Books, Volume 13 #4

Cyril Dabydeen, Stoning The Wind. Toronto: Tsar Publications, 1994. 83 pp. $10.95.

David Adams Richards, A Lad From Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 1994. 106 pp. $11.95.

A paradoxical community is emerging, made up of foreigners who are reconciled with themselves to the extent they recognize themselves as foreigners.

--Julia Kristeva, Strangers To Ourselves

In the postmodern world we live in, people are concerned with image and self-image and define the self within that perspective. Who we are is portrayed by how others see us, how we see others and how we see ourselves. The knowledge of ourselves rests in the domain of the public forum. Knowledge is acknowledgement. Cyril Dabydeen's poems in Stoning The Wind and David Adams Richards's essays in A Lad from Brantford deal with these questions.

Richards writes novels that are clear and compassionate depictions of the working class in the small towns of New Brunswick. His characters are people whom mainstream culture would regard as disadvantaged outsiders. It is precisely this value judgement that is critically, and pugilistically, examined in his latest book of essays. This is the wisdom of contemporary exiles, at home and yet not at home in Canada as it is imagined and presented. Dabydeen, unlike Richards, is not a native-born Canadian, yet like the New Brunswicker, he blends an outsider's and an insider's perspective of Canada in his poetry. Dabydeen was born in Guyana, came to Canada, did postgraduate degrees here in English and public administration, taught in Ottawa and was named Poet Laureate in Ottawa from 1984 to 1987.

Both are not reduced to silence or inarticulate gesture by their foreignness; rather, both see what they write as having a moral weight and thus a duty to reshape the world.

The voice in Dabydeen's poetry is caught between the world-as-imagined and the world-as-presented. I have desired other things: paradigms, /complexes. But what is given is not what is expected: Barbecuing this summer with people I never knew before /Whose lives suddenly became mine. Underneath the moments of such a life transformed into poetry is the state of being at home in exile. This state emerges from the awareness, most easily accessible to the immigrant and the outsider, that no context is natural and that what may seem natural is only the habitual.

These books do more than royal commissions, sociological analyses and political programs to show what it means to be Canadian.

As a colonial one grows up learning to desire an imperialist culture and to despise what is at hand. This double alienation makes everything artificial. One learns in the local "Teachers' College...Shakespeare and other stalwarts" so that the local town becomes "ghostly" and the nearby river winds away "in the night's stygian blackness." Stygian, one should note, comes from the word "Styx"--the river in the Greek underworld. The local night becomes hellish from a European perspective. The learned use of an imposed mythology to read a native experience creates a self-conscious dislocation from truth. As a result, the life of the colonized becomes a quest/Or disbelief with other shapes and shadows.

Dabydeen's poetry maintains the ironic stance of the dispossessed and some may find that offputting. Even those who can read West Indian English and may find the sentiment of "Belly-Mumma" heartbreaking can find in this poem about a pregnant immigrant about to give birth the same sense of distance that is maintained in the more accessible "Canadian English" poems. Here a midwife speaks to the mother to be. She tells her that she will be proud to give birth to a son for whom she will sacrifice and suffer to give him the opportunity to become successful in this alien white world. She will know she has been successful when that same child will despise her for her colour, her language and her habits. For her the pain of birthing does not stop when the child is born.

Legs wide open, patacake open--
...a child does come out
right here in Canada--
dis same one who go speak
Queen's English widout accent
....
who go be soft-spoken
go be ashamed o' you too
when you eat wid han'
....
He go say you na gat table manners

That same child will forget you is he same-same/moder wid brown skin or black skin....dis same child go mek you so full of pride!

But immigrants and their descendants live with their "desire never fulfilled" for acceptance and assimilation. It is that desire "still making us survive in the wilderness" that defines the voice of the postmodern citizen--deracinated, dispossessed, refugee, at home nowhere, and thus everywhere, in the world. It is a voice "constantly shaped by crossings." and alien. Being stateless/or permanently self-exiled...I hurl out syllables--/all strange images no one will hear about elsewhere....Here there is no Orinoco, Demerara,/or darker rivers--but journeys, sinuous.

It is no use defining that voice as simply "the other" the way "Africans were once named/simply non-Europeans" because as Dabydeen's own life and poetry shows that simple dialectic between a centred nationalism and foreignness has broken down. Nationalism now includes foreignness, and the "foreigner" has become accustomed to nationalist myths. This does not create a synthetic but a self-conscious and fragmented self. We have come here/to live/our lives falling/apart/because we want to/live one thousand/years from now. If assimilation is to happen it is not in this lifetime. Here in Ottawa/...we are yet visitors, players,/making a burden out of ourselves,/the quest we carry, like other furies/that yet abide.

This quest for identity, for a home, for origins, is Romantic. The voice in this poetry admits to that particular self-definition, "declaring myself always a Romantic." But his self-conscious knowledge that such a quest is doomed is what converts Romanticism to postmodernism. One can desire to live by turning around/Facing the real self and its place of birth, mud, soliloquies/or madness that lies fallow in the brain but one is aware that that desire is "never fulfilled" and one ends up not at the true self but with a construction in the mind of the places we carry with us/call our own after a while/and therefore wish to redefine.

You should not think that this is merely the problem of the immigrant confronting the enigma of arrival. After all, Cyril Dabydeen is a first-generation Canadian, but that is not the case with David Adams Richards, who was born and grew up in eastern Canada. Yet one finds in this collection of his essays the same sense of double alienation present in the work of the Guyanese-Canadian. Now living in Saint John, N.B., Richards finds himself part of "a community that is growing farther and farther away from its centre," and that centre understands itself in terms defined by the Americans and the British: "Canada, to both Americans and Brits, is still a colony." As the colonized accept the values of the colonizer, including the ones that regard them as inferior beings, so too does Richards see Canadians' acceptance of the image of their identity in similar terms: "We have pulled the wool over our own eyes so often that most of us come to accept the view others have of us. Most of what Canada is or has been is somehow decided by England, France and the U.S.A."

Now living in Saint John, N.B., Richards finds himself part of "a community that is growing farther away from its centre.," That centre understands itself in terms defined by the Americans and the British.

We try "to relive a mythology that isn't ours," for a mythology gives identity and if we do not have access to our own, then as Richards says elsewhere about patriotism, "if we can't get it from our own nation, we'll get it where we can." Dabydeen's natives see and understand themselves through others' eyes and sensibilities, and so too do Richards's Canadians. "Because we refuse to be speechless," we sing the songs of another country. In the essay "Just Singing Along," Richards notes, "Don Williams sings about `Good Ole Boys Like Me,' and for six months it was top of our charts--though he talks about cotton wool, Thomas Wolfe's novels, the Civil War, Tennessee Williams' plays, and Hank Williams' songs.

He suggests that "we foster our patriotism from America's bankroll." This adopted identity destroys the way in which we can read ourselves with integrity. It is a form of illiteracy. "If we wish to talk about illiteracy we are illiterate this way. We are glutted with information that is either almost absolutely irrelevant to us or makes us part of someone else's hinterland."

For Richards this ignorance carries with it moral presumptions because it confuses notional knowledge with actual experience. To live out of notional knowledge is to live in an alienated and alienating way. It is to accept "moral cowardice" by being politically correct when such correctness is not one based on the lived experience of being Canadian but on standards proposed by the countries that control our culture.

Richards cites hockey as an example. He observes, in an essay of the same name, that "our game" of hockey is "more than most things I can put my finger on, fundamental to the spiritual nature of Canada. Yet "the sport is lost...because of our national nature to allow others to dictate to us the premise on which we view ourselves." We view our self-deprecation in doing this as civility, but Richards asks, "Why do we mistake moral cowardice for civility?"

Richards advocates a wisdom that comes from experience and not from what is touted as sophistication. This is not the wisdom of the naïve. In fact the title essay of the book starts off: "A lad from Brantford once said to me: `We all think of you guys as real stupid, ignorant of the country--but you got dope and murder down there too.' He was not making such an unusual statement. The Roman poet Juvenal made it as well when he suggested that only country bumpkins could possibly be displeased any longer with adultery."

Note the self-conscious inversion of stereotypes here. The lad from Ontario speaks badly and reveals his ignorance from his so-called sophisticated standpoint. The one supposedly "ignorant of the country" knows the Latin author and writes in controlled ironic manner. Sophistication has to do with accepting unreflectingly the biases of a mainstream culture; wisdom is the broader and deeper knowledge that comes from experience that finds itself today not at home in the figures of the world.

This wisdom is something Richards shares with Dabydeen. Both look at the world with a critical and passionate eye; both write from the moral perspective of the outsider. Both approach the difficulty of defining identity today. Their books do more than royal commissions, sociological analyses and political programs to show what it means to be Canadian. For this reason if for no other--and there are many others--they deserve to be read.