I don’t have a working definition of what it might mean for a work of literature to be effectively political. So, let’s forget about working definitions. I’ll speak only for myself. For me I feel it might have something to do with books I have an ongoing desire to reread. To reread for pleasure and see what I missed the first time, if my understanding of the questions raised have shifted over time and how. This rereading deepens political reflections and allows for layers of precision and questioning to accrue over time.
Which leads me to another question I can’t answer: why do I have such a strong desire for literature to be effectively political? But perhaps we’re living through a political moment (ecological collapse, the rising far right, wars and genocide, etc.) in which this question is increasingly less perplexing. Apparently, real life ostriches don’t stick their heads in the sand. This is a myth and an expression. Nonetheless, when I’m reading literature, I do not want it to give me a metaphorical feeling that I’m sticking my head in the sand. Instead, I want it to give me a greater sense of the real and unreal worlds that continuously surround me.
I want literature to give me a greater sense of the real and unreal worlds that continuously surround me.
This is a list of books I hope to one day reread (if I haven’t already.) And that I know I will enjoy rereading. While I assume these authors wouldn’t particularly care to have their work reduced to categories like “effectively political”—just as I generally don’t like to see my own work reduced—politics, implicit or explicit, is one of the aspects that draws me to each of these books. We are all, in completely different ways, working to write books that might stretch beyond familiar categories and, in some small sense, alter the parameters of what each reader feels might be possible both in literature and in the greater world
So as not to play favourites, the list is in alphabetical order by title:
I’ve always really liked novels written by poets. Kaie Kellough is an exceptional poet and this novel makes full use of his evocative, poetic skills. A multifaceted, fever-dream recollection of the real and unreal living city that is Montreal, this book find politics both where you’d expect and where you might not: a person leaving a pharmacy, the 2012 printemps érable student protests, talking potholes, the river, the referendum and of course the ever present flying canoe (which one theory posits might be “an Indigenous-futurist time machine” which “will one day carry the First People back to a permanent time before the arrival of the Europeans.”) This monologue is framed simultaneously as a statement given by the protagonist to The Ministry of Culture and the ongoing rant of the very same man standing on a street corner. Kellough writes: “Do you understand me when I say that this is a fictional city in which there is no concrete present moment, but rather a dreamlike limbo in which the infrastructure does not know whether to straighten and stand or tumble into the St-Lawrence and sink to the bottom?” Montreal couldn’t possibly ask for a sharper literary tribute. I started rereading Accordéon in order to write this, couldn’t put it back down until the last page, and found it even more relevant and resonant than when I first read it in 2016.
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars starts with one of the all-time great opening lines: “I don’t believe in safe spaces. They don’t exist. I do, however, believe in dangerous stories.” And it just keeps getting better from there. Utilizing a warm-hearted critique of the conventional tropes of the trans memoir as a way to reinvent those very tropes in fabulist Technicolor, for me one of the joys of reading this book is never knowing what might happen next. Its twists and turns revel in the power of fantasy to alter reality, to question so-called reality in ways that make it, at least momentarily, more bearable, alongside a complexity of character and motivation which drives so many of the relationships. These characters are simultaneously simplified types and complex humans, and often the dynamics within and between them occur so swiftly that it is only later we realize just how much emotional intensity has been expressed. When the narrator says goodbye to her sister, she reveals to readers the real reason she hadn’t announced her plans to leave earlier: “It wasn’t because I was trying to spare her feelings. It was because I was selfish. […] I had to run away into a world where she could not follow.” (For context, this scene takes place against a backdrop of giant dying mermaids.) “It was because I was selfish.” How many of us are so honest with our secret selves during such dramatic moments? This “notorious liar” might lie to others but rarely lies to herself, and this tension between fantasy and self-awareness fully energizes its insights and politics.
There’s a short sentence in this bookI keep coming back to, only seven words: “how to live as if it mattered.” In a way that’s what I’ve always been looking for in art and literature, while at the same time often suspecting I’m looking in the wrong place. These seven words come near the end of the story “lost in a world where he was always the only one,” and a short paragraph later they continue: “remember: to feel joy, you first have to escape.” Islands of Decolonial Love drops us directly into the trauma and paradox of being Nishnaabeg today, always struggling to live fully and honestly when the odds are stacked so violently against it. A longing for decolonial love dances through these stories, fragments seen from ever-shifting perspectives, told with a swiftness that continuously left me off balance and opened. There are of course many tales of trauma in literature today, but rarely have I read stories that mix trauma with healing in a manner that is so ambiguously straightforward and satisfying. We move from curling fatalities to the fact that Gannets can detach their wings, from hippy-artist-potheads to Profs from the Native Studies Department, from stealing a loved one’s body from its coffin to Yeti’s finding each other in unlikely circumstances, from understandable suicide attempts to therapists who don’t get it. Reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson always makes me want to keep going, to learn more, to fight for a world where colonialism can and must continue to come undone.
Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) is a strange and wonderful hybrid that uses the creation of an encyclopedia about a fictional 2001 television show, Little Blue, to pay tribute to the narrator’s closest friend after she’s gone. In the process, it casts beautiful insights onto its many themes: queer and trans living, unrequited love, ongoing mourning, joyful friendship, and the powers of (obscure) pop culture to help us cope. This is a story written with aching love. The playful love for a cult TV show is balanced with the much more painful love for a deceased friend. If we mourn for too long, society might tell us that we’re wrong, that it’s time to move on, get over it, but this book shows, at least at times, that it’s actually the conventional wisdom that is misguided. Since Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), at its core, is about nothing more or less than the fact that the narrator still loves and is still grieving, both emotions intertwined with the difficulties of survival. Plante writes: “She took me under her wing. If she hadn’t, I’m not sure what would have happened. She softened my shame and anxiety about being trans. She showed me that it was possible to wade through that river and reach the other side.” On every page I felt this care, dedication, and purpose.
“Don’t mistake my words for trauma porn, because this is just how it went down for us. If these stories can’t be told without a yt tear being shed, that’s not my problem. No, my trauma is not a commodity, but my story doesn’t always have to be uplifting, resurgent, or revolutionary to be my truth, either.” This complicated refusal of the settler gaze is just one of the many ways nîtisânak pulls no punches, exploding autofiction in every queer and Indigenous direction, the places where memoir can both bend and break. The overlaps between essay, memory and internet vernacular create a language all of their own. A language that pulses through life events, both difficult and beautiful, taking perfect aim at all-too-familiar power imbalances in ways that don’t let anyone off the hook, including the author. Morgan writes: “So it was that MDMA, and queer love, forced me into my body: my mouth, and my sweaty skin pressed against the rest of the crowd. And it was the dance floor that facilitated queer love.” Complex, intimate, funny and vulnerable, when I first read it in 2018 this book seemed to encompass all the anger, energy and accuracy of the current moment, managing “to rage with style, humility and love,” and it has only gained potency in my rereading of it. Turning critique into literature and literature into critique, nîtisânak knows exactly what its fighting both for and against, how to shove the words directly into the sweet spot where it hurts.
What are the differences between camouflage and being an imposter? Oscar of Between is autobiographical but with one “fictive device,” namely giving the narrator the name Oscar, both to signal the inability of others to immediately identify their gender and to clarify that the “inbetween” must be more fully acknowledged and cherished. This book is a work unlike any other. Fragmented yet cohesive, it continuously surprises me. The writing is swerving and sharp, always imbued with poetic crispness and lucidity. I rarely had any idea where it might go next and yet each step along the way thrived with its own strong politics and inner logic. It is memoir driven by experimentation and by honest yet unexpected thought, making itself as it goes along and questioning its own methods in ways that always add forward momentum. Warland writes: “The longer she lives, the more interested Oscar becomes in failure—what we consider it to be. How so often it’s the unnamed force that shapes story.” Documenting many of her own failures, which often take the form of community rejections from artistic communities I so deeply wished had the ethical reflection to know and do better, the narrator gradually takes power from realizing they are “a person of inbetween,” that there are others out in world and in their life who are also “of inbetween,” and that many of the categories the status quo provides for us might be little more than camouflage. Every time I reread it I discover so many new things it’s hard to believe it’s always the same book.
Divided into four sections—titled “Passive Aggressive,” “Defence,” “Fighting,” and “Difference”—Prophetess begins with a child witnessing a horrible crime in her homeland of Iran. It then goes so many places, taking new turns in each new section, that I don’t actually want to tell you the plot, for fear it will spoil the unnerving thrill of it all. Witnessing the crime leaves the child narrator mute, unable to share what she has seen, and this central repression perhaps sets off the more magical transformations that later open the novel up toward eccentric brilliance. Baniahmadi writes: “Everybody calls me the silent girl, but my world is full of noise. It’s all noise. The voices of a million people crawling inside of me.” (So many of the books I’ve been writing about on this list go places I would never expect them to, and for me this is in and of itself political, showing us we can never be certain what will happen next, and therefore must always consider the possibility and potential of the unexpected.) A multidimensional journey through trauma, feminism, violence, religion and internet fame, Prophetess employs clean, precise sentences and an enjoyably rapid pace in order to pull the reader along into effective literary whiplash. “We get closer to death from the day we are born, and every day along the way, we must be willing to destroy something to move forward.” In this book, destruction is paired with transformation, and the most dangerous moments create the possibility for a refusal that might also become the change we wish to see in the world.
“It was when Marthe decided to write the Great Canadian Abortion Novel that she’d started having bad dreams.” And yet We, Jane is a good dream, one that slyly succeeds in becoming the Great Canadian Abortion Novel we didn’t know we needed. A journey home to Newfoundland, a story of female friendship between the narrator Marthe and her once famous mentor and newfound friend, highlighting a personal project to pick up and continue the thread of an underground movement from 60s Chicago known only as Jane. To learn the secret knowledge of how to perform illegal yet safe abortions. As the global far right continues working to turn back the clock in so many ways, including making safe abortions illegal and therefore most available to the extremely privileged, this book shows us how the desire for effective resistance can take many forms, how deeply the personal is political, and how intergenerational knowledge must be sought out, built up and continuously rediscovered. I first read it against the backdrop of a painful to watch recent U.S. election and its concurrent supreme court skulduggery, and it therefore made me hope that Canadian politics was different enough from the U.S. to sustain at least some progressive policies. (At the same time, living on stolen land, I know it is essential to always see so-called Canada for what it actually is.) In so many ways We, Jane delivers on this feeling of possibility, while also realizing that nothing is ever easy. Employing a deep knowledge of Newfoundland living, and skilled evocative storytelling, it amplifies useful perspectives on how the activisms that helped people survive the past can once again come alive in the present and future.
What are the best ways to support political struggles that aren’t your own? What are the fundamental principles of a utopia during war? Can we transcend the societal values we inherit? Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a remarkably original, literary page-turner that explores such pressing questions of our time.
A depressed writer visits a war zone. He knows it’s a bad idea, but his curiosity and obsession that his tax dollars help to pay for foreign wars draw him there. Amid the fighting, he stumbles into a small strip of land that’s being reimagined as a grassroots, feminist, egalitarian utopia. As he learns about the principles of the collective, he moves between a fragile sense of self and the ethical considerations of writing about what he experiences but cannot truly fathom. Meanwhile, women in his life—from this reimagined society and elsewhere—underscore truths hidden in plain sight.
In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.
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