Thursday 23 March 2017

A Lovely Note


Opened my email to this. How sweet.



  Dear Casey, 

  I'm going to bed with an irrepressible smile on my face,  
  because I've just read The Ziz. How wonderful your stories
  are. Thank you. 

  I hope something's bringing you such joy. 

  Hugs, 

  Kaitlyn 



This did, Kaitlyn. Thanks.

(She is of course referring to Finding Creatures & Other Stories.)

Saturday 11 March 2017

Review: “Cathedral of the August Heat” by Pierre Clitandre



I have read more than sixty books about Haiti over the years—or rather, nonfiction books about, novels set in, and so on. Cathedral of the August Heat * by Pierre Clitandre is the most perplexing.

I must first say that I know little of magical realism, which I believe is the genre this book most clearly fits into. Women become pools, men cathedrals (well, each of those happens only once, but there is lots else besides). This doesn't happen on every page and when it does it is generally effective. But I can't measure its effectiveness against, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude and its ilk, which I haven't read.

I am spending so many keystrokes on the style because this book is much held by style, so much so that the content and indeed the story are sometimes obscured by it. Recall that this is written in translation—as far as I can tell, a very literate and often beautiful translation, by Bridget Jones.

The sense I have is that some of, perhaps much of the gist of the novel is, like the Kreyol language itself, not in the words so much as what images and stories they remind the reader of, and in this the English translation can't much help us. I have had times in the past when a person would speak to me in Kreyol and I understood every word that was said and had no idea of the meaning. English, at its most colourful, can do the same. All of this is to explain that although I read with care, there were often times when I had only the foggiest idea what was going on, and I don't know how much of this was the language and how much was due to the author's tendency to switch points of view without necessarily saying who we were switching into, and drifting back and forth between minor characters over much of the book—occasionally lending confusion as to whether a character was the same as another or a different one entirely.

This may have been deliberate. We do learn names, and there is one character in particular, strangely called John, rather than Jean, who is more or less the main POV character. But we miss him for ages at a time and we never really do get into his skin. Much, much is said of the collective experience of the poor, and how they are herded back and forth and brutalized by the elements and the soldier class. So it may be that Clitandre's vagueness in POV change and his distance from the heart of his characters is because they are all, to him, metaphors, folk images, elements of Vodou, reminders of history, reminders of suffering and the only way to elude it—maybe. A wiser (or more foolish) writer than myself might spend a lot of time trying to understand the position of women within the narrative, and children, and men, each separately, and a thousand other ingredients that combine in this ever-moving, elemental piece.

One last word on words. Despite her gorgeous rendering of Clitandres most brutal and sublime reveries, I can't thank Jones for choosing “a lively West Indian English” as the jargon for the people. I have spoken in English with many Haitians and they do not speak that way. It felt weirdly superimposed and hard to get used to—no less beautiful but foreign. A minor point.

So what of the story? Read it? Don't read it?

Read it. Let it wash over you just as it is, without struggling in the ways I have struggled to make it fit into the confines of a regular novel. Don't expect all the plot lines, or metaphors, more accurately, to be tied up. Don't expect to know how it ends. (Remember that Duvalier was still in power when this novel broke. Clitandre's father, by the way, was one of the many disappeared.)

Let it be a long, long poem, expressing the endless ebb and flow of suffering and beauty and brutality and hope. It is coarse, it is sometimes disgusting, it is transporting, it is tragic, it refuses to be any of the above.


Image: Credit is not given. A Haitian mural. No idea where, but Jacmel on the bus does give us a hint!

“Peace In Oneself" - Buddhists Rally Against Racism


Calligraphy by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh

If you are alive, you are probably aware of the enormous pressures against refugees and other migrants in the last few years, and the increasing acts of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and racism generally. Most uncomfortably unexpected to residents of the Lower Mainland has been the distribution of KKK literature in Surrey in the last months. And with the fears or deportation running rampant in the USA, increasing numbers of people are risking winter conditions and arrest to walk across the border into Canada. I need not go on and on. You know it better than I.

Here is one thing my Buddhist sangha has decided to do in response:


Dear Thay, dear Sangha.

It is necessary for us to cancel our sit on March 12th (second Sunday), with apologies. We will still be sitting on the fourth Sunday (the 26th) at Vancouver Status of Women.

Some of us will be taking our practice to the International Day Against Racism on March 26, in downtown Vancouver from 1pm - 4pm: 

http://vancouver.carpediem.cd/events/2462226-international-day-against-racism-march-at-thornton-park

Please feel free to join us if you wish to attend as a sangha. We have taken this step in response to rising anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and racist sentiment in the world at large. Our teacher and many of our members worldwide are or have been refugees and immigrants. We want to stand peacefully together to support our sisters and brothers who are bearing the brunt of destructive policies and behaviours.

RSVP to me and we can let you know where and when we will gather.

A lotus to each of you, Buddhas to be!

Casey