What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
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,

Oh, the mess that the heart wreaks. The pity of it all when so much was possible. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye is unbelievably short—a mere 160 pages—considering all that it carries of pain, sadness, anger, cruelty, dashed hopes, of descriptions, characters, events, of all that makes a novel great. Once again, like many of the books I have sent you, you might be inclined to think at first, “This story won’t speak to me.” After all, a story set in Lorain, Ohio in the early 1940s, mostly told from the point of view of children; a cast of characters who are poor and whose blackness makes them not just a skin colour removed from you and me but a world removed; a perspective that is innately feminist—there is much in this story that starts where you and I have never been.

And yet it will speak to you. Read, read beyond the first few pages, plunge into the story the way you might dive into a chilly lake—and you will find that it’s warmer than you expected, that in fact you’re quite comfortable in its waters. You will find that the characters—Claudia, Frieda, Pecola—are not so unfamiliar, because you were once a child yourself, and you will find that the cruelty, the racism, the inequality are not so alien either, because we’ve all experienced the nastiness of the human heart, either in being the one lashed or the one lashing out.

The making of art, as I may have mentioned to you before, involves a lot of work. Because of that, it is implicitly constructive. One doesn’t work so hard merely to destroy. One rather hopes to build. No matter how much cruelty and sadness a story may hold, its effect is always the opposite. So a glad tale is taken gladly, and a cruel tale is taken ironically, with feelings of pity and terror, pushing one to reject cruelty. Art then is implicitly liberal; it encourages us towards openness and generosity, it seeks to unlock doors. I suspect this will be the effect of The Bluest Eye on you, with its many lives blighted by poverty, stiffled by racism, dashed by random cruelty. You will feel more keenly the suffering of others, no matter how different you thought they were from you at first.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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