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Shorthand

Emerging Author of the Month: Manini Sheker

by

Tell us about yourself.

I was born in Madras, India, and I have lived in Dubai, Banff, Toronto, Oxford, and Benares; I like to think of myself as a bit of a nomad, most at home on the move, in meadows and on mountains, at the meeting places of misfits. I’ve studied psychology, religion, social work, and international development, and for the past few years I’ve been trying to find ways of balancing my interests in social justice and literature through my writing and activism. In 2011, I was a finalist for the Guardian’s International Development Journalism Competition, for which I spent a week researching a story in Manila. More recently, an essay I wrote on religion, freedom, and economic development was awarded the Ngo Human Welfare Prize by Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford.

Tell us about the piece you’ve decided to share.

I’m sharing two excerpts from my novel, Nostaglia for the Future, which follows the life of Christina Fleischer during her teenage and student years in Toronto between the late 80s and early 2000s. Through its depiction of Christina’s search for meaning and a moral anchor, the novel explores what it means to be a young Canadian in a world where old certainties and truths are increasingly liable to question. Christina must learn to navigate the complex interplay of politics, religion, and morality in order to come to a realization of the possibilities inherent in the experiment of hope that modern multicultural Canada represents, even as she faces the dangers and misunderstandings that arise from the cultural conflicts she encounters.

Christina, a teenager of German-Canadian descent, befriends Fatima Al Akbar as they start high school together in downtown Toronto. The only child of a misanthropic academic and idealistic artist, with a tendency to escape the world around her by turning to books, Christina is drawn to Fatima, an orthodox Muslim of Palestinian-Egyptian heritage with a similarly literary bent, as they recognize that they both feel like outsiders, albeit in very different ways. Christina becomes a frequent visitor in Fatima’s home, where she is welcomed with warmth and generosity into the Al Akbar household by Umm, the matriarch and helm of the family, whose kitchen and songs become the anchor of their childhood. Not long after she gets to know the family, Fatima’s older brother Sharif, and later her younger brother Karim, are sent off to Afghanistan to join their father in the fight against the Communists, and as Fatima approaches her final year in high school, she and her mother join the rest of the family in Afghanistan. In the years that follow, Christina progresses through her studies in university, increasingly bewildered by the news emanating from the Middle East, tensions in her own family life begin to increase with the death of the other source of a spiritual anchor for Christina, her grandfather, a scientist who had moved from Germany to Canada after the Second World War. The letter he leaves for Christina at his death throws her into turmoil as she tries to reconcile the gentle old man she knew with what she reads in his last words to her. Christina’s liberal, questioning parents give her little certainty to hold on to in her quest for a moral centre, and her struggles come to a head in 2002, when Umm, Fatima, and Fatima’s youngest brother Saif, return to Canada to seek medical care for Saif, now grievously wounded in battle.

The first piece is from the beginning of the novel, just after Christina has got to know Fatima; the second is set ten years later, some years after Fatima and her family have left for Afghanistan.

When and why did you realize you had a passion for writing?

I’ve always read a lot and over the years became increasingly fascinated with the ways in which literature could have an impact on people’s lives and provide alternate ways of envisaging solutions to political and socio-economic problems through the creation of empathy. I was initially drawn to writing because of an urge to tell stories in a way that might help people enter into lives that are not their own and see something of themselves in others. The silence and solitude of a writer’s existence have also always attracted me, and over the years, writing has become a means of processing life and approaching stillness. Having studied social work and international development, I decided to return to creative writing as a more empathetic way of approaching the same goals of thinking about the larger moral issues of modern life.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

I’ve often returned to the works of John Steinbeck, Seamus Heaney and Halldór Laxness for their largesse of vision and the respect and sympathy with which they depicted the lives of the poor and disenfranchised. It was in reading them that I first sensed the transformative power of narrative and verse. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead has also been a very special book for me because of the meditative nature of its prose and the fearlessness with which it approaches the immortal.

Canadian authors have also been influential in the development of my literary consciousness. In particular, I have admired the works of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, Alistair MacLeod, Tomson Highway, Joy Kogawa, and Elizabeth Hay for their capacity to hold a mirror to the Canadian psyche and create a new mythology for Canada.

What kind of writer do you aspire to be?

I want to be a writer who can’t be put into a box. I hope my writing will address the perennial questions of human existence, across many genres, including fiction and non-fiction.

How and when do you find time to write?

I like to write in the mornings when I am bleary-eyed and still in my pajamas, before the distractions of the world have a chance to intrude. When I am lucky I also retreat to cottage country and write staring off at a lake.

A Young Panic

by

prelude

1.

She stands before him
in all her naked
tattooed, feline beauty.
For the first time,
he can’t identify his fear.
she, entrenched
in his devouring
hungry, all-seeing
gaze
his eyes
licking her.

2.

I was a really anxious child he told her everything made me scared it’s incredible so incredible how we can just change, isn’t it though I suppose since it happens over time we don’t really notice but all of a sudden we are a brand new, whole new person and not just spiritually, metaphysically but physically as well because all of our cells change, you know they regenerate every . . . 

Seven years. She smiled, just in time to digest chewing gum.

He laughs. Later on he ceased to admire her subtlety, the way she steered conversations in a way that told him she didn’t think he was as clever as he did.

Or, as he was.

But she was just as poor a judge of cleverness as he.

But he gets ahead of himself because the bad memories poison the good (the evil poisons the good like blood in milk, blood in water. Her blood, his).

He laughs. With her, laughing was the easiest thing, easy like getting into warm water. Like touching.

3.

But the thing is he knew that “love” was like a dagger, a sword, a wound, something that bled so fresh and so plentiful like this never ending supply of blood like HOW DO I HAVE SO MUCH BLOOD IN ME? What kind of vessel am I? I am a vessel, oh eternal calm vessel vessel vessel. I am a blood vessel, no, an ivory canoe in a blood vessel. I am riding an ivory canoe in a sea of blood and the blood stains the canoe red and I must hold my arms aloft so that I do not get blood on my arms because then it will seep under my skin and it’s not my blood so it can’t touch me but the canoe is the colour of my teeth oh god my teeth are red with blood it fills the cracks I have drank your blood. I bite your throat because I am a hungry animal, a hungry dog, a pitiful skinny hungry snarling feeble dog. You can see my ribs. Feel them, feel them. They swell beneath my fur sharp as knives. You reached your hand out to pat my head, to scratch my ears. I bit your throat and licked your blood before you could cry out. And trust me: It hurt me more than it hurt you.

4.

To get back on track, the whole thing seems trivial now, but for the blood roaring in his ears.

No, he was mistaken. It is faint now. It is mild. No longer blood. Something that burns less, something that melts into shut-eyed forgetfulness. The human’s ability to forget is like a narcotic. He shuts his eyes to the past; they are soft as butter. And she now is a photograph more than a memory. Standing at the end of a lane in an amber colored kimono, stirred by the breeze. She is encased in that photo like a butterfly behind glass. Memories move, they breathe. But she no longer lives within him. She is dead, like the butterfly in the glass. Exquisite, full of detail, and dead.

5.

Only now can he see in full what was coming for him. She led with her teeth. He liked her because with her, things had value. She would pause on the sidewalk and stare into the night sky and say “look at that, look how beautiful it is.” She paused. She breathed. She allowed things to have importance and therefore he felt that every encounter he had with her was important. Moreover, he felt that being with her gave him importance. Her substance, and her significance were imparted to him and therefore he too became a person of value, a person who could appreciate the aesthetic and spiritual riches life was able to offer and what life itself was as a concept and as a reality. She liked to speak; she was often blindingly eloquent. She spoke often about memory as an alternate consciousness in itself, as a whole new artistic channel. Memory was as weighty as gold, There was often disparity between who she was and what she said. It was only in her poetry where this creature seemed to rise in her throat, something sensuous yet violent, that allowed her to dip between the fabric of present time and space. But her outward self, the woman you saw perched atop a bar stoop getting drunk and laughing with her head tossed back or polished, put together in the morning, walking around her apartment in her high heels just to make sure she was up to wearing them all day, was warm and clear. Her multiple selves, her different phases made sense to him at the time, along with everything else. She draped herself in transparent tapestry; she swallowed stories by the spoonful and let them inside her grow wild and rampant, beautiful as fragrant midsummer blossoms but dark and dangerous as the unlit woods or the deep river within which swim creatures we cannot see when we peer in from the edge but if we listen closely, we can hear the water move. He swam in the pool of her; she let him. He was not frightened.

interlude part one

Once upon an indeterminate time, and in a different universe (the rules are different, not the flora and fauna) there lived a girl with her father on the outskirts of a forest. The father was a hunter, he would disappear into the forest and return with pelts of fur and tender deer meat. The girl was so beautiful that her beauty was a character unto itself (prismatic hair, alabaster face, eyes that reflect the sun like a pool of shattered glass). One of the village boys was in love with the girl and her beauty. He was beautiful himself, like a lanky, tawny-crowned classical God-child. One day, the father went into the forest and was gone for far longer than he had before. His daughter grew worried. She began hearing voices from the forest, seeing lights glinting at her from its depths, and her anxiety grew heavy and dark and pressed on her chest. She fell ill. The boy who loved her took care of her but he could not assuage her sudden, consuming desire to enter into the forest and find her father. Her beauty had grown wasted and cold. His desire for her caused him to relent. They went into the forest together. The forest strengthened the girl. She was filled with a mystical sense of purpose. She began to hear a voice whispering to her, that the boy could not hear. He was afraid but she pressed on and soon her chest began to tighten with fear—not fear of the forest, but fear of he who walked wide-eyed and frightened behind her. The voice poisoned her. She began to distrust him. By then they had walked so deep that they had lost their way. She had felt drawn by something but suddenly the feeling dropped off and all she saw was darkness around her. The boy had been following her. They were lost. Slowly, the forest poisoned him too. His desire overtook his being and like an animal he leapt at her, long limbs pinning her to the earth, ripping at her clothes as if he had claws instead of hands. Her screams didn’t reach him. He snarled. His teeth were sharp where he bit into her skin, bruising her throat. She scratched his face and he bit her lip so that the blood bloomed across her mouth, dripped along her jawbone. It aroused him. He glutted himself on her breasts, licking and kissing and nipping at her until she fell still, too weak and ill to protest. He licked between her thighs. He growled as he pushed himself roughly into her, pulling her hips to his until he was buried within her. She wept, silently as her blood trickled down her thighs. When he was done he pushed her aside and sat on the ground, panting, his eyes darkened with an alien presence. She was cold, so cold, she kept murmuring. He had her blood on him. All over him. He looked at her face and saw that rather than being vanquished, his rape had only made her beauty grow stronger. The tears that lined her cheeks and the blood that spilled from her mouth were opalescent in the half-light. She had a face of jewels. The spirit left him then and he slumped to the ground unconscious. She wept. She was so very cold.

interlude part two

The young poet Ella Jameson lectured on art. “The artist sees differently, considers the world differently,” her clear cut voice and self-possessed stare lent her an air of transcendence, leading those watching her to believe that they were truly in the presence of someone otherworldly. She liked the ambiguity of the artist, she explained, no matter what your medium the artist is driven by creativity and exhibitionism.” Even those who create art and do not share it with others, there are still elements of presentation. There are fantasies of recognition. I do not believe art is a humble undertaking. We are trying to create something larger than ourselves and larger than our relationships with others, something that does not simply connect with others on a cerebral plane but an instinctive, intuitive one as well. I prefer to use the term truth instead of beauty, as beauty can be deceptive but truth in art is unmistakable.” As she spoke, each word delicately handled, a stillness settled over the crowd. It was silent, so each word seemed to hang a moment longer, not immediately pushed away by movement and whispers, but lying still to be absorbed into the audience.

“I am not against aestheticism,” she continued, “the human eye looks for beauty and craves it. However, in these times aestheticism often becomes stylistic and in becoming so loses that which is resonant or true. Aestheticism, in its beginnings in Classical times, was rooted in nature and proportion, proportion being a representation of nature’s perfection. Thus symmetry and harmony in physical beauty—the face of a woman or the body of a young man for example—is the embodiment of the triumph of nature and thus something to be revered. Just as true beauty is grounded in nature, true art must also be. It was easier to reach this harmony of human and nature when we had to work with natural forces and materials, when they infiltrated our daily lives. It has changed, and just by looking at the fortresses we have built and the technologies we now rely on one can easily see why art has taken a turn for artifice. It is not an absence of beauty we suffer from but an absence of truth and of what is real. I do not mean to challenge Keats, but to say that times have changed and are changing. The artist’s role however should not be subject to this change. The necessity for truth and nature in art only grows with the shifting of the world and its values. The gradual loss of the concept of a larger connecting force between us is making way for an individual centric society, one based in materialism and an absorption in ourselves. It is the artist’s duty to speak to the greater consciousness, perhaps even a collective consciousness that remembers. I believe that great art can lead us to remember the part of us that was once connected to the earth, an instinctive place. As an artist it is this hidden part of the human I wish to access and to touch, and to stir recognition of something that cannot be named. I urge my fellow artists to strive for what is instinctive and within them. It is not the time to embrace individualism but to remember what once was and what still hangs on, despite humans’ efforts to destroy it. Our relationship with nature, its perfections and imperfections, must be remembered. It is this word I seek to emphasize: remember. For a moment, we ought to forget ourselves as what we are and break into that primeval place of our minds that knows exactly what we were and what we will be.”

6.

Later, “What are you scared of? ” he asks. She is naked and her knee bends outside the covers, silhouetted against the window. Her eyes—later he learns that she hates when he asks her things like that and that she rarely talks about herself as though she were a character, with character traits, flaws and strengths—narrow and she answers:

“Everything, but I never let myself think about it. So nothing, I suppose.” And she is quiet but in the way that he knows he shouldn’t speak just yet. She adds, “Actually, I distrust cats.” And she laughs, “No, seriously. I do,” Later, he realizes that she would have been happy and they probably would have stayed together if they had just never done anything but laugh.

Tell me, does death speak to you? Tell me, has it made a name for you?

She curled up next to him, hooked her leg over his, puckered her lips. Yes, she whispered and again, yes. Yes. How I let it, curl up on my chest like a cat. Breathe on my face. Lick my lips. Kiss me, again. Again.

She was beautiful she was she was she was.

He was an anxious child. He avoided unfamiliarity. He preferred to watch films he had seen before rather than ones he hadn’t. His mother always objected to that. She pushed him towards what was new, and she made him watch Aladdin and it scared him so much when there was that scene in the desert with the beetle and it was dark and the man’s face was dark and jagged but he had kept watching because his mother was there and he didn’t like it when she told him he must be braver. He also got frightened of the part in the prison with the old man, because that too was dark and hehated the part before the end but he felt stuck, and he physically could not move because he was scared but also because his mother watched him and once it was over she said there, that’s not so bad now, see everything turns out just fine in the end.

That’s how your life will be, she told him, there are going to be scary bits and sad bits. You won’t always know what’s going to happen. In the end, everything will turn out.

Oh, oh how scary and delicate lust was.

The silence of someone leaving you.

The Cricket Bottle

by

It was that kind of boredom. I’ve never been able to figure how, even when I’m angry about being bored, I could still be bored. Well, school manufactured that kind of boredom.

I leaned back in my chair, bearing a bigger grudge than usual against the stupid metal bar that anchored it to the desk. It was always digging into my knee, and the paint was flaking off. Butt-ugly. No one ever re-painted them, but why bother, I guess. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime half-assed job, and, well, after a couple of weeks in a classroom, all desks become speckled, graffiti-carved non-objects anyway. If someone bothered to repaint the bar, it’d only be a matter of hours before some kid wrote “fuck balls” on it or something. There are no blank spaces in a high school filled with markers, pens, and chalk.

Mr. Phillip was reading from a handout about Ontario university applications—actually reading from it, like he thought we couldn’t read it ourselves. Maybe some of the kids couldn’t. You hear of things like that. I looked up at the clock, but homeroom wasn’t anywhere near over, so I slid down and got comfortable for the longest fifteen minutes ever . . . 

It was ridiculous, though, the whole thing. The handout was supposed to tell us, the kids who had suddenly found themselves in grade twelve, the final year of high school hell, how to apply to university and college. Pick a school. Pick a program. What are you interested in? As if it were that simple. Sure, I liked math, but I didn’t think I wanted to spend my whole life doing it. I looked at the clock again and saw that there were still thirteen minutes. I didn’t want to hear about university and college programs right then—especially not so close on the heels of the Ninth Night. It made growing up seem too sudden, an overnight collapse of simple freedoms. I closed my eyes, trying not to think about who I was supposed to be, or the years of school it would take to get that far. I tried to forget that I had a name, a face, a direction in life, and to think: I am not a person. I tried to just breathe, but the classroom had a distinct smell, hard to locate, but a faint dust of BO, and, that day, sneakers rank from rain.

I turned to the window at my left, instead. The rain had come on sudden around seven in the morning, a torrential downpour of sky-vomit. It was lighter now, and since the cloud cover was getting thin enough for the sun to pass through, it would probably stop by the final bell. My homeroom was on the second floor of Burchell Lake High School, so I had a pretty good view of the town. Beyond the buildings, the forest was a dense green smudge in the rain, hard to make out. I couldn’t see Foot Hill. The sparse beams of sunlight were refracting off the surface heat of the lake, encasing everything in a wall of murky glow, but unless you went to the edges of town, you’d never know about the lake. You’d just think there was a wall of light there for no reason.

I stopped my foot from jack-hammering the floor and remembered how it had felt when my sneakers slid on the night grass of Foot Hill. I rubbed my fingers, feeling the rough dryness of crickets as I put them in the bottle for Fact. The Factory liked the sounds crickets made, and I always caught them for it, even though I knew doing that was pointless. I tried to put myself in the Ninth Night and couldn’t; tried to imagine Factory and Fingers and Booze and Boondoggle and the others beside me in the grass and couldn’t; tried to remember what crickets sounded like before I stuck them in bottles, and couldn’t. Oh, god. Eight more days until the next Ninth Night. Eight more days of school and homework and questions and life choices and guessing at everything until the next Ninth Night, until I could hear the Factory say “Did you know? ” And feel its distinct shadow beside me. Eight days. I didn’t think I could make it.

It was always hard to imagine the atmosphere of the Ninth Night the next morning. I guess the senses aren’t enough. I had been an n.e.1—a Non-Existent One—for six years, and that wasn’t enough, either, to keep the feel of the Ninth Night around me when there was daylight—even damp rain-light. Sometimes I thought I had to have the mask on, with its particular weight and smell, but really, it was just impossible to be in both the night life and the day life. You had to be two people at the same time to do that, and right then, with the crust of school and my classmates around me, I was Aiden White and couldn’t really be Mustard. Not really.

But, like when you reread books or whatever, I could always picture Mustard’s actions and how he spoke, what he said. I was Mustard, after all, when the Ninth Night came. I could remember how, last night, he had waved the spray can, arcing white paint on the community centre wall, and then what he had said to the Factory, and felt embarrassed for him—for myself, I guess. A rare moment of cohesion.

But Mustard hadn’t been wrong about how the Factory had cruised in the basket of the shopping cart the last time we all went carting. I searched the wall of light beyond the window, trying to justify how Fact had distracted me—arms spread out, head up, probably had its eyes closed too, trusting me entirely to get us to the end of the race course. Really, the sight had been kind of stunning. Embarrassing, too. The lake had been damn cold when I couldn’t look away from it and we missed that final turn of the hill.

But when I met the Factory for the first time, it was different. Everything, really, was different. I didn’t know about cricket song or night air, though it had been cold. I knew flames, the kick of kerosene, the burn of skin. I used to set fires just to feel the flame. Back then, though, Tumble had been in charge, a Ninth Night veteran in a banged-up motorcycle helmet. Something in the way Tumble would slouch used to make me think of my brother in the day life, but there was no real way to tell, and no way I could ask, of course—the Rules and all. Tumble and I never got along in the same way as me and my brother anyway, and things like slouches, they could be deceiving. The point of the Ninth Night was to make us less aware of ourselves, to be no one and not someone, but it could have the opposite effect too. I knew that some kids, like Tug maybe, who didn’t speak, changed things about themselves because they knew it was a dead giveaway—but you couldn’t trust that. I believe that we walk a little differently, talk a little differently, think a little differently in the dead of night when we know that no one can see our faces. The cold chill of the air breaks our voices, disperses them over forest. The hard, brackish wood trails demand heavier, more careful footing. The masks make us stand differently. You can’t even tell girls from guys, not with all those shadowed angles.

I’d been going to the Ninth Night for almost a year then. It was dark winter that night. Cold. The sky was like flint. Snow made it hard to get up Foot Hill, and I was almost late. I stopped to catch my breath at the fallen log outside the rendezvous, and my knees hurt from lifting my legs so high, so laboriously—I was short back then, but shot up in ninth grade, suddenly. I figured Tumble would call me a short burnout again—it could be mean—and make me carry all the wood-boggans to the hill by the lake, so I was trying to figure out how to play off my tardiness without making a stupid excuse.

I heard a branch. I swung around, and was momentarily blinded by the condensed breath that filled my gas mask. The Factory was behind me, hugging itself to keep warm. The plastic eyes of its owl mask were flicking up with what little light there was. It was shorter than me. I thought it looked awkward, vulnerable, but all the n.e.1s kind of look like that somehow.

I said, “Hey.”

It said, “Hey.”

“You lost? ”

No answer.

“Ninth Night? ” I asked.

“Yeah.” Replied a pale, diffused voice; more a caress of air than anything.

I took in its outline, the white trace of light on dark sweater, dark hood, and felt the woods spread out around us in the rustling glow of birch trees and sky. I said, “Follow me.”

Fact nodded and tagged along behind me to the crooked pine. We were last to arrive, but Tumble and Woodchuck were fighting so no one noticed except Light Fingers.

“Oh? Finally found a grass-stalker shorter than you, eh, Mustard? ” it said. That jerk had always been so damn droll. I told it to shut up just when Tumble gave Woodchuck a sock to the gut and ended the fight. Tumble started into the Rules and I heard the Factory name itself for the first time.

There was nothing special about all that, really, but I remember the whole night clearly, brilliantly: how Tumble made me carry the slipshod toboggans anyway, for no reason; how the hill was really dangerous that night—Butt cut its leg on the icy plating that shingled the hill—and the bushes that caught us at the bottom chimed with scattering icicles on impact. I remembered how Woodchuck, Fingers, and Tonto built snow ramps that couldn’t hold against the boggans at full speed; how Tumble tripped me with an ice-covered branch and then shoved it up my sweater. I remembered how the Factory had almost, like magic, rode its boggan standing, with its arms out like the mast of a ship—the same as later in the cart—and made it safely all the way down only to face-plant when it stopped at the bottom.

“The little bird here has real landing finesse,” Fingers said and laughed.

“Yeah, fucking graceful,” Tumble jeered.

“Ow,” was all Fact said. The others headed back up the hill. I stayed, got Factory onto its feet again. I wanted to make sure it was real—after that—sort of wanted to know how it felt under its mask, the clothes.

“Well, the first part was pretty cool,” I said.

It kept its gloved hand on my shoulder to steady itself. “Huh? ”

“Standing. On the boggan.” I could feel heat under my skin, under it all.

“Oh. Yeah. Falling sucked though.”

That made me laugh. “You haven’t even begun to fall.”

“Good to know.” It brushed snow off its hoodie. “Did you know that the way you feel when you fall is caused by the vestibular apparatus or labyrinth in the inner ear detecting changes in acceleration? ”

“No . . . I did not.”

“But when you skydive, you don’t actually feel like you’re falling? ”

“That’s . . . weird? ”

“It’s because—”

“Hey, Mustard! Get your slow ass up here!”

Tumble. I shouted at it to keep its panties on, and Fact and I began the trek up the icy hill, using the shingled plateaus to pull ourselves up.

“Did you hear it? ” Factory asked.

“Hear what? ”

“A moose. Way out there, somewhere,” it pointed to the lake side of the hill. “It’s what made me crash.”

“A moose made you crash? ”

A laugh. “An invisible one.”

“Sound barrier moose.”

“Yeah.”

“Mach-moose,” I said. We both snorted.

Then Fact said, “So if someone crashes into an invisible moose in the woods, does anyone hear it? ”

I laughed so hard, I slipped, had to regain traction. We were at the top of the hill, but when I mounted that last slope, I was suddenly slipping down again, a sharp burn of impact against my shoulder where Tumble had hit me with a fucking snowball.

“You okay? ’ Fact called, its face full of the flare and glow of winter moons, owls lighting on snow.

“Last one up the hill carries all the boggans!” Tumble yelled, meaning me, of course.

That was the night I lit Tumble’s wood-boggan on fire.

Tumble was real fond of that strip of wood it had hacked out of a tree, but I lit that piece of shit on fire, sent it shooting down the hill. It skipped over the plateaus with a soft hint of burning bark and mould, and the firelight flicked across the ice and snow like, for a moment, a yellow moon had flown out from under us to burn out in the brush.

And maybe it was that fire that started it. I saw the flare and felt it burning. I don’t know. Years later, I could still feel it burning, but I don’t think I would have set it if the Factory hadn’t come to that Ninth Night. Tumble had pissed me off plenty of times, but that’d been the first I paid it back—that had been the first time I felt like I had to teach it something about me. Factory was the variable. It changed the equation for everything that night, talking about falling and moose and moving around beside me like that. It knocked me off balance somehow, even with my feet planted firmly in the snow. Falling down at first sight.

And because of the Ninth Night, and what it was supposed to signify for the n.e.1s—for me—who needed to be anonymous for one night every nine days to get out of their own skin, I’d never known who the Factory was. It was somewhere in Burchell Lake, made someone else by the daylight, and I would only ever know the barn owl mask, the sound of skin I could never touch, the falling.

The bell rang, startled me into the day life. Homeroom was over, but I was still falling.

Intimations of Age (1970)

by 

Their older sisters bolted from my timid torch
on legs as lithe; and now these
fawns, these flowers in my dream-
pasture of lust, glowing more fiercely
as my sun declines, they nestle
close without fear, their brittle fingers
liberated on my distanced flesh, and call
me Uncle.

And the sisters, el
dorado’s dancehall nymphs ten years ago, now
heave into the station of the mind
trailing children and talking quite openly
of intra-uterine devices.
(The days are fingers, turning me
to their own blank eyes. My tongue
exaggerates the memory, and then
the stone’s sound shakes the well.)
And at the barricades the Afro-
printed rebels, discovering by rote
(a quickening treason of self-knowledge)
300 years of misplaced blackness, vicariously
warm against each other in their chain-
gang chants of Africa and anarchy; while I
retreat to verandahs and rum, and turn

to other roots, which grow like morning
details to myopic urgency:
a father, never close, now
slipping through the gaps of silence
into testiness and recollection, as I
assume his role and watch my son’s
fierce love batten on my terror of the road
that darkens into dream;
a mother-in-law, warming herself at the flame
of my last gift to her, whose twelvemonth legs
amaze themselves with puppet steps.

Like a chrysalis despairing
of the light I turn again, to find
my woman naked between dresses, belly
breasts and limbs two harvests old,
pouting at the mirror’s indifference.
My cosmos pivots on the fulcrum
of her deeply furrowed groin. Oyster-
tight, her gum-chewed nipple is
the only granule in this swelling darkness.

Chineyman (1968)

by 

He moves haphazardly, blown along the pavement
in uneven gusts, like ricepaper.
The oldest man in the world.
Not for him, beneath that mask of grey
enamelled hair, dried dreams of palaces
floating on their pools of silken poetry
or orchideous concubines in rites of silk.
More likely a drab exchange of servitude
Eastern soil for saltfish
and the crudely offered tithes paid daily
on the mackerel counters by us lazy blacks
who’d rather spend than sell:
the necessary sacrifice of language
and the timeless shame of burial
in this uncultured soil.
Yet in the intricate embroidery of that face
are all the possibilities of legend—
Kublai Khan in rags.

Loud-limbed and less ancient
I defer the pavement to this parchment schooner
with no port, this ivory chorale of semitones.

Author of the Month: Martin Mordecai

by

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a writer. That’s what I tell border guards—though to tell the truth, I feel a sort of brazen shiftiness as I make sure to look into their eyes and say it. I’ve only published two books, after all, one co-written with my wife Pamela, who has a much longer bibliography across poetry, prose, plays, and literature for children—a real writer.

I’ve told border guards different things over the years, all of them more ‘true’ at time of telling: civil servant, diplomat, journalist, television director, publisher, bookseller, even (when I’m carrying the paraphernalia) photographer.

But I guess ‘writer’ is true at this time: I don’t do anything else.

When did you realize you had a passion for writing?

When I ran out of other options for making money. More accurately, in 2000, when the Toronto Arts Council gave me a grant for a piece of writing I’d been playing around with for 20-or-so years. As a taxpayer myself, I felt (and still feel) an obligation to work hard to complete a project. That one became my first novel, Blue Mountain Trouble (2009). Other grants since then have transferred the sense of obligation to other projects.

I’ve always scribbled. At high school (in England—a very long story) I was blessed—as so many writers are—with two teachers who were passionate about literature, and knew a vast amount about the literatures of England and Europe. With their encouragement, I started scribbling then.

Returning to Jamaica at nineteen, I continued scribbling. A few poems and a story were published in the Caribbean, but I had no real ambition to be ‘a writer.’ Writers were god-like creatures in my life (and to some extent, still are). From childhood onwards I’ve been surrounded by books, wherever I’ve lived. I often say that home is where our books and music are—right now it’s Kitchener, but at different times it’s been Jamaica, Trinidad, Washington D.C., Boston, Toronto.

And wherever I’ve been, even in hotels and temporary lodgings, I’ve scribbled. I don’t know if that constitutes a passion for writing. But the passion for reading—the foundation of any writer, I firmly believe—and for music, remain.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

I’d have to begin with the King James Bible, whose language is the groundation of almost all Caribbean literature in English.

After that: Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, poets who, in their completely different ways, demonstrate the possibilities for using English—the KJ Bible again, but also the endlessly variegated languages that our histories have engendered—to create literature for and about the Caribbean, which is mainly what I do. (Exile, albeit voluntary and pleasurable, focuses the mind on former things and ways of being.)

For prose, I find Latin American literature inspiring, especially Gabriel García Márquez (who calls himself a Caribbean writer), Jorge Amado (who writes about a part of Brazil that is very Caribbean), and Eduardo Galeano, who writes alternative histories of the Atlantic world. They have been served by superb translators, but I sometimes say that it would be worth the effort to learn Spanish and Portuguese, even at my age, just to read them in their original languages.

But insofar as all reading influences a writer, I can also mention some non-hemispheric authors, from Somerset Maugham, H.E. Bates, and Graham Greene, to Truman Capote, Ursula Le Guin, and John Steinbeck (who, incidentally, began his working day by reading something from the King James Bible), Mark Twain (my desert island author), and Damon Runyon, a favourite of my father’s, who didn’t waste time with Grimm and Mother Goose when reading to his children.

How and when do you find time to write?

I try to do a few hours in the morning, as early as I can start. If that goes well, I’m set for the day: energetic, calm, cheerful—and, as my wife will tell you, I’m not naturally cheerful or energetic. That feeling sustains me through the period of the day when I have to do other things (driving, cooking, snoozing—a must at my age) and leads me to that point I remember Ernest Hemingway saying was his goal for the day: Knowing where you’re going to resume. In his case that meant the next morning; in mine it means the early evening of the same day, which may go on for a few hours. I know that 90% of writing is re-writing, but I don’t do as much of that as I should, until I absolutely have to.

Like right now. I’m re-writing a novel I’ve been working on (scribbling at for near forty years, writing seriously for perhaps ten, from the year of my first Canada Council grant) which is being transformed as I re-write. I tell younger writers who ask: ‘Follow the characters, and the language. Step by step.’ Some completely new thing will emerge.

What has been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a writer?

Making a living. In that I’ve been immeasurably helped and immeasurably supported (emotionally, spiritually and, very importantly, financially) by my wife Pam. Without Pam’s royalties we’d be living in homeless shelters and tapping out our words on computers in public libraries.

The other challenge is confidence. I’m currently revising what sometimes seems to me my life’s work, a historical novel set in 1831-32 Jamaica, dealing with events that have been exhaustively written about by Caribbeans and other scholars and novelists (the former of whom I’ve read some, the latter of whom I’ve avoided like the plague—confidence again). In the novel, I’m coming at some things from an angle, so to speak, and there are moments (several each day) when I feel an abyss of darkness opening under my typing chair. But I press on—I am, I remind myself, a taxpayer funded by taxpayers. And—give thanks—by a wife who believes in what I’m trying to do. In that context the other challenges seem small.

How have you changed as a writer over the years?

I’d like to think I’ve gotten better—whatever that means—at saying what I want to say. In truth, I’d really like to think that I’ve learnt more about what I want to say! But who knows? I haven’t written enough.

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