Review: Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

I’ve read a few other books by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and loved them. This Accident of Being Lost and Islands of Decolonial Love are collections of short stories and poems that explore different aspects of connection, love and belonging from an indigenous perspective. These works showcase a writing style that is deeply personal, beautiful in its emotional intensity and particularity.

In The Theory of Water, Simpson leaves the realm of fiction and poetry to speak more overtly politically. While I found this premise interesting, I felt flat-footed: despite the title, this book is not a work of political or philosophical theory but a personal memoir. Simpson looks back on the process of grieving the loss of Doug Williams, an Elder and friend who guided her in reconnecting with ancestral knowledge. When writing figuratively — such as in her metaphor of sintering, that joining and mutual transformation of snowflakes that could form a basis for radical communal movement — Simpson’s prose is evocative and compelling, even in this non-fictional form.

However, her engagement with political theory left me disappointed. Works seemed haphazardly referenced, and were summarized subjectively: I recently read X and it made me think of Y. Her approving references to Gramsci and Aimé Césaire appeared carefully worded to give the impression they were opponents of communism, rather than committed communists with specific disagreements with specific communist parties. Her epistemology was also too irrationalist for my tastes (“Cyclical time comes from land. Linear time is a European construct that overlays cyclical time — a mechanism to organize the world in a homogeneous way to facilitate, of course, capitalism.”) Still, I found it interesting to see how she incorporated radical Black authors like Cedric Robinson into her vision for the radical indigenous movement.

Perhaps if I had gone into the book expecting a memoir, I would have appreciated it more for what it was than been disappointed for it not being what I wished for.

Review: Survival by Margaret Atwood

Writing in the 1970s, Atwood surveys Canadian literature and identifies a few of its central themes and tendencies. In doing so, she helped bring self-consciousness to the literature of this frigid, confused, often-violent child of Britain, nudging it toward a distinct national identity.

Atwood identifies “survival” as the idea coursing through Canadian literature (in contrast to the US’s “frontier” and England’s “island”): survival against Mother-Nature-the-Monster (having discovered that Canada’s natural bounty was nothing like the idyll pictured from the shores of England), survival against the dominance of its southern neighbour, survival of the francophones in a sea of anglophones.

Survival is precarious in these works. Most of its characters succumb to some travesty or other. Atwood attributes this pessimism to a victimization complex, which she breaks down into four stages: denial of victimhood, resignation to the inescapability of victimhood, belief in the possibility of overcoming victimhood, and some fourth stage of transcendence (more of a theoretical possibility than something typically achieved, in reality or in literature). Most Canadian literature lingers in the second phase.

The book is well-structured; each chapter investigates a particular facet (nature, animals, settlers and immigrants, family, women, francophones, artists, death, failure), critiquing poems and novels that touch on these topics or motifs. Each chapter comes with a shortlist of 3-4 key works and a longlist of perhaps a dozen referenced works. Atwood’s writing is colourful, wry, and incisive, and her tour through CanLit is well-paced and enjoyable.

Having surveyed the previous century or so of writing, the work is now over half a century old. It was highly influential in shaping Canadian literary criticism, and thus the Canadian publishing industry broadly. It is therefore undoubtedly dated. I thought this was particularly true of the chapter on artists: with the advent of CanCon laws and funding for the arts (not to mention self-consciousness as a nation or the ease of distributing media across the globe), the lack of audience is no longer so existential for Canadian artists. Canada has also changed. Now several generations later, our identities as and associations with settlers and immigrants have shifted. Indigenous literature was absent from Atwood's investigation due to its near-total exclusion from the publishing industry. A modern revision would presumably investigate ideas of indigeneity and settler-colonialism founded on Indigenous literature that has since made it to print.

Still, I found it very easy to see themes of survival and the ways it ripples through other topics in many of the Canadian works I have read lately. Ducks is all about survival in the bleak capitalism and soul-crushing misogyny of the oil sands, first as a bare survival but then transitioning to an insistence on thriving and overcoming victimhood. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic narrative; survival means navigating a sparse and hostile world to find meaning in life. Study for Obedience picks up on many of the family themes Atwood discusses, with the brother taking the position of domineering patriarch. To this protagonist, survival means finding a way to coexist as a Jewish woman and an immigrant with the backwards villagers.

This is, obviously, a book about Canadian Literature from front-to-back. But I think it holds interest outside that narrow scope too. By honing in on this niche, Atwood demonstrates the value — or even the necessity — of literary critique and literature for developing a cohesive community identity. This work therefore may be of interest for someone hoping to develop other national or political identities. Second, although dated, Atwood hits upon some very persistent aspects of the Canadian identity. Those interested in learning who Canada really is, or taking a good look at themselves in the mirror, may also wish to pick it up.

Review: Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

“You should listen to me,” is the implicit argument being made by a narrator to the reader, especially a narrator who speaks as intimately and as conscious of the reader as the one in Study for Obedience. “Why?” is the natural question for the reader to ask back, and this question drew me through the first couple chapters. The narrator’s story-telling — a mix of far too much detail mixed with vague handwaving or elided rationale — quickly clued me in to her unreliability, but what story was she trying to tell me, and what really happened?

For a little while, I thought the narrator was like Amy, from Gone Girl, making herself out to be the perfect victim, while secretly carrying out a nefarious plot. The narrator is so meek, so self-deprecating, so unworthy of interest that I thought for sure it was a cover. But this aspect of her nature seems indeed to be true. The narrator is a victim of abuse, raised to serve her older siblings. She may also have been sexually assaulted (in a characteristic linguistic loophole, she tells us that there had been “no assault that had been reported, investigated, and brought to trial”). Now middle-aged, she leaves her life in the city to be a house-keeper for her brother in a tiny, traditional, rural village. She finds ways to make her devotion to her brother a matter of exercising her own agency. It’s a character and setting alien to me: very conservative, hierarchical, punishing, sexist, and so internalized that the character sees virtue in the ways she subsumes herself to these values.

The narrator is Jewish, although that word and its cognates never appear. Her identity can be pieced together from the stereotypes others apply to her and from the shape of the vague history she tells of her ancestors (“an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits.”), who fled the land in which she now lives during the Holocaust. She shares the grinding loneliness and fear of moving through the world as a Jewish woman. The villagers treat her as an outsider, no matter how much she tries to integrate. They accuse her of witchcraft, responsible for the many strange events that occurred after her arrival.

But the reader has to wonder about the actual cause of all these events. The narrator emphasizes to us the improbability of so many rare events coinciding:

Accepting that my arrival had coincided with the madness and necessary extermination of the cows, the demise of the ewe and her nearly born lamb, the dog’s phantom pregnancy, the containment of domestic fowl, a potato blight which I have so far neglected to mention – acknowledging that all these events had occurred in quick succession more or less upon my arrival in the place, and admitting that not one of these things had happened singly in recent memory, that the town and surrounding areas had actually lived through a blessed and prosperous fifty years, and that these unfortunate events had still less ever, in recorded history, happened simultaneously – granting all this, yes, still, it was difficult for me to accept the bad feeling of the townspeople.

There is also the unignorable fact that the narrator — for motives she does not reveal to us — wove together “herbs and grasses I knew so well by sight though not by name” into “shapes of some significance to me”, and then dropped them off in the middle of the night to select locations in the village, murmuring “quiet words of devotion” and then nervously waited for the effects to take place. The narrator’s value system is far from sympathetic. She works without scruples for a corporate law firm set on ruining the environment and the lives of those who try to protect it. She sides with her brother against the employees who accuse him of sexual harassment. Are her beliefs just the result of her childhood conditioning, unquestioning service to those higher up the hierarchy? Or is she a bad person?

 At this point, we should consider the epigraph the author chose for the novel: “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.” Now the reader is placed in a predicament: is the narrator innocent of all the strange occurrences, merely a worn-down victim of abuse, obedient to a fault, mistreated by her antisemitic neighbours? If so, how do we explain these strange events and the narrator’s woven dolls? Or, is the narrator murderous? Did she cause (some portion of) these events? If so, the reader must accept the existence of magic, and is placed in uncomfortable company with the narrator’s antisemitic neighbours. (And if we choose this answer, the meek, unworthy neighbour recalls Gone Girl’s murderous heroine after all.)

The book ends with a surreal confrontation — for some reason, the townsfolk are all wearing matching white tracksuits when they summon her about the woven dolls — and although it is unclear what exactly transpired, the narrator demands her right to live, as a survivor of horrific violence against her people as well as someone now personally implicated. She receives it. The novel ends with her caring for her sorrysack brother in their home: “I am living, I claim my right to live.”

This novel wasn’t for me. I want to grasp events in all their spatiotemporal particularity; the narrator sands down all the details of history and geography until the village could be anywhere in Eastern Europe, and until its history of Jewish oppression becomes myth-like. I turn to novels to understand the human experience, but despite hearing this narrator’s entire story, I still have no idea who she is; there is no cathartic moment where truths and lies are revealed. The author invites us to contemplate these ambiguities, but rather than finding the result to be profound, I thought it made the treatment of these serious topics superficial, empty.

Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven has a fun premise but a messy execution. A deadly pandemic hits Toronto and wipes out 99% of humanity. The narrative unfolds across multiple timelines in the decades before and after a fictional SARS-like virus emerges, all revolving around the lives of film star Arthur Leander and his connections. Twenty years after the pandemic, civilization has collapsed, and mankind lives on in small clusters of families scattered about the land. There is no electricity and people live by hunting in the forests and scavenging relics of the past.

The novel contrasts characters who drift through their lives with those who purposefully construct meaning. Arthur’s best friend, Clark, who had originally wished to become an actor, works as a coach for business executives. For his work, he interviews a woman about one such executive, and she gives a diagnosis of the ills of the modern era:

“[Adulthood]’s full of ghosts. … I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that. … But I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

This quote captures the main themes explored as we get to know our broad cast of characters. Arthur is one of these “sleepwalkers”: he escapes his birthplace of the tiny island off the coast of British Columbia for the big, anonymous city of Toronto, but leaves university to become an actor. His career progresses in a blur of parties and fortune. He falls into a relationship with Miranda: she needed a refuge from her abusive relationship, he liked that she was from his place of birth and unconnected to Hollywood. He just as quickly falls into an affair with the woman who becomes his second wife, and then soon after, begins a relationship with his third wife. Other characters at varying times also avoid confronting the real world in front of them, or the unhappiness within themselves. Frank, the brother of the paparazzo who tried to save Arthur’s life, spends the first days of the pandemic writing public relations fluff for a wealthy philanthropist, allowing him to put off thinking about the world changing and what his place in it will be. 

Miranda, on the other hand, is far more conscious of her goals and decision-making. Following her divorce, she pursues a career in shipping because the office environment is a calm and serene contrast to her cramped and chaotic student apartment she had shared with her abusive boyfriend. She creates an extensive graphical sci-fi novel for nobody — or rather, for her own personal satisfaction, not money or fame. Her comics share their title with this novel, and survive long past her own death. The paparazzo, Jeevan, treats his job with mercenary-like detachment, but plans to become a paramedic: he wanted to be the type of guy people turn to in a crisis. Although his plans derail in the wake of the outbreak, he finds purpose in settling down and starting a family, and rebuilding society.

The climax fits into this theme disjointedly: twenty years post-apocalypse, a prophet has arisen and is violently bringing “salvation” to the world. Over the course of the novel, the Prophet captures and kills several characters we become familiar with, before ultimately being assassinated by a member of his own movement who we barely know. Although the Prophet is the main antagonist in the post-pandemic scenes, his character is underdeveloped. His belief that everything happens for a reason leads him to conclude that the pandemic was divine intervention. This teleological definition of purpose is different from the purposiveness explored through the other characters. Religion and radical movements are of course sources of meaning and purpose in life, but this angle was explored simplistically. I wondered if the author had plotted out one storyline, and then not course-corrected this plotline when her character exploration took her into different thematic territory. 

Indeed, I wondered why the author centered the story around a pandemic at all. The major themes were most compellingly developed in the prepandemic timelines, while the apocalypse felt like an unnecessary narrative frame. The sleepwalker theme as well as the author’s other comments about interpersonal connection (e.g., Arthur’s relationship with his friend, V—“I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter”) and of being known or observed (small island life, urban anonymity, paparazzi spying) were interesting, and explored well. The post-apocalyptic world, on the other hand, is surprisingly boring. The author has clearly thought deeply about her world — there is extensive detailing of logistics — but never did I feel curious to learn more.

Perhaps it is because it is a rather sterile world. The characters necessarily focus on survival and logistics rather than lofty questions about the meaning of life. But even in stressful and existential situations, humans connect and bond with each other. This connection is mostly absent from the author’s post-pandemic plotlines. People’s emotions are instead explored through their connections with objects — old comics and magazines, items scavenged from the beforetimes, a snowglobe carried about — lending these passages a nostalgic and detached tone, and one that often shifts into a critique of consumerism.

I think the author’s underestimation of the emotional needs of humans even in desperate situations also limits her handling of the Prophet. His rise is portrayed as incomprehensible and he and his followers are one-dimensionally zealous. Naturally, writing in the early 2010s, the author would have had no knowledge of the reactionary and fascistic movements that gained steam after the 2020 pandemic outbreak. But much older works have better captured similar vitriolic and religious reactions to plagues, as well as the more positive emotional responses that arise in their wake.

The novel tells the stories of creatives: actors, writers, photographers, musicians. The last few days of civilization are told by television news and newspaper columns. There is something missing entirely: politics. No government body guides behavior or organizes responses. The characters do not remark on this absence — except for noting the failure of the national guard to save them. Nor do we see nascent political bodies form in the ashes of civilization. Excluding the authoritarian orders of the Prophet (and perhaps the Conductor’s benignly dictatorial control over the travelling orchestra), everything appears to be managed through easy, unanimous, anarchistic consensus. Perhaps the author believes that with self-actualization taking a back seat to basic survival, political disagreement vanishes. The right-wing attacks on science and the state in response to COVID stay-at-home orders shred that belief. Indeed, reading the novel with all the hindsight of the 2020s, it is surprising that the Prophet does not appear to be capitalizing off the fears and anxieties of his followers. Politics is how humans collectively determine purposeful activity (or, as it were, “sleepwalk” into climate change or through pandemics). Collective negotiation of purpose is far more challenging than individual determination of purpose, and so its absence is notable. 

The novel is now an HBO TV show. The author often composes her scenes as if they were television shots. While this style is not particularly literary, I imagine it made for a more straight-forward adaptation. The unevenness and holes in the themes that plague the novel may also translate better to a series of cohesive television episodes.

Review: From The Ashes by Jesse Thistle

This memoir is narrative more than it is introspective. Having read it, I now know the darkest events that marked Jesse Thistle’s life, but I still don’t really know who Jesse Thistle is. What was it that went through his head or tore apart his heart when he went from kicking one addiction to immediately starting another? What was it that kept him going through each tragedy, rather than succumbing to the horrors of homelessness and addiction like so many others? What was it that finally gave him the strength to go clean, that last time?

I think the memoir wasn’t written to answer these questions, but to teach the reader the answer to a different question: why is it that homeless people can’t just get back on their feet? Thistle shows us — often in gory detail — how illiteracy, the pressures of starvation, medical problems, workplace exploitation, court fees and police records, ragged wardrobes, and broken social networks all work together to make that feat near impossible, even outside of drug dependency. But there is a missing piece to his answer, the human emotions of it that are shared with even comfortably-housed readers: relationships with father figures that corrode under mutual toxic masculinity, separation from social communities, addiction, reconciliation. How do you process these experiences? How do they feel? Solving the problem of homelessness is not just a matter of charity, of getting people off the streets, but of recognition of humanity. Weaving in not just the main narrative beats of his life path but also the parts of his experience that are surprisingly universal would have made for a more powerful, unforgettable book.

To ask someone to share the deepest parts of their heart is a lot. I am often a little awestruck when I find an author who can do so — recent partially-autobiographical reads Ti Amo and This Accident of Being Lost come to mind. I can understand why an advocate for the Metis people and for homeless people, who is probably asked often to share his experiences for the advancement of the cause, might try to keep a little bit of himself to himself.

Structurally, the memoir is a series of poems and short stories that rarely span more than one chapter. Thistle crafts them well: they are well-paced, filled with striking imagery, and encapsulate particular challenges or issues tidily. But it leads to an overall disjointed narrative. A teacher shows him kindness, then is never heard of again. His mother welcomes him to her home, but he rebuffs her, and the topic is not raised again. The world is similarly disjointed. There are brief allusions to the lack of treaty rights for the Metis, the declining social safety net, the lack of workplace protections for day labourers. If we want to house everyone in Canada, we need to recognize how each of these are related.

Review: This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

The author seems to have put a lot of herself in this book. Or, at least, there are some intensely intimate passages that feel so neurotically and emotionally particular, and so I imagine the author has to have drawn a lot of these lines from the contours of her soul. Maybe she embellished a bit here, amplified a bit there, and twisted in strands from people she's known over these threads. Is it strange to move through the world when so many people know these pieces of your heart? Or, rather, imagine that they know these pieces of your heart?

The unifying themes of these short stories are love in the digital age and being indigenous while settler capitalism destroys the planet. In the first theme, Leanne explores modern experiences like the strange intimacy of online friendships, the overthinking that comes with 15-minute gaps between messages, the way interactions can be quantified and analyzed, the way the real world and the digital world bleed into each other. In the latter theme, Simpson shows rich examples of indigenous connection to the earth, not the sappy stereotyped "Mother Earth is so powerful. The water is so sacred" kind of platitudes settlers want to uplift (to quote a sarcastic line from the final short story), but what it means to feel connection to a place and to your ancestors, the struggles of weaving in modern living and tradition, and sharing these experiences with people.

Not every story or song was to my tastes, but the highlights were meaningful to me.

Review: Ducks by Kate Beaton

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is Kate Beaton’s 2023 autobiographical comic book relaying the her experience graduating university in 2005 and working in the oil sands for two years. Anna Wiener blurbed the book, and I thought it was an appropriate choice: both Wiener and Beaton wrote memoirs detailing their experience as women in the male-dominated gold rushes of their particular eras and locations — Wiener in Silicon Valley in the 2010s, and Beaton in Alberta in the 2000s.

Both memoirs resonated with me personally. I graduated university not too long after Beaton. I considered the oil sands — many of my classmates were pulled into its gravitational orbit — but I couldn’t bring myself to so directly be part of the environmental devastation they wreck (a realization Beaton describes coming to in the novel). Unlike Beaton, I was fortunate to not have student debt, and so I had more of a choice. Instead, I left home for a different black hole: 2010s Silicon Valley.

A troubling question woven throughout the book is how working at the oil sands changes people. Beaton describes her experiences with sexual harassment and rape. Many of the men around her dehumanize her, treat each other with callousness and cruelty, and turn to drugs, alcohol, and prostitution. Would the men she knows and loves back home turn into these hateful men too, if they were here? I remember coming to a similar realization in my early 20s. On the social media platforms built by 2010s Silicon Valley, I discovered the manosphere and its denizens' dehumanizing and transactional perspective of women and relationships. A similar troubling question writhed through my mind: which of the men around me were secretly retreating to the anonymity of the internet to post such hateful things? 

Both the Alberta oil sands and the Silicon Valley tech scene were places people went to make money. For both places, these workers — mostly men — left their homes to be somewhere where they had no community, to work long hours. That uprooting is hard. Its concentration in an area produces a culture that supports this form of sacrifice — often a toxic one. Beaton skillfully portrays this with empathy, without condoning or shrugging off the horrors. We see the difficulty of being separated from your wife and kids, and the small actions of recognition — like sharing cookies during the Christmas Eve night shift — that can make all the difference in such wrenching times.

Beaton also beautifully builds the tension arising between the desire to stay home and the desire to leave. It is familiarly Canadian: I have family in Cape Breton, and relatives who also left the Maritimes for Atlantic Canada. Her portrayal of the growing, gnawing sense of bleakness and isolation leading up to her sexual assault and the numb confusion afterwards were so moving that I put the book down for a while.

Beaton explores community and identity well. Her connection to Cape Breton is strong, and she finds other Cape Bretoners to form a community-away-from-home, who share some of her experiences. An interesting reflection comes towards the end where she is interviewed by a Globe and Mail reporter about her experience in the oil sands, and feels that the reporter is looking for salacious quotes about the awful men who work the oil sands. She is indignant: these people were her people too, in a way; the Toronto office worker hasn’t grappled with the fact that the men in her community would also be transformed by the oil sands.

The book touches on many political topics: environmental destruction, theft of land from indigenous people, illiteracy, sexism, the back-breaking and carcinogenic nature of manual labour, social inequality, and how the profit motive exacerbates all these problems. They don’t quite all tie together right, their linkages remain murky. In part, the genre of memoir acts as a limit: the author is constrained by their own slow-growing awareness of these issues. Still, it is a touching story with some memorable illustrations, and a time capsule of a very Canadian experience.

Review: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

“One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
— Omar El Akkad, October 25th

El Akkad’s tweet, posted in response to a video of the devastation Israel wrought on Palestine, has received over ten million views. It’s a resonant message: we have all been watching a live-streamed genocide unfold, and it is so frustrating to see the major institutions of society refuse to acknowledge this, to sigh and say “oh it’s so complicated,” and receive little real repercussion for it, excepting a few angry protestors at public events, while people who do speak out against it are fired and detained in immigration centers.

The author develops this sentiment further in this expressive collection of ten essays, weaving in his personal experiences. Born in Egypt, he immigrated with his family to Canada when he was just a child. He knows what it’s like to view the West from outside (“In the unfree world, the free world isn’t a place or a policy or a way of living; it’s a negation… For a life stunted by a particular kind of repression, the driving force will never be toward something better but away from something worse.”). He learned about the ideals of the liberal West, and then learned how inconsistently and hypocritically they are applied. The experience of immigration — treated as an outsider, valued very explicitly according to your economic contributions and to your adaptation to the local norms — provided one window into the facade of liberalism; being an Arab who came of age and worked as a journalist during the War on Terror provided another.

El Akkad’s reflections on the journalism and publishing industry were some of the most compelling of the book. His fury at the way liberalism constrains journalistic speech and upholds an unachievable ideal of neutrality in the face of starvation of children radiates through these pages.

There’s always been a contradiction at the heart of this enterprise. In the modern, well-dressed definition, adhered to in one form or another at almost every major newspaper, the journalist cannot be an activist, must remain allegiant to a self-erasing neutrality. Yet journalism at its core is one of the most activist endeavors there is. A reporter is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege. Against the slimy wall of press releases and PR nothingspeak that has come to protect every major business and government boardroom ever since Watergate. A reporter is supposed to agitate against silence. To maintain both these realities at the same time—of the neutral agitator—requires a cognitive dissonance that can be seen in every corner of the industry.

The toll it takes on you to exist in the West and to not speak out against the violence and exploitation it perpetuates around the world is a consistent theme of the book:

Know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sign of dismembered children?

El Akkad takes aim at the “the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle”, who views the “conflict” as “all so very sad, but you know, it’s all so very complicated.” He acknowledges the upfront self-centered hatred of the Republican party, but focuses his criticism on the Democratic party for the corrosive effect of its hypocritical, self-interested ambivalence towards genocide. His writing echoes Martin Luther King Junior’s writing of over sixty years ago:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

That we are still fighting the same battles for liberation against the same foes as we were sixty years ago is infuriating and depressing. Yet, El Akkad’s book is cathartic to read. His writing is vivid, poignant, often poetic. He affirms the contradictory feelings of living in the heart of empire, surrounded by all the privilege it brings while witnessing the devastation it wrecks around the world. But bearing witness and internally grappling with negative feelings isn’t enough. El Akkad acknowledges the need for action too, encouraging the support of boycott movements and using prize acceptance speeches to speak out for the liberation of Palestine:

It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world.

But for the reader who has already found a non-Israeli vendor for “chocolate flavoured hummus” and coffee and who isn’t winning literary awards, there is little guidance for further negative resistance, and even less for positive resistance, whatever that might be. It is difficult to glean what a positive vision for a more just society might be, since the author dismisses as unfree and imperial the various anti-capitalist states that provide an alternative to Western liberalism.

Will this book change minds? Give people the courage to speak out more strongly? I hope so, and discussion online and reviews I’ve read suggest it might. Certainly, anyone who might once have said "oh, it's so complicated" will feel deeply ashamed to repeat this bromide after having read this work. Still, the book’s argument is just a first step towards changing the ideology that turned a blind eye to this genocide. For a deeper understanding of liberalism and its history, I recommend Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo. El Akkad’s book is a snapshot of our present day anguishes, examining the 2024 US election cycles and Canadian news headlines of the last few years in particular. It is an emotional read, but not one that provides a theoretical explanation of the forces that shape society or proposes a way out. Because of this, I think this book will fade in relevance as the years go on. However, grappling with the psychological demands of our present is also necessary, and this work fulfills that need.

Review: Canada in the World by Tyler Shipley

Canada crafts a narrative about itself as peace-keeping nation, beloved around the world as a friendly force for good. Sure, Canada will reluctantly acknowledge a few stains on its reputation — activism around the residential school system and genocide of the First Nations has grown too loud to ignore. But these historical beats are seen as blemishes, unconnected to Canada’s broader national identity.

In Canada In The World, Tyler Shipley corrects this narrative, starting first with early settler relationships with First Nations to show the through-line between Canada’s settler colonial origins and its continued colonial exploitation domestically and abroad. Shipley emphasizes large structural forces like capitalism, industrialization, and material geopolitical interests, over individual personalities and cultural clashes. With this method, he builds a cohesive narrative that covers several centuries of history in just 500-odd pages. Shipley often takes explicit aim at Canada’s nation-building mainstays like Canada Heritage Minutes and grade 10 history texts, and weaves in familiar media and contemporary history and the occasional personal anecdote. He draws from a vast set of secondary and tertiary texts, summarizing their theses and contextualizing them into his overarching narrative. The result is a compelling, approachable text that should be, for now, the definitive introductory leftist text on Canadian international political history, with a bibliography that lends itself well to further study.

The book is strongest in its first half, which covers Canada’s settler colonial origins up through its tepid opposition to fascism in the mid-twentieth century. The latter half drags somewhat: Canada has been very active in the world during the so-called Cold War and the periods that followed it, supporting oppressive dictators (e.g. Chile) and overthrowing democratic socialist governments (e.g. Ecuador) with the goal of furthering its mining interests and aiding US imperialism. Shipley does an admirable job at trying to summarize the requisite history of dozens of nations to understand Canada’s role in these conflicts and connect them to the unifying theme of his book, but the goal of a comprehensive survey of such activities inevitably results in episodic vignettes packed with names and dates. Still the book compares favorably with Yves Engler’s Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy (one wonders why Engler bothered at all; he draws from Shipley’s book as a source to create a fully inferior and redundant work), and would pair well with books like Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets and Vincent Bevins’ Jakarta Method, which provide more structure into the mechanisms of western foreign intervention.

It is too early to say how well the book will hold up since it was published in 2020. However, the relationship between Israel and Palestine has sharpened in the intervening years and Shipley staked out a position that would have been quite bold just five years ago, but has increasingly been adopted since. His analysis of China will likely age more poorly: he has nothing positive to say about modern day China, despite its lifting of a billion people from poverty and its emphasis on mass education, while praising similar poverty alleviation efforts when they occur in Latin America. Still, it is a fantastic corrective to the mythology of Canada.

Review: Canada's Long Fight Against Democracy by Yves Engler and Owen Schalk

Washington’s role in destabilizing and otherwise interfering in democratic governments in the imperial periphery has been well-documented (see, for example, Manufacturing Consent, Washington Bullets, or The Jakarta Method). Canada has curated an image as a friendlier, more peaceful version of its southern neighbour, while aiding the US in its regime-change efforts (or sometimes playing a leadership role in such efforts, as in the anti-Venezuelan Lima Group). Canada’s role in geopolitics is under-explored, and Canadians should be more informed of the real foreign policy of their state. Engler and Schalk aim to address this need, but I found the book disappointing.

One of the most important tasks for a work of this sort is to draw out the tactics and repeated themes underlying western interference in global south politics. In Manufacturing Consent, the authors present their propaganda model, then show its application through several examples of American interventions. In Washington Bullets, Prashad presents a manual for regime change, and explores how intervention has shifted from one of “boots on the ground” and assassinations to economic warfare and lawfare, again providing a slew of examples from American interventions. Excepting three paragraphs or so in the brief conclusion to his work, the authors provide no such structural analysis to the events they recount. 

Another angle for a work of this sort is to educate the reader on a small handful of examples with enough context that the reader really understands the conflict. Vincent Bevins takes this approach in The Jakarta Method, using a combination of archival research and witness interviews to show the reader how Washington pushed for regime change in Indonesia in the 1960s, and then applied this same method to later interventions. In contrast, Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy covers 22 conflicts in 210 pages, providing just a cursory summary of each event.

The result is essentially a listicle in book form. The authors seem to hope to convince via a fire-hose of facts rather than providing their readers with the structure and context needed to remember or recognize Canadian regime change operations. And even this approach could serve a useful function in being a repository of resources for deeper research, however the small handful of references I investigated out of curiosity were of low quality. (Clicking through the footnotes did introduce me to Canada in the World by Tyler A. Shipley, which seems to be a more promising read.)

The real prize for a Canadian writer would be to put forward something like the “manual for regime change” or the “propaganda model” but for Canada. Is there a difference at all between Ottawa’s approach and Washington’s approach? How does Canada distribute its aid dollars and diplomatic resources differently? Does its media apparatus — just as concentrated in the hands of billionaires as the US, but also with a prominent public broadcaster — manufacture consent any differently? Canada’s focus appears to be drawn towards the locations of its mining operations, but protecting its corporations alone cannot explain its involvement in countries like Ukraine; is its goal in geopolitics the same as the US’s, or are there slight differences? Canada is far less likely to deploy troops abroad: is military capability and expense the sole explanation or is there more to it? The answers to these questions are not in this book.

Review: The Social Safety Net by Nora Loreto

Between Canada’s relatively tiny population and the concentration of media in the hands of very few major corporations, there's a paucity of people's histories of our own country. Nora Loreto’s book on the decline of Canada’s social safety net attempts to fill this crucial vacuum. After all, how do we improve the systems we have — from education to housing to healthcare and beyond — if we don’t understand how we got here?

This work is broad in scope, and provides an approachable overview. I’d therefore recommend it to a curious leftist hoping to get caught up to speed on the basic beats of Canada’s history. How were social services organized before the welfare state was created? How did the welfare state come about? What were the major turning points in Canada’s neoliberal journey (particularly the Mulroney government of the 1980s and the 1995 Chrétien-Martin budget)? What sorts of rhetoric and political strategy does neoliberalism harness to push through its unpopular reforms?

Loreto focuses on the welfare state, and I understand the need for a writer to draw boundaries around their work somewhere. However, by not discussing production of resources and focusing only on expenditure of resources, Loreto’s polemics read a little utopian. Every subsidy to a corporation and every tax cut is criticized because the money could have gone to direct transfers to lower income people or other social programs. Questions of money are dismissed as unreal:

The deficit, the result of a fiscal imbalance between state revenues and state expenses, became as important, if not more important, than things that actually mattered and were real, like whether or not someone could afford groceries or access surgery. 

I agree with Loreto that it is deplorable that our government has aided the accumulation of massive amounts of wealth in the hands of the few. However, to meet the needs of everyone in our country, we need to ensure the long-term health of our country’s economy. I would have liked to see more discussion of state-owned enterprises or other investments that would lead to improved productivity so that we can reduce our working hours and care for those who cannot work. We cannot leave “thinking seriously about the economy as a whole” to the neoliberals while we get dismissed as unserious thinkers who just want welfare handouts. That does not garner trust in our ability to govern.

A further boundary is quietly drawn geographically. The US's gravity means it cannot be excluded from this history, however — puzzlingly — most of the rest of the world is. The demoralization of the left and the increased aggressiveness of neoliberalism after 1990 (both noted by Loreto) should both be viewed in the context of the dissolution of the world's first worker state (that is, the USSR), an event Loreto mentions only in passing. Canada is so small, we have to understand our history in a global context and not as a nation that just occupies the shadow of the US because our future certainly lies in international cooperation, not tying ourselves to a sinking empire.

Still, this book fills a void. Although its economic analysis falls somewhat short of what I had hoped for, as a history of Canadian rhetoric around social services it succeeds quite well. I smiled when Loreto turned one of neoliberalism’s favourite values on its head, concluding “Yes, sometimes even radical ideas are common sense.”