On Monday night in Vancouver, I found myself backstage at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre with a celebrated and motley crew of writers including Roddy Doyle, Heather O’Neill, John Vaillant, Sadiya Ansari, Conor Kerr, Bill Richardson, Kim Thúy and our host, writer and broadcaster Elamin Abdelmahmoud. We’d been asked by the Vancouver Writers Fest to open the annual literary gathering.
This was not the original plan. You see, the beloved Vancouver festival usually begins with an event highlighting the Giller Prize’s shortlisted authors. But that didn’t happen this year as the Giller – from which many writers have pulled their works from competition because the lead sponsor, Scotiabank, is an investor in an Israeli weapons manufacturer – elected to go a different route.
So another event was planned in its stead: a grand celebration of Alice Munro. But that was scrapped after it was revealed this summer that Canada’s beloved author turned a blind eye to her daughter being sexually molested by her stepfather, Ms. Munro’s husband.
We were “Plan C.” Being a literary programmer today means you’ve got to know how to navigate the minefield of CanLit, and Leslie Hurtig, the Vancouver festival’s artistic director, made an astute last-minute pivot. Organizers asked each of us, in seven minutes or less, to tell the packed house how we find joy in a world full of hate and division.
But joy is hard to come by among our group. While writers are different beasts, many of us are solitary people who absorb our surroundings in a literal way, which eventually manifests on the page.
I struggled with Ms. Hurtig’s ask. For the past three years, I have been writing a book that has consumed me. The Knowing is about the genocide on this continent and about my family’s own losses owing to institutionalization in Indian Residential Schools and hospitals – places that were supposed to do no harm but did the exact opposite. I wrote as another genocide rages in the Middle East, tearing apart families. Images of dead children and families torn apart, with both sides grieving in heaving rivers of pain, fill my social-media screens.
It is as if humanity has learned nothing.
Ms. Thúy was the first to take the stage. She told the story of finding happiness as a preteen girl in literature – specifically in Marguerite Duras’s spellbinding novel, The Lover.
I spoke next. I was honest with the audience, telling them that finding joy lately has been hard, after spending so much time researching and writing a book on erasure while watching the same thing happen overseas. But I told them that earlier in the day, I found it standing in front of 350 high-school students at the Calgary Public Library as part of a Wordfest literary event.
I told the students about writing a book that unravels Canada’s history through my unique lens, about what it was like to be the only First Nations journalist in newsrooms back in the day, and about how I need to constantly explain the laws of subjection and colonial suppression that echo today. I told them that every Indigenous family shares a commonality: We all knew of the missing, or of family or community members who didn’t come home from Indian Residential Schools, Indian Hospitals, tuberculosis sanitoriums or asylums.
We spoke about genocide denialism – about how that they, the younger generation, have to learn about Canada’s past so we can break the cycle and not repeat it.
The students listened intently. None of them were on their phones. They were quiet, enthralled. When the talk was over, they came down to the stage and we took group photos.
There was one school there from Tsuut’ina Nation. One of the girls hugged me, others thanked me for my talk; another said she liked my earrings. One boy, tall and thin, proudly told me he was Cree and Blackfoot. As we stood for our picture, I swear he stood taller.
After they left, another group came forward. One student made a beeline toward me; his eyes were as blue as the sky and he looked like an all-American athlete. His face had an expression of absolute wonder as he took my hand and shook it, thanking me, as if pieces of a puzzle were falling into place. He smiled proudly and said: “My best friend is Blackfoot.”
I told the Vancouver audience: This is my joy. Seeing the future in the eyes of Canada’s youth.