creative forces

Blog # 51…November 2015

"You only leave home when home won’t let you stay.”  from Warsan Shire’s poem, Home.

Images and statistics detailing our world’s shifting population are flooding our hearts and minds these days.  The shocking contrast they make to the comfort and ease of our lives in Canada leaves me unsettled and feeling helpless. Very often, reading fiction helps me make sense of the world; a good writer can explore situations that engage me in my own exploration.  Occasionally a character will have an experience that resonates with my own, or, although the setting and events may be totally foreign to me, the universality of the emotions touches and engages me. We all see the same stars in the sky and smell the same freshness after a rain, even if there's the sound of gunfire in the distance.

I've just finished Lawrence Hill’s, The Illegal, a case in point.  It’s the story of a marathon runner in a fictional location in the Indian Ocean who has to flee his country and lives on the run (so to speak). Hill used details from his long history as a runner, from a job he once had at Pearson Airport, and from time spent in Berlin when he met many refugees from Sudan.  Keita, the runner, is a complex black man with strengths and weaknesses - both physical and emotional.  The secondary characters are lively, believable and struggle with issues that we recognize easily. An old white woman who's facing the loss of her independence welcomes Keita into her home and a sympathetic Immigration Minister is caught up in corruption.  A black woman whose money and power in the refugee ghetto allow her to both support and exploit them manages somehow to be likeable.. The story is set in 2018 and, since the book just came out a few months ago, it seems eerily clairvoyant.

I’m about to read two other books about refugee experiences as I’m  preparing (as part of a neighbourhood group)  to welcome a migrant individual or family to Toronto and support them for a year...daunting!.  It’s early days but I’ll track our progress in a postscript to future blogs.

Tasneem Jamal is the daughter of refugees expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in the early 70’s. The characters in Where the Air is Sweet are fictionalized but bear similarities to real people; their stories are blended to present a variety of points of view.  She tells us how people felt and responded to events rather than focusing on the events themselves. Amin had the misguided notion that the success of the Asians in business and commerce threatened native Ugandans - their loss, Canada's gain.  

Kim Thuy came from Viet Nam the in the late 70’sas one of the boat people.  In Ru she describes her own experiences as a  child,, uprooted from her home and landed in a strange place (Canada in winter).  It's a particularly moving story since a large portion of the migrants these days are children…30 million worldwide. Another line from Home “No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”

In her Massey lectures Margaret McMillan spoke of the freedom that fiction offers to interpret historical events in a personal way that we can feel and understand.  We’re all humans, sharing the planet, our share largely dependent on where we're born … we've got a larger share than we really need and I hope we can do something to even things out.