I finished posting my translation of “Tennisman" by Serge Gainsbourg and memorized the first verse of his song "Sparadrap" (Plasterwrap).
Now that the heat is on I’ll need to start humidifying my guitar soon. The hygrometer was below 45 this morning.
At 11:00 I logged on for my Introduction to Canadian Literature lecture.
Professor Kamboureli was having technical issues before the TA joined the chat and helped her.
The marks for our close reading essay have been posted.
The professor’s place is still under construction. They are building a built in bookshelf for her study and she barely has a kitchen right now.
We started the lecture a minute early.
We still have a week’s grace for our next assignment but she urged us to try to avoid taking advantage of it because it causes complications in the marking procedure.
She has uploaded some background files on black writing in Canada, her own essay of diaspora and an article about language and grammar for essays. They are optional reading.
Multiculturalism enables and disables. Scholars have and continue to analyze it as a nation statement. The assessment between them for or against is about fifty fifty.
In the story “Squatter" the critique of multiculturalism comes from outside. The narrator does not know Canada. His critical distance adds to the irony. It helps to situate the story inside of colonialism. The fact that the story is told inside of a Parsi compound in India adds to the effect. Nariman is talking to children and so there is a pedagogical context and a moral.
In Mistry’s story collection there are stories about the other children. Jehangir is aware of the structural elements of Nariman's stories.
Nariman is hybridized in his use of language and other elements.
There are lingering consequences of colonization.
Postcolonialism exists because the lingering effects of colonialism persist.
Savakshaw is searching for happiness by being extremely successful in different pursuits, but success is not enough.
Sarosh changes his name to Sid in Canada.
I said that I’ve met a lot of people that have changed their names, not because it was expected of them but because they were annoyed by the difficulties that other people had pronouncing them. A friend of mine named Ibrahim wanted people to call him Brian and another friend named Naama settled on Naomi just because they found it simplified their lives.
In the adaptation process one loses something of the self when one changes their name.
A young woman suggested that there is sometimes freedom in changing one's name because one makes the choice independent of the name imposed by their parents.
The professor told a story about when she was teaching at the University of Victoria people thought that her first name must be Smara because Smaro sounded too masculine.
Erasure works both ways.
Someone said that a friend of his named Mustafa couldn’t get a job but after he changed it he had ten offers.
Canada’s multicultural policy doesn't change a lot of this. It helps to cover up issues with fake benevolence.
Sarosh’s "malodorous" problem of expression. The body becomes the site for playing out cultural differences. Being unable to swallow Wonder Bread. Digestion is tied with assimilation.
There is a reference in the story to eating cake instead of bread which evokes the famous story about Marie Antoinette supposedly having said “Let them eat cake if they have no bread." A student asked, "Isn't that a myth?" The professor said that it doesn't matter if she really said it.
Food marks cultural differences.
The Professor is Greek but says she hates the annual Greek festival.
The grammar of food provides insights into the immigrant experience. Food becomes metonymy.
Metonymy uses one attribute or entity as an expression of a related one. Fishing for pearls is metonymy while fishing for information is a metaphor. This dish is delicious is metonymy. The crown for the queen is metonymy. Suits for businessmen.
In the story Sarosh is told that every immigrant ethnic group develops a different malady.
Multiculturism is called a Canadian invention.
The “Crappus non interruptus" device.
The diasporic experience is one of in betweenness.
Nariman says his story is sad and instructive.
A “squatter” can also be a homeless settler.
When Sarosh returned home everything had changed and so he was still in between.
“Unhomeliness” is a phrase coined by Homi Bhabha.
Immigrants are accountable to both their home and their host land.
I said that even without the absurd scatological metaphor the idea of expecting to assimilate as a first generation Canadian is unrealistic. If one spent one’s formative years elsewhere then one can't really fully shake the culture in which one was raised.
The professor seemed to both agree and disagree. She said she came to North America when she was twenty and she feels she is adjusted as a Canadian. Her mother tells her she is not Greek anymore. But she agrees in the sense that her first years in Canada were formative because she was studying.
When she came to the prairies she felt overwhelmed but came to love them. She says prairie literature about the vertical man in a horizontal world has helped to shape the literature of Canada.
With all this criticism of multiculturism I don’t hear a lot of suggestions for improvement. Canada is ranked the number one best place to immigrate. There doesn’t seem to be a country that handles multiculturalism better than Canada. Obviously there is room for improvement but I’d rather hear the suggestions than the criticisms. It's like watching the best juggler in the world and heckling her.
We took a break.
When we returned we talked about black writing in Canada.
Austin Clarke was the first important black writer in Canada. He shaped the tradition and helped young black writers move up.
Black writing is not a singular experience. It is as rich as that of any other tradition. It engages with the Canadian imaginary. Canada’s putative benevolence. Black writing deconstructs benevolence.
She has uploaded a document by Phanuel Antwid and David Chariandy.
One Out of Many is a collection of writings by black women in Ontario.
Canada In Us Now is the first anthology of black poetry and prose in Canada.
Some black writers cultivated the myth of a racism free Canada, such as Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frederick Douglas and even Martin Luther King Jr.
There was slavery in Canada, mob violence against blacks, the KKK, segregation and not renting to blacks.
The character Dot in Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Place calls Canada blasted cruel.
In the late fifties and early sixties there were shifts in immigration when black people were allowed in to take jobs as domestics and porters.
The “Roots” approach does not just look at the migration patterns from the fifties on but at the actual presence of black people in Canada from the beginning. George Elliot Clarke, Karina Vernon, Winifried Siemerling, and Wayde Compton have all written on this. Roots emphasizes transnational migration in all periods.
Many black immigrants to Canada have already had the diasporic experience.
The middle passage is one of three legs of the slave trade. The triangular pattern involved ships from Europe to Africa trading goods for slaves, taking them to America in exchange for goods and bringing the goods back to Europe. The crossing took between five weeks and three months.
Diaspora means to scatter, to disseminate. It is the experience of living away from one’s home country by trauma or by migration. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary diaspora is not strong anymore.
Collectivity – ethnic group consciousness, collective memory about origins. Idealizing home and remembering only good things. Nostalgia for a place that would not necessarily be the same if one went back.
Diaspora is a condition induced by trauma of loss. The loss and the trauma linger. The haunting is integral to the diasporic consciousness. Retaining language. Elsewhereness. The binary between the host land and the homeland is problematic. The word “host land" makes immigrants into guests and others. Diaspora in host land.
We started looking at David Chariandy’s Brother. Chariandy wrote the first novels that wrote Scarborough into the Canadian landscape. He reverses and deconstructs the existing aesthetic and socio-cultural paradigms of Canadian literature.
Jelly is a black artist but as a DJ and not a writer or painter or musician.
Chariandy’s most recent book is I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter, published in 2018. He works against and through the tradition of white suburban fiction.
She said she’ll talk about the white diaspora next.
She didn't finish the slides.
After the lecture I went online to check my essay mark and I was shocked that I got 70%. I went through all of my essay marks since I started at U of T and this B minus is the lowest mark I've had since the C plus I got for my first essay in Academic Bridging. It seems to me an unfair assessment since I know I've gotten a lot better at this over twelve years of writing papers. This was a very depressing result.
I emailed Professor Kamboureli and asked her to take a second look at my essay. She got back to me and said she’d look at it before the end of the week. I sure hope I got a better mark for British Literature.
I had chips and salsa with yogourt for lunch.
After a siesta I spent the rest of the day typing my Canadian Literature lecture notes and finished just before dinner.
I had two small potatoes and the last of my roast beef with gravy while watching Interpol Calling.
This story takes place in Canada where Duval is attending a conference in Montreal. He has made friends with a Mountie named McPherson who introduces him to his sister Blanche and her fiancé Vic LeRoy. Duval is convinced that LeRoy is a killer named Fuger who escaped from him in France twenty years before. He says Fugere has a tattoo on his right arm but LeRoy seems to have an artificial right arm. McPherson thinks Duval is way off the mark since LeRoy is one of the most successful businessmen in Montreal. Duval has dinner with the three and "accidentally" spills hot coffee on LeRoy’s right arm to see if it is really missing. It is. Duval tries to look into LeRoy’s past by checking newspaper records for LeRoy’s history as a businessman but nothing shows up before 1940. Vic said that he lost his arm in an accident while working for the Ajax Lumber Company. Duval goes to check the camp but LeRoy’s record has been torn out. As Duval is leaving LeRoy tries to run Duval over with a truck and although Duval didn’t see the driver he is sure it was LeRoy. Duval has sustained a mild injury and so is treated at the local hospital. He gets the doctor to check the hospital’s records on removing a limb twenty years before. I'm pretty sure that a hospital would not breach the Hippocratic oath and look up patient records even for the police. But it is found that LeRoy had to have his arm amputated because of a botched attempt to remove a tattoo. Duval goes to try to find the tattoo artist that did the work but finds him dead. McPherson is convinced now. They go to Vic’s hunting lodge and confront him. The tattoo artist’s neck has marks that can be traced to Vic's artificial hand. Vic runs to the woods with his rifle but Duval separates from McPherson while holding a string. He ties his end to something in the bushes and has McPherson pull it towards him. While LeRoy is shooting at the movement Duval gets behind him and after a fight he is captured.
Blanche was played by Paula Byrne, who played Nurse Frances Whitney in the British TV series “Emergency Ward 10". Later she opened a slimming clinic for women only.
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