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Refugees

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I happened to finally reach Alison DeLory’s Making It Home in The Pile right before three exciting developments for this book (and author):

  1. It got shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize .
  2. It became the latest selection for the Nimbus and Vagrant Book Club.
  3. It’s the featured eBook this week for our campaign with Nova Scotia’s public libraries, Stay Home Read Atlantic.

I finished reading recently enough that I can give it the ole “live-blog” treatment here.

Premise:

There are three parallel, linked plot lines/settings:

  1. Young Cape Bretoner Charlie is working in the Alberta tar sands and struggling with addiction issues. His girlfriend Nell initially helps him through it, but in the process starts feeling at home in Alberta.
  2. In Cape Breton, Charlie’s grandparents, Tinker and Flo, learn they have another grandson, Charlie’s half-brother, and Flo starts fundraising with the church to sponsor a family of Syrian refugees.
  3. Amira, Sami and their children reluctantly flee their Syrian home, adapting to a difficult life in a Turkish refugee camp, hoping for the opportunity to immigrate to a permanent home.

Reading Speed: DeLory’s writing is straightforward, active and engaging. The mounting tension in each story line makes the novel a literary page turner. For me it was a quick read, despite not being light in subject and theme.

Format: From a hard Advanced Reading Copy.

Accompanying Music: Although it’s about Halifax, which is barely mentioned in the book, I’m going with “Love This Town” by Joel Plaskett. It beautifully evokes the longing-for-home theme of the book.

Show-stopping quotations:

…all they needed were breast milk and love to thrive.

There are other excellent sentences in this book, but this one above all had me scrambling for a highlighter. It puts things into perspective. Could a single line say any more about humanity than that?

Insights:

In fact, the entire story line from which the above quotation is from–Amira, Sami and their children in the refugee camp–really put things into perspective for me.

More than a decade ago, while working at a newspaper in Ghana, I wrote a story about the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, which is home to more than 12,000 Liberian refugees who fled civil war, though many were born in the camp. My story focused on a dozen local chiefs, each of whom represented a warring group back in Liberia. They met weekly, like a city council, to talk about peace and community building for the miniature city their people had created in a new country.

It was positive, what they were doing, much like Sami’s efforts to doctor the sick in the Turkish camp featured in Making It Home. But they, and Sami, duty-bound, were making the best out of an unfathomably difficult situation; their true homes had been quite literally destroyed. There was nothing to go back to. Survival, and hope for a better future, was all that was left.

Of course that got me thinking about our current situation, in which essential workers must take significant risks. The rest of us simply must stay home. None of it is easy, and I don’t mean to downplay the impacts that feeling under virtual house arrest can have, the extreme stress it sometimes causes, the mental-health fallout. But reading Making It Home refreshed my gratitude that I have a home where I can stay, and that I am with people who love me.

DeLory plots her debut novel perfectly, incorporating remarkably diverse perspectives seamlessly, balancing different cultural and gendered perspectives, and bringing the stories together for an ending in which every character shares, in their own way, that same refreshed appreciation for home.

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“You are loved, he told the baby each night. You are so loved.”

These are Mahindan’s words to his son, Sellian. But Mahindan’s words resonate further as regards contemporary cultural oscillations toward the global migrant crisis.

Sharon Bala’s debut novel, The Boat People, draws us into a Catullan odi et amo—“I hate and I love”—with 503 Sri Lankan refugees who precariously reached the shores of British Columbia in 2010.

Walking home from my local grocer here in what I make a dim shot at calling home—Toronto—I stopped at an intersection and read the crimson ink, blaring and bleeding on the cover of the Toronto Star: “A skyrocketing backlog is pushing the wait time for refugee hearings dramatically beyond the federally stipulated 60 days, with recent asylum seekers now waiting 16 months to have their claims determined.” That was today, September 21, 2017.

Sri Lanka. Canada. Norway. We’ve been here before. Michael Ondaatje’s interstitial shudders between the ‘east’ and the ‘west’—conjoined with Somerset Maugham’s geographies of the heart—this is the company in which I place Bala. She is brisk, bracing and astonishingly prescient. Nothing in this novel is free. There are no dialogical quotation marks. The heuristic effort is mercilessly placed upon the reader in a manner that is effortlessly Teiresian. Bala has done that rare thing fiction can do: forecast the future. All the more remarkable, as each day’s news pounds the ears, Bala is completely without fuss about her apparent prescience.

The Boat People will—and should, on the grounds of what Lionel Trilling called in his essay of the same name “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent”—linger long in the mind as an almost Graham-Greene-esque thriller about Canada’s Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Homeric in her narrative arc, Bala’s novel is rhetorically purposive—but poetically, softly rhetorical. One wonders whether this book could, like the late Derek Walcott’s Omeros, have been composed in verse after all. Read aloud, a poet cannot but hear Bala’s tri-colon crescendos interspersed with now melodious, now dissonant slant rhymes.

Mahindan’s arrival in British Columbia begets a new departure, as does, of course, Odysseus’ return to Ithaca in the Homeric Odyssey. Like Odysseus, the subsequent journey is not nautical but terrestrial. Like Odysseus, Mahindan has a “fighter from afar”—a not implausible etymology for “Telemachus”—in the form of his son, Sellian. Indeed, “arriving was just the beginning,” as Bala tells us. Mahindan’s “optimism dimmed at the prospect of another journey ahead.” Odysseus, upon returning home to Ithaca at the putative epic end of the Odyssey, must set out again—not outland by sea, but inland. So refined is Bala’s prosopography that one cannot but pause at the city whence Mahindan has arrived toward another (Homeric) journey: Kilinochchi: I cannot but hear the words kill and on in that city’s name.

In Canada, it is “left-wingers who let feelings [sic] undermine common sense,” according to Bala’s villainous Fred Blair, an MP whose CV ostensibly consists in border patrol and not much else. An imperious, flat-track bully, Blair’s character is perhaps this novel’s only flaw: his every decision is painfully predictable.

A newspaper calls the boat—“sensationally”—some semblance of a “ship of dreams.” We are accustomed, these days, to so much blustering against DACA and Dreamers, and demented talk of walls. And so the words of Bala’s Fred Blair: “those terrorists dream big.”

Bala is ahead by a century in the cricket score of politically powerful contemporary fiction. She has seen rhetorically post-Brexit, post-Trump, possibly post-NAFTA, bombast from a country miles away.

The heart of the matter, to return to Graham Greene (and to cricket), is the moral equivalency whereby Bala bowls us leg before wicket. We are still reeling from Norway’s, and others’ stupid adventures in Sri Lanka. We are still warbling in the wake of post-colonial chaos that has therefrom obtained. But, Canadians? “They’re no better than the Sinhalese.” Moral equivalency, again.

Sure, “Ganesha is okay” among the metaphysically migrated bric-a-brac brought on The Boat. Why Ganesha, though?

“Just don’t think about it.” But what then?

“And it will go.” What then?

This is what we migrants will always wonder. What, then, when we let it go?

The Boat People
Sharon Bala
McClelland & Stewart