In spite of my passion for CanLit (or maybe because of it),
I held off reading this book – Arrival: The Story of CanLit. Maybe if he had changed the title to The
Story of CanLit in the 1960s I’d be a bit less critical.
I avoided reading because I knew it would make me mad. It
would be T-O-centric and phallo-centric. And it is. Moreover, it is the tone.
That overly confidant mansplaining talk which presents opinion as if it were
fact. I blame that tendency for the false news fad which we are fighting today.
Rather than blame myself, and other teachers and former teachers, who have
failed to stress, teach, develop the skill of being able to differentiate
opinion, fiction, from fact. Or worse, we failed to help groom students who
care about the difference, the ethics of opinion. The responsibility of
speaking in the public forum.
You can sort of imagine how this book grew. First,
everything starts in Toronto. With a bit of bleed from Montreal after the Quiet
Revolution. Then someone said You have to include some other part of the
country. What about Vancouver, Tish, and the American influence? Then someone
said You have to include some First Nations and more women, so he drops in
Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed although it is the ONLY indigenous writer and the
ONLY non-fiction and published in 1973.
It’s a child’s viewpoint, the belief that nothing happened
before I got here. No reference to previous award winners, especially writers
who remained in Canada. In the brief biographies, writers like Laurence and MacLennan
do pay homage to earlier writers from their regions—Sinclair Ross, Ernest
Buckler. Little reference to E.J. Pratt. Nothing important said about Dorothy
Livesay, twice GG winner, active in the little mag Contemporary Verse from
Edmonton in the 1940s. Or Laura Salverson or Winnipeg. Or Emily Carr. Not enough mention of
the Centennial and all the promotion in the years before 1967 which helped
young people travel in Canada, develop a sense of Canadian identity and pride,
and meet their counterparts in other regions. Money did come from the Canada
Council for writers and publishers, but the biggest benefit to me seems to be
the creation of a nation of young people who desire a CanLit, to make it and to
buy it.
I do like the little blurbs about books, although not the
stars. Trust the tale, not the teller. And I did learn the meaning of Tish.
Backwards?
I also felt a lack of a definition or an understanding of
what literature really is and why it is important. And of the link between colonialism
and CanLit. If there was no CanLit before 1967, it was because we were a
colony. Even if politically we were not a colony after 1927, in our heads, and
in the education of the decision-makers, we were still “lesser than” the mother
countries and convinced, as they told us, that nothing of value comes from
here.
I avoided reading because I knew it would make me mad, and
it did. But, I guess, it also made me think.
