Canadian Literature Needs to Stop Talking Only to Itself

Every October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, readers receive a gift: we are reminded that literature is vast—vaster than empires, to coin a phrase. Chances are, the laureate for literature will be—at least for English-speaking readers—foreign in every sense. Even ardent book lovers might concede that they haven’t kept up with Elfriede Jelinek of Austria or Jon Fosse of Norway. How many of us were saving this year’s winner, Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, for an especially rainy day? (And how many are pretending we knew his name all along?)

True, no one can read everything. There’s too little time. Not all books are translated, or translated well. Still, it’s salutary to remember the big picture. In Canada, the literary world tends to be inward-looking. It’s obvious why. For three-quarters of a century, the official position has been that if Canadians don’t support Canadian culture, no one will—and that some stage management is required. After all, American influence is overwhelming, while the United States and international markets are tough nuts to crack. In terms of consumers, Canada is tiny. So, the writing and publishing industries, like the arts in general, have been kept afloat by a robust system of government subsidies. The money is intended to get Canadian authors onto shelves. If a national literature exists, it’s been incentivized into being.

There’s plenty to praise about public arts funding. But cultural protectionism has made CanLit something of a closed loop. For most Canadian writers, the safest strategy has been to play the local game, aiming for domestic stability without worrying unduly about their reception abroad. This goes double for Canadian poets, who, without much hope of life-sustaining sales figures, measure success in small gradations of prestige and accomplishment. The field of Canadian poetry is effectively a conversation among peers. A sameness of style and concern always threatens to take root.

One of the pleasures of reading Contraband Bodies, the first book of poetry by Jide Salawu, is the sense that the conversation has been interrupted. Another delight is the happy eccentricity of the language: the poems sound unlike much of what is published in Canada today. Salawu is from Shao, Nigeria—some 300 kilometres from Lagos, according to Google Maps—and studies and teaches English and film at the University of Alberta. As he writes elsewhere, “I packed my bags and left Nigeria on June 17, 2021, heading straight into Edmonton’s blistering summer.”

That journey is a recurring subject in Contraband Bodies, but the personal narrative of migration belongs to a far-reaching account of departures and arrivals: his portrayal of Canada has a global backdrop. The introductory poem, “Opening Glee,” contains a series of surreal images: “Pilgrims in jagged tunnel, / refugees in flame burning / restlessly through the path of water.” After “pilgrims” come “nomads,” “stowaways,” “amblers,” and “voyagers of fortune.” These nameless travellers and their bizarre fates—their “garlic delirium”—suggest Salawu’s primary themes of exile, diaspora, and disorientation.

Salawu is not the first poet to write about immigration to Canada; given the country’s history, it could hardly be otherwise. But his complex, challenging volume makes the vital point that there is no refuge from global affairs, not even in Edmonton. And it shows that you can always make original art out of familiar stories—in this case, the narrative of departure, arrival, and disillusionment.

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Not long ago, the very mention of “Canadian literature” might have instilled dread in anyone who’d endured one too many tales of prairie hardship. Only in Canada would a novel have the title Grain or a book of poems be called Seed Catalogue.

But that was never the whole story. Thanks in large part to the research of Karina Vernon, a professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, the prairies have become more interesting. In The Black Prairie Archives (2020), Vernon anthologizes writing by Black authors, many of them little known, from the nineteenth century to the present. The prairies, and Canadian writing about them, were never lily-white. More recently, Black authors from the prairie provinces—including Suzette Mayr, Bertrand Bickersteth, and Kaie Kellough—have enjoyed a tremendous run of success, winning acclaim and some of Canada’s biggest literary awards.

Contraband Bodies finds a place in this landscape. Salawu’s collection is published by NeWest Press, a literary institution in Edmonton. Another edition will be published in Lagos. So, is Salawu a Western Canadian writer—or a Nigerian poet who just happened to find himself in the Oil Capital of Canada, of all places? (Somewhat surprisingly, the only oil in Contraband Bodies is olive.)

The answer, of course, is “both.” Countless writers—exiles, émigrés, travellers, refugees—have had ties to more than one place, and it wouldn’t be completely inaccurate to say that the history of literature is the history of imagining home. Forging links between “here” and “there,” Salawu’s poems of migration help transform our sense of the prairies and, by extension, Canada. A number of contemporary writers with African connections—Tolu Oloruntoba, Jumoke Verissimo, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Klara du Plessis—are showing how CanLit needs to be understood in international terms. Salawu’s allusions to Nigerian authors and his use of Yoruba words and proverbs suggest the distance he has travelled. But the North Saskatchewan River prompts him “to remember the long elegy of the Niger”: one river flows into another.

“Contraband” means “illegally imported or exported.” When it modifies the noun “bodies,” the adjective jars. Salawu’s title implies that people are reduced to the status of commodities, of property. In Contraband Bodies, the effects of migration and exile are all-encompassing. In “Nomad’s Elegy,” Salawu writes that, in exile, “everyone is a contraband body / including your lover,” while in “Sufferhead,” the speaker observes that “On every road I have drifted, / I hear the voices of the dead / and contraband bodies waiting for dawn.”

It’s hard to think of a timelier phrase. Not that the news is entirely new; US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been in the business of detention and deportation since 2003. And migration crises are a global phenomenon, even if ICE is part of a uniquely American dystopia. Still, Salawu’s phrase has the ring of diagnosis: it epitomizes a defining issue of the day.

The displacement Salawu depicts, whether observed or faced first-hand, has psychological repercussions. In “Sea Stories,” the speaker suffers a kind of nausea—“I have no stomach to keep sea stories”—when confronted with the scale and peril of migration: “Ten thousand boys are crossing / the black Atlantic without life jackets.” “In Thiaroye-sur-Mer,” he continues, “hundreds are wading / th[r]ough the butane eye of the Mediterranean.” Thiaroye is in Senegal, not on the Mediterranean, so the “wading” must be proleptic, the “hundreds” attempting to escape, presumably to Europe, via ocean first and then sea. The Mediterranean is flammable, explosive; throughout the book, Salawu leans on images of fire to evoke risk. His poems move from village to city and range from Nigeria to the United Kingdom to the American South to the Canadian prairies. The reader experiences a sympathetic disorientation, not least when poems blur the distinction between description and hallucination.

In “Entering the Prairie,” Salawu recounts the voyage to a new continent, “a new history.” “The airport is bare,” the poem begins, “but you can still hear / the stampede for the last gate call.” (“Stampede” is an appropriately Albertan word.) The destination is neither welcoming nor forgiving. “In Canada, you are an African migrant, / there may be doors closing / at the first syllable of your country,” he writes in “This Is Not Home Sweet Home.” In “Static Charge,” the shock of the new is made literal: “Touching the doorknob—the waves / went through; I was sentenced / to electrocution by Edmonton’s winter.” And in “Pillar of Snow,” winter is simply overwhelming: “The trees are pillars of salt. / Even the geese have sought refuge elsewhere.”

In these poems, migration is mediated by technology. Salawu writes in “All the Glory of Home” that “WhatsApp is the sacred grove / where I told my mother / how much I miss the harmattan.” Meanwhile “X is a bad opera where many sing / about aliens feasting on ransom.” In another poem, “I Will Return to You, Marrakech,” “Exile is a broken thread of salty water / joined in part by WhatsApp stories.” Implicit in the references to electronic communication is the possibility of return, a prospect—not necessarily happy or uncomplicated—that haunts Contraband Bodies.

Does relevance matter when it comes to poetry? It’s a safe bet that US president Donald J. Trump won’t be reading Contraband Bodies or any other collection of poems. On the other hand, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has listed Tom Stoppard, Ian McEwan, and James Joyce as three of his favourite writers. I hope that Salawu’s book lands on the bedside table at Rideau Cottage and also wends its way to Lena Diab, minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.

In terms of readership, though, the odds are against any Canadian poet, political or otherwise; the numbers aren’t there. But for readers willing to seek out contemporary poetry, there is the promise of singular perspectives and alternatives, both timely and timeless, to the glib language of mainstream politics. All poets have to do—and this is plenty to ask—is fire the ear and imagination of anyone who happens upon their writing. Salawu has held up his end of the bargain.