been eaten into extinction.

1964
Prometheus was a Bristlecone Pine located on Wheeler Peak in Nevada.

In 1964, Donald Currey, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, was conducting field research on the climate of the Little Ice Age. In the course of his research, he attempted to core-sample Prometheus. After breaking his only increment borer (a $200 drill bit), Currey, with the permission of Donald Cox (a forest Service District Ranger), cut the tree down.

Subsequent analysis showed that Prometheus was almost 5,000 years old, making it the oldest living known organism at the time.

1997
On January 20, 1997, Grant Hadwin swam across the Yakoun River on Haida Gwaii. A former forester, Hadwin had decided to make a statement protesting the exploitation of old growth trees on the Haida Gwaii archipelago.

Once across the river, he made a series of deep cuts into the trunk of Kiidk’yaas, a striking 300-year-old Sitka Spruce that due to a genetic mutation had golden (rather than green) needles. Kiidk’yaas was a culturally significant tree to the local Haida.

Two days later, Kiidk’yaas toppled in a winter storm.

2006
Sometime in 2006, onboard a research dredger off the coast of Iceland, James Scourse did what he has done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before: he threw a small Ocean Quahog clam into an onboard freezer, preserving it for later study.

On that very same day, Ming the Clam did something that hadn’t occured even once in its 507 years: it froze to death.

2014
Lafarge, a multinational construction company, owns the mineral rights to Guning Kanthan, a limestone hill in peninsular Malaysia. As is the practice of the company, they are in the process of razing the hill to procure limestone used to manufacture cement.

The north side of Guning Kanthan is also the exclusive home of six species of snails. The most famous of the six measures a mere 3 mm in length and was, in July of 2014, named Charopa lafargei in honour of the company that will drive it to extinction.

2016
Late October, 2016, gardener Paul Rees of Widnes, England, found a peculiar Earthworm in his garden. Named Dave by Paul’s stepson George, the worm, at 40 centimetres, was twice as long and over five times heavier than the average Earthworm. In fact, it is thought that Dave is the largest worm ever recorded.

In the interest of science, Rees donated Dave to the Natural History Museum. Dave was transferred to the care of Emma Sherlock, whose speciality is worms and other related animals.

The first thing Dr. Sherlock did, as might be expected, was to euthanize and preserve the specimen.

2018
On March 19, 2018, Sudan, a male Northern White Rhino, died at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy if Kenya of complications. Well loved, he is survived by Najin, his daughter, and Fatu, his grand daughter.

He was, as you are surely aware, the last male of his species and Najin and Fatu are the last two females.

Michael Maranda is assistant curator at the Art Gallery of York University. For the past thirty years he has been engaged with the visual arts sector in Canada, as artist, organiser, administrator, curator, editor, advocate, publisher, critic, and, more recently, as quantitative researcher. He runs the publishing activities of the AGYU, and is a prolific commenter on social media. Maranda was educated at the University of Ottawa, Concordia University, and the University of Rochester. His work has shown internationally, primarily in artists book-related venues. For some deeply ironic reason, his rip-off of Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations was exhibited in several of Gagosian’s gallery spaces.

1/20/2020

FICTION: CARLEIGH BAKER

LAST WOMAN

I’ve been playing a video game. Post-apocalyptic—post-geomagnetic disaster, in fact—which sounds like something that would melt people. The woman in the video game is the last person on Earth, and has to stay alive. And let me tell you, she didn’t win the goddamn lottery on that front. She’s in the far north—Yukon, I think. Miles and miles of forest, snow, wolves, bears. She has limited supplies, but at least there’s no one to fight over them. Silver lining. Also, there’s a deep, deep silence, which seems nice.

“Things are quiet now. But you won’t believe how quickly the world came apart,” she says. She doesn’t say if anyone melted.

In the mornings, I make a half Bodum of tar-coffee and crawl back into bed. I eat in bed. I’m not proud of this. There’s a tiny table in the corner of the cabin, but I don’t like eating there, and I love bed. Some days I write a little. Or read. Most days I just play. I haven’t played a video game in a long time, but this one seems tailor made for me. I like solitude. Writers like solitude. Modern women without husbands or kids are supposed to be all about solitude. I’m a modern woman, who runs toward adventure with open arms. I moved to Galiano Island three months ago to write, and work weekends at the bookstore. That gives me five days a week alone. And by alone I mean alone. My cabin is on an acreage surrounded by deep forest, and although the owners live on the property too, I never see them. The locals are friendly, but it’s that usual island thing. I’m a foreigner. Worse, a mainlander. People are waiting to see if I’ll make it through the winter; then they’ll invest in me. Since I can’t write all the time, and I have no social life, and I really can’t afford to spend every day drunk, a video game feels like the responsible choice. And a video game about survival is even better. Modern women are all about surviving.

The last woman on Earth ate some bad fish last night, so she’s in bed today, too. She had a better sleep than me, a solid six hours, but I seem to be weathering a little bout of insomnia. I bet if I was burning a zillion calories a day staying alive, I’d sleep better, too. She has to stay in bed and take antibiotics, which, since I have the game on easy mode, are plentiful. But if anything happens while she can’t get out, if she runs out of water or tinder or something, she might still bite it. Then you have to start a brand new game. No second chances.

We while the day away together, she with a snowstorm howling outside, me with the patter of rain on my tin roof. Once she’s healed up and the snow stops, she goes fishing. Walks across a frozen lake and cracks a hole in the ice with a hatchet. I wonder how hard that would be to do in real life.

There’s no cell service at my cabin. Not for five kilometres in any direction—a mid-island dead zone. The internet is reasonably good in the early morning, if I sit close to the wall. On those days I can call my parents using Google (the video chat sucks too much bandwidth) but we still get cut off a lot. Every time the connection breaks I feel like throwing my laptop across the room.

But it’s not the laptop’s fault. It’s the only source of any voice other than my own. Although I know it’s terrible sleep hygiene, I fall asleep most nights with it open in my face. I’ve killed the woman in the game a couple of times that way. She died of exposure while I slept. She’s kind of like a pet. A Tamagotchi.

I’m playing the sandbox alpha, because story mode isn’t ready yet. In story mode she’d have goals, places to go, but in sandbox she just runs around and collects stuff. In easy mode, the wildlife doesn’t attack you, but predators still attack prey animals, so the woman sometimes stumbles across carcasses she can strip. Of course, they freeze if they’ve been out there too long. She can take the hide and gut, too—lays it out to cure on the floor of her cabin. Bet that smells great. Not like she’s expecting company.

Or at least, that’s what I thought. In one of the new game trailers for story mode, the woman expresses her faith that someone is out there. It’s vague, but seems likely that this person is her husband. She believes he’s still alive. She collects wood outside a forest ranger’s lookout, then climbs the stairs to the top. The view would be spectacular if she could see through the fog. She goes inside and lights a fire, boils some water to purify it, cooks a chunk of deer. I wonder if she knew how to light fires without a lighter before the geomagnetic disaster. It’s harder than it looks. In real life I mean, not in the game. My cabin doesn’t have a wood stove but it does have a space heater. Not a great one. Most of the time, I’m in my long johns. Eating in bed. Good thing I’m not expecting company, either.

There is a guy, Sean. Not in the game, in real life. Not here, Vancouver. He’s in Copenhagen right now, and he was in Paris before that. He’s a photographer. This makes him sound pretty cosmopolitan, which I guess he is, but we don’t sit around talking about opera or whatever. I met him on Tinder; we went on a couple of dates, and then I think maybe he ghosted me but I was too busy moving to Galiano to notice. Anyway, I didn’t take it personally. Who could possibly take Tinder personally? But for some reason, he’s been messaging again. He’s been sending me beautiful photos of bookshops, first along the Seine River, and now from a strange little enclave in East Copenhagen.

They don’t allow cameras here, but I took two anyway, he writes me.

Badass, I write back. I’m afraid if I appear too impressed with his flirting, he’ll stop.

He uses Instagram to message me, which is appropriate for a photographer. Sometimes he sends me first person perspective photos of himself holding a cup of mulled wine in a park somewhere. Sean likes his wine. We drank a lot when we dated, which to be honest, was only a few times. I look at the photos and infer the “wish you were here” subtext.

There are no streetlights on the island, which makes the darkness of winter nights absolute. If you live on the water, you can see the glow of the city, but I’m in the forest. There are no predators on the island, but there are a lot of deer. There is also a constant feeling of being watched. I’m not nuts. When I finally admit this feeling to some of the locals, they nod knowingly, though most say it’s probably the deer or raccoons or whatever. But the feeling makes it uncomfortable to be out at night. One night the car I borrow on the weekends to get to the bookstore breaks down, and I have to walk home. I can’t find a flashlight at the store but I do find a lantern. Normally the locals pick me up if I’m walking, but lord only knows what they make of this hooded figure in black, stumbling, half blinded by lantern light. Nobody stops. When I’m only steps from my cabin, on the darkest part of the trail, there’s a rustling in the bushes, and terror takes me right the hell out of my body, so I watch a buck emerge from the trees from a third person point of view. Relief. Embarrassment. My adrenaline reek probably scares him away.

The game woman is cold and hungry. She’s grumbling a little, but otherwise she never says much. She could build a fire in one of the abandoned train cars, but there’s a dam not too far ahead, and she’s got stocks there. Energy bars and crackers and some fish she cooked this morning. When I can, I’ve been keeping her well fed.

I realize I’m hungry, too. I forgot to get groceries last time I had the car. Last night I ate half a block of plain tofu, which obviously didn’t satisfy. It’s weird to be somewhere where there are zero places to buy food after 10 PM. There’s a can of tomato paste and a can of chickpeas in the cupboard. The other half block of tofu in the fridge. Two tea bags, salt, and some cinnamon. I roast the chick peas and brew some tea. A friend from the city calls on Skype while I’m cooking, but the connection is crap so we message instead. I put on a podcast so I can hear a voice. Toss the chickpeas in salt and eat them until I feel sick.

That night I wake to what feels like my bed being shoved across the floor. A light shines in my bedroom window, and I hear a man’s voice outside. Everything shudders again, with a deep groan I’m not sure if I’m hearing or feeling, and some books fall off my shelf. For one moment I really, really think the world is ending, and oh fuck me, I’m going to be alone for it. Then I realize that the voice outside is Ken’s, the man who owns the cabin.

“Everything okay in there?” he calls.

“Yep!” I say, in a croaky voice I barely recognize, before even knowing what he’s talking about. Maybe things aren’t okay. I wonder how he knows about the problem with my bed. Poltergeist? What should I do? I see the flashlight beam retreating back toward’s Ken’s place, should I go get him?

Social Media has the answer. Hundreds of “OMG, DID YOU FEEL THAT EARTHQUAKE?” tweets.

My phone buzzes. You feel that? Sean messages.

Don’t tell me you felt it in Copenhagen?

Got back yesterday. Jetlagged, he replies, with a picture of his dog, Henry, sprawled out on the couch. I packed a bag in case we had to get out. Water, dog food, whiskey.

HA. I assume he’s joking, but he sends me a photo of the packed bag. That’s some good whiskey.

Be prepared, he writes. I try to imagine him as a boy scout.

We message until the light filters through the curtains. I guess he didn’t want to be alone, either.

Sean has blonde hair and pale blue eyes that point in different directions sometimes. In an embarrassing moment of vulnerability I told him they were beautiful, and I meant it, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. Hard to explain to someone that their imperfections are their best assets. His attractiveness, like anyone I’ve been attracted to, lies in his emotional detachment—he was always happy to see me, but only so happy. Also, he talks about weird stuff. The first thing he brought up on our first date, in a hip Gastown bar with a Yeah Yeah Yeahs soundtrack, was the super-deluxe robo-toilets they have in the Tokyo airport. I don’t even remember if he had a segue between “nice to meet you,” and that. After I recovered from the initial concern about what other people might think of the conversation, I realized I loved it. One of his eyes drifted toward the roof, while the other looked at me intently. Then he showed me his photos of a group of Japanese guys who dress up like rockabilly dudes and challenge each other to dance-offs in a park outside Tokyo. Sean loves Japan. I think he was disappointed to learn I haven’t travelled much.

Once, when I was reading him one of my stories on his rooftop deck, overlooking downtown, he snapped a picture of me. That seemed to me like high intimacy. He didn’t show me the photo and I didn’t ask. The sun was setting and we’d had so much gin.

No food again. Not in the game, in real life. It’s an hour long walk to the store. A modern woman would walk to the store. I check Google Maps three times, to see if there’s a faster way to get there, some secret trails through the forest. It’s only about a kilometre away as the crow flies. But I’m not a crow. In the video game, crows circle the bodies of fresh killed deer. Ravens, I guess, since it’s the Yukon. I wonder how the animals made it through the geomagnetic disaster, but then I realize I have no idea what a geomagnetic disaster actually is. Google it.

Turns out it wouldn’t melt anyone, which is a shame. But it would knock out all the electricity, which would totally kill most people these days. A very un-sciencey website called Business Insider claims that in 2012, a huge solar storm sent out an energy wave that almost hit Earth. If we'd been in the storm’s path, we would have been hit by a solar flare, (amazing!) and then a coronal mass ejection, (who can we thank for this catastrophe nomenclature!) Billions of tons of hot, electrically charged atoms of hydrogen and helium would have been our conquerors. It sounds terrifying, but I guess besides a really bright light, people on Earth wouldn’t actually see it happening. That might make it even scarier.

I wonder how the woman in the game survived. Maybe she was one of those people who don’t have a smart phone. Those people still exist, though there are fewer and fewer of them. What if she is the only person left because she didn’t have a smart phone?

I decide to walk to the store. It takes a lot of preparation. There’s clothing considerations—it’s cold, but I’ll heat up quickly. So, layers. And then of course there’s me. I’m a disaster. Pale, sickly, dirty hair—I can’t remember the last time I washed it. My cabin only has a bathtub, and washing long hair in the tub is the shits. Something’s wrong with the water, it’s kind of yellow and smells like sulphur. “Not poisonous,” Ken says. Great. But still, I’m never really clean. Fortunately, Galiano is an aesthetically forgiving community. I put on my glasses over bleary, unlined eyes, spend another half hour stressing about which shoes to wear (practical, not aesthetic concerns) and finally, finally, leave.

Outside, everything is winter white frosty. I go back in and get my sunglasses, check Google Maps again, check Facebook again, leave again. Sunbeams everywhere, it’s nuts. After a few steps, the adrenaline-heavy “leaving the house” feeling is replaced with a drunk-ish happiness, some kind of endorphin rush for having granted myself fresh air and blood circulation. I take pictures of the light filtering through crystalline tree branches. I don’t see anyone. The island is long and skinny, and most houses are set away from the road, down long driveways. As a result, the roads seem empty. There’s still the deer, of course. Sometimes, if I look at a deer for too long, I get weepy.

A Galiano raven has cultivated exactly the right acoustics to achieve the Ultimate Haunting Call. Those who have been fortunate enough to experience the UHC in person know that it's not necessarily a mournful cry. If anything, a smug satisfaction at having engineered maximum amplification and reverb through a combination of positioning, air clarity, temperature, and vocal chops, is detectable in the cry. These are the things you start to notice when you spend a lot of time in silence. Outside feels good, less like loneliness, and more like solitude. Buzzfeed says that’s different. I decide to force myself out for a few hours every day.

The woman in the game has found a gun. I don’t know anything about guns besides what I’ve learned from other games, but it’s clearly a shotgun. She finds some ammo, too, in the trunk of a car outside a fishing shack. This means she doesn’t have to wait for the wolves to make her kills for her any more—now she’s got the power. She runs out into a field and the first thing we see is a rabbit, so we shoot it. It screams. She just gets to work on the carcass, like, no big deal—this will make some great mitts. But over here, in real life, my eyes are watering.

Hey, maybe you can come to the island sometime, I message Sean, holding my breath.

Sounds good, he messages back. But that’s it.

The next day, on a misty road that’s presenting me with a seriously pastoral farm landscape, I see a snake. Just a garter snake, no big deal. I used to catch garters when I was a kid and impress the boys with my totally masculine bravery. I loved the feel as they hugged my wrist, coiling themselves around it like they were claiming me. The snakes, not the boys.

As I get closer, I see it’s half squashed. There’s more carnage further along—a couple of flat lizards. The road is a reptile deathtrap. I look away, at the horses in the fields, frosty green beans hanging from a lattice, sun diffusing onto Scotch Broom. It’s chilly, but these genuinely cold spells only last a few days, usually. Still, you’d think the lizards would hibernate in the winter.

And then, an eagle flies overhead and drops a lizard on the ground right in front of me. Alive, but stunned. Both of us. I approach slowly, like it might be a lizard bomb, undetonated. Run a finger across its mottled brown skin and it doesn't move. Pick it up by the tail, crouching low to the ground in case it wiggles out of my grasp, but it doesn't. I walk a long way into the woods, into a half frozen grassy marsh. I can't explain how I know I’ve found the right spot; at a certain point I just stop walking and put the lizard down. Again, that Galiano feeling that someone or something is watching me, like I’m being Punk’d by nature. But maybe that instinct is wrong, not an instinct at all, really. Maybe the opposite of an instinct. A long-time misconception that I’m not a part of all this, Of nature, I mean.

This realization doesn’t come with fireworks or nausea, or anything that might mark a life-changing epiphany. Maybe it’s just cabin fever. I want to sing, which sounds douchey, but I’m so tired of silence. All that comes to mind is a John Trudell poem, so I sing that. Culturally borrowing—hardcore—but hopefully Trudell would forgive me. “Days people don’t care for people. These days are the hardest.”

When the all-season songbirds start to sing along with me, I admit, it feels like a prayer.

The last woman on Earth (maybe) would never indulge herself like this. She doesn’t know it’s almost Christmas day, or if she does, she doesn’t acknowledge it. It’s a day like any other: do some fishing, purify some water, stay alive—none of that other shit matters when you’re the last woman on Earth.

She’s been skinning her kills. She’s been stockpiling the stinking hides and the gut, because she knows the bullets for the gun won’t last forever. Birch saplings will be straight enough for arrows. Maple for a bow. But they have to be dried and hardened, and these things take time.

"Last Woman" originally appeared in the 2017 Hingston & Olsen Short Story Advent Calendar.

Carleigh Baker is an nêhiyaw âpihtawikosisân /Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ilwəta peoples. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays, The Short Story Advent Calendar, and The Journey Prize Stories. She also writes reviews for the Globe and Mail and the Literary Review of Canada. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings (Anvil, 2017) won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award for fiction, and the BC Book Prize Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. She is the 2019/20 writer in residence and a 2020 Shadbolt fellow in the humanities at Simon Fraser University.

12/7/2019

PROSE: CARRIANNE LEUNG

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

"What is to be said at this time? What is to be awaken, what essential truth is there to hold? I am only a storyteller, and all I’ve ever known has been that stories are necessary."

WRITING IN A DANGEROUS TIME

From Carrianne Leung's Word Feast Lecture, September 20, 2019, Fredericton, NB

Of Beginnings

My social media feeds have been filled with photos of bees. Bees on flowers. Bees in a ballet of flight. Bees on bees. My friends are obsessed with bees. In the context of the complexities and catastrophes facing us, of course we are obsessed with bees.

Simultaneous to the appearance of bees on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I keep trying to write, but it’s not going well.

We writers know the power of the flow—that magical place where words pour from us like soft water. We intuitively feel for that surge that is from us but not quite of us. This is the part of the process of writing that makes our work so enlivening and occasionally terrifying. But when the words and stories do not flow, when we are caught in low tide, when floundering… I have been floundering.

There is no magic to be found lately. Icebergs are melting, fire is setting the world alight, 50% of our biodiversity has been lost. The scale of human suffering is insurmountable. Hate crimes, incarcerated children, state terrorism, missing and murdered women, overpoliced bodies, people floating on water, people crying, people rising. We look for bees in our state of seeming helplessness with the sole duty to not look away. What do I write?

I don’t know, and this talk will not give any answers, but I hope it gives us a space to think about, talk about, write towards something. Perhaps this talk is not even about writing. It may be more about being human existing in this precipice of something else, some deep transformation, as our world is also transforming.

Of Looking

I started writing this paper in the spring. The days were growing warmer, the leaves on the trees burst into my favourite hues of fresh green, flowers re-emerged like sleeping beauties. Unlike my usual joy at greeting this season, I wondered what I did to deserve this wonder?

One day, as I was walking, a monarch butterfly flew close, crossing my path. I stopped to give it the right of way, and it fluttered, in that zigzag way that butterflies do, pass. I wanted to apologize for not having given full attention to their fierce tenacity enough in my lifetime. I wished that I had paid better attention. Do butterflies know how beautiful they are to us? Do we know how beautiful we can be to each other?

We know that a writer needs to attend to the world, and I do. But I do so lately with an intensity that can only be described as a last gasp, as if all this will fall away like illusion at any moment, and I must remember it to record properly. I don’t have the discerning eyes of a scientist who can perhaps detect the smallest evidence of our unravelling. I only have the eyes of a writer who seeks beauty, humanity and life, even in scenes of death. Everything looks deeply sacred to me now—trees, birds, strangers’ faces. There is an illumination to everything. Is this what mourning looks like? I am full of grief and fear and wonder.

What are we really looking for? Who are we becoming in this looking?

There are other things happening. My child turns 12 and starts middle school and is worried if they will have friends. My parents grow frail but attempt to be more kind. Some friends have just had babies, and I have to remember that babies are still being born. Who am I to despair? I am in the middle of life, a really good life that I may or may not deserve. I need to be called back to the minutiae of the everyday.

This is my predicament of being a writer in a dangerous time—the simultaneity of life and death on scales big and small … as I search for what stories to tell. What is to be said at this time? What is to be awaken, what essential truth is there to hold? I am only a storyteller, and all I’ve ever known has been that stories are necessary.

Of Language

Here I am in Nova Scotia, on an island off the bigger island where birds outnumber people. It’s now August and I continue to struggle with my writing. Toni Morrison has died, and my social media feed is full of her interviews, essays and excerpts of poetry and fiction. She leaves a stream of life in the wake of her passing.

The seagulls scream here, as I read Morrison’s words on a rock by the shore. The sounds interrupt my concentration, and I imagine that they are repeating insistently their history. I have been listening, but I can’t understand their language, and I won’t pretend that I ever will. I am here by the water and watch the many lifeforms each with their own sense of place, time and storytelling. The tide rises and falls regardless of whether I wake or die in the night. The rocks unmoved by my presence. My brief visit is not even brief in their timeline but just a speck. I am a speck. This gives me some comfort.

Author and poet, Dionne Brand claims that Morrison changed the texture of the English language, and I think this is what it takes in times like these.

Language increasingly is weaponized. We are and have always been engaged in a struggle over language and meaning. There have been warnings before—George Orwell’s 1984 alerted us to how language can be co-opted from the people and delivered back as something else to contain the people. The Ministry Love, Ministry of Truth, of Plenty were exemplars of what Orwell said was Oceania’s doublethink. The Ministry of Truth, for example, was in charge of propaganda, the perpetual broadcasting and repetition of falsified histories, production of facts, the ultimate spin doctoring. Orwell writes, “I do feel writers have the ethical responsibility to dismantle the fascist language that we are seeing and resist the cooption of language to shape that agenda.”

We are in a storm of fascist language, I think. Hate gathers like fog and enunciates itself as policy, as rhetoric, as headline. Morrison asserts that this kind of language is not “like” violence but very much is violence.

Part of what we do as writers is to wrestle our language free of its institutional cages, its slogans and branding. We must create a sentence like Morrison or Brand to call attention to our humanity, wake us from this frozen state of hell, caress the texture of things. To sit with the noise of bees, of clover, of the scream of gulls, to listen even if we do not understand. I think of Morrison and her reach for language. I think of the sacred space as we, her readers, must reach to meet her.

I understand language as my craft and my spell that I must invoke with careful intention. When we write, when we leave our marks on the page and our words walk off into other people’s lives, I hope they bring a new way of being and seeing our humanity. I think of Morrison.

Of Violence

I can’t turn away from the constant feed of evidence on my feed or the news. I have tried to log off social media. Not read the news. I do this because I do not know what to do in the face of so much violence. Every day, there are fresh killings. Every day, the news scream that we are in peril. I am so privileged that I can attempt to filter it out because my own safety is not as precarious as so many others, those of friends, those of people I love, those of strangers. The line from me to you, to them, to out there, to the bigger logic of things. These lines connecting all of us are becoming clearer. I am here only because “they” are there, in harm’s way. There is a suffering that comes in bearing witness, to being unable to make it stop. We are not exempt, not safe, not innocent. There is no neutral place to exist or to write. But there never has been.

In an interview with author Thea Lim, Booker Prize winner, Marlon James stated that depictions of violence are gratuitous if we do not show its aftermath, the suffering and the survival. We seem to spectacularize violence. We know the brutality against Indigenous, Black and brown people and communities. We know the trauma of widespread sexual and gendered violence in our institutions, our communities, our homes. We know so much and yet, violence is pornographic if we go numb. Thea Lim responds to Marlon James and extends that perhaps the flipside of violence is tenderness and intimacy. Perhaps then, this is the reach?

On Twitter, there was a post by Indigenous CBC journalist, Jesse Wente that stayed with me. He wrote: “Dystopian novels are not warnings, they are preparations”. And so, I re-think books like Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves, Larissa Lai’s Tiger Flu. I also think of what Thea Lim told me about her novel, Ocean of Minutes when I asked her if it was dystopia, and she replied that it was allegory.

In all these books, characters are forced to navigate a treacherous world, a world on the brink--but the central story is not about this. It’s about what is required to survive. There is immense tenderness at the core of this survival, an expansive love that may not immediately topple the regimes but provide a path to sustain us on the way to doing so. These books offer an opportunity to re-imagine the world, draw on history and spirituality to re-fashion how to be human. And isn’t that the whole point of literature? To show us to ourselves and keep pursuing this question: what does it mean to be human?

I think about Indigenous writers and Black writers whose work are not prophesizing apocalypse because their communities are already post-apocalypse, or their apocalypse continues. Their lives through generations have already been devastatingly interrupted and they are bringing us life after. I think of BIPOC dystopian literature as perhaps not dystopian at all, and more as Afro or Indigenous futurisms. The power of imagination, the calling of ancestral knowledge to the fore, the inheritance of what it means to enact humanity—all this is in books. So, in times like these when I can’t find words, I have always conversed with books. I am doing so again. I am learning. I am grateful.

Stories have always been my instruction manual on being human.

Of Human

I tell my students, everything you write is about what it means to be human. Even if your characters are aliens, teenage vampires, cats, you are writing about humanity. Stories have always been my instruction manual on being human. When I first immigrated to Canada as a child, I learned English because I loved to read fiction. It wasn’t a compulsion to communicate, but a compulsion to understand and a need to be reflected. One writer in particular, Jean Little, wrote of lonely children, children in pain, children growing up despite this loneliness and pain. I appreciated her so much because it was told against all the other narratives of childhood where I could not locate myself. I was in awe—how did this writer have this profound understanding of my feelings? How did she reach out from the page to remind me that I am part of a human family, not monstrous or Other, but just a child? I suppose this is the quest that I am on in writing this talk. I am seeking to know that I am not alone, and I am seeking to understand this pain and to put language like a salve upon it.

And it’s not just of suffering, but of putting the words to our complicated joy too. We mustn’t forget about joy. We will need to re-imagine what this means, re-imagine what a good life is by other metrics.

Of Archive

I’ve been thinking about literature as archive. Literature is knowledge, document, testament to what a culture at a given time values and doesn’t value. For that reason, some writers who do not see themselves in the pages, write the absences, the blank space between lines, the margins. Every story that gets told is made possible by other stories that do not, could not come. These stories exist in silence, like ghosts, like haunting. I believe this is what makes someone like Toni Morrison genius. She re-inserted black ancestors to a 400-year archive of America in her novels despite the persistent erasure of black life through slavery and anti-Blackness. She restored complex personhood and dignity to the lives of ancestors and descendants.

In discussing Morrison’s work, Sociologist Avery Gordon writes about ghosts and hauntings as power that can be named and not named, the density of concepts like Capitalism, Racism, Colonialism but also, the delicacy of what these things feel like, sound like, act like in the lives of oppressed people.

We are thick with ghosts that can be named and not named. The recent surfacing of consciousnesses that movements like #MeToo, Idle No More, and Black Lives Matter are giving shapes to ghosts, showing the outlines of absences, of the power that gives forms to our lives. It’s not that gender violence, white settler colonialism or anti-Blackness are recent events but a trajectory of destruction that hides in policy, in rhetoric, in the everyday practices of ordinary people. It is not easy to write the delicacy of mundane violences, the artfulness of subjugation, the slow death drive of hate and greed. These affects and effects are not so easy to describe, to name. So, we write the stories of these hauntings.

What gets read, what gets published, what gains traction are important questions to consider. If dominant stories that are repeated like some kind of truth are no longer working, if the assumptions about what is universal are proven untrue, we need counter stories, haunted stories, unburied stories. We need to clear space for them. Even in this moment when we face an uncertain future, or if we can’t imagine what the human future will be, we must create and continue to serve this archive. The archive is for the past and the future, but also for now. It is hard to be human, it is hard to be a writer. Tell this.

Of Witness

We are changing necessarily. Our consciousness, our roles in history, our sensibilities—all are changing in these dangerous times.

If we are to write the world, to bring it in, let it permeate our words and blur the boundaries between text and life, what are the stories that must accompany us in this transition? To write, I must be filled with compassion. It’s the only way I know how to do it. So, where does my compassion lie? I hope it will always be on the side of justice.

One of our functions as writers is to bear witness. Poet Billy Ray Belcourt pushes us farther and states that “I think that part of the work of the poet in the 21st century in the West is to not just bear witness, but to trouble and denormalize the way in which cruelty actually is a part of the fabric of life in Canada.”

Does this goal seem lofty? Maybe. Is it necessary? Yes. Is it a dangerous time? It is. There is more at stake than ever but perhaps, this has always been so. Everywhere, throughout history, somebody has struggled for their lives and humanity, and somebody has picked up a pen, a paintbrush, used their voice to express this sorrow, this rage, this insistence to life.

Of Relationship

We need audacity in order to re-write the world. But what kind of audacity? A Hero’s journey? I am re-thinking this metaphor and narrative. I am turning the central protagonist around, so she can look at others, embrace them, engage, understand that she is born in a nest of relations and her heroism and courage is not a solo trek.

Instead of being a “good person” or a “good writer”, I have started to think instead of fostering good relations. I count myself in the company of brilliant contemporary writers who are also wrestling with these preoccupations. The ideas weave like conversation in our stories, poetry and essays. There is a genealogy in our literary histories, and this genealogy makes all things possible, generating language that I can hold and build. I believe our words are a commune also for readers. If we are dreaming the same dream—how miraculous, how incredible! Perhaps I have been hoping all along that I am working towards this same dream or a path towards something that feels like love, like life, like justice, like the human.

While I was writing That Time I Loved You, I felt a bit concerned by how my characters took over my life. They emerged as fully formed characters and followed me everywhere. I met Lee Maracle for the first time during the writing of this book, and asked her, in a scared whisper if she ever felt she was haunted. Lee, matter-of-fact replied, of course, writing is speaking to our ancestors. She accepts this as her practice. If this is indeed what we do—this divine invocation of ghosts, of history, our duty to ancestors, then perhaps we are also learning how to be good ancestors ourselves.

Writing possible futures must necessarily lead us back to relationship, and this includes non-human life forms. I have felt the need to slow things down, to walk at a snail’s pace. On that encounter with the butterfly, I thought how strange that I offered a right of way to a butterfly, but isn’t this so? Isn’t this the most basic of things, the coterminous inhabitation of this space and time? Perhaps we can still retrieve and renew the possibilities of relationship that does not further harm, but can re-imagine the relationship between a woman and a butterfly that would exceed my understanding of the world as I know it?

I’ll ask again: what audacity do we need now? I’ll offer my answer: We need each other.

Of Story

Duty is not contrary to creative freedom. In fact, I think of it as part of creative freedom and the height of imagination. Story finds fertile ground when we understand what ours is unique to tell. This does not mean borrowing or inhabiting another voice as the case of cultural appropriation. It is the acknowledgement of what is facing us vis a vis a web of relationships.

Some writers have written dystopia, of the after-effects of catastrophe—whether this is a climate crash or a humanity crash. We also need to think about what to write in the time between, the transition, the ways we will change AS we are changing. The change will be rapid and slow. When I think of the time before Trump was elected to now, it could have been a million years ago. Or a minute. The temporal becomes something else in dangerous times when we are unprepared for how deeply we can sink, how deeply it cuts. And so, as writers, we play with time.

There is theory in storytelling, so there is deep knowledge found in our literature. Leanne Simpson writes in Dancing on Our Turtle's Back that elders have said that everything we need to know is encoded in the structure, content and context of Indigenous stories including an ethics and responsibility. And so, we need to make more space for these stories.

Even if you are not Indigenous or colonized, we may begin to free ourselves from the confines of colonial logics, structures, forms and a return to the communal, of relationality. We, as Frantz Fanon indicated, must attend to the colonial wound. The wound that is also evident on the land, the waters that will soon no longer sustain us because of the same colonial and neoliberal violence that is and has been enacted on human bodies. We need to free our imagination from the trajectories of violence and destruction in order to write with an agency towards different futures.

If our work is not about this witnessing and touching on a deeper understanding of our humanity—a shared, dignified humanity for all of us, then what is it for? Dionne Brand says that we write in order to transform, and this touches me deeply. At the end, we need to banish the idea of a “return” to safety … Perhaps the task is not to write ourselves back to an illusion but to a transformation. The role of writing, the role of art has this special task.

As we proceed, we will re-gather the most essential things, and we will write more love stories, our comedies that are shot through our tragedies, our betrayals, our pride. I hope there will be new ways of seeing, thinking, loving even as we remember. We will have choices to make: will we be generous? Will we be just? How will we act when we are afraid? Our literature will reflect all of this.

Of Endings, Of Futures

During one sleepless night while I waited for my child to be born, I learned that birth requires patience. I recalled that it was bloody, full of pain, full of euphoria, utterly magic. And so now, I think maybe patience is required for all kinds of birth—to write, to listen, to die. Even in death, there is a process of creation, and so, even in this moment I remember there needs to be patience.

As I was finishing this talk, I read an article in the Washington Post by Dan Zack titled, “Everything is Not going to be OK: How to live with constant reminders that the Earth is in Trouble.” He writes, “Hold the problem in your mind. Freak out, but don’t put it down. Give it a quarter-turn. See it like a scientist, and as a poet. As a descendant. As an ancestor.”

I will be slow and patient, as I turn the problems in rotation and trust, the stories are coming.

I have deep respect for the work of writers. We sit in solitude, in meditation and reflection for many hours of our days, crafting something exquisite that comes with pain, with joy with tremendous purpose. Sometimes we turn to write as simply a way to relieve ourselves and our readers of this pain of existence, to offer shelter, and I do not mean to take away such necessary relief and shelter. But I do want to ask you, respectfully, gently, to not re-direct your gaze from the wounds of this world. I would like your participation in this project of what it means to be human in our fullest form, with each other whether that be in your writing, in your relations, in your sense of yourself in the world.

I believe in the power of literature and the power of writers. We have a special opportunity and responsibility ahead. How privileged are we to be writers, how brave, how open we are to be the witness and the mirror! How lucky we are to be in a web of relations to everything! And also this, as much as the times we live are dire, we are also fortunate to be the ones living it.

It seems that we have some choices to make, it seems that we do this day by day, just as we will write it, word by word. I think we can be afraid, but I think we also have courage.

I extend my hand to you. I watch this butterfly cross. I’ll keep looking for bees.

Carrianne Leung is a fiction writer and educator. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Equity Studies from OISE/University of Toronto. Her debut novel, The Wondrous Woo, published by Inanna Publications was shortlisted for the 2014 Toronto Book Awards. Her collection of linked stories, That Time I Loved You, was released in 2018 by HarperCollins and in 2019 in the US by Liveright Publishing. It received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, and was named as one of the Best Books of 2018 by CBC, That Time I Loved You was awarded the Danuta Gleed Literary Award 2019 and was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards 2019 and long listed for Canada Reads 2019. Leung’s work has also been appeared in The Puritan, Ricepaper, The Globe and Mail, Room Magazine, Prairie Fire and Open Book Ontario.

Forward>>

YOUR CART

PROSE: MICHAEL MARANDA

FICTION: CARLEIGH BAKER

PROSE: CARRIANNE LEUNG

WRITING IN A DANGEROUS TIME