Lisa Moore is picking at old wounds. Her latest novel, February, is about the Ocean Ranger — an oil rig whose sinking off the coast of Newfoundland in February 1982 remains a painful blight on the province’s collective memory. February follows the lives of the fictional Helen O’Mara — whose husband is among the eighty-four men killed in a disaster that yielded no survivors — and her four children. Moore explores how loss is played out over nearly thirty years of slip-and-slide between past and present. With February, the author delivers what readers of her two previous collections of short stories and one novel have come to expect of her work: prose that is at once challenging and facile, richly poetic but eminently consumable.

When February came out, one critic accused it of being too Canadian. We’re at a point where “Canadian” is sometimes used as shorthand for literature that is too aesthetic or intellectual.  What are your thoughts on where such “Canadian-ness” fits into our national literature?

I’m from Newfoundland, and that probably comes before being Canadian, or at least gets mixed up in it: they’re two separate identities mixing together. Since becoming a writer, I’ve travelled through Canada a lot to do readings, and that has really informed my idea of what it means to be Canadian — just travelling in the landscape and seeing how different it is and meeting the people. I really don’t believe there is such a thing as a Canadian kind of writing. I think that Canadian literature is as diverse as the country is big, and it gets more and more diverse every day. I read last night with three other writers, and each of the books that we read from was completely different. Of the three books written by Canadians, one is set in Beirut, one is love poetry, and mine is about the sinking of the Ocean Ranger. That’s a literary experience in Canada: if you go to a reading, you hear all of that.

Do Canadian authors tend more toward regionalism, then? Does writing from Newfoundland have a distinct voice?

Newfoundland is difficult to get to, and it has in the past been difficult to make a living there. Mostly people were dependent on fish. Now, of course, the fishery is gone, and we’re reaping the benefits of oil.  Michael Crummey’s [recent book Galore] is about outport living, and my book is about an oil rig that sank. Both involve isolation. An oil rig is an island, too, in a way. So that’s something that we share in common: the literature is informed by geography.

You and Michael Crummey are both belong to the writer’s group The Burning Rock Collective. It seems that in Newfoundland, and St. John’s in particular, the artistic community is tightly knit.  How much does the conversation taking place in that community influence your work?

Michael Winter is a very good friend of mine, and Ramona Dearing, Larry Mathews, Claire Wilkshire, Beth Ryan: these are all people whose work I’ve read and commented on while it was in progress, and they’ve read mine and offered me criticism. That experience makes literature a really living thing. It gives it another layer; it lifts it off the page. St. John’s is also a diverse place artistically. The music scene is very rich, there’s a great visual arts scene, and film is taking off. Everybody knows each other, and everyone is often collaborating.

In February, we get a strong sense of community. The Ocean Ranger sinks, and there’s this experience of communal grief that happens afterward.

When the Ocean Ranger sank in Newfoundland, it was a tremendous shock that just reverberated through the whole province. That disaster is still a raw wound there.

Why do you think that is?

It’s because it never should have happened. Corners were cut, and safety procedures weren’t followed. The men weren’t trained properly; they didn’t have enough survival suits. The lifeboats were not durable; many of them broke apart when they got in the water. Loss of the sort that occurred on the Ocean Ranger is always shocking and difficult to take, but even more so when it’s unnecessary.

It broke my heart to read the Royal Commission on the Ocean Ranger disaster.  I just found it unbearably sad. It outlines the details of all the things that went wrong, many of which could have been avoided. It made me realize that people risk their lives just to make a living on a regular basis.

Do you have any personal connection to the Ocean Ranger disaster?

No, but my own father died very suddenly of natural causes around the same time. My mother and father were madly in love, and I watched my mother go through that grief. My sister and I went thought it as well.

I thought a lot about the idea of trauma when I read February and the idea — I think Hannah Arendt said this, among other people — that it can be worked through with narrative. Was writing February a kind of catharsis?

When I went to research the book there was very little material information available. There was almost nothing written: just the Royal Commission and a few books and documentaries. It was astonishing how little material there was about an event that had left such a mark on Newfoundland.  Then this year another book came out at the same time as my own — a piece of non-fiction by Mike Heffernan called Rig — and a sociologist named Susan Dodd is writing a book about the Ocean Ranger as well. It feels to me like people have come to a point in the process of grieving or working through trauma where it’s becoming possible to tell the story. And also absolutely necessary to tell the story.

I wanted to show that this is not the kind of disaster that just hits the headlines and then goes away. This is the kind of thing that continues to affect people who are left behind for generations. It wasn’t just the loss of those men, as awful as that was, it was also that their families were scarred. In fact, the whole province was. It was important to me to say that with the book.

Despite that, the ending of February is very hopeful.

When someone dies, in order to honour that life you have to live joyfully. Even though the book is about grief in some ways, I wanted there to be joy in it as well. I wanted that to come through in the language, in the way that Helen experiences through her senses. I hope that it’s a sensual book, that the senses of the reader are engaged and come alive. And I wanted Helen to fall in love again. Because I think that is not, in fact, a romantic notion but a realistic notion.

(Photo by Barbara Stoneham)

Anthony Stewart is a tenured professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Dedicated, brilliant and, he admits, a little neurotic, he is a typical academic in nearly every way. But walking the halls of Dalhousie’s ever-bright and sterile Arts Building, Stewart does not look like his colleagues. Six feet six inches tall and black, he looks — to many students, professors, and strangers, and even once to a member of the Nova Scotia Judiciary — like a basketball player. “If I had a dollar for every time this has been said to me,” Stewart has written, “I might not need a job at all.”

Named for the backhanded judgment that dogs him, Stewart’s recent book, You Must be a Basketball Player: Rethinking Integration in the University, opens a conversation about how the Canadian university looks, what this means, and why the situation must change. Its text sets out to debunk the idea that some unflappable gold standard of merit guides the doling out of jobs. Stewart points to such directives as regional representation and spousal appointments as examples of how preferential hiring is already a matter of course in Canadian institutions, both academic and otherwise. As long as race is not involved, he argues, hiring qualified candidates for reasons beyond the ones printed on their CV is considered a legitimate, even necessary, practice.

Although essentially an argument for affirmative action, Stewart’s book is hardly what you’d expect. The author whisks personal anecdote and rational analysis into prose that is lucid, sophisticated, and, most surprisingly, funny. It reads as a bit of a romp — albeit a critical one — through a world that will be familiar, sometimes painfully so, to anyone who has spent even a B.A.’s worth of time in a Canadian university.

Does Canada feel differently about race relations compared to the United States? Do Canadians think we’re exempt from the problem?

Yes. And we’re wrong. Americans have a very long and very public history with respect to issues of race, so it’s been easy for us to scapegoat them and say, “They don’t have it figured out, but thankfully, look at us, we do.” These are still ongoing issues that have not been resolved in this country. As I say to everybody who will listen to me on this subject: I have a job that most people would love to have. I’m paid to read, write and think. I’m on the inside. My criticisms, specifically of the academy but more generally of the professional classes in Canada, come from somebody who is a paid-up, card-carrying member of those professional classes. So if the issues look the way they do to me, you have to imagine how they look to an eighteen-year-old kid from, say, Little Burgundy.

I see my privilege as something I have because somebody else doesn’t have it. I’m no smarter than my parents are. By fate, circumstance, good fortune, and my own hard work — and probably in that order, it’s worth saying — I’ve been put in a position to have a job that either of my parents could have done, but they weren’t in a position to take up for a variety of reasons. Even from my own family, I’m very aware that my privilege does come at a cost. And so does other people’s privilege.

You write in the book about “colour-blindness,” which we’ve typically construed as being a very liberal and progressive quality, but you argue that it requires an extremely privileged position to support.

You have to have power in order to make a gesture towards divesting yourself of it. In a lot of ways, academics are outside of the world that we write, think and talk about. We don’t run for office; we’re not competing with other business people. We are outside a lot of things, and yet we pretend that we’re part of them.

That isn’t the case for many of your undergraduate students. After their time in university, they’re going to re-enter society, as it were. And many of them are going to be in positions of power.

That’s why we owe them our best. I hope this is my contribution as a teacher, and certainly I hope it’s the contribution that You Must Be a Basketball Player makes. The next time one of my former students or one of my readers hears someone say that we’re trying to live in a colour-blind society, I hope they’ll laugh in that person’s face. Because the notion of colour-blindness is one-sided. Even if everybody I know successfully sees the world in colour-blind terms, that does not guarantee that really lousy things aren’t going to happen to me over the course of my day because of other people who have not signed on to this bargain. The point isn’t to work towards a society that only re-inscribes the privilege that was supposed to be interrogated in the first place. The point is to get better at dealing with our differences.

In a pragmatic way, what’s the first step? What should Canadian universities be doing differently?

Universities should be hiring qualified people who are going to bring to their departments, to their faculties, things that those faculties don’t already have, people who are going to provide ethno-cultural representation that either doesn’t exist or is under-represented. And that’s not hard. I’ve been keeping track, unofficially, at my own university. Just within my faculty there have been five people of colour that I know of who have not been hired [in years past]. These are  completely qualified people who our faculty for one reason or another didn’t see fit to hire. If [our society] isn’t willing to talk about that, it’s going to keep happening.

When you get a flat tire, you don’t just keep driving along pretending it’s not there until it magically fixes itself. But on some level that’s what we’re doing now with this issue. We need to get past the sense of being implicated in some way. We need to start doing with issues of integration what we do with the rest of our work — we need to bring the same level of intelligence, creativity and discipline to this issue that we would to any other. The fact that the academy lags behind other professional environments in terms of diversity should be a source of constant and daily embarrassment.

I wonder if this is one version of a problem that academia routinely encounters, where theory and practice inevitably conflict. Is there a way to theorize as an occupation and still keep a foot grounded in the outside world?

The short answer is yes, it can be done. The long answer is that I think that some people see theorizing as a substitute for real commitment. Aesthetic and intellectual radicalism have never been a guarantee of political progressiveness, as anybody who’s ever thought about Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, F.T. Marinetti — and the list goes on and on — knows. The one doesn’t really prove the other. It’s important we recognize that; it’s important that we be a little more honest about who we are. [American philosopher] Richard Rorty once wrote that we have all the theory we need. Another middle or upper-middle class academic theorizing about poverty does nothing to stem the wave of poverty in the United States, was his example. I don’t know how you can argue against that position.

What’s the end goal, then?

I don’t see some sort of terminal point where these are no longer problems. People will always be different from one another in any number of ways. If you take the issue down to its absolute base and everybody is ethnoculturally the same — a picture that you can’t really paint, but let’s say for argument’s sake that you can — there would still be men and women, for instance. We would still need some sort of way to constructively, actively and, one hopes, progressively deal with our differences so that one group doesn’t oppress the other.

We accept as a given that we are always going to be different from one another, but from there we do not accept that the only way we can live with our differences is to pretend they don’t exist. That’s something we don’t do in any other aspect of our lives. We make discriminations in everything we do. We discriminate between red wine and white wine — different sorts of red wine, different sorts of white wine, even. We will always have figure-ground relationships. The reason you can see a black dot on a white background is because of their contrast. To finish that metaphor, the white background is the default, and the black dot is the exception which allows you to see both. Well, I’m here to tell you, when we start [discussing] the perceptual default in Canada, the answer is not going to be a 44-year-old first son of Jamaican immigrants. I know that I’m going to have different things asked of me than you are. More is going to be asked of me in terms of making sense of the differences in the world.

Because you’re not only being asked to represent yourself, but also everyone who looks like you?

Everyone who even remotely looks like me. In addition to that, I am also more responsible for understanding you than you are for understanding me. Goodness knows I’m not the first person to say that; James Baldwin and others already have. It is the people who are the exceptions to the rule who have to deal with these issues. What I want is for everybody — irrespective of their own ethno-cultural lineage — to take it upon themselves as a project, as what they do as human beings, to become a little more engaged with our differences.

“I read a copy of that magazine you work for,” a friend of mine told me recently. “I like it. It’s really Canadian, but it isn’t lame.”

Around the same time, a letter landed on my desk. Using a pseudonym, the correspondent, a self-described Canadian writer, aired his grievance about the alleged absence of Canadian content in current issue of The Walrus. “Inside the issue there are three short stories under the heading under the heading Summer Fiction,” the correspondent wrote. “None of the stories contain any Canadian content or reference to Canadian culture and traditions.” The letter was CC’d to the Canadian Council for the Arts, concerned whether “the powers that be are paying attention to what is being published in Canada.”

The claims made in the letter are so flimsy that they aren’t really worth knocking down. But while I doubt that many Walrus readers share our anonymous detractor’s beef with insufficiently-Canadian Canadian fiction, I do think that this low whine draws attention to a more common assumption. Namely, that if it’s Canadian, it’s got to be lame. (more…)