Avery Qurashi Reviews:

Cynthia Flood, You Are Here, Biblioasis, 2022

Clark Blaise, This Time, That Place, Biblioasis, 2022

Both born in 1940, within months of Margaret Atwood and Dennis Lee, Cynthia Flood and Clark Blaise are part of a generation of writers who consciously engaged in developing and celebrating a distinctly Canadian body of literature. In their most recent collections, Flood and Blaise assemble favourite stories from their decades-long careers, showcasing their breadth and highlighting the themes and fascinations to which they have repeatedly returned in their work. In You Are Here, Flood offers stories that move between Canada and the UK and which are as likely to explore the love lives of leftist organizers in contemporary Vancouver as they are to script confessional conversations between boarding school nuns in postwar England. Blaise’s collection, This Time, That Place, follows an approximate chronology from childhood to middle age as his characters, some of whom appear in multiple stories, move from Jim Crow-era Florida to 1950s Montreal and onward, before turning to explore Indian diasporic experiences in present-day California.

Each in their own manner, Flood’s and Blaise’s collections interrogate place and placelessness from complexly ‘Canadian’ perspectives. Even with the titles You Are Here and This Time, That Place, Flood and Blaise demonstrate an attentiveness to spatiality and orientation that runs through their selected stories. For members of a pioneering cohort of Canadian authors concerned with establishing a national canon, it seems appropriate that Flood and Blaise would contemplate both place and placelessness in their writing. In his 1974 essay ‘Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space,’ Dennis Lee characterizes Canadian writing as always having to measure and manifest itself through the terms offered by British and American literatures. He identifies a sense of ‘non-belonging’ that is inevitably characteristic of a literature for which ‘the texture, weight and connotation of almost every word…comes from abroad,’ and suggests that the task of Canadian writers may be ‘to find words for our space- lessness.’ While readers in 2023 may perceive Lee’s colonial underdog framing of the Canadian settler as a failure to engage with settlers’ complicity in colonialism, understanding how Canadian authors of this generation engaged with questions of national identity can help us to contextualize the nuanced ways in which Flood and Blaise take up questions of place.

With many of his protagonists caught between French-Canadian and American identities, Blaise complicates the familiar ‘two solitudes’ binary that might be expected of Anglo-Québécois fiction by moving his characters across the Canada-U.S. border. Phil Porter (known to some as Philippe Carrier) is a protagonist who struggles to embody what is, in working-class Montreal, a unique positionality: that of an American who learned only at age 13 that his family had hidden from him his French-Canadian birth name and birthplace. Blaise’s readers first meet Porter as a child in the stories ‘Identity’ and ‘North,’ before encountering him again as a re-Americanized 40- something author in the story ‘Translation.’ Now an adult, Porter still ‘dread[s] the Canadian border,’ since for him, ‘[t]he simplest questions of an immigration officer were the imponderables of his life: What is your name? Where were you born? What is your nationality?’ The rituals of identity affirmation that he must undergo at the threshold between his two home countries transform him from Phil to Philippe and back again. In ‘Translation,’ a reviewer frames Porter as a sort of axolotl: ‘an intermediate cultural life-form…a permanent, arrested cultural larva with lungs for land and gills for water.’ Duality makes him a strange and unglamourous creature.

Awkwardly inhabiting his cultural hybridity, Porter is drawn to spaces in Montreal that, like him, do not fit within a simple English-French binary. For Porter, ‘[p]ost-war immigration and the diaspora from the old Jewish ghetto’ have transformed Rue St. Denis into ‘an attractive no man’s land of suspect ethnicity between the once-solid halves of a bilingual city.’ The city grows older along with Porter, such that by the time he reaches midlife, he is no longer uniquely out of place in monolithic Montreal but is instead one of many travellers in a multicultural metropolis. As the collection’s chronology progresses, its stories become more decidedly ‘multicultural,’ reflecting the increasing investment in multiculturalism as a source of Canadian national identity that took place towards the end of the 20th century. First published in 1970, Blaise’s story ‘A Class of New Canadians’ predates the Trudeau government’s multiculturalism policy by one year as it exposes the arrogance of an American man who gets to feel like ‘an omniscient, benevolent god,’ while teaching evening ESL classes to recent newcomers at McGill.

In the story ‘Eyes,’ a British immigrant positions himself as a sort of foreigner in a predominantly Greek Montreal neighbourhood, finding affinity with the Greeks and Jamaicans onto whom he projects a state of non-belonging, even as he simultaneously relegates them to the role of background scenery in the drama of his own acclimation. As the stories in his collection move closer to the present day, we can see in Blaise’s work an increasing effort to speak to a shared experience of placelessness from varied perspectives. Like the ESL instructor who relishes in feeling ‘like Joyce in Trieste, Isherwood and Nabokov in Berlin, Beckett in Paris,’ Blaise seems interested in evoking a cosmopolitanism that allows both him and his characters to slip into borrowed subjectivities. The English protagonist in ‘Eyes,’ for instance, sees his son as ‘becoming Greek, becoming Jamaican, becoming part of this strange new land.’ This cultural malleability that Blaise’s characters can access is consistent with a liberal Canadian vision of multiculturalism. It is worth asking, though, who is able to speak for whom, and to wonder about what is not heard.

It is to some of these difficult-to-hear spaces that Cynthia Flood draws her readers’ attention in You Are Here. Whereas Blaise writes from the perspective of the professor at the front of the room, or of the celebrity novelist, Flood centres the cleaning staff who overhear the lecture or the long-aspiring poet who could never find time to write as she supported her many husbands’ professional goals. Flood repeatedly writes from invisible vantage points on the sidelines of radical spaces, and in this way, she, like Blaise, investigates in-betweenness in a way that feels fitting for self-consciously Canadian stories. ‘Twoscore and Five’ is narrated by a feminist collective’s unnoticed middle-aged archivist who tells us, secondhand, of a love triangle between three young organizers. Similarly, an ignored custodian at a workers assembly hall narrates ‘Blue Clouds,’ divulging the details of a scandalous affair between a comrade and his girlfriend’s teenage daughter. The inventive and cinematic story ‘A Young Girl-Typist Ran To Smolny: Notes for a Film’ is likewise told from the margins, rather than from the frontlines of revolutionary action, as it focalizes a young woman who makes her contribution by selling subscriptions to a leftist magazine in a Vancouver commuter suburb. Turning our attention to the quotidian underbelly of the revolution, Flood highlights the boring, forgotten and often feminized labour that creates the material conditions for radical and creative work. Speaking from locations of obscurity, Flood offers a response to the task that Lee sets for Canadian writers, using her unobtrusive protagonists to create a language for non-belonging.

While Flood does not explore questions of Canadian cultural identity as often or as explicitly as Blaise, she does in some instances interrogate what ‘Canada’ might mean in relation to British and American hegemony. Set in 1928, ‘My Father Took a Cake to France’ places a young Toronto-born scholar at Oxford, where he begins a lifetime of lamenting the felt cultural inferiority that has befallen him as a Canadian. While the man is ‘intelligent, yes, highly intelligent,’ he resents that ‘he can never be what he feels, he knows, he should have been,’ as ‘[t]he Ontario farm is too near’ and thus, ‘some part of him feels he is beaten before he starts.’ Standing aboard a ferry to France while he recites to himself English poems memorized at his Toronto public high school, the man embodies a Canadian brand of colonial ‘self-hatred’ that Lee describes in ‘Cadence, Country, Silence,’ despite his pretensions of superiority. In the story ‘Dirty Work,’ Flood gestures to Canada’s place on the world stage in relation to the United States as her narrator observes the evolution of anti-war mottos: ‘Slogans grew nuanced, transitional: End Canada’s Complicity, Bring the Troops Home, Don’t Do Uncle Sam’s Dirty Work.’ As the narrator observes and condemns American imperialism in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, Flood invites her readers to consider what these U.S. invasions might mean for Canadians.

Never instructive, instead subtly provocative, Flood challenges her readers to interrogate their own assumptions, politics and psyches. With the opening story, ‘Gold, Silver, Ivory, Slate, and Wood,’ Flood foregrounds the collection with a reminder of the presence and histories of Indigenous peoples and cultures in North America. In this story, a retired shoe salesman wonders about the lives of a people whose artwork he sees trapped behind glass at a museum. Similarly, we might, as readers in 2023, examine Canadian identity by contending with questions that our earlier preoccupations with Englishness, Frenchness and even multiculturalism often ignore. Where, for instance, does Montreal’s Hochelaga district, where young Phil Porter endures his teenage years as Philippe Carrier, get its name? Whose experiences demand that we deepen and complicate our conception of a multicultural mosaic or an immigrant city? In spite of his perceived disadvantages, how does the Canadian scholar at Oxford hold and exert power in the country he resents? Ultimately, Flood’s and Blaise’s collections provide a fascinating background on 20th-century Canadian history, with snapshots of Anglo-Franco relations and radical social movements at the fore. Both writers take up the task of finding a language that speaks to Lee’s sense of ‘space-lessness’ and provide fertile ground for readers’ continued inquiry into what it means to live and write in so-called ‘Canada.’

—Avery Qurashi