Current Issue: 50th Anniversary Interventions (#204)

Canadian Literature's Spring 2010 issue (CL#204), "50th Anniversary Interventions", looks back on Canadian Literature's 50th Anniversary Gala, and celebrates Canadian culture with papers about Duncan Campbell Scott, book policies, copyright, civil war poetry, and new Québecois literature.

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Afghanistan is much in the minds of Canadians since Canada started sending troops to the Central Asian country in 2002, but few of us know much about the culture and history of Afghanistan. In Ghafour’s The Sleeping Buddha, both an autobiography of her family and a field report of the state of Afghanistan in 2003, when the author returned to the country of her birth, the reader learns something about the country not often reported, if at all, in the media.

Hamida Ghafour “fled Kabul with her parents . . . in 1981” and was working as a reporter in England when she was offered the opportunity to return to Afghanistan by the Daily Telegraph, an opportunity to “witness firsthand this ‘war on terror’ and cover the post-Taliban reconstruction era.” Acculturated as a Canadian, Ghafour tries to provide a humorous side to the patriarchal constraints imposed on all women—living with two other foreign women and a male South Asian aid worker, Ghafour writes, “the guards downstairs thought the women in the building were Waseem’s harem.”

But patriarchal values and suspicions of professional women were the least of Ghafour’s worries. Those she overcame by wearing clothes that were acceptable to the conservative Afghan society and when pushed, claiming to be a Westerner rather than an ethnic Afghan woman. What Ghafour had to negotiate with more difficulty were emotions evoked by seeing the destruction of her familial heritage and the destruction of her birth country, as well as by confronting a culture that meant much more to her through the memories of her parents. In The Sleeping Buddha, Ghafour is not merely reporting on the uneasy tolerance of the foreigners, the rubble left by the Russian invasion and the Taliban, and the politics of Hamid Karzai, but also on the loss of her grandmother’s poetry, the ruins of the ancestral home, and the erasure of a family’s concrete past. Although “poetry forms a deep and emotional core of Afghan identity,” Ghafour laments that “books that survived the communist purges were looted by the mujahideen and what was left was burned by the Taliban.”

On an equally personal note that provides the kind of insight that news reports cannot, Ghafour writes of visiting her grandmother’s house in the eastern part of the country: “There is one ancient bush of purple blossoms in front of the house. The bombs missed it, and it has stood for nearly a century, as old as King Amanullah. My grandmother would have seen it from the window of the sitting room when she was a little girl.” While analyses of American politics and Karzai’s dilemmas and interventions of warlords are readily available if one looks for them, this kind of elegiac portrait of an Afghan family and the loss it suffers is both moving and rare.

Equally moving but for a completely different reason is Wayson Choy’s Not Yet. Choy has established his writerly reputation with The Jade Peony and Paper Shadows, his earlier memoir. Readers might expect this latest book to be a sequel. It is and it isn’t. Not Yet is a meticulous observation of Choy’s collapse from asthma-heart attack in 2001, his hospitalization, his very gradual recovery and rehabilitation process to health. This return to active life is followed by a trip to China, a rare behind-the-scene description of the writing process as he worked on All That Matters, and ends with a second heart attack.

This reviewer only has the uncorrected proof and therefore cannot provide quotations. But Choy’s writing is a mixture of humour, searing self-analysis, and eloquent recognition of the warmth and support provided by his friends—virtually an extended family—during his ordeals. In case one should think that Not Yet is all about Choy, it is also about writing and the writer’s obsession with his craft against all obstacles, including failing health and medical interdictions. Choy, as shown in his previous books, has a wonderful knack for providing eccentric characters with endearing qualities. In this book, people such as Victoria and Danielle, though making only cameo appearances, are given the same attention as close friends and near relatives. But the real revelation, ultimately, is Choy the writer.

If Ghafour’s The Sleeping Buddha is panoramic and Choy’s Not Yet is a miniature, The Evergreen Country by Thuong Vuong-Riddick is somewhere in between. Told in the more conventional structure of an autobiography, the book begins with the arrival of the author’s Fujianese ancestors in Vietnam and their gradual social establishment in Hanoi at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The first few chapters cover the marriages of grandparents and parents as well as the births of siblings. The pace slows down after the birth of the author in 1940, no doubt because Vuong-Riddick no longer relies solely on the memories of others.

Growing up, Vuong-Riddick experienced first the Japanese, then the Chinese military invasion during WWII. It was also a Vietnam colonized by France. When peace returned, the author’s father bought shares in a company called Les Magasins Chaffanson and the author attended a convent called Les Oiseaux. At the same time, Vuong-Riddick experienced the cultural confusions ethnic Chinese growing up under colonial rule inevitably must, whether it is between Chinese and Portuguese, Chinese and British, or in this case, Chinese and French. Into this cultural mix can be added the American presence in the 1960s, the author’s sojourn in Paris, and her eventual settling in Canada. It is an eventful life. But that is not the only reason The Evergreen Country is interesting. The book also outlines the complex and tumultuous history of a country that, like Afghanistan, the world knows not enough about.