bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1987) — Fall 1987 // Automne 1987, p. 59
Beyond Forget by Mark Abley, Douglas &
McIntyre Publishers, Vancouver/Toronto,
1986.
Forget (pronounced For-jay) is located south-east of Regina, nestled between the Manitoba and U.S. borders. Forget is one of those tiny prairie communities (population 88) that is fading gently into oblivion as if it were slowly being worn down by the harsh environment and vastness of the dominating prairie sky around it. Forget’s only claim to fame, before Canadian freelance journalist Mark Abley chose it as the starting point for his odyssey of rediscovery of the Canadian prairies, is as something of a linguistic curiosity, one of the few remaining communities in Saskatchewan where French is still widely understood and spoken. Forget is rather typical of the literally hundreds of prairie pitstops made by Abley in the summer of 1985 in order to “explore a province, a region, a pattern of culture that I had rejected with such ignorance and ease.” Abley tells us he “wanted to rediscover what my home had been a refuge from.” Abley is originally from Saskatoon but left in the mid-1970’s to study at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He has since returned to Canada and settled in Montreal, where he works as a contributing editor to Maclean’s, and frequent contributor to Saturday Night, the Globe & Mail and the New Statesman. I remember Mark from our days together on the University of Saskatchewan student newspaper, The Sheaf, back in the mid- 1970’s. He never seemed to fit into the odd, ragtag collection of student activists, Marxists and National Farmer Union types that ran the Sheaf in those days. A cerebral, brooding and intensely private individual, he would come in to the Sheaf office only to file his story and promptly leave.
And once he left Saskatoon for Oxford we were certain he would never come back. In looking again at his Prairie roots, Abley cuts a wide swath across southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, travels as far north in Manitoba as the grain port of Churchill on Hudson Bay, through Alberta from the cowboy country around Lethbridge to the foothills of the Rockies, on to Calgary and Edmonton, and finally back to Saskatoon. The book is a succession of vignettes of prairie living in tiny communities, many with the curious names so common to the region, names like Climax (“welcome to the Climax Hotel – good times, good food”), Eyebrow, Elbow and Medicine Hat. While the reader is provided with snapshots of farmers, cowboys, retirees, even surly restaurant waitresses, all with a dash of Prairie history thrown in, one does not come away with a truly distinctive image of prairie life. Abley’s tendency to focus on the smallest communities also leaves the reader with the impression of steady decline, when in fact the Prairies have been, over the last decade, one of the most robust economic regions in the country, with cities like Calgary, Edmonton and Saskatoon witnessing rapid growth. But there are some nice portraits – Souris, Manitoba, which Abley describes as the tiny perfect Canadian community; Gimli, Manitoba, a quaint Icelandic community that began as the Republic of New Iceland, set aside as a self-governing entity by the Canadian Government in 1875 for immigrants from the oldest democracy on earth; and Churchill, Manitoba, where hungry polar bears roam freely in the fall, waiting for the ice to freeze, much to the entertainment of hundreds of tourists. Abley meets a native woman and her boyfriend in the Churchill bar — “the roughest bar north of fifty-five”, an encounter full of pathos and particularly telling of native life in the West. I also liked Abley’s account of his visit to the West Edmonton Mall — “a giant fantasy, an idyll of the credit card” where “you purchase happiness at will.”
In Beyond Forget, Abley describes another curious phenomenon of the West – the taking on of new identities by European immigrants or discredited travellers from elsewhere, such as the German poet Felix Paul Greve, who fled his country in 1909 to escape heavy debts and who settled in Manitoba, where he began writing prairie-based fiction and non-fiction as Frederick Philip Grove. Grove won the Governor General’s award in 1946 for non-fiction for his autobiography “In Search of Myself”, in which he managed to fabricate an elaborate tale of his past. It was not until 1973 that his true origins were determined. Archie Belany was another — an Englishman who emigrated to Canada in 1906, learned the Indian ways and language, told everyone he was a Métis, and eventually settled in a log cabin in northern Saskatchewan. Grey Owl, as he was known to Canadians, became wealthy as a lecturer in North America and Europe and as a conservationist well-known for his work with the beaver. He died in 1938, shortly before the real truth of his origins became known. He, too, had reconstructed his identity amidst the thousands of newcomers to the prairie West. Abley, to his credit, also addresses one of the most disturbing aspects of Prairie life — the squalid living conditions of Canadian natives on the reserves and the uncertain future many find when they move into cities like Regina, Winnipeg and Edmonton. “The Prairies are Canada’s Third World” he is told in Winnipeg, in reference to the quality of life of the native population. Abley tells us that one in three young Indians in Canada tries to commit suicide; one in three of all Canadian Indians will meet a violent death. Sobering statistics.
One comes away from Beyond Forget with a better appreciation for the polyglot multicultural nature of the Prairies, its vastness, and the way in which its harsh environment and isolation shape those who inhabit it. But Abley’s broadbrush approach to the region might prove somewhat unsatisfying to those who want more detail. The reader is left with fleeting impressions and a yearning for a little more history and more substance, with perhaps a few less stops along the road. Nonetheless, for someone wanting an impressionistic introduction to the prairies, Beyond Forget isn’t a bad place to start.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1987) — Fall 1987 // Automne 1987, p. 59. Read the rest of this issue →
