Reading witness testimonies and scholarly books on genocide has been my focus for a couple of years. But it didn’t stop me reading fiction and memoir and poetry, all of which make a connection to genocide at some level. These books demonstrate how violence is never forgotten—it may be ignored or repressed or denied, but its effects are felt, even reverberate, from one generation to the next. For me, all of these books stress how important it is to act purposefully to relate to the people and the more-than-humans (the land, water, plants and animals) we share the planet with in a more loving, reciprocal and collective-minded way.
These books demonstrate how violence is never forgotten—it may be ignored or repressed or denied, but its effects are felt, even reverberate, from one generation to the next.
Medicine Walk is a luminous story of a journey towards reconciliation between a mostly absent father, Eldon Starlight, of Ojibway-Scottish heritage, and his teenaged son, Franklin. The land—here the Rocky Mountains of southeastern BC—is a palpable character with an aura of healing that helps Eldon to tell his story. Wagamese’s superb insights and his radiant writing inspire the reader to see his novel as a metaphor for the need for conciliation between Indigenous peoples and settlers in Canada. The old man who raised Franklin but is not Indigenous himself grasps that “[s]ometimes when things get taken away from you it feels like there’s a hole at your centre where you can feel the wind blow through, that’s sure.” This recognition is a sure sign of hope.
In Birds Art Life, Kyo Maclear tries to put aside her grief around her father’s illness to consider the wonder of the small, and the seemingly ordinary urban environment, which she discovers, is full of extraordinary birds. I spend a lot of time under trees myself, gazing up at birds and trying to identify them. And I love how Maclear describes the pleasure and the calm intensity this activity generates, soothing her uncertainties as a writer, partner, mother, daughter. “The birds tell me not to worry, that the worries that sometimes overwhelm me are little in the grand scheme of things.”
Kim Echlin’s novel, The Disappeared, exemplifies the interconnectedness of our modern world. A young woman from Montreal falls in love with a Cambodian musician she meets in a bar. He disappears and she doesn’t know why. Years later she travels to Cambodia and is compelled to confront the impact of the 1975-1979 genocide there, ending her long journey of confusion and heartbreak with some hard-won reckoning. She admits that “The strangeness of my love for you is that it has made me dead in life and you alive in death. I am afraid you will disappear and no one will remember your name.” Echlin’s exquisite writing about love as well as the horror and loss experienced by the survivors of genocide reminds us that love doesn’t conquer all.
Washington Black tells the story of 11-year-old George Washington Black. He is scooped from slavery in Barbados by a white scientist, “Titch” Wilde, who decides the boy is the perfect size for ballast for his “Cloud-cutter,” a makeshift flying machine. Over an adventurous few years, with the help of Titch, Wash escapes some of the horror and savagery of slavery. But he cannot avoid its taint. When the scientist abandons him he realizes that, for Titch, “any deep acceptance of equality was impossible.” Even once Wash finds love and work as an artist and scientist in his own right, he and Edugan herself asks who the privileged people who say they want to save “others” are doing it for—the others or themselves.
In Take the Compass, poet Maureen Hynes offers readers a “blessed pause from calamity” in the poem “What she needs.” It’s just what we all need. This delightful collection of small journeys is filled with poignant, nourishing poems focused both on the specifics of everyday life and love, and the affronts to peace and social justice we’re facing. “Well, we’re all kind of blue now./ Blue poured over the entire world,” she says. But if you’re feeling down, you’ll get a tremendous lift by reading out loud “Everything’s Hunky-Dory,” with its hilarious description of “highbrow/knickknacks.” It ends: “A chock-a-block collection that just/looks higgledy-piggledy but melts/the hearts of the hoity-toity & tickles the toes of the whippersnappers/& the pipsqueaks. What good fortune.”
Michael Crummey’s The Adversary pits a brother and a sister against each other in a deadly struggle to control the resources of an out-of-the-way fishing village in Newfoundland. It’s the early 1800s and life is bleak. “There was a killing sickness on the shore that winter and the only services at the church were funerals,” his novel begins. It’s beautifully but accessibly written, grim but delightful and unpredictable. And it ably demonstrates that the disheartening world of corruption and power-mongering we’re living in now is nothing new.
If you’ve heard Tanya Tagaq embody the sounds of the land and the animals of the high Arctic in her throat singing, then you can anticipate that her writing will be distinctive, even disturbing. Her novel Split Tooth extends the extraordinary compass of this Inuk artist, for whom the beauty of the land is ever-present: “The air is so clean you can smell the difference between smooth rock and jagged.” Tagaq weaves poetry into the story of a teenage girl confronting her sexuality, her relationship to her family, to the Indigenous spirit world and most devastatingly to the colonialist violence inflicted on the Inuit people by resource extraction, residential schools and alcohol.
Held, by Anne Michaels, is a complex, dazzling novel that is easier to embrace if we see it as poetry as much as fiction. Opening with the drifting consciousness of a wounded British soldier in France during World War I, the novel spirals deep inside the minds of its four generations of characters. For all of them, “the past exists as a present moment,” not just in their minds, but in their bodies too. “What history is war writing in our bodies now?” the narrator asks, evoking a crushing sense of grief and loss, of intergenerational trauma. A trauma that Michaels suggests can only be combated by art and engagement—and by love, by being held.
What is genocide? Why does it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?
At the end of the Second World War, with the establishment of the United Nations, the holding of the Nuremberg Trials and the adoption of the Genocide Convention, the international community assured itself that genocide would never happen again. But never again has become a meaningless phrase.
This book asks why. It also asks, what is genocide? Where has it happened in the past? Who is being threatened by genocide today? And what can we do to prevent this terrible crime from recurring?
Providing an overview of the history of genocide worldwide, this revised, expanded edition helps readers answer these questions. It brings them up to date with recent events—the killing of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the persecution of the Uyghurs in China, the broader recognition of the genocide of Indigenous Peoples, the resurgence of fighting in Darfur, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. It examines and elucidates the debates and controversies surrounding the use of the term genocide as well as the reasons for the common response by individuals, governments and the United Nations—denial.
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