Precarious
With no sense of community, there is no hope.
A book title hits you.
In a local bookstore after a decent meal on a damp Friday night less than a month before Christmas.
There it is on the shelf.
Lush green field and tiny blobs, almost insects, in the lines between the bushes.
Precarious.
The subtitle says the book is about migrant workers.
Like wetbacks.
Or Okies.
Lots of derogatory words for people caught with little hope in life but to scramble from hard work to harder work to put food in their mouths.
They are at the bottom.
The book is by a guy from Toronto.
He is writing about Canada’s temporary foreign worker program.
A long way from migrant labour but still hard, for some, for sure.
CBC has a space on its website for the book.
The Spindy has a piece on local political attitudes to the brown-skinned workers from other places who pour your coffee every morning.
The frame is national.
The frame is international.
About race, so no surprise the self-described progressives, the trendy, localise a national story but miss entirely a story at home of the same thing.
Not a racial problem locally. It’s a class problem and so, like all the cool kids upalong these days, the local cool kid wannabes miss them.
Well, ignore them really.
Inconvenient.
Discomfort-inducing. like the local Indians - to borrow a book-title-word - to people whose American ideas slam into the reality in front of them, rip them out of the screen-fiction they live in.
If ever the locals allowed themselves to see without the screens their brains drop over their eyes, you wonder what they might think.
Think less of themselves, maybe.
That would be a miracle.
The economy in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 21st century, in the political Age of Celebritocracy, worship of the facile as the new religion, and all built over the brittle backs of migrant labour of one kind or another. In fish plants at home or a ferry-ride away near the fields where other Newfies harvest pennies, too. Or in the other fields, the oil fields or mines of Labrador, Alberta, Saskatchewan, or the endless North.
No one knows how many of them there are, although a couple of people at Generic Canadian University tried to figure it out and how it fit. Remittance workers is the grand name for them. Almost 20 years ago, someone figured out there might be 10,000 people from Newfoundland and Labrador making more than $100,000 a year back then doing fly-in, fly-out.
A lot of people.
About the size of Gander today.
Or half of Mount Pearl.
Lot of money, back then.
Still lots today, compared to the average wage here, which people here talk about less often than they talk about unemployment rates, and they don’t talk about that at all.
And on top of that the fly-in, fly-out of the offshore or Voisey’s, but no one in town who runs things or wants to run things has a thought about any of those people and how to deal with their problems and their issues, which are, truthfully, tied to the problems we all face and we are all ignoring. Economic. Social. Just not on anyone’s screens. So not real.
It is not townies versus baymen.
The dividing line is not the income, either.
The boundary is the work.
Blue collar. Dirt-under-fingernails. Skilled trade. Labour.
It is the class line.
Another book.
Dream Interrupted: the Rise and Fall of Quebec Nationalism, the new English edition from Sutherland House of a French book published two years ago, Au Québec, c’est comme ça qu’on vit - In Quebec, that’s how we live, subtitled the rise of identity nationalism.
Curious about how identity nationalism in Quebec fell in just two years but hey, that’s not the part that tweaked me.
In the English introduction, Marianne Ackerman tells of how, when both worked at the Montreal Gazette, the book’s author Francine Pelletier would write reviews of French plays for her, the things she would never go to see on her own.
“Our theatre” Pelletier would call them in print and Ackerman writes that it “pained” her to cross the words out.
Early in the book, Pelletier doubted that aside “from Newfoundland, this tightly knit spirit,” that is, a “deep sense of kinship,” and “this feeling of being part of a shared, turbulent history” she found in Quebec a half century ago exists anywhere else in Canada, then or now.
So there’s me wondering where is this shared turbulent history in Newfoundland and Labrador.
And where’s Our theatre.
Or our literature.
Are there people from Newfoundland and Labrador using the life of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians to tell their stories of today, their challenges of today, their anger, their hope, their joy?
Maybe I have missed it.
Maybe I am just not hanging out literally or figuratively in the right places to see this reflection of a culture and people in their own art.
It is not completely missing.
I read Hollow Bamboo and feel like this is a book about Newfoundland, the one I know.
I see Skeet and it feels familiar.
By contrast, Son of a Critch is an American sit-com with Newfie skin. Hudson and Rex… don’t make me laugh. Saint Pierre? Pfft. Death in far-from-Paradise literally with one actor from the Brit series now working on a North Atlantic copy.
When he was starting out, Rick Mercer used to talk about the difference between the crowd here and up along. His one man show in 1990 was “Show me the button and I’ll push it” subtitled “Charles Lynch must die.” It was about us versus them, or to be more careful, the way them didn’t know or didn’t care to know who us were.
There is still appetite for this thing in Newfoundland, for art about us from our perspective. A reunion of Codco, the original mirror held up so that we may see ourselves, warts and all, sold out in a flash and sold out a second show. But no more than one extra matinee, which really just begged the question of where the Codco troupe of today is.
Or Mercer.
Is there more art in Newfoundland and Labrador?
Or art any more?
Riddlefence. Okay.
Crow Gulch. Island. Yep. Mostly because of the Corner Brook social commentary in amongst the talk of Mi’gmaw people when they are not really Mi’gmaw but something different.
From Newfoundland, though, which seems unimportant to people making up their identity.
Dayboil. Maybe, Dayboil. If you stretch it. Hard to escape the irony, though, of anything that talks of colonialism and its legacy, even if only in the blurbs at the front and the back of the print version, or of identity when the identities and the legacy they are talking about are all imported. The imaginary - to use the made-up academic word - imposed on the actual, which is always inconvenient for them.
Hard to be post-colonial in a society still colonial in every aspect. Like all of the modern fad of residential schools where there were none, this is less about finding ourselves and more about twisting ourselves to be like them. The same way townies at Spencer used to hire English cast-offs to teach their girls to be and sound like little English, this is about “them” not “us” of us wanting to be them, not us and not wanting to know us at all.
Most of the memoir stuff is nostalgia passed off as insight. The smell of Nan’s bread. Bologna. Speaking of which, Yvonne Jones’ book has basic factual mistakes, suggesting a ghostwriter and not very good research. Hard to shag up the story of your own life but there it is. Openly Karl and Dangerously close to contempt stand out against an otherwise dull coloured or blank canvas.
There is cultural expression, a sort of folk art, like Andrea Barbour or other stuff online, but like the other authentic expressions of community it gets dissed. Disrespected. Discarded. Dismissed. Not unusual that way, as Jeff Webb’s art gallery book makes clear, but what is missing is the townie versions, which you might really expect to be the more socially critical stuff. Something with an edge to it. Critical of local society written by people who are connected to the local society.
Maybe I am wrong about all of it. Maybe I am missing something. Not seeing. Maybe there is our theatre and art but I cannot recognise it.
But we only find out by asking questions.
By challenging and provoking and begging to be proved wrong.
Thing is, I don’t see cross words in amongst the crosswords but angry words are what should come out of poverty and neglect, when the bigger worry for far too many is about how some local lawyer feels now that her celebrity leg-over from the Mainland is shagging some other Mainlander now.
What you fear on a rainy Friday night is that the community Pelletier was thinking of are of is now gone, dissolved by the fog from the in-crowd. The bunch known for their indifference, indolence, incuriosity.
And that hope that comes with a community that could produce *our* theatre and music and stories and plays and art has slipped away as surely as the migrant labourers, head down, slip off to the splitting table or freezer or field or mine not because anyone attacked their community and destroyed it but because the people in the community just gave up.
Wonderful reflective (if that's the right word) piece, if we have lost interest in our roots in recent years.
That apart from Quebec, only NL seems to have the distinctive culture, most due to small communities and rural areas, as to it's history, and here that has been little written about.
For me, I have never met a French Canadian that I did't like,.... perhaps only one that was just a pain, at times.
My first exposure was age 19 and early 20s, when driving through rural Quebec towns, the people were so friendly, and knew a bit of English, where I knew nothing of the French language, having done Latin here at school in the 50s and 60s. There carving of wood was spectacular.
Then working at Churchill Falls, with experienced fellas knowing about the best types of soil for dikes being built, as I was testing that for compaction. And others at various fields and some who played poker, or smoked weed or hashish, on occasion, on Saturday night, and their common use of the F word, .but not in a vulgar way, and that was new to me to see and hear.
Then later in business with a manufacturer who made products for hydronic heating for buildings in Nl. They were technically very good, produced great quality and competitively priced. And great service and always on time, and visited here regular to assist local design engineers.
Of my dealing with companies from Ont , PQ, and a couple of the USA states, PQ people I interacted with were the best, US second and Ont third, as good people to work with. For decades never a dispute, products always on time, critical as to contractors schedules.
So the distaste of the unfair CFs contract in NL, is real, and the present MOU for more of the same, seems to reflect the poor foresight or ability of NL politicians, and some advisers and local business people who want to make the quick buck.
That the idea locally that in general the people of PQ is not good people, is wrong from my feelings and from my experience.
That the people from PQ , like NL, has struggled to survive and prosper. We have much in common, and should learn from their history and struggles.
I have been deeply interested in the struggles of rural Nl, especially the Depression era. Over several decades, I have gathered considerable quantity of local stories from elders from my area of birth, (from the late 1890s to the 1980s on their struggles and way of life, and is prime material for a writer with ability to organise it......It is not fiction.
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