• Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory and Place
• Daniel Francis (editor)
• Anvil Press (2008)

[Editor's note: "How We Imagine Ourselves," by veteran Sechelt Peninsula publisher and author Howard White, sets the tone for Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory and Place (Anvil Press), a diverse collection of memoirs and essays that illuminate our province's recent history.]

How We Imagine Ourselves. You could go just about anywhere with a subject like that. But in fact it speaks very directly to me. In many ways I see my whole struggle as a writer and a person as a struggle to be able to imagine myself as who I really am rather than the way Madison Avenue, or Hollywood, or Toronto or my old school teachers imagine me. And I see our struggle as a people, here in B.C., in the same terms. It is because of our inability to imagine ourselves clearly as an equal province of Canada that we continue to get three percent of federal spending in the federal budget, instead of the 12 percent we deserve, or the 85 that goes to those two poor have-not provinces, Ontario and Quebec. And it's our inability to imagine ourselves clearly as a nation that allows us to elect and re-elect traitorous leaders who won't stand up and demand accountability when Canadians are murdered in Mexico or Iran.

Growing up in the kind of place I did, a logging camp up the B.C. coast, I experienced the same kind of identity anxiety kids probably do in many parts of this country, but in a more concentrated form that might have made it harder for me to miss. I owned a bit of reputation around camp for the way I could skip across a slimy boomstick, but when I looked in the Grade 1 reader my correspondence course provided, the boys and girls there walked on sidewalks. All mention of boomsticks was carefully avoided. I could run the camp tender from Garden Bay when the men got too drunk to do it themselves, but Dick and Jane could run elevators in apartment buildings, something I was sure I could never manage. Their fathers worked in offices, not under broke-down logging trucks.

For years it was just a seed planted in my mind that somehow I was being cheated out of a rightful place in the world, and this sense grew as my family moved to Pender Harbour to be near schools. I eventually went off to complete my education at the University of B.C., where various enthusiasts tried to get me interested in the literary classics. But every time Professor Akrigg pointed out a great line by Shakespeare, I heard echoes of my old logger friends back in the bunkhouse of my dad's logging camp, and it seemed to me their good lines were good in exactly the same way Milton's were.

In both cases you had a wordslinger whose aim was to score a knockout punch with the audience by choosing just the right word in just the right place, who spent a lot of time perfecting their skill, and who got damn good at it. In fact I was pretty sure that if Frost or Shelley showed up at one of those bullshitting contests, they would have their hands full keeping up to old Snaky Spence for sheer invention, drama and texture of language.

Literary bunkhouses

Thus my defensiveness about the people and ways I had grown up with back on the rural B.C. coast took on a literary dimension. I began experimenting with this idea in some poems which took ordinary storytelling technique of the kind I'd heard back in the big bunkhouse, and fashioning it into poems.

Not only did I feel there was an unsung way of life there that was as unique as anything to be studied in Elizabethan London or Faulkner's Deep South, I started incubating a theory of literature which held that mastery of expression could occur as readily in an up-coast bunkhouse as in an ivory tower in some great city in some past age.

Why not? The idea that untutored people could develop rare forms of intelligence in working the soil or solving problems of natural science was fairly commonplace. Why wouldn't this also apply to handling the language, something every person does from the time they're born to the time they die, all day long, practising it perhaps more than any other human activity? Why shouldn't there be natural masters, "Undiscovered Milton's" as Thomas Gray said, and lots of them?

I've been pursuing that belief for 20 years now and have a large warehouse full of books to prove it. Most of the authors in that list certainly fit the undiscovered category, although I will not go so far as to claim they're all Miltons. But people like Bus Griffiths, the logger-cartoonist who wrote the pictorial novel Now You're Logging, boilermaker Bill White, who told the story of early West Coast labour in Hard Man to Beat, Jim Spilsbury, the pioneer with a Grade 4 education who spawned a whole series of books about his escapades up and down the B.C. coast, or Clayton Mack, the ancient Nuxalk storyteller who dictated the oral history bestseller Grizzlies and White Guys, each in their own way helped inhabitants of the B.C. coast to imagine themselves in a distinct and original way.

That to me is what culture ought to do, and my experience has been that if we as writers and artists make that effort to reach out and touch people where they live and speak to them in their own words, they will respond. The sales figures for some of these books would make them bestsellers in the U.S. and they've sold almost entirely within the confines of B.C.'s tiny regional market. When Knowledge Network broadcast a film of Spilsbury's book, it drew the highest weekday audience the network ever had. The interest is out there, if only we make the effort to reach it.

The problem is that we have developed a strangely limited idea of culture in our society, which causes work of this kind to be dismissed. Not only is this reflected in the attitudes of critics and reviewers, but also in government cultural policy and in the way our schools and colleges teach literature.

Jailing the people's poets

Interestingly enough, it was a Palestinian poet by the name of Fawaz Turki who helped clear up my thinking about what's wrong with our approach to culture. I met Fawaz at a big Amnesty International jamboree of oppressed writers in Toronto a few years ago, and one of the things that intrigued me about him was a rumour that he might be reduced to chopped liver by a Mossad hit squad at any time. I found it invigorating to think that I was sharing the planet with people who cared enough about poetry to shoot anybody over it.

I made use of a bar break to ask Fawaz if his notoriety wasn't maybe to do with something besides versifying, like bombing buses. Fawaz was a bit piqued by this suggestion. Any damn fool can chuck a bomb while it takes brains to write a poem, and the Palestinian people understand this, he pointed out.

Back in Jordan it was nothing to have a crowd of several thousand gather on a few hours notice to hear him at an open-air reading. When he appeared in public, throngs of grown women followed him around ululating and fluttering their hands like leaves, chanting his name. His broadsheets outsold the newspapers. Poets like him and his buddies Mahmoud Darweesh and Fawazi el Asmar were far more important to the Palestinian cause than bomb-throwers, and far more worrisome to the authorities, and this was because of their ability to express the feelings of their people, Turki said. That is why so many of the poets known to Amnesty were behind bars, not only in Palestine but around the world.

I tried to picture this in Canadian terms. Prime Minister Harper is pacing around his desk ranting at General Hillier, "General, you and I will have no rest until we silence that traitorous menace Fred Wah, the Man Whose Name Is Breath!" Or: "I'm sure you know why you're here, General. At 15:31 yesterday the l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets declared war on conventional imperialist grammar. I want our fighting men to spare no effort until this sinister challenge is stamped out to the last slash and hyphen!" It didn't quite click.

Later I listened to recitations by Fawaz and some of his cohorts to try and figure out what special powers made their poetry so dangerous, and I was even more perplexed. It was the plainest stuff you could imagine.

I hate nobody
I rob nobody
but when I starve
I eat the flesh of my marauders
Beware my hunger

At a bull session later some CanLit prof asked why poetry was less marginalized in so many developing countries and about 17 third-worlders tried to answer at once, saying in effect that literature in industrialized society is elitist and contemptuous of common people, so why should they be anything but contemptuous of it in return.

The one-good-spoke theory

Someone pointed out they were putting poetry on subway posters in Canadian cities as evidence of Canadian literature reaching out to common people. Someone else said that wouldn't help if nobody on the train knew what the poem meant. A Toronto poet opined that true art must not be fettered by political baggage or it couldn't rise to the greatest intellectual heights, it couldn't be "serious."

The air was thick with metaphors aimed at convincing western writers that what they called "serious" literature was just one kind of serious literature among many, and the pursuit of usefulness could be at least as valid as the pursuit of timelessness, but it was a bit like describing colour to the blind. I forget what all was said but somebody -- it might have been Fawaz -- summed it up by describing literature in the West as a wheel in which all the spokes had been busted out except one, but the owner didn't see anything wrong because he figured the spoke that was left was the best one. And that's just it.

I wouldn't try to say here that there is no place for the kind of poetry or the kind of art which is normally thought of as serious writing or the kind of art which is normally thought of as serious art in modern western societies. What does seem to have happened to us is that in accepting this highly evolved, highly specialized form of expression as the only legitimate concern of the serious artist we have lost sight of the wholeness of cultural activity, which ought to include many more forms that would appeal to all segments of society.

Culture is not the symphony, any more than transportation is a Learjet. Culture is that whole complex of shared history, thoughts and feelings which gives people a sense of distinctive community and provides the impetus for collective activity. Which is a longwinded way of saying it is how we imagine ourselves.

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