Tunesday : Doctor My Eyes

Doctor My Eyes

Written and Performed by Jackson Browne

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand

I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long

'Cause I have wandered through this world
As each moment has unfurled
I've been waiting to awaken from these dreams

People go just where they will
I never noticed them until I got this feeling
That it's later than it seems

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see
I hear their cries
Just say if it's too late for me

Doctor, my eyes
Cannot see the sky
Is this the prize for having learned how not to cry

I'm taking a detour from the timeline of my life this week because I realise I haven't been recording what is, and will continue to be, an important event to me: my upcoming cataract surgery. So, yes, this is a very literal song choice, and I had to mentally flip a coin between Doctor My Eyes and These Eyes by The Guess Who because I grew up on, and feel nostalgia for, both songs (and in the end, Jackson Browne won out because he has the doctor in there, too). I have always loved this song, so I'm happy to have found a spot for it (and yet, These Eyes is more fun to sing along to...).

I was maybe twelve when I got my first pair of glasses - which seems kind of old compared to other kids who need them; this was probably the first time I had ever had an eye test. Wearing the glasses home from the optometrist, I was dazzled by the sharpness: I had never before seen the individual leaves defined on a tree, or recognised the horizon as a solid line instead of a fuzzy transition, and I gazed with wonder on the passing, unblurred view from inside the car. I also remember that I wasn't really given a choice about what my glasses would look like - the medical assistant had put a pair on my face at the first appointment, made some adjustments, and sent them off for lenses - and I was too shy to ask her at what point I would be allowed to try on some others (perhaps my mother had asked for the cheapest option and I was cut out of the decision process to stay within her budget). So, as this was the late '70s, what I was given were large, plastic, owlish frames with heavy glass lenses, and no matter how dazzled I was by the vision they afforded, there wasn't much chance that I was going to wear them all the time. I certainly did bring the glasses to school - and couldn't believe the sharpness they brought to what was written on the board - but I was vain enough to only wear them for copying notes, popping them on and off as needed, feeling like a dork when they were on. And despite my eyesight only getting worse over the years, I still only wear my glasses when driving (after Kennedy was born and we moved back to Ontario, I tried to reinvent myself amongst strangers as more matronly - I got my hair cut short and began to wear my glasses full time - but neither affectation felt like me and I gave up both; maybe you need to start wearing glasses as a really young child for it to feel natural; I don't actually mind living in a soft focus world).

So, maybe ten years ago, I had a routine eye exam and the optometrist looked through his scope and said, "Someone has punched you in the eye". I assured him that no one has ever punched me in the eye, and he insisted that I had the beginnings of a "damage related" cataract, and that at some point, someone must have hit me in the eye. I then remembered that when Kennedy had been a baby, she bucked suddenly as I was reading her a picture book on my lap and the corner of the book had jabbed into my eye: Could that have caused this cataract? The doctor said that it didn't matter how, the important thing would be to monitor my fuzzy growth and pluck it when "ripened". And then began my years of dread.

I remember there was a commercial on TV once for Lasik that made me wince, and my niece Ella (maybe four at the time) asked me what was wrong. I told her that the idea of laser eye surgery freaked me out and always made me shudder, to which she replied, in that voice of stretched patience that she has always used on me (to my great amusement), "Auntie Krista, it's not like a couple of big guys are gonna pound on the door one night, and when you answer it, grab you and say, 'You're coming with us right now for laser eye surgery'. If you don't want it, don't get it." And she had a point. And yet.

My inlaws have both had successful and life-changing cataract surgeries (as has my mother, but she doesn't really talk about it), and have been asking me for years, "When are you having yours taken off?" And I can always reply, "It's being monitored. Since it's injury related, my cataract might be growing extra slowly. The doctor will decide when it's time." But it's not like I was going back for yearly checkups; primarily because I decided I didn't really like that optometrist.

So, last summer I went to a different eye doctor, and when he looked through his scope, he was alarmed: One of my eyes has a huge cataract, and while the vision in my other eye is severely near-sighted, it also has the beginning of a new cataract. When I offered what the other optometrist had said about the one being "damage related" and slow growing, the new doctor said there was no such thing. Cataracts are cataracts, and as I am barely legal to drive (!), he referred me immediately to an ophthalmologist for surgery. (Kennedy feels like she has been unfairly maligned for years - she for some reason thinks that I once accused her of hitting me in the eye with a book case (how??) - so my eternal apologies for ever believing that Kennedy damaged my vision when she was just a babe.)

Cataract surgery is big business here, so a referral in August meant that I didn't get to meet with the surgeon until October (and, of course, all I could think of was A Clockwork Orange and that scene above; about two big men pounding on my door and hauling me off for laser eye surgery). He also seemed alarmed by my weak vision and recommended taking off both cataracts at once; and despite thinking my case relatively extreme, he figured the waiting list wouldn't allow for my surgery before May. It's now late May, and my surgery has finally been confirmed for July.

I went the other day for my pre-op appointment. I was brought into an examination room for "measurements", and the medical assistant (MA) explained that I had two options: measurements could be taken manually, which is covered by the provincial health insurance (do I need to note that all of this is covered by our slow but feeless health care system?), or for $200 extra, I could have it done with lasers. The laser system was recommended as exponentially more precise, but that the manual system was certainly adequate. As Dave has benefits that cover extras like this, I went for the lasers. So after a brief put-your-chin-here-forehead-here-and-look-through-here routine test, the real fun began.

I was sitting on something like a dentist chair, and after having to scootch to the front edge of it to put-my-chin-and-rest-my-forehead on the machine, the MA spun my chair forty-five degrees, and telling me to stay at the forward edge, she lowered the back of it to beyond horizontal, and then told me to carefully lean back. It did have armrests for me to steady myself, but even with her hand gently supporting my back, it was definitely awkward to settle all the way back into the chair (and as the only other people in the waiting room were seniors like my inlaws and mother, I have no idea how they achieve these acrobatics).

The MA then put numbing drops into both my eyes and I know I tensed: Why would my eyes need to be numbed to "take measurements"? She then placed on my eye an object, kind of like a suction cup and nearly as big as the front surface of my eyeball - which necessitated fitting it under my eyelids - which was then filled with saline. She asked if I was okay - I know I was tensing and flinching - and all I could answer was, with an attempted laugh, "Is this what I'm paying extra for?" Once it was filled, the object started flashing a red light into my eye, and the MA kept telling me that I needed to look straight into the light and keep both eyes open, but as I could constantly see the light, I couldn't understand what I was doing wrong: it took a couple of minutes for her to get the measurements. When she removed the object, the saline ran down the side of my face (most of which she caught with a tissue), and then it was time for the other eye - doing my best to cooperate but tensing and flinching as the cup was fitted, once again, under my eyelids. (Incidentally, as she stretched the device across my face to reach the second eye, some wires dragged between my open lips and the MA laughed and said, "Did you get a good taste there?" I stifled a gag at the idea of all the faces and mouths those wires come into contact with; seems unlikely those wires get sterilised between appointments.) Once again, as the saline was filling and I was gripping the armrests, the MA asked if I was okay and I replied, "It's pretty terrible, but yes, I'm okay." The second eye only took a few seconds (because the cataract in that eye is smaller?), followed by the whoosh of the saline running down the other side of my face, being incompletely caught by the now wet tissue that had been used on the first side. As we were now finished, the MA asked me to pull myself back up to sitting: it wasn't all that hard, but no way one of those seniors in the waiting room could have - or should have - been expected to do that. Why wouldn't such a busy office have a proper dentist-type chair to raise and lower a body? I can't be the only person who is facing this experience with a lot of anxiety; why make it worse? (And note: While I was being "measured", Kennedy was in the waiting room, texting with Zach. He told her that the measurements for his laser eye surgery last summer involved poking at his eyeballs with a series of needles, so maybe my experience wasn't so bad after all. Whelp. I was certainly happy to have Kennedy there to drive me home, and as we watched so many middle-aged women in the waiting room being given the instructions for their elderly parents' upcoming surgeries as I waited to pay my $200 fee, I pointed out to Kennedy that this was only the beginning of her starting to take responsibility for my health care. To which the receptionist vigourously nodded her head without quite making eye contact with us.)

I'm going to need to take pretty much the whole month of July off of work - the eyes will be done two weeks apart and each take a couple of weeks to heal completely - but there are worse things than lounging around in July; we'll probably do a cottage rental that month while I'm off anyway. Talking about the surgeries at work, John (a 70-something former bookstore owner) said that his cataract surgery had changed his life for the infinitely better and didn't think I would actually need all that time off. Malena (a 20-something part timer) said, "Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but my brother-in-law said that between his laser eye surgery and his vasectomy, the eyes were the more painful procedure. He couldn't stop crying from the pain and that just made the healing process worse." Gack. I understand that I'll be awake for the whole thing and I've been told that it's unsettling to experience the smell of your own eyeballs burning. Ick. It has been explained to me that while the artificial lenses the doctor inserts will give me perfect 20/20 vision at a distance - those defined leaves on the trees will be my new normal! - I will definitely need reading glasses to see anything up close; and how this will affect my job at the bookstore gives me pause: will I need to have glasses on a chain around my neck and constantly pop them on and off like I'm back in school again? Sigh. It will be what it will be; I do know that it can't be put off any longer.

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long

Between Them: Remembering My Parents

Between Them, this book's title, is meant, in part, to suggest that by being born I literally came between my parents, a virtual place where I was sheltered and adored as long as they were alive. But it is also meant, in part, to portray their ineradicable singleness – both in marriage, and in their lives as my parents.

Between Them is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford's biography of his parents, presented in two parts: A section focusing on his mother, written thirty years ago when she passed away; and a second section (which comes first in the book) about his father, written recently. Ford allows that there are likely to be inconsistencies between the two accounts – because the point was to rely solely on memory – and he permits himself to repeat certain events. And always and everywhere he stresses that, as is true for all of us, it is impossible for a child to ever truly know his parents; to know what is in their minds, to understand their relationship, or to see them as outsiders do. Certainly well-written and basically interesting, the fact that Ford knows so few details about his parents' lives, and refuses to speculate or extrapolate to fill them in, actually makes for thin gruel – I liked what is here but don't know that I see the point.

That which was most intimate, most important, most satisfying and necessary to each of my parents transpired almost exclusively between them. This is not an unhappy fact for a son to face. In most ways it's heartening, since knowing that this is so preserves for me a hopeful mystery about life – the mystery which promises that even with careful notice, much happens that we do not understand.

Like I said, the base details are interesting: Parker Ford was born in rural Arkansas; the youngest child and only son of a dour single mother (his father committed suicide), Parker had little education and modest ambition – landing a job as a travelling salesman (selling starch) for the Faultless Company suited him fine. Edna Akin, also from the Arkansas sticks, was only fourteen years younger than her mother and seven years younger than her step-father – and as she got in the way of their fun, Edna was sent away to boarding school, and when she was old enough, brought back home and set to work. Edna met Parker when she was seventeen and he was twenty-four, they soon married, and went on the road together: enjoying hotels and restaurants, and presumably, each other's company for fifteen years. Richard Ford came along relatively late in life for his parents, but if they resented him as a drag on their good times, they never let on: he felt loved and wanted and every move the family made – from apartment to duplex to the suburbs – seemed for his benefit. The need to lay down roots meant that Parker continued his sales route, alone, from Monday to Friday while his family stayed at home, and although that meant that Richard lived an atypical bifurcated life – loose and carefree on weekdays, more quiet and scheduled when his father was home – he regarded this as his normal; didn't think he could have been closer to either of his parents. Parker died suddenly, at home, when Richard was sixteen, and while that was, of course, devastating, Richard was soon gone away to college and family life became something for phone calls and visits. In the second half of the book, Ford describes his mother's eventual death as well. 

The more we see our parents fully, after all, see them as the world does, the better our chances to see the world as it is.

I did find this book interesting for two reasons: 1) My mother-in-law, who is just barely older than Richard Ford, had a father who was a travelling salesman; someone who was away from Monday to Friday; a father who died of a heart attack in a hotel room when she was just twenty – I enjoyed imagining that this is what her childhood had been like, too. And 2) I clearly remember trying to psychoanalyse my own parents when I was a kid – my dad was probably ill-tempered because his father had been abusive; my mum was probably an indifferent mother because she had married too young and felt short-changed by life – and it wasn't until I was grown up (and no longer needed to protect myself by making excuses for them) that I realised it wasn't my job to parse motives: all I know for sure is the way that they acted; I have zero information about their interior lives. Because of this, I appreciate that Ford didn't try to invent interior lives for his parents (even if it feels a bit maddening that he wrote a biography of people who had always been reluctant to talk about themselves), but perhaps this book would have felt weightier if he had added more of himself into it. As an only child who has lived to a greater age than either of his parents did, I understand Ford's desire to write this book and preserve what was known of Parker and Edna, I just don't know who the ideal reader would be.

New Boy

Take off your kid gloves, Diane. He doesn't need special treatment just because he's bl– a new boy.

As the latest title in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, New Boy is author Tracy Chevalier's take on updating one of the Bard's plays – in this case Othello – and the more of the books I read in this series, the more I wonder if the concept can really be done well: Even when Shakespeare, writing four centuries ago, borrowed from the ancient tales, he didn't try to set them in the London of his day; and I think that he got away with not quite credible storylines by winking at the audience with, “That's just the way they did things in Verona or Denmark or Scotland; it's different there.” Unfortunately, in addition to not buying into the plot, I didn't think New Boy was terribly well written either, with one caveat: it might be an interesting introduction to Shakespeare for preteens; kids who don't question the plot, can identify with young love and schoolyard bullies, and don't mind being spoonfed some social history. Not for me.

O and Dee
Sittin' in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes love, then comes marriage
Then comes Dee with a baby carriage!

In a way, Chevalier had the perfect concept: Othello is re-imagined as eleven-year-old Osei (or “O”); the son of a Ghanaian Diplomat, he has been the “new boy” in school four times in six years – and as the only black student in this 1970's Washington D.C. Middle School, he is the perfect outsider character that might inspire not just prejudice, but jealousy, too. Desdemona is Dee – the pretty, popular girl who has never given her heart lightly – and Iago is Ian; schoolyard bully whose behaviour is not just mean, but newly, cruelly, testosterone-fueled. If characters are going to act crazy – fall in love at first sight and then try to literally destroy each other because of blinding jealousies and puerile power plays – where better to place the story than at the dawn of puberty? It's almost believable. But by having the story play out in one day – O and Dee meet before first bell, are in love by first recess, Ian starts to poison O's mind while Dee goes home for lunch, O and Dee break up at afternoon recess, and something like tragedy occurs on the playground after school – this short book (less than two hundred pages) felt needlessly rushed. Chevalier also tries to squeeze into this brief treatment some explanatory backstories for her characters – their teacher, Mr. Brabant, is a racist because he had some of them in his platoon in 'Nam, and Affirmative Action means that a black kid doesn't have to, and never will, try at school; Ian has always paid for the bad reputations of his older brothers and gets spanked with a belt at home; O's older sister has gotten involved with the Black Power movement, and maybe O won't accept racism so casually any more – and with clipped sentences and telling-not-showing, none of this felt literary:

Another time his words and tone would have stung, for of all the adults at the school, Mr. Brabant was the one she most wanted to please. But today was different – Dee had found someone new whose opinion she suddenly cared about more. And someone Mr. Brabant was judging. Dee didn't like his tone. Still, she could not disobey her teacher. The best response, she decided, was to take her time rather than rush to please him. As she began to saunter past Mr. Brabant toward the entrance, she could feel him staring at her, clearly aghast at her new attitude. It made Dee feel powerful.

Three (maybe four?) times, an adult character refers to O as “the bl– new boy”, we hear about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, the athletes who gave the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics, Ghanaian Chiefs who cooperated with the slave trade (offering a few of their subjects in return for the freedom of the rest), and at the climax, overt racism: Chevalier was obviously using this book to make some social commentary, but if you're not a Middle Schooler yourself, nothing would be new or illuminating. 

As the second book in this series to which I've given two stars, I must say that I'm disappointed overall with the whole Hogarth Shakespeare series. Harumph.

Books in the Hogarth Shakespeare series:

Shylock is My Name

Vinegar Girl

The Gap of Time

Hag-Seed

New Boy

Dunbar

Macbeth

And Related:

Nutshell

And the Birds Rained Down

It was raining birds. When the wind came up and covered the sky with a dome of black smoke, the air was in short supply, and you couldn't breathe for the heat and the smoke, neither the people nor the birds, and they fell like rain at our feet.

Fire Swept Algoma by Frank H Johnston

And the Birds Rained Down is a small and quiet book, but it captures a bit of magic nonetheless. It reminded me of a Group of Seven painting put into words, by way of Margret Atwood's Survival: a classical interpretation of Canada, made modern. As author Jocelyne Saucier won the prestigious Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie for this book (the first Canadian work to do so), I reckon it has appeal to those not familiar with our tropes and iconography; on any level, this is simply a finely-crafted and appealing read.

The whims of a fire cannot be explained. It can climb the highest peaks, rip the blue from the sky, spread in a reddish glow, swelling, whistling – good god, it can leap onto anything that lives, jump from shore to shore, plunge into ravines soggy with water, devour peatlands, but leave a cow grazing in a circle of grass. What is there to understand? Fire, when it achieves this power, obeys no one but itself.

As the book begins, we meet a photographer (unnamed throughout, this is apparently a common device in Saucier's work) as she makes her way deep into the Northern Ontario wilderness. Having spent the previous two years tracking down and photographing the elderly survivors of the local Great Fires of the early twentieth century, she is hot on the trail of the most famous and elusive survivor of them all: Ted Boychuck; the Miracle Boy who featured in the memories of so many others; he who walked through a wall of flame, and half-blind, wandered for six days with a bouquet of flowers in his hand before disappearing for years. When she stumbles upon a hidden camp, the photographer finds both more and less than she was hoping for: Boychuck has apparently died recently, but left in camp are two other octogenarians; two old men who, alongside Boychuck, had decided to live out their natural lives on their own terms, far from the family or social workers who might think it a kindness to lock them away. With nothing but a tinbox of strychnine and mutual promises to avoid unnecessarily painful ends, what looks to the photographer like a deathpact is actually a lifepact: with a minimum of interaction between these three reclusive old men, they have been keeping each other alive for years (along with the financial and material contributions of two younger guys who grow an annual crop of marijuana in their woods). When they enter Boychuck's cabin together, they discover that he had spent his time painting impressionistic scenes of smoke and fire – over three hundred canvases in all – and while the photographer is disappointed to have missed out on meeting the man himself, she realises that she has found so much more.

Are you this interested in the lives of others because you don't have one of your own?

Several times the photographer – who can't stay away from the hidden camp and its cache of paintings – is accused of not having a life of her own, and while we don't really get to see what her life back in Toronto is like, we are introduced to two other characters who could be accused of the same: Miss Sullivan of the Matheson Museum is a spinster whose life was so empty that she took to following residents of her small town around, keeping notebooks on love affairs acknowledged and secretive. She became so attuned to the habits and subtle actions of others that she could read volumes into footsteps and sighs. As she wasn't above steaming open people's letters at the Post Office, she also was the only one who knew why Boychuck wandered with his bouquet; what sent him to live in the woods. We also meet Gertrude/Marie-Desneige: institutionalised at sixteen, she has spent a lifetime interpreting the actions and mental states of everyone around her. When her nephew (one of the pot growers) rescues Marie-Desneige and brings her to the hidden camp, the old woman is the only one who can “read” Boychuck's paintings; pointing out the screams and bodies where the others had only seen brushstrokes and squibbles. It wouldn't seem an accident that it's the old women who didn't live lives of their own while the old men had the freedom to live any way they liked; the fact that the photographer is repeatedly described as not particularly feminine likely explains why she straddles the two worlds.

There is nothing more beautiful than an impossible love.

Ah, but you can't introduce a fragile old woman into an all-male wilderness camp without it shaking things up. Described several times as birdlike, as a fledgling who could easily be blown from her nest, Marie-Desneige (who wasn't locked away for no reason) is in need of protection, and one of the old men steps up; igniting a very touching late-life love story. And just as these old people demonstrate that they can fend for themselves outside of the hospitals and nursing homes they ran away from back home, there's something very poignant about an octogenarian love affair: everything about this book is about living life on your own terms. And, yes, even dying on your own terms.

A smile for death is the final courtesy.

From the historical underpinnings to the rock and bog and blackfly nature writing, this book follows steadily in the footsteps of classic CanLit. But by modernising the characters, Saucier evolves and elevates the tropes: there is subtle magic here beyond the base plot and I found it touching, thought-provoking, and worthwhile.

Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone)

In deciding who to write about and who to leave out, I created a simple formula: Has the cultural, national, regional or religious community you come from reached a crisis point in the host country? Is that country, be it in North America, the Caribbean, Asia or Europe, experiencing some kind of moral panic about your presence in their midst? If you answered yes to both questions and you're not European white, African American, aboriginal or East Asian, then congratulations (or is it commiseration?), you're brown. Perhaps you can and do pass for white when you feel like it. Good for you, and shame on you. Millions can't and don't. They carry their brownness everywhere they go, and sometimes lose their lives because of it.

I picked up Brown because it recently won the prestigious Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing here in Canada, and having been assured (*more on this is a moment) that it is both important and an enjoyable read, I thought it might be right up my alley. But as that opening quote shows, author Kamal Al-Solaylee takes a very broad view of who qualifies as “brown”, and as he doesn't focus on any particular ethnic group (he covers Filipinos, Sri Lankans, North Africans, Mexicans) and tries to be as broad when discussing religious groups (he notes which groups are Hindu or Christian, but does take particular issue with Islamophobia), it would seem that his main focus is economic: As poor or displaced people from the “Global South” attempt to find a better life in more highly developed economies, they are taken advantage of by those who have the power to withhold the rights of citizenship or a decent wage or basic safety. We (lighter-skinned citizens of the destination countries) don't feel bad, according to Al-Solaylee, because, like brown people themselves, we've been conditioned our whole lives to equate lighter with better and “brown” with filth (but, hey, at least brown is, socially, a step above black). This book is packed full of interesting stories and interviews and statistics, and I'm not arguing against its overall impressiveness, but I never really got a handle on Al-Solaylee's thesis; it has a whiff of the strawman about it. People should read it anyway. To return to how I heard about Brown, I read this article about it winning the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize in The National Post :

It already enjoys a high critical reputation, and it is perfectly matched to its historic moment. But you may, particularly if you’re a white reader, hear a voice in your hindbrain saying “Oh, a book about race? I’ll save the 30 bucks and just punch myself in the face.” No no no. Brown is just a good book – intimate, learned, genial, clever. That’s all: it’s a good book that will last a while. It is probably an important book, too, but I want you to know you can go ahead and overlook the nutritional value.

By saying I read The National Post, non-Canadians should understand that I'm saying I'm a conservative (which in Canada really means centrist, not skinhead), so not only do I bristle when Al-Solaylee uses bias-laced adjectives (Bobby Jindal is “ultraconservative” and a collection of progressive essays is “vital”), but I can't quite get worked up over his case for colour-based economic discrimination: It is horrifying to learn that nearly one foreign worker a day dies in Qatar while building the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup, and of course I don't support the abuse of Filipina maids in Hong Kong or Sri Lankan nannies in Turkmenistan, but whether it's one of these sponsored foreign workers who goes underground to take their chances on unregulated cash jobs, or the Algerian who sneaks into Paris to sell fruit, or the Mexican who walks across the desert looking for restaurant work in the United States, once a person decides to circumvent the rules of immigration, that person can't then expect the rights and privileges of a documented, tax-paying citizen. I honestly don't know what it means that all of these people can be lumped by Al-Solaylee under the umbrella term “brown”. Do I really support the deportation of illegals for the same reason the following was named the ugliest colour in the world?

Brown is divided into three parts: The first covers the history of “colourism” and how even people of colour learn to rank themselves (and each other) on a shade scale; I thought it was interesting that Brazil recognises 300 official colour designations, but balk at Al-Solaylee stating that American television has seen a whitening/unaccenting of Latino actors from the days of Desi Arnaz and Ricardo Mantalban to today's Sofia Vergara and America Ferrera (they all seem equally light-skinned to me and Sofia's accent is the thickest of the bunch – and note I only balk because if I don't agree with the little stuff, I can't agree with the big). The second part covers how brown people are used as labour in other nonwhite countries; and again, while I have a problem with people staying and working in a country illegally, my bigger issue with this section is that there's no real insight into why these people were forced to leave home and family to go work abroad in the first place; if all the exploited labour is coming from “brown” countries, how can those countries be fixed? The final section covers the discrimination faced by brown people in Britain, France, America, and Canada; and while the chapter on the US primarily focusses on illegal Mexicans, the others are about Islamophobia – seen as an unfair generalisation in the aftermath of homegrown terrorist attacks; with which I can agree in general. I liked that Al-Solaylee travelled to all of these countries to seek personal stories, and he definitely put a human face on his statistics.

Al-Solaylee would be from the opposite end of the political spectrum from me (which in Canada, also makes him a centrist), so he spends a lot of ink on the scary decade under a Conservative government and how they used a creeping fear of Muslims as a wedge issue to stir up their base. Being from Toronto, that's where Al-Solaylee sampled for tales of discrimination, and while I agree that Project Thread turned out to be a pointless witchhunt that unfairly stigmatised innocent men, he hardly paints a clear picture of the situation in Canada by narrowing his focus so completely. By leaving out any mention of the browning of the west coast, or Quebec's designation as a distinct society that sees them unaccommodating to “others”, and especially, by making zero mention of our own homegrown and brown-skinned terrorist who murdered an unarmed soldier before shooting up Parliament, Al-Solaylee loses any sense of objectivity for me: by cherrypicking stories to fit his premise about Canada, I was left wondering where this happened in the chapters about countries I'm not intimately familiar with.

My daughter's boyfriend's parents are currently selling their house, and apparently, the much despised next door neighbour came to them and said, “Just don't sell to anyone brown, okay?” (It was reported today that the average price of a new detached home in Toronto is now $1.8 million. As we live within an hour of Toronto's downtown, we've essentially become commutable to the city and a growing portion of those coming out our way are, indeed, brown.) This was told to me because it is understood that I would be disgusted with the neighbour: I may be conservative but I am not a bigot; why would I care about the colour of my neighbours? However, and I can't be alone here, I had two different reactions to current events of late: A brown terrorist blows himself up at a pop concert and I am unsurprised to learn that he was a radicalised Muslim; learning that he was known to police seems to invalidate Al-Solaylee's point that it's unfair for Britain to focus on the Muslim community when searching for potential threats. And last week, when the brown driver of a car that plowed through a crowd in NYC turned out to be a mentally disturbed Navy veteran, I didn't think of the attack as terrorism; probably a case of lack of mental health support for returning veterans. Both were premeditated attacks by brown men, but because one of them was a Muslim, I did put them in separate mental categories. I had hoped that reading Brown would help to clarify this dissonance, but Al-Solaylee went in a different direction. People should read it anyway.

I don't often bother to add links for further reading, but this book reminded me of so many others:

Scaachi Koul wrote the Globe & Mail review for Brown, reminding me that she covered much of the same ground about brownness in her recent One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter.

Sunjeev Sahota describes a year in the lives of a group of undocumented Sikhs living and working in England in The Year of the Runaways .

David Bergen wrote about a near-future world in which brown people are exploited both at home and when they make their way to an even greater wealth-divided America in Stranger.

And Moshin Hamid's subtle subtext in Exit West is that the brown people are coming whether we like it or not; borders are an imaginary construct and how dare we put up barriers to those who simply want to improve their lives?

Tunesday : Superman's Song

Superman's Song

(Roberts, B) Performed by Crash Test Dummies

Tarzan wasn't a ladies' man
He'd just come along and scoop 'em up under his arm like that
Quick as a cat in the jungle

But Clark Kent, now there was a real gent
He would not be caught sittin' around in no junglescape
Dumb as an ape doing nothing

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him

Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job
Even though he could have smashed through any bank in the United States
He had the strength, but he would not

Folks said his family were all dead
Planet crumbled but Superman, he forced himself to carry on
Forget Krypton and keep going

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him

Tarzan was king of the jungle and lord over all the apes
But he could hardly string together four words: "I Tarzan, you Jane"

Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes
I'll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back on man
Join Tarzan in the forest

But he stayed in the city
Kept on changing clothes in dirty old phonebooths 'til his work was through
And nothing to do but go on home

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him
And sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him

I was feeling pretty uninspired while trying to decide which song to feature this week, until I remembered Superman's Song. This was a tune Dave and I both loved and we'd turn it up when it came on the radio; singing along even though neither of us could hit (anywhere near) the same notes as this fabulous pair of singers. I picked it this week not for its literal morbid theme, but simply to have it in my discography. Yet now that I'm really thinking about it, it probably appealed to me right now because it captures something melancholy and nostalgic - the knowledge that you're at the end of an era even as it's happening - that does suit as the soundtrack to what comes next in my history.

As I wrote about last week, a Vietnamese gang took over the bar I was working at, and I felt forced to quit a job that had been so much fun for two years. After being the breadwinner for months and months while Dave tried to figure out what to do with his life, I didn't feel guilty taking a couple of weeks off as he transitioned into his job managing Theatre Network, but it wasn't long before I began looking for work again and there was one thing I knew for sure: I was done with our vampire party lifestyle - it was time to go nine to five. And yet at this point, waitressing was the only skill I had.

Delight gave me a lead: a manager (and friend of hers) at a lounge downtown was looking for a daytime waitress who could serve as his assistant; someone who could help transform a dead basement bar into a busy lunch spot. I remember the day I went for my interview - it was during a freak October snow storm and I had trouble driving the car through the drifts alongside the curb, and having to park too far from the lounge, I got sticky snow clumps on my skirt and down my shoes and in my hair, which became wet and limp and plastered to my head. Dragging myself in like the soaked kitty from the Pepe LePew cartoons after she has fallen in the pickle barrel, I did not make a good impression, and I did not get the job. 

Next, I applied for a job at the restaurant in the Citadel Theatre (at the time called Marlowe's). This was already a thriving lunch business: the large restaurant served a buffet every day for the time-crunched office workers in the surrounding buildings, and a small (ten table?) bar provided a more leisurely à la carte experience. They were hiring for the bar - which was good because that was the only full-time position they had; the restaurant waitresses only working three hours/day - and I was hired on the spot: not only did the Chinese-Canadian owner, Gordie, know my old boss Wayne, but he considered it a coup to have stolen me away from an obviously more successful businessman. (Gordie loved to talk about Wayne as though they were good friends - despite him always referring to my old workplace as Shangri-La's instead of Sha Na Na's - but no matter how long I worked for Gordie, I never transferred my loyalty to him; I never wanted to gossip about my former bosses who had treated me so well.)

Right from the beginning I found this job challenging: Although we had served food at Sha Na Na's, that was never the focus, and now I was handling a lunch rush just about every day. And while the restaurant waitresses served, probably, 90% buffet customers (so, just drinks and clearing plates) and large tables had a 15% gratuity automatically added to their bills (which I couldn't help but notice tended to reduce the quality of service), I was serving 90% off the menu and constantly running off my feet between the kitchen and the bar. After the rush, the restaurant would close and I would handle the small afternoon coffee/meeting crowd on the bar side, and most days there would be an afterwork cocktail crowd, with Fridays filling the place up. Although we were the only restaurant in the theatre, I don't remember serving a pre-show crowd; I'm pretty sure we were closed by seven p.m. every night (I don't remember exactly, but I probably worked 10:30 - 7 every day).

But I got used to the change in work and got good at it. One day the manager who had been Delight's friend came in and had lunch with Gordie (some Downtown Business Association meeting), and although I felt self-conscious serving him, it was obvious he didn't recognise me: When lunch was over, he teased, "You're exactly what I need in my lounge. How can I steal you away from here?" I'm sure I was blushing fiercely as I replied, "That's funny because you never got in touch with me after I interviewed for that position." And Gordie, the not terribly successful or competent businessman, laughed like he had succeeded at another coup.

I was busy enough that the money was good, and I became good friends with many of the waitresses in the restaurant, but although it was nowhere near as fun as working at Sha Na Na's had been, the greatest change was the switch to a daylight lifestyle. Getting the job at Marlowe's felt like a growing up - Dave was also working days at his theatre, we were married and moved into the first house we bought, and although we still hung out with Delight and Dennis sometimes, the crazy nonstop party days were over - and even though I knew in the moment that this was a good thing, I certainly felt melancholy. I spent about as long working at Marlowe's as I had at Sha Na Na's, but while the latter became an integral part of who I had been, Marlowe's was just a job. Ultimately, it was the lame time-wasting nature of this job that would finally force me to go back to school. And ultimately, even if I was saying goodbye to my high-flying Superman days, it was a necessary loss that paved the way for what came next.

Marlena

The truth is both a vast wilderness and the tiniest space you can imagine. It's between me and her, what I saw and what she saw and how I see it now and how she has no now. Divide it further – between what I mean and what I say, who I am and who I appear to be, who she said she was and acted like she was and also, of course, who she really was, in all her glorious complexity, all her unknowable Marlena-ness, all her secrets

As Marlena opens, thirty-four-year-old Cat is interrupted in her “too-good” Manhattan life by a ghost from her past: Sal, the brother of Cat's once best friend, is in town and would like to meet up and talk about Marlena. The plot rewinds back to a sleety December in northern Michigan where Cat and Marlena meet for the first time, and as we are straightaway told that Marlena will die within a year of that first encounter, there's a satisfying tension to the storyline as it switches between the events that lead up to the tragedy in the past, and the ways in which Cat is still dealing with its aftermath in the present of nearly twenty years later. Author Julie Buntin writes beautiful sentences and unspools a credible narrative full of truth and insight, but in a way, it didn't feel like I was reading anything new. This is a very good read but nothing elevates it to the level of great.

Why do they say ghosts are cold? Mine are warm, a breath dampening your cheek, a voice when you thought you were alone.

When fifteen-year-old Cat (formerly known as Catherine, but desperate for reinvention) first arrives in Silver Lake, her parents are newly divorced, they can no longer afford her private school fees, and the cheap modular home on blocks that her mother was able to buy is actually the nicest house on a street of A-frames and trailers. When Marlena – two years older, beautiful, and wild – emerges from the barely habitable barn conversion next door, the breath is knocked out of both Cat and her older brother, Jimmy. As the girls get to know each other – as Marlena introduces the goody-goody Cat to boys and drugs and petty crime – they quickly develop one of those all-consuming “outlines blurring” friendships particular to teenaged girls. And yet, as the older Cat is telling the story after two decades of maturation and reevaluation, she drops frequent dark hints of things to come and constantly wonders if she ever knew Marlena at all.

Sometimes I feel like she is my invention. Like the more I say, the further from the truth of her I get.

This switching between the two timelines was used perfectly by Buntin to demonstrate the growth of Cat's character; as in the contrast between the horrible ways in which the increasingly delinquent Cat treated her (fragile, newly divorced) mother in the past and eventually realising how brave and hard those years must have been on her; how young and beautiful and not done with living her mother had been. And this thoughtfulness is brought to bear on every aspect of the narrative – whether it's the mature Cat inserting what she didn't yet know as a teenager or present-day Cat acknowledging how her teenaged experiences were influencing her current behaviours, self-reflection adds both heft and balance to what could otherwise be tawdry details.

Great loneliness, profound isolation, a cataclysmic, overpowering sense of being misunderstood. When does that kind of deep feeling just stop? Where does it go? At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is kind of a self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you're still responsible for your mistakes. It's a little frightening to remember just how much, and how precisely, I felt. Now, if the world really did end, I think I'd just feel numb.

Nicely stated, but on the other hand, does that last passage really say anything I haven't read – or thought – before? And yet, the following short bit, and particularly its intriguing semicolon, stopped me in my tracks:

What I'm trying to say is that day, I learned that time doesn't belong to you. All you have is what you remember. A fraction; less.

Throughout, my sense was that I was enjoying the writing, the technique, but it wasn't adding up to much. After finishing Marlena, I was reading some reviews and discovered this one in The Atlantic. I found it most interesting for two reasons: It includes a link to this essay Buntin had written for The Atlantic in 2014; in which she wrote about a Marlena-like friend she had in high school who came to an early and tragic end. Also, this review primarily contrasts Marlena to several other recent books about female teenage friendships, and as she specifically mentioned both The Girls and My Brilliant Friend – two books that made my shortlist of favourite reads last year – I am forced to acknowledge that Marlena just doesn't rise to the level of the other two. Again, I really did like this read, I just wouldn't say “love”.

American War

“You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?”
“Come now,” said Yousef. “Everyone fights an American war.”

One of the most intriguing aspects of American War is its author, Omar El Akkad: Born in Cairo, raised in Qatar, El Akkad eventually moved to Canada with his family and became a journalist with the (progressive national daily) Globe & Mail newspaper. Reporting on the Arab Spring, embedding with the Canadian army in Afghanistan, witnessing the Guantanamo Bay trials – every bit of unique and timely eyewitness knowledge El Akkad has is woven into this speculative fiction about an upcoming second American Civil War. With a fascinating and well crafted Prologue and intriguing early chapters, I thought that bringing a global perspective and voice to an examination of the mounting and increasingly nasty partisanship seen in American politics just might be both interesting and important. But once it really gets into the conflict – explaining its origins and how it plays out – I, as a Canadian, couldn't buy the trajectory of violent tribalism; I can't imagine what Americans themselves make of it. In the end, despite now residing in Oregon with his wife, perhaps El Akkad isn't American enough to have written this book.

An empire is when many small countries become part of one big country, willingly or otherwise. An empire is what we used to be.

The novel's narrator is a Civil War scholar – one of the Miracle Generation who was born during the conflict and survived both the fighting itself and the devastating plague that followed – and interspersed with his narrative are excerpts from government documents, speeches, memoirs, etc. We quickly learn that as climate change raised the sea levels in the mid-twenty-first century, flooding coastlines around the globe and causing mass internal migrations, the world came together to sign the Sustainable Future Act; essentially outlawing the use of fossil fuels. And this is what causes the South to rise again: making a rather loose comparison to slavery, the Southern states (of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia; “the Mag”) protest that their economy would be devastated if they stopped producing and using oil (at the beginning of the war, Mexico annexed Texas and what was left of the flooded Southwest, so what I think of as oil country isn't in the picture at all). And what might have been a brief skirmish became a twenty year war when a suicide bomber assassinated the President at an armistice meeting. This assassination and escalation are in the recent past as the narrator begins his story, which focuses on six-year-old Sarat Chestnut and her family: refugees from Louisiana who at first thought they were fortunate to be transported to a tent city, Camp Patience, in neutral Tennessee; but as the years drag on and Sarat and her brother are indoctrinated in the politics of despair and revenge, the reader understands that this is how insurgents are bred.

What is the first anesthetic?
Wealth.
And if I take your wealth?
Necessities.
And if I demolish your home, burn your fields?
Acknowledgement.
And if I make it taboo to sympathize with your plight?
Family.
And if I kill your family?
God.
And God...
...Hasn't said a word in two thousand years.

As a teenager in the refugee camp, Sarat is befriended by an older man who feeds her honey and caviar and poisons her mind:

I sided with the Red because when a Southern tells you what they're fighting for - be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness - you can agree or disagree, but you can't call it a lie. When a Northern tells you what they're fighting for, they'll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather. I'd had enough of all that. You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind. Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind.

And apparently, this – a dispute over fossil fuel use (and, ironically, the rich and powerful from both sides continue to use gas to power their cars and boats throughout the war) and foreign meddlers who profit from encouraging an us-vs-them mentality – is all it will take to prompt and sustain a decades-long Civil War. And I didn't buy it. I didn't understand why it was these three states that attempted to secede (and poor South Carolina – the site of an infection, the entire state is quarantined, but those who fled before the walls went up are notably “the meanest sons of bitches on the front” and “no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, they were fighting them all at once”), and while I liked the irony of the Bouazizi Empire (after the Fifth Arab Spring, the Northern African and Middle Eastern states deposed their dictators and united into one empire) running guns to the rebels in their aid shipments, I can't imagine these three embargoed states facing down the the rest of the American military for decades (and, yes, I understand how insurgents have prevailed against the American military from Vietnam to Afghanistan, but this is the future military, brother-against-brother, and I don't buy it).

You must understand that in this part of the world, right and wrong ain't about who wins, or who kills who. In this part of the world, right and wrong ain't even about right and wrong. It's about what you do for your own.

What I primarily didn't understand is what's left out of the book: Since this is set sixty years in our future, I don't understand how there aren't any big technological advances; the Civil War starts in 2074, and while there are improvements in solar power, people are still driving old gas-powered cars and boats, and getting their news on tablets and radios. Where are the robot soldiers or virtual reality or interplanetary space travel or anything else we seem to be on the cusp on? And what's going on in the rest of the world? It is noted that China is a superpower, the only reference to Russia is that they've ended their wars of expansion, and I found it weird that if the Bouazizi Empire has united the Arab states, there's zero mention made of Israel. And perhaps most glaringly absent is any reference to race relations in America: El Akkad has reported extensively on the Black Lives Matter movement, but other than Sarat being of mixed Black/Latina heritage, race isn't mentioned at all; it plays no role in the second Civil War. I'm not even American and this doesn't seem to me to be a book that understands America.

Perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence – a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?

And yet, despite frequent aphorisms and the many problems I had with the situation's underpinnings, I did enjoy the writing in American War; I still think it's a really interesting idea, and especially from the point-of-view of this particular author and what he uniquely brings with him. I liked the character of Sarat, liked the use of the scholarly narrator and the found documents to fill in the history, was satisfied with the actual plotline. In the end, however, I don't think this book lives up to its promise; it's not, ultimately, more important than, say, The Hunger Games.