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The Hermit and the Ham

BEE IN THE BONNET
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Judicial Inquiry into Fraser River Fishery "Racist"

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Feds Let Natives Down Again

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Chief of Chiefs Dies at 91

Downtown Eastside Crusader Dies

Profile of Eden Robinson: The Hermit and the Ham cont'd
By Stafford O'Neal

On the hermit side of things
The 'hermit' side of Robinson's personality is the side few people see when she shuts herself away for long periods of time in order to write. "People in the village are sometimes surprised to find that I'm here because they haven't seen me. For me writing is a passion. It doesn't feel like I'm working 18 hours. I want to do it."

But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! Her 'ham' side is evident in the sense of humor expressed by a unique laugh everyone who writes about her seems to mention. According to CBC arts reporter Rachel Giese, "her distinctive laugh starts as a shy giggle and swells to a room-filling crescendo."

And in a Quill & Quire profile it was described as "a burst of low bass sound underscored by a high-pitched hum, Tuvan-monk style." This "earthy exuberance" punctuates her conversation both intimately and in the many interviews she is forced to undergo because of her phenomenal success.

Robinson's much anticipated new novel, Blood Sports, is advertised by her publisher McClelland and Stewart as a "Canadian bestseller, written with the cunning of Alice Munro and the twisted violence of Stephen King." The author herself, of course, claims King as a major literary influence, and credits The Shining with making her want to write in the first place.

But her more substantive reasons for liking King's books are intelligent ones. The attraction has less to do with the stereotypical fear factor, than with the fact that he populates his novels with real and authentic characters. As she told Giese in a recent interview, "King's books are full of working-class people who have shitty jobs and live in small towns. They're people I know." I can't think of a better reason to read Stephen King than for the opportunity to meet working-class people with shitty jobs; I agree with Robinson. If the end result of reading Stephen King compulsively between the ages of 10 and 14 is the close attention to character development characteristic of Robinson's writing, the ends certainly justify the means. It's a shitty job but somebody has to do it.

Robinson has herself apparently worked some shitty "McJobs" in her time too. She has been employed at one time or another as a janitor, a receptionist, a mail clerk, a dry cleaner, and a napkin ironer. Now, of course, she is a professional writer; writing is her work, whether or not it will remain her passion. In an interview during a promotional tour for the new novel Blood Sports Robinson was already setting the wheels in motion for a sequel to be called Death Sports.

This is sophisticated marketing. The ink is barely dry on the one book and advertising has already begun on the next. Both of these books, the former out in hardcover and expected in paperback in February 2007, and the latter projected for some unknown future date, derive their characters and plot from the long short story (or novella) "Contact Sports" that was the centerpiece of her first book, a collection of four stories published as Traplines in 1996.

Full of dark and brutal tales punctuated with a gritty deadpan humor, Traplines catapulted Robinson into the literary spotlight when it won the Winifred Holtby Prize for best first work of fiction by a Commonwealth writer and was named a New York Times Editor's Choice and Notable Book of the Year. Back home in Canada Robinson was put on the Maclean's 100 Young Canadians to Watch list, and no doubt people are still watching and waiting ten years later. Since then she has been featured writer at the Edinburgh Writers' Festival, and Writer in Residence at the Whitehorse Public Library and the University of Calgary. And, of course, the nominations and awards just kept on and may very well just keep on coming.

Her second book, the highly acclaimed Monkey Beach came out in 2000 and was quickly appreciated by critics. It has been variously described as an "artfully constructed" (The Washington Post) and "intricately patterned" (National Post) narrative about the coming together of Haisla and popular cultures. This novel won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, was short listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was nominated for both top Canadian literary prizes, the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award. It was also named one of The Globe and Mail's "Best 100 Books" and "Editor's Choice." Robinson wrote it with money received in the six figure advance that resulted from a bidding war between publishers wanting the rights to her first book, Traplines.

"The great thing about the money was that it gave [her] three solid years to write. [She] never had to leave [her] apartment." Monkey Beach is about family intimacy and energetically evokes the Haisla community's encounter with popular Western culture by introducing the entire gamut of native clichés as drawn from Robinson's own experience.

But the setting for Monkey Beach posed a problem for Robinson when in talking c with the elders of her community about writing down Haisla reality she met with some resistance. There are things she is not supposed to make public. As she told Suzanne Methot, "I wrote about a feast, and I found out later that you're not supposed to write about feasts in Haisla culture." Indeed the level of violence and psychosis in Traplines is limited in Monkey Beach by the fact that it actually takes place among the people with whom she grew up.

"Like many aboriginal writers," Suzanne Methot writes, "Robinson believes that she must strike a balance between her artistic freedom and the privacy of her community and a culture that the colonial government once sought to eradicate." Since the publication of Monkey Beach only John Burns in The Georgia Straight has cautiously called the novel a "disappointment by comparison" with Traplines. The disappointment is perhaps the result of the fact that Robinson feels a bit restrained by tradition.

But to be fair, the two books are like apples and oranges, or twizzlers and salmonberries and can hardly be compared. In this context Eden Robinson apparently comes by the contradiction inherent in her vocation honestly enough. The stories of the Haisla were first translated from the oral tradition and taken down in writing (to the chagrin of some elders) by her uncle Gordon Robinson in his Tales of the Kitamaat (1956). It is quite understandable that she would want to return to the mean streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside as the setting for her third book.

On the one hand she became very attached to the characters in "Contact Sports;" it took her ten years and over 30 drafts before this first novella of just over 100 pages was ready for publication. And during this period the author's grandmother died, and she experienced perhaps the first real grief of her life. By returning to an urban setting she avoids the problem of angering the elders in terms of community values.

Part of the authenticity of Robinson's work is the ease with which contradictions between popular and native cultures are resolved in a kind of treaty process. These negotiations operate like a defense mechanism and in the end only put off the inevitable. There is always a point at which the two cultures are, in fact, completely incompatible. Surely, otherwise First Nations cultures are doomed to become nothing more than the miniature totem poles and dream catchers of a tourist souvenir stand waiting to be lost when luggage is searched at a border crossing or an airport. They end up completely buried under the garbage of pop culture and packaging.

This is what the elders of First Nations communities are worried about when they caution against the wholesale marketing of oral tradition. And this is why Robinson is right to be respectful of their wishes and responsible in her transcribing of tradition into literary fiction.

She sees great significance in the fact that she was born on the same day of "dangerous genius" as Edgar Allan Poe and Dolly Parton (and Janis Joplin). As she puts it, "I am absolutely certain this affects my writing in some way." Add to this mix early exposure to her mother's True Detectives and True Romances, her grandmother's television soap operas, her father's Mechanics Illustrated, and pop cultural product such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer consumed over the years and you have the determining factors that go together to make this writer unique. "I happen to be a huge TV-aholic in recovery," Robinson admits.

But such influences are perhaps no more or less apparently confused and contradictory in her than in any writer growing up in the late twentieth century. It would be safer if comparisons to other writers were limited to contemporaries such as Michelle Berry, Michael Turner, Evelyn Lau, and Andrew Piper who all portray the bleaker side of growing up urban in the last quarter of the 20th Century. And as a Native Canadian writer, of course, she joins the ranks of others such as Thomas King, Thomson Highway, Richard Wagamese, Lee Maracle, Gregory Scofield, Daniel Gavid Moses and Drew Hayden Taylor.

She has already been compared in a recent Globe and Mail literary review to Leonard Cohen in terms of the "technical virtuosity" with which she combines "a variety of narrative forms and conflicting styles" in her new novel Blood Sports. She has not yet, however, been compared to the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Perhaps it would not be such a bad idea to add his name to the list of writers made relevant to Robinson's literary achievements so far. Robinson grew up near Kitamaat Village (not Kitimat town) among the forests and mountains of central coastal British Columbia.

"Kitamaat" is a Tsimshian word meaning 'people of the falling snow'. Dostoevsky begins one of his most famous narratives, Notes from Underground, with an epigraph which makes thematic use of the atmospheric potential 'apropos the falling snow' to set the scene for all the dark psychopathology that follows. And of the main character in his novel A Raw Youth Dostoevsky wrote that he took "an innocent soul, yet one already touched with the terrible possibility of corruption . . . These are all the abortions of society, the 'uprooted' members of 'uprooted' families." All this seems quite appropriate. Blood Sports bills itself as a novel about such corruption. The first sociopath Robinson ever met apparently "was dating one of her cousins." She comes by her interest in this honestly too then.

It is possible to judge a book by a quick look at its cover and then forget all about the novel when the movie version is over. According to a recent review in The Calgary Herald Robinson's new novel Blood Sports is "a gripping page-turner of a tale [that] should have Quentin Tarantino knocking down her door." Oh boy, a Canadian Kill Bill and its sequel Kill Bill Again. I can't wait. Don't get me wrong! I think she can write. She's a very good writer, maybe even great. But Eden Robinson has yet to reach her full potential, and there is still plenty of time for that.

After all she is only 38 or thereabouts. A 38 is a gun, if I remember right. Robinson, according to a recent review of Blood Sports, doesn't play with guns; rather, she "writes like a seasoned knifefighter . . . In her hands, language is a weapon that can leave you bleeding, unsure of just how you were cut." The National Post reviewer means this metaphorically, I hope.