What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
An incandescent novel,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON  K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Some voices are barely heard. They are left to speak among themselves, worlds within worlds. Then someone listens, gives them artistic expression, and now the loss is lesser, because those voices have become eternal. Such is the achievement of the American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) with her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God. You will notice the language right away. There are two voices in the novel. One is the narrative voice that frames the story. It is lyrical, metaphor-laden and formal. Take the first two paragraphs of the novel:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

The other voice is that of the characters, and it’s something else. They speak in the African-American vernacular, and you’ll hardly believe that English can do such things. A random example:

“Well, all right, Tea Cake, Ah wants tuh go wid you real bad, but,—oh, Tea Cake, don’t make no false pretense wid me!”
“Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah’m lyin’. Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom.”

It’s not cute, it’s not folkloric, it’s not patronizing. The effect is rather of a renewal of language. You read—you hear—as if you were hearing for the first time. And what you will hear is the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman whose voyage of self-discovery, with its hard-earned lessons, is told through her three marriages.

The most significant element in the life of Zora Neale Hurston—even greater than that she was a woman—was that she was black. It is inconveivable that her writing—consisting of four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and more than fifty shorter pieces—would have been the same had she been white. She was black in a white society that for two hundred years had held blacks in slavery. She was black in a society that was, at best, racial in its thinking, and, at worst, racist. I imagine that every day of her life there was some glance, some exchange, some limitation that reminded Hurston of the colour of her skin and what that was held to mean

Now, it’s hard, when you are perpetually made aware of one single element of your identity, be it the colour of your skin, the shape of your body, your sexual orientation, your ethnic heritage, whatever, not to linger and dwell on that element, not to become twisted and bitter as a result. Yet the miracle of Hurston’s art is that it manages not to linger and dwell, not to be twisted and bitter. Their Eyes Were Watching God is not a diatribe about racist America, though examples of racism are easily found in it. It is instead an incandescent novel about a character whose full humanity and destiny is explored—and she happens to be black.

I suspect that if you read the first chapter of Their Eyes Were Watching God, you’ll read the other nineteen. You will read about Janie and Tea Cake, about love and muck, about happiness and disaster. And the worth of that—other than that you will have been entertained—is that for the duration of a story you will have entered the being of an African-American woman. You will have heard voices that you might otherwise never have heard.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. One of the joys of buying secondhand books is the unexpected treasures they sometimes contain. Case in point: a colour photo slipped out of your copy of Their Eyes when I opened it. A group shot. Nothing written on the back. Nine people camping: five women, three men, and one girl in a lifejacket. Though no doubt casually taken, note what an excellent photo it happens to be, how the way the people are arranged is aesthetically pleasing, the eye moving in an easy circle from the seated woman on the left to the girl on the right, how the group is slightly off-centre so that the feel of the shot is unstudied, how the peripheral elements are unobstrusive yet revealing. It struck me that the group is shaped in the form of an eye. We think we’re looking at them, but, in fact, they are an eye looking out at us, winking. Perhaps that’s why they’re smiling, amused at the trick they’re playing on us, the viewer being viewed. I wonder what the story of these people is. Clearly they’re a family. Was this their book? Who among them read it? What stories do they have, what voices?

encl: one inscribed paperback and one colour photo

Response:

Pending…