Kunstlerroman

            On Tuesday morning I woke up from my first decent night’s sleep since the time change. 

            I memorized verses three and four of “A la pêche des coeurs" (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian. 

            I worked out the chords for the verses and chorus of “Sparadrap" by Serge Gainsbourg. There's really just the bridge and the instrumental parts left. 

            At just before 11:00 I logged on for my Introduction to Canadian Literature lecture. Professor Kamboureli continued with her talk on diaspora. Diaspora is voluntary or involuntary displacement marked by the trauma of loss. Its tropes are nostalgia and return. Return is often manifested in a fantasy about the lost place invoked by cultural celebrations and feats. Sometimes the return is actual but that is also accompanied by the trauma of loss because the place is not the same as remembered. Black writing in Canada. The black diaspora by roots and routes. The collective memory of the slave trade’s middle passage on the slave ships. Death on the boats from violence, suicide or disease. Diaspora is shaped by the receded memory of elsewhereness. 

            We looked at the opening passage of David Chariandy’s Brother in which the older brother Francis is teaching the younger brother to climb a hydro pole. I said that it reflects Francis’s whole life. He is a risk taker with an urge to be at the top of this world he cannot leave. He has a death wish.

            Francis’s urge to “memory right" in the moment reminds me of the idea of self remembering towards self awareness that I learned in Gurdjieff studies. 

            The novel Brother is against and through the tradition of white suburban fiction. 

            Donald Trump asked white suburban women to love him because he will keep low income housing out of their neighbourhoods. Essentially that means he will keep black people away. 

            Brother’s Scarborough is one of multicultural ethnic enclaves, criminality, a dystopian landscape of neighbourhood crime scenes. 

            Aisha is the only character who leaves but she comes back. She is diasporic. She becomes an agent of change. 

            The spatial structure is limited to Scarborough. Desirea’s barber shop is important. 

            The temporality is tied up with mourning. Aisha unfolds time backwards and forwards when she returns. Memory and trauma are interrelated. 

            The Rouge Valley is the biggest urban park in North America. That’s only been true since 2019 when Toronto transferred 18.5 square kilometres of land to the already existing national park. The Rouge serves as a refuge and sanctuary in the novel. 

            Chariandy says it is not nature and the professor thinks it’s because it's the site of a former Seneca village called Ganatsekwyagon at Bead Hill. There was farming practised there as well. But that site is less than 400 years old and this is not really Seneca territory. The Seneca moved up here for the fur trade. This was much longer Huron-Wendat territory before they moved up to Georgian Bay. There's also the fact that the Seneca, like other members of the Iroquois league had a tendency to settle in larger villages over longer times than the traditional occupants of this area and they named them. The Huron-Wendat and the Ojibwa never stayed anywhere for that long and they tended to only group with not more than four tepees at a time. I think the main reason Chariandy said it wasn’t nature was because there was so much urban garbage dumped there. 

            Desirea’s barbershop was Dru's. Clients were not welcome. They had their own world and a different economy. Money changed hands but not like in a normal business.

            I said it was a hybrid culture that housed the hybrid hip hop art produced by Jelly. 

            The relationality transcends racial and ethnic divisions. It is literally a multicultural counterculture. The small space reflects restricted mobility but where agency is encouraged. 

            We took a break. 

            Why is Michael the narrator? He is a witness and mediator on the inside and outside. Narrators who tell their own story tend to be unreliable. The first person narrative helps to come to terms with grief. Telling is healing. Aisha is the catalyst for this. She has critical distance. 

            You feel “it”. You spot the threat. “It” is exposed. It embodies lost opportunity and physical and emotional violence, abjection. Internalized race. “It” is unspecified but it takes shape. 

            Michael has no social life. He repels the outside. 

            The professor sees racialization everywhere but it seems to me this novel could have been written in a different culture and a different location like a ghetto in Iceland or Poland. Poor people get hassled by the cops everywhere. The only difference would be that the cops don’t carry guns in places like Iceland and so they have less opportunity to kill poor people. 

            Remembering becomes healing. The story goes backward and forward in time, crisscrossing spaces. 

            Michael withdraws and is overprotective of his mother. Mourning is disabling unless one engages with it. Trauma grants the narrative its structural and formal elements. He is repressed and has lost his memory. He needs to come to terms with the materiality of it. Michael’s mother Ruth is numb, uncommunicative and detached. They need to share in collective kinship and relationality. 

            I asked her to provide an example of a white suburban novel, since she’d several times contrasted Brother with that genre but without offering anything specific with which to make a comparison. She drew a blank at first but then said Generation X though she couldn’t remember that the author was Douglas Coupland until someone texted the name. Someone else said The Virgin Suicides is an example. White suburbs are more protected. 

            She said Brother is a black bildungsroman. A bildungsroman is a novel that focuses on the development and education of a character from childhood to adulthood. It’s a coming of age story covering psychological and moral growth. It’s the process of the formation of a mature subject. It’s personal but symbolically social to tell the reader how to change the world. 

            A kunstlerroman differs in that the subject grows into an artist. The artist figure becomes a spokesperson for their community. 

            Carding curtails social freedom. Carding is the Community Contacts Policy in Toronto. It involves information gathering by stopping and questioning people who have done nothing wrong. 

            She says for white people it’s more about individuals while for black people it’s more about community. I guess that’s just because they have less privilege and so there is more strength in community. 

            Jelly is Djeli, a Griot or storyteller. I said Jelly gels things like culture together and jelly can be food, medicine and a conductor for electricity. 

            Jelly is a genius about flow. Mixing one era with another. He is a hip hop kunstlerroman. I don't think this is true. To be kunsterroman Jelly would have to develop into an artist during the novel. His artistic development was pretty much complete from the start. She says he represents the artist and challenges the existing narratives of the music industry and cultural paradigms. Black cultural language in youth culture. Turntableish. Non linear. He deconstructs. 

            I mentioned an interview with Chariandy in which he says that he got a play list from a DJ for most of the music in the novel but that he added Nina Simone on his own. She said she knows that interview and will talk about it next time. 

            I had chips with crushed tomatoes with onion and garlic, scotch bonnet sauce and yogourt for lunch. 

            In the afternoon I typed my lecture notes and finished a little after 18:30.

            I looked at the topics for my second short response essay for British Literature and decided to compare the similes in two stanzas of The Faerie Queen, but I have to reread a lot of the poem to figure out which two would most inspire me. I read the first forty stanzas before dinner. 

            I had three little potatoes, a slice of ham and gravy while watching Interpol Calling. 

            In this story a woman named Jane travelling on a yacht called the Susan with two men named George and Sid discovers that her shipmates are criminals transporting stolen jewels. They are docked on a canal in the French town of St André. Jane tells Sid what she’s found out and she says she's leaving. Sid tries to stop her but she backs off the boat and drowns. Meanwhile by coincidence the ship on which Duval has been travelling back to Paris has engine trouble and has to stop for repairs in St André. The mechanic tells him it will take four hours. He goes to the police station to use the phone and sees that they’ve fished Jane's body from the canal and assume it's suicide. In her pocket is a lump of shiny metal which Duval informs them is platinum. Duval says if there is anything unusual about a suicide then it probably isn't. Sid and George had been scheduled to rendezvous with Captain Blink who was to take the stolen jewels to Amsterdam. But since Sid and George were late Blink had to sabotage his engine by putting sand in it in order to buy time. The local police ask for Duval’s help. Duval looks at the info on all of the boats that are docked and sees that the odd man out is Blink. The papers show he passes through every month and this is the first time he’s ever stopped. The mechanic had pointed out Blink’s engine and said it had sand in it but an experienced barge captain wouldn’t get sand in his fuel pump. Duval sneaks onto Blink's barge but gets caught snooping. When Blink finds out he’s Interpol he plays it cool. Duval finds it odd that he is not angry about sand in his fuel pump. Duval learns that there had been a major jewel theft in Cannes the amount of time ago that the Susan could have travelled to St André. Duval figures they must be transferring the jewels to Blink's barge to take to Amsterdam. Duval borrows some jewels from a local jeweller and brings them to George, Sid and Blink. Sid and George think he’s found the jewels and George accuses Sid of ratting. Blink knows it’s a trick. Blink pulls a gun but the police arrive and arrest them all.