What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A voice that rises up against erasing,
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,

This letter, I’m quite sure, will be my last one to you. I said, over and over, that I would persist with our exclusive book club as long as you were in power. But selecting a book for you; reading or re-reading it; thinking about it; writing the letter that goes with it; having the letter translated by my parents and discussing that translation with them; scanning the cover of the book; uploading the English and French letters onto their respective websites; and finally mailing book and letter so that they reach you on time every second Monday—all this takes time and effort, and while it’s been a great pleasure for me (I don’t know about you), I’ve been doing it for close to four years now and I want to move on. I have the luck of living with two pregnancies at the moment: the first is my partner Alice’s, who is carrying our second child, a girl due at the end of May, and the second is mine, a new novel gestating in my head. I’m having a small writing studio built in my backyard so I can have a space to take care of my novel not far from where Alice and I will take care of our new baby. I’m very excited about the new novel. It will be called The High Mountains of Portugal and it shimmers in my mind like snow-capped mountains catching the sun. I already have lots of notes written, I’ve been gathering material I intend to read for research, and the story in my head is bursting with promise. I can’t wait to get started on it. I’m of course equally excited about the new addition to our family. Both babies will require lots of joyful work.

And it so happens that this is the hundredth letter I’ve written to you. One hundred. One, zero, zero. The same as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That’s a lot of letters and books. And come to think of it, it’s the same number of chapters as in my novel Life of Pi. One hundred is a nice round number and a good number to end on. (The number of times you personally have written back to me is also a nice round number, by the way: 0. That’s zero, naught, nada, zilch.)

It’s true, too, that I’m tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

Now what would be your send-off book? The question preoccupied me. We started on a strong note—with The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy, if you remember, which I sent you on April 16th, 2007—and I wanted to end on a strong note. The answer came naturally when I received an invitation from the Artistic Director for French Theatre at the National Arts Centre, in Ottawa, a one-minute walk from where you work. I was invited to participate in an evening event called Mais que lit Stephen Harper?, in which books and reading would be celebrated. I eagerly accepted and I hope that you will come, too. Take this as a personal invitation. The event is at the NAC’s 900-seat Theatre Hall at 7:30 pm on Friday, February 25th. It’s sold-out, but I’m sure two tickets can be found for you and Mrs. Harper, if you want.

The invitation, I mean my invitation, came from Wajdi Mouawad. There, I knew what book to send you, I had our hundredth book. Wajdi Mouawad is not only the Artistic Director for French Theatre at the NAC, he’s also a brilliant playwright. I liked the idea of ending our book club with a play of his for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I haven’t sent you enough drama (or poetry). Secondly, because what better way to signal to you that art is partial and unfinished because its meaning is forever changing and evolving, that art demands a constant and renewed involvement on the part of the reader, listener, viewer, that art is the work and joy of a lifetime for maker and receiver, what better way to signal that than by sending you a play script, a play on the page, which is partial and unfinished because it’s unstaged? By doing so, I end our book club not with a full stop, but with suspension points. Thirdly, a play by Mouawad is an excellent choice for our final book together because he’s a multilingual Québécois of Lebanese origin, and thus a typical hybrid Canadian, and I wanted to end with a Canadian writer. Fourthly, I’m sending you Incendies—Scorched, in Linda Gaboriau’s lively English translation—because, as I’m sure you already know, the Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic adaptation of the play has just received the nod of an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. Yet another Canadian work of art receiving international acclaim. Fifthly, and lastly, I’m sending you a Mouawad play because, as I just said, he’s brilliant. The man has got fire in his guts and bile on his tongue. He’s an Angry Young Man (do you know the movement? British, postwar, vocally dissatisfied with the status quo—I once saw their emblematic play, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and years ago, while living in Mexico City, I had the privilege of meeting and hearing a reading by another of their lions, Arnold Wesker).

Scorched is appropriately titled. Part of the action of the play takes place in a war-torn country which, though unnamed, is obviously Lebanon, a hot place where one is likely to be scorched by the sun. But more to the point, the play scorches the soul. It tells the story of a twin brother and sister, Simon and Janine, and their mother, Nawal, who falls into complete silence for a reason her children will discover only after her death. The play turns on a revelation that is truly disturbing. I read it and felt dazed. And this is after merely reading it. The effect upon hearing it from a stage, revealed by an actor, brought to life, would be something close to shell shock, I’d think. And the emotional impact lingers in the mind, too. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story that more potently symbolizes the horror and insanity of war. In a few pages the power of art is revealed: just a few people talking on a stage, pretending to be someone else somewhere else, quite obviously a device—and yet, at the end of it, you walk away feeling as if you’d lived through a war that’s ripped your life apart.

I’d love to see the play staged, and I can’t wait to see the movie.

Now that we’re closing down our literary duet, there are so many books I regret not sending you. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tristram Shandy, Martin Buber’s I-Thou, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, more of J.M. Coetzee, the list goes on. Oh well, they will wait for you on a shelf in a bookstore or library somewhere. Books are patient. They have time. They’ll still be there long after you and I are gone.

What I’ve been trying to do in this long epistolary dead-end with you, beyond the plying of irony, is to make the following point: that the books available in bookstores and libraries throughout Canada, that the exhibits to be seen in this nation’s galleries and museums, that the movies coming out of this country, that the plays and dance pieces seen on its stages, that the music heard in its concert venues, be they bars or orchestra halls, that the clothes that come from our designers, the cuisine from our best restaurants, and so on and so forth with every creative act of Canadians, that all these cultural manifestations are not mere entertainment, something to pass the time and relax the mind after the “serious” business of the day is over with, the earning of money—no, no, no. In fact, these manifestations are the various elements that add up to the sum total of Canadian civilization. Take these away and nothing worthwhile remains of Canadian civilization. Corporations come and go, leaving hardly any trace, while art endures.

Yet it is corporations and their voracious demands that regulate our lives nowadays, far more than theatres, bookstores and museums. Why is that? Why is it that people work so crazily hard these days, at the expense of family, health, and happiness? Have we not perhaps forgotten that work is a means to an end, that we work so that we might live, and not the other way round?  We’ve become slaves to our work and have forgotten that it’s in moments of leisure and stillness, when we’re free from working with a hoe or at a keyboard, that we can contemplate life and become fully ourselves. We work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as they move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves. And so that has been the point of my fruitless book-gifting to you: to raise my voice against Canada becoming a nation of erasers.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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