Ruminations on the Wisdom of Don DeLillo & the Ruins of Griffintown
May 23, 2010 § 1 Comment
It’s no secret that Don DeLillo is one of my favourite novelists. His novels have a tendency to strike me on several levels, perhaps because the narrative is usually fragmentary and on several levels. And whilst his dialogue is predictable in many ways, based on particular idioms of New York City English, it’s the way DeLillo constructs sentences and thoughts that always leave me digesting his work long after I’ve read, or re-read, it. I oftentimes lose patience with people who say things like “I don’t have time to read fiction” or “I can’t remember the last time I read a novel.” To me, this shows a fundamentally closed mind; novels percolate with ideas, philosophy, and ways of being in the world. Novels allow us to personalise events and history, to re-consider moments in time, to re-consider our own ways of thinking, our own narratives.
Certainly this is true with DeLillo’s novel, Falling Man, about the aftermath of 9/11 in New York City. This is not just a rumination on 9/11, indeed, the terrorist attack is a motif to explore post-modern family life in New York. But it doesn’t have to be New York, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be post-9/11, either. But the novel would lack the punch if it was set in Winnipeg in 1986.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing this is to give thought to the on-going argument between Nina, the mother of the novel’s main female character, Lianne, and Nina’s lover, Martin. Martin, however, isn’t really Martin, he’s a former terrorist himself, named Ernst Hechinger. Nina and Martin/Ernst argue throughout the book, in the presence of Lianne, over the nature of terrorism and the attack on New York. Nina’s argument is hued by the fact that she is a Manhattanite. Martin/Ernst is German. She lacks the critical distance to see the attacks, he lacks the intimacy with Manhattan. Throughout the argument, which is fierce and scares Lianne, they consider God and the motives of the attackers. Nina sees fear on the part of the terrorists, Martin/Ernst sees history and politics.
Nina has just had knee surgery (and is developing a reliance upon painkillers) in the time after the attacks. Indeed, Lianne is stricken at how her mother, in the wake of the surgery, has embraced her old age. This worries Martin somewhat. He wants her to travel again, to go out and see the world, to revitalise herself in the wake of the surgery and the attacks. She is somewhat more reluctant.
Martin: Travel, yes, it’s a thing you ought to consider. Get your knee back to normal and we’ll go. Quite seriously.
Nina: Far away.
Martin: Far away.
Nina: Ruins.
Martin: Ruins.
Nina: We have our own ruins. But I don’t think I want to see them.”
Martin: But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.
I love this passage, not so much for what it says about NYC and 9/11, but for what it says for cities in general. Ruins are all around us on the urban landscape (or the rural one, for that matter, abandoned homesteads, for example). Ruins tell us the story of what was once here, how we got here, how we might have otherwise been. Ruins tell us powerful stories about destruction, that is true, as Martin is noting. But they also tell us powerful stories about ways of being that have been lost. The ruins of Griffintown are a prime example.
The ruins of the neighbourhood are there for all to see. In Parc St. Anns/Griffintown, on the former site of St. Ann’s Church, the remaining ruins of the church itself, its foundation, as well as foundation stones of the presbytery, the girls’ school, and the dormitory for the crusading priests who came through the Griff on their way to other parts of the world, are all there. There are ruins of factories and warehouses throughout the neighbourhood. Ruins of tenement flats. Palimpsests of advertising for consumer products that are long gone.
Parc St. Ann's/Griffintown
Wellington Tunnel
Griffintown Palimpsest
We see this life as it used to be. We consider what once was. How people moved out of Griffintown because of its proximity to all these factories, train yards, and the like. How the flats were cramped and cold, lacking in modern amenities like hot water. Or yards. The neighbourhood, when I began studying it a decade ago, always reminded me of the Talking Heads’ song, “Nothing but Flowers.” Here was the site of the beginnings of the Canadian Industrial Revolution in the 1830s, reclaimed in large part by nature. An inner city neighbourhood sprouting leaves and trees. And grass growing through fractured concrete. Trees growing out of windows of derelict, decrepit buildings. Their floors reclaimed by nature.
The ruins of Griffintown also speak to this power that Martin refers to in the novel. This was a locus of power for Canada, for the British Empire and Commonwealth. Not just the products manufactured there, but the working classes trudging along to work, filling out the army in World Wars I and II. The hulking CN viaduct, not technically a ruin yet, but something close to it, speaks to a time when the railway was king. Indeed, it was built to separate the railway from the roads.
Anyway. DeLillo’s got me thinking about the meanings of the ruins of Griffintown. And what they mean, to the old Irish community that once lived there, to the urban landscape of Montréal today, and to plans to re-develop the neighbourhood in the future.
The Irish & Crime in 19th Century North America
May 4, 2010 § 7 Comments
WordPress lets me see what search terms lead people to this site. Usually, they’re predictable, people searching my name, or Griffintown, or things along those lines. But today, there is this term: “explain the strong association between the 19th century irish diaspora and crime?” So, explain I shall.
Yes, this is a stereotype. But behind this stereotype is some kind of truth. Yes, the Irish, especially Catholics in inner cities, tended to find themselves in trouble with the law in disproportionate fashion in the 19th century. This was particularly true in port cities: Montréal, Saint John (NB), Halifax, Boston, New York, Philly. 19th century sailors were hard-living men. And the consequence of that was an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of police stations in those cities. And, yes, a lot of those sailors were Irish Catholics.
There was also the matter of labour violence. The Irish tended to do the kinds of jobs that no one else would, but they also tended to guard their employment jealously, in that if someone else wanted to do their work (free blacks in the States, French Canadians in Québec), they would protect their right to work. Oftentimes with violence when others threatened to undercut their wages (and the Irish tended to do work on very thin margins to start with).
Connected to this was ethnic/racial violence. For example, the Bowery B’hoys Riot of 1857 in the Five Points of Manhattan, where the Irish Catholics who had recently settled there were attacked by the nativist gang, the Bowery B’hoys. Or in York Point, Saint John, in 1849, when the ultra-Protestant Orange Order insisted on marching through an Irish Catholic neighbourhood on the Glorious 12th. Or more internecine battles in places like Philadelphia between black and Irish workers.
As an aside, this has led to one of the most simplistic arguments I’ve ever come across. Noel Ignatiev, in his overly dramatic How the Irish Became White (in order to “become white,” you have to first be considered something other than “white,” and I’m not convinced that the Irish were ever seen this way), argues that slavery essentially lasted another generation in the United States because the Irish Catholic immigrants to New York and Philadelphia, poor working-class immigrants, I might add, refused to throw their lot in with the free black populations of those 2 cities prior to the US Civil War. Had they, he argues, slavery would’ve ended. So, in essence, Ignatiev argues that the Irish “became white” by siding with the Anglo-Protestant hegemons in the United Sates against the blacks. Of course, to have expected anything different is just, well, simple. Why would the Irish side with the blacks? The blacks were the only other group of people down near the bottom of the socio-econo-cultural totem pole with the Irish. So, obviously, they’re going to try to distance themselves.
Anyway, I digress. Political violence. Well, politics were corrupt in the 19th century, pure and simple, whether it was Tammany Hall in New York, or battles against Anglo-Protestant hegemony in Montréal, corruption was everywhere, and violence was a common tactic by all sides. The Irish got their shots in just like everyone else.
But the most common reason why the Irish found themselves in trouble with the law in North America wasn’t any of this. It was the drink. The Irish were a disproportionate number of public drunks in North American cities, at least in the northeast of the US and Eastern Canada, for much of the 19th century. But, before we get into stereotypes of the Irish and the drink, let us remind ourselves of something else: they were the working-classes, they lived hard lives of unsteady and dodgy employment in the factories, ports, and canals of these cities. Their lives were defined by insecurity, in terms of employment, finances, housing. Inner-cities of Boston, Montréal, New York, Baltimore, in the 19th century were, in many ways, worse than they are today. Housing was worse, social conditions were worse, welfare states were worse. And so, not surprisingly, people tended to distract themselves from their problems with alcohol. And not surprisingly, this means that they ran afoul of the law and ended up getting arrested. And the Irish, well, they were a significant chunk of the urban working-classes in these cities. So, no surprise that they appear so frequently in the crime statistics.
Years ago, I was reading a book by my MA supervisor, Jack Little, about state formation in the Eastern Townships of Québec in the mid-19th century. As the Grand Trunk Railway was being built between Montréal and Portland, ME, in the 1850s, Irish navvies flooded the Townships. A rash of crime broke out along the rail line, and Stipendiary Magistrate Ralph Johnston was dispatched out to Sherbrooke to investigate. The results of his investigation surprised him, and in his report to his bosses in Québec City, he stated that the crime was actually committed by non-Irish Catholic, non-navvies. In short, by locals. And the Irish-Catholics got the blame. “In the eyes of too many,” Johnston wrote, “their crimes are to be Irish and Catholic.”
Yup, racial profiling existed in the 19th century too.
Recent Readings on the Irish Diaspora
April 26, 2010 § Leave a comment
As I continue to read, deepening my knowledge of the Irish diaspora in the United States and Canada, I find I’m struck by the changing trends in the historiography, in particular the fact that this literature IS diasporic and transnational in nature. Ever since Kerby Miller published his landmark Emigrants and Exiles in 1985, historians of the Irish in North America have been encouraged to keep an eye on the Irish context. But, for a long time, this was no more than a cursory glance across the Atlantic Ocean, briefly acknowledging what it was that lead the Irish to leave Ireland in the first place.
But, in the past decade or so, a much deeper understanding of the Irish context has taken root in the literature. Diasporic Irish historians have been caught up in the debates in Irish historiography, the revisionists v. the post-revisionists, but even the older discussion between revisionists and nationalists. And what I’m finding interesting is the influence of these Irish historiographical debates on scholars studying the diaspora. It also seems that it is social scientists, rather than historians, who seem to be caught up in these debates. I suppose for historians, historiographical debates are so internalised in our work, to openly comment on them seems redundant, at least for some of us.
Take, for example, Reginald Byron’s 1999 study, Irish America, an overly ambitious title for a case study approach to the diasporic Irish of Albany, NY. Indeed, part of the chip on Byron’s shoulder is that studies of the Irish in the US have focused on the ethnic enclaves of major cities: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, to the detriment of smaller centres, such as Albany. But then the problem is that Albany itself isn’t all that representative of the larger American context, in that it was a predominately Catholic city, and it, too, is a northeastern city. Anyway. Byron is a cynic of the Irish, which is fine, he argues, ultimately, that symbols of Irishness, most notably St. Patrick’s Day, are no longer Irish in nature, they are American, as the Irish have been fully assimilated into the mainstream of American life. To an extent, I agree. He bases his conclusion on 500 oral interviews with “Albanians,” most of whom were people who are of Irish descent, amongst others (German, English, French Canadian, Italian, so on). What he found is that most of the informants had no special knowledge of Ireland and Irish affairs, and did not live their quotidian lives in the Irish fashion, whatever that is. Fair enough, but when you read into the Irish context he covers, in discussing the historical background as to how Albany became so Irish in the first place, one begins to see the connections.
Byron spends a lot of time attempting to portray Ireland as un nation comme les autres, to borrow from the revisionists of Québec historiography. Indeed, this is the very goal of the Irish revisionists, who seek to downplay many of the more traumatic events in Irish history as a means to normalise its history within the mainstream of Western Europe. The problem with this is that there are things that make Ireland exceptional: it was colonised by its neighbour, its Catholic population was oppressed and disenfranchised by the colonising power. Byron scoffs at the common misconception that the Irish were in permanent rebellion in the 19th century. Again, to some extent, I do agree. However, this ignores the fact that the Irish did rebel in 1798, 1847, 1867, and that there were revolutionary, physical force nationalists operated on Irish soil for most of the 19th century leading up to Irish independence and Partition in 1921. Indeed, the response to the 1798 and 1916 rebellions were particularly draconian on the part of the British colonisers.
Indeed, it was this on-going pattern of rebellion that galvanised the Irish diaspora, especially in Canada and the United States, as nationalist circles were strong in both countries. Indeed, it was the Irish in North America who raised funds for the independence struggle “back home,” even if Ireland was a country many diasporic Irish never saw, and only knew through stories and memories of their ancestors and more recent immigrants.
But this also leads to problems, as evidenced in Paul Darby’s Gaelic Games, Nationalism, and the Irish Diaspora in the United States. Darby, who plays Irish football, occasionally comes off more as a fanboy than a scholar in discussing the trials and tribulations of the Gaelic Athletic Association’s American branches, praising their dedication, hard work, and so on, and not acknowledging the American GAA’s biggest problem: an inability to make itself relevant to the diasporic Irish. The GAA, according to Darby, was incredibly successful within circles of Irish immigrants in the cities he studies: New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. But the American GAA faded when immigration from Ireland dried up.
At any rate, the larger issue I have with Darby’s work is that he seems to equate the Irish in North America with Irish nationalism, in that the Irish here were all nationalists. No doubt this stems from studying a particularly nationalist organisation as the GAA. But the GAA didn’t speak for all the Irish in North America, even within the contexts of Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Thus, Darby leaves us with a problem that is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Byron. Whereas Byron wishes to downplay the ruptures of Irish history and identity in Albany, NY, Darby seeks to keep those ruptures in his readers’ minds, in order to explain this strong Irish identity amongst his case studies in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Surely there is a common ground between Byron and Darby.
Indeed, my own work, as well as that of many others (Rosalyn Trigger and David Wilson, for example) explore the ambivalences and ambiguities of the Irish in North America. It is too simplistic to say, as Byron does, that they became assimilated into the mainstream of North American culture and politics (if they did, JFK wouldn’t have been identified as an Irish-Catholic American), or to say that the Irish in North America = Irish nationalists, as Darby does.
Urban Archaeology & Material Culture
April 21, 2010 § 1 Comment
Recently, I’ve been thinking about urban archaeology and material culture. Given my research interests, I suppose it’s only natural that I would also think about the actual physical landscape of the city and how it shifts and changes with time, populations, and construction.
Years ago, I visited Montréal’s Pointe-à-Callière Museum, in the Vieux-Port. Point-à-Callière is the site of the first settlement of Ville-Marie, where Paul de Chomedy, Sieur de Maisonneuve decided to plant his new settlement in 1642. The museum itself is based around 3 archaeological digs (Pointe-à-Callière iteslf, as well as Place Royale and Place D’Youville), and artefacts from these archaeological digs are on display. But it’s not just that. In the underground of the museum, down where the digs took place, one can physically see the layers of city and settlement on Pointe-à-Callière, from the initial aboriginal inhabitants through the founding of Ville-Marie, to the governor’s mansion that was once located there, through urbanisation, industrialisation, and so on. The physical remnants of the buildings, and artefacts are there for the viewer to see.
My favourite part is the William sewer, which canalised, and placed underground, the Rivière Petite Saint-Pierre, which itself had become a stinking cesspool as it flowed above ground through what was once the Nazareth Fief (and later Griffintown), into the St. Lawrence, hence creating Pointe-à-Callière. Apparently (at least according to its entry on Wikipedia), the museum has plans to open up and expose the Petite Saint-Pierre, as well as the old location of St. Ann’s Market in Place D’Youville, as well as the remains of the Parliament House of the United Province of Canada, which was burned down in the Rebellion Losses Bill Riot in 1849 (just imagine a riot today in a democracy burning down the house of parliament!).
Anyway, this is where I first thought about urban archaeology, but I never really gave it much more thought in terms of my academic interests until a couple of summers ago, whilst walking along the Canal Lachine, where, at the St. Gabriel locks, Parks Canada has dug up the foundations and remnants of a factory on the northeastern side of the locks.
Andy Riga, over at The Gazette, has an interesting blog, “Metropolitan News;” his latest post is about the public toilets, disused and buried under Place D’Armes. During the reign of Mayor Camillien Houde in the 1930s, partly as a public works project, Vespesiennes were built in Carré Saint-Louis, Square Cabot, amongst other places, and public washrooms were constructed in places including Place D’Armes. The washrooms there were shuttered in 1980, victim of many things, including Montréal’s notoriously crumbling infrastructure. Since then, there have been a few plans or attempts at plans to revive the public toilets, but they are in serious decay and would cost too much money to renovate them, due to years of neglect, water damage, and humidity. So they remain buried under Place D’Armes which, like Dorchester Square downtown, is undergoing a massive renovation.
So notions of what’s underfoot have long interested me as I’ve wandered about the city, but especially in the sud-ouest, Griffintown and Pointe-Saint-Charles, as well as Saint-Henri, where I’ve lived for most of the past decade.
Also, too, there is the influence of Prof. Rhona Richman Kenneally of Concordia University, who encouraged me to give some thought to material culture in approaching my dissertation and my work on Griffintown. Ultimately, as interesting and exciting as I found approaches to material culture in my studies, there was no way to fit it into the dissertation (the same can be said of proper mapping of the Griff). But I remained intrigued by these ideas.
So, with all of this in mind, I finally got my hands on Stephen A. Brighton’s Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora, based around digs in the Five Points of Manhattan and in Newark, New Jersey. Using the archaeological evidence, Brighton constructs an argument centred on the material culture of 19th century Irish-American life in these two urban centres. Using this methodology, Brighton is able to answer a lot of questions we cannot answer using more traditional historical methodologies. Brighton has the remnants of the material culture of the Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans. Finding glasswares with symbols of Irish nationalism on them suggests that the movement had some traction amongst the tenement dwellers of the Five Points.
My favourite part of his analysis, though, comes in relation to medicine. The artefacts from the Five Points come from the 1850s and 60s, whereas those in the New Jersey digs are from the 1880s. In other words, the Five Points Irish were more recent arrivals and lived in greater poverty than those in New Jersey. Thus, their access to the nascent public health system was different than that of their compatriots in Jersey. Brighton found that the Five Points Irish relied more on cure-alls and pseudo-medical tonics to cure what ailed them. Throughout the dig site are bottles that once contained tonics and cures, whereas in New Jersey, the digs uncovered evidence of reputable medicines. This, concludes Brighton, is symptomatic of that poverty but also, too, perhaps of the alienation of mid-19th century Irish immigrants from the mainstream of American culture and society (remember, the 1850s also saw the Know-Nothing movement in the USA and the Bowery B’hoys Riot of 1857).
So what Brighton offers up here is a piece of evidence to support what historians already know from more traditional sources. And this brings me to my problem with Brighton’s book: it doesn’t add much in the way of new information to our historical knowledge. Rather than challenge historians’ traditional takes on the Irish in the Five Points (especially), Brighton confirms what we already knew with the archaeological evidence.
Montreal Mosaic
March 31, 2010 § Leave a comment
I have an article published on the Montreal Mosaic website on the Montréal Shamrocks Hockey Club, based on the article I published. You can read it here.
Positive Feedback
March 27, 2010 § Leave a comment
A few months ago, I published an article in a book edited by John Chi-Kit Wong of the University of Western Washington in Bellingham. The book was entitled, Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada to the Second World War (University of Toronto Press, 2009), and my article was entitled “‘Scientific Aggression’: Class, Manliness, Class, and Commercialisation in the Shamrock Hockey Club, Montreal.”
Today, John forwarded the authors a review of the book from the H-Arete listserv, which deals with sport history, written by Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Blake had this to say about my article:
A few chapters show a keen interest in narrative, examining individual newspaper reports and trends in sports reporting. In “‘Scientific Aggression’: Irishness, Manliness, Class, and Commercialization in the Shamrock Hockey Club of Montreal, 1894-1901,” John Matthew Barlow argues that reporters in Montreal “became less concerned with the idea of fair play” and “more interested with winning and losing” (37) long before the amateur debate died. In a special subsection, Barlow provides cogent Ð almost literary Ð readings of individual press accounts. Important, too, is his highlighting of how self-consciously the journalists created stories of games. Consider this 1900 pronouncement: “Narrative in the superlative can only convey an imperfect sense of the paragon of perfection and sensation detail of this, the last and premier exhibition of a week’s great hockey” (64). It’s a shame Aethlon was not around then.
Very nice to get such good feedback on my first publication.
The Young & The Expendable
March 13, 2010 § Leave a comment
Over at the Kings of War, Dave Betz has an interesting piece on the gender imbalance of children in many parts of Asia, based on an article from The Economist. Both Betz and The Economist bring up many issues and questions to ponder, but here I’d like to look at one, from an historical perspective. Betz ruminates on whether or not a surfeit of young men in a society (most particularly China) will lead to a rise of militarism in that culture and, ultimately, belligerance.
The Economist points out that “in any country rootless young males spell trouble.” Indeed. Society tends to be suspicious of young men in general. However, historically, there have been simple uses for such young men: the military or colonisation. Essentially, they were the cannon fodder, whether literally or figuratively. Societies never got too excited about their demise, either, at least not on the macro-level, there were always more where they came from.
The Ancient Greeks also found another use for rootless young men: they made excellent colonisers. So the Greek city-states would send out boatloads of young men, sending them across the Aegean Sea to Anatolia. Or up towards the Black Sea. If they were successful, and they established a colony, hey, great. Now there was a captive market for goods produced in the home city. If not, meh, so be it, there would be another boatload next year. This model was picked up again by Europeans in the Age of Expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Across North America, bachelor cultures emerged. For example, in the inland woods of New France, the coureurs de bois spent their time carting furs from the hinterland, where they traded with the aboriginals, back to the colonial centre, such as Montréal or Detroit. But out in the woods, these guys lived life hard. Their work was insanely physical, carting the furs and other goods in their canoes, over portages, in and out of the water, most of which was insanely cold, and rafting down rapids. Priests in the back country were both in awe of these men’s physical strength and stamina, and terrified of them. Probably for good reason.
Along with their intensely physical work, the coureurs had a bachelor culture that reflected their hard lives. They drank heavily, sang songs, engaged in all kinds of physical tests of strength and stamina, including wrestling, fighting (boxing hadn’t been invented yet), and various other events that would put MMA to shame. Colonial officials echoed the priests’ fear of them.
The West, in both Canada and the United States, was also another bachelor culture. And whilst Hollywood has over-dramatised the violence in the American West, Canadian historians have under-represented the violence of the Canadian West.
The bachelor culture of the Western frontier was not all that different than the coureurs 3 centuries earlier: heavy drinking, braggadacio, and contests to see how was the “best” man. The best man was usually the one who could drink the most, make the most money, was physically the strongest, or who had the best luck with the ladies.
Long and short, young men have historically been the most rambunctious segment of society. But historically, societies have found an outlet for their bored, rootless young men, whether as cannon fodder or as explorers/colonists. What happens to these young men in Asia is something, as Betz notes, for us all to ponder. It is clear the issues run deeper than just simply a gender imbalance and too many young men for the young women.
False Reporting
March 12, 2010 § Leave a comment
The CBC is declaring that a full 98% of Canadian family doctors have experienced abuse at the hands of their patients. Of that, 75% had suffered “major abuse,” and 40% had experienced “severe” abuse. This information comes from a report in the journal Canadian Family Physician. But a closer look reveals that this claim, that nearly all doctors have been abused, is close to bogus. The researchers randomly selected 3,802 family physicians across the country and then sent out a survey. Of those 3,802, only 774 responded, or 20.4%. So the results are based on a 20.4% response rate. A response rate that low comes close to negating the results, according to standards of social science research.
I haven’t read the original study, I’m responding to a media report of it. Could be that the report in the trade journal says something different. But the CBC is claiming that 98% of all family physicians in Canada have been abused. Balderdash. Here’s why: given that the survey was mailed out to doctor’s offices, that means that the doctors themselves had to take the initiative to fill it out and return it. And, certainly, those who did respond, this 20.4%, were mostly likely those who have an interest in the issue. In short, those who responded were those who had been affected by the issue, abuse.
Grandstanding like this on the part of the CBC is regrettable because it distracts from the larger issue, which is the fact that our doctors are being abused by their patients. That is an unacceptable situation. What is even more disturbing is that female doctors are more likely to suffer abuse from their patients than their male counterparts.
As our health system gets more and more overburdened, doctors and nurses, the front-line respondents, are the ones who take the brunt of the anger of their patients, frustrated by any number of reasons, from waiting lists to doctors being over-worked and unable to spend as much time as they’d like with their patients.
But the CBC obscures this with its fantastic claim that nearly every single doctor in the land has been abused in some, way, shape, or form by their patients. It’s kind of like when that cop at O.J. Simpson’s double-murder trial was found to have planted evidence at the scene of the crime. Over-reaching to make a point does nothing but detract from the issue at hand.
The Problem With Writing History
March 5, 2010 § Leave a comment
I just finished Orhan Pamuk’s brilliant novel, Snow. It tells the story of a hapless Turkish exile poet, Ka, who returns to Turkey from Frankfurt. Ka is a poet without poems. He’s not written one for years when he accepts an offer from a friend who edits a Republican newspaper in Istanbul to travel to the distant eastern city of Kars. In Kars, there has been a wave of suicides by young women wearing the hijab, which is seen as a challenge to the Turkish republic of Ataturk. They were expelled from their university studies for refusing to remove them. And so a group of them killed themselves. But nothing is at seems in Kars, and Ka is drawn into the city’s murky underside, in part due to a bizarre coup led by an actor, in part because he falls in love for the beautiful Ipek, in part because of the radical Islamist terrorist, Blue. Kars is a poor city, isolated, and caught in its place in history on the borderlands, caught between its Russian, Turkish, and Armenian pasts. And Kars is isolated during Ka’s visit, it’s snowed in. It’s a mountain city and all roads in and out, as well as the railroad, are blocked by heavy, heavy snow. This isolation has its own in-built tension between this forgotten borderlands city and the cosmopolitan capital of Turkey, Ankara, and its interntionalised largest city, Istanbul. This tension within Kars echoes that of the Turkey that Pamuk presents, between this Europeanised cosmopolitanism and traditional Turkish culture, to say nothing of Islamism. And Ka, as a westernised Turk living in exile in Germany, is a focal point for this tension.
Anyway, I don’t want to give away the plot, because if you’ve not read Snow, you should. It’s not for nothing that Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.
What I want to point to is a discussion the narrator of the novel has with an associate of Ka’s, Fazil, at the end of the book. The narrator, Pamuk himself, responds to Fazil’s early declaration that he can only write about him in the book Pamuk is writing on Ka’s visit to Kars if he agrees to include what Fazil wishes to say to Pamuk’s readers. He says this:
‘If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.’
‘But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, they do,’ he cried. ‘If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us.’
Fazil’s words have resonance for me as an historian. I study the working-classes, I study people by-and-large excluded from, or oppressed by, systems of power. The community I study is one that was an inner-city, working-class slum. The people who lived there, grew up there, they’ve escaped, moved up the social ladder. But that history is still there.
A few years ago, I was hired as a consultant by an advertising agency working on behalf of Devimco, the development company that was planning to radically re-build Griffintown. Devimco was trying to make its plans more palatable, so they hired this advertising agency, as well as a consultant, an American living in London. This consultant has done some impressive things with shopping malls across the UK and in places like Dubai. Anyway. He prepared a text for all of us to ponder for our 2-day summit on the future of the Griff. Basically, he wanted us to come up with a marketable narrative for Griffintown, which was why I was there; the historian. In this text, he wrote:
Griffintown represents the next generation in Montreal’s long history of bold waterfront stewardship. What makes it unique is that it restores the public’s access to the waterfront, making it home for a real community, instead of simply an industrial workforce.
Leaving aside the fact that Montréal actually has a long history of the opposite of “bold waterfront stewardship” (Autoroute Bonaventure, anyone? How about all those port facilities?), the part I’ve italicised, dismissing the former residents of the Griff as simply an industrial workforce really just echoes what Fazil says in Snow. This consultant is dismissing these real people, arguing that because they were the working-classes, they couldn’t have culture or community. We’re supposed to feel superior to them, we’re supposed to see ourselves as better than them.
This is something that plagues historical scholarship, going back to the days of Herodotus. Even despite E.P. Thompson’s entreaties to be fair to the working-class (or any other subaltern group, really), to “rescue them from the enormous condescension of posterity” (to quote from his masterful The Making of the English Working Class), it’s a hard road to hoe. Indeed, Thompson himself is partly to blame for this, by taking on this providential charge to “rescue” the working-classes. We shouldn’t do that, either.
Instead, what we strive to do is to take our subaltern, down-trodden, excluded, or what-have-you, people is to take them for what they are/were: people like us. This is hard to do, it is hard to be sensitive to our historical actors, to recognise them as multi-dimensional actors, with agency, just like us. Joy Parr helps us see that in her The Gender of Breadwinners, wherein she reminds us that the roles our historical actors play were not sequential, but simultaneous. We are many things at the same time, and so, too, were our historical actors.
This is something I think historians of the subaltern need to be reminded of regularly, it’s not something we can read in a book once and keep in mind when we’re actually doing our work. This point needs constant reinforcement. It’s easy to forget, really. For me, that Devimco session helped. So, too, does doing oral history. And so, too, has the reading of Snow. I must keep Fazil’s words in mind.
An Episode in the Life of a Diasporic City
February 5, 2010 § Leave a comment
Montréal is a city of literature. It has been the home of many great novelists, both of Canadian and international reknown. It is also a city that has been the setting of many novels, bestsellers at home and abroad. For years, I lived in the neighbourhood that was the setting of Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion, Saint-Henri. Prior to that, I called Duddy Kravitz’s Mile End home. Presently, I call the setting of Balconville home. The Plateau-Mont-Royal has been immortalised by the likes of Michel Tremblay, Mordecai Richler, and Rawi Hage. One of the best academic reads of recent years was Sherry Simon’s Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Simon explores the cultural and social history of her Montréal through the literature, in both official languages, that depict the city’s multicultural landscape and lived experience.
Montréal’s literary authors, to say nothing of Simon herself, have projected and reflected the experience of immigrant groups and their diasporas through their works. It was from Richler’s works that I learned so much of the Jewish experience of Montréal, that I came to understand the city as a Jewish one. Indeed, Richler was instrumental in re-casting Montréal as something more than just a bifurcated locale, a city caught between French and English, in that he inserted the city’s Jews into the dialogue, his writing maturing with the city throughout the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Today, however, in trying to find a bowl of matzoh ball soup, I was kind of stunned by just how much Richler’s Montréal has changed. As I wandered through the city’s downtown core, both searching for the soup and running a handful of other errands, I got to thinking about not just how diasporas inform and reflect off each other, but also how diasporas evolve, shift, and replace one another. This was especially true, I thought, in a 5-block section of downtown just west of Concordia’s downtown campus. In this stretch, there are, amongst other things, a German restaurant that has been there for most of my life, as well as newer Russian, Indian, Iranian, Lebanese, Irish, Armenian, Mexican, Central American, Chinese, and Thai restaurants. And not a single place that served matzoh ball soup. During Richler’s years studying at Sir George Williams University, one of the founding institutions of Con U, I’m sure matzoh ball soup could be found in the vicinity of the campus. Of course, one would not have found the plethora of “ethnic” food (the term is in quotations because it is such an unsatisfactory one to use in this instance).
This is neither a lament nor a complaint, I eventually found the matzoh ball soup at Dunn’s, an old Jewish deli, on Metcalfe. It just is what it is, an episode in the life of multicultural, diasporic city.
Matthew Barlow 