bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2000) — Fall 2000 // Automne 2000, p. 42
Editor’s Note: Reprinted with the permission of The Toronto Star syndicate published September 18, 2000. In this article, columnist Graham Fraser, a National Affairs writer, describes an emerging trend: Canadian novelists dealing with Canadians wrestling with international conflict.
A Canadian was beaten up, seized, and is being held in captivity in a country where he doesn’t speak the language, and has no idea when he will be released.
In deep, still-unhealed pain, another Canadian who served in the Third World has become a highly respected public figure — but this sympathy and celebrity cannot hide the damage he has suffered. These are two men in the news: Shaun Going, a 45-year-old construction entrepreneur, is in prison in Belgrade, along with his 19-year-old nephew Liam Hall, and retired Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire is speaking from his soul when he testifies to the horrors of war in Africa.
But those descriptions also apply to Bill Burridge, the fictional Canadian diplomat in Alan Cumyn’s most recent novels, Man of Bone (1998) and this year’s Burridge Unbound. Both are harrowing accounts: first, of a diplomat taken hostage, and then, perhaps even more poignant, of the slow recovery of a trauma-damaged idealist.
The two novels are not only a chilling glimpse of the pain inflicted on those caught in vicious civil strife, they are also part of what may be an emerging trend: Canadian novelists dealing with Canadians wrestling with international conflict.
It is not a common theme. It is almost 20 years since Margaret Atwood wrote about a Canadian journalist taken into custody in the Caribbean in her novel Bodily Harm. But this year, in her novel The Rules of Engagement, Catherine Bush has presented a mirror version of Cumyn’s diplomat: a young woman who flees an intense and violent conflict in her emotional life in Toronto to work for a London think-tank studying the roots of war.
It is as if fiction is coming to terms with Canada’s involvement in the world.
“It doesn’t surprise me, because as a country, we are reaching out more,” said Alan Cumyn in an interview, pointing out that Canadians are working around the world as diplomats, aid workers and teachers.
Now 40, Cumyn taught in China and in Indonesia
– and, as he came to terms with the tensions lying beneath the surface in those societies, he was struck by how little security is provided for Canadian diplomats.
He then came to Ottawa, where he worked for several years with the Immigration and Refugee Board.
It was in that capacity that he read the testimony of political refugees, former hostages and torture survivors, and came to understand something of what they had endured. Then he began to read the scientific literature.
“There’s quite a lot written about post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “We’re not wired very well for dealing with trauma after the event. At the time, we cope — but our brains seem to be wired to dwell on it constantly afterwards.”
He found the presentation of traumatic events in popular culture to be profoundly misleading: people going through shootings, violence and injury, and keeping on going. It doesn’t happen like that.
It certainly doesn’t happen like that to Bill Burridge, who is shattered by the events described in Man of Bone — and is still a deeply damaged man in Burridge Unbound. (The second novel opens with Burridge appearing before the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations – and, to his own humiliation, losing control of his bowels.)
“Fiction was a really good vehicle for this,” Cumyn said, describing the imaginative leap that took him inside Burridge’s skin after studying the experience of a number of former hostages. “In an odd way, you can be more true to it.” This is a risky time for Canada’s connection to the rest of the world. Foreign aid has been slashed, and there is no indication of any intention to increase it. Canada’s diplomats are dramatically underpaid and fleeing what was once one of the most prestigious careers in the country. Lloyd Axworthy is on the point of leaving politics, apparently because he had no assurance that he would be able to remain in Foreign Affairs.
Peacekeeping is increasingly difficult for the Department of National Defence to contemplate. The CBC has dramatically cut back on its network of foreign correspondents.
But the Liberals are failing to recognize that for increasing numbers of Canadians, all politics is not local, and dealing with the world is the crucial, uncontested federal power. And those who, like Stockwell Day, suggest that Canada’s involvement in issues like land mines or children in war is a kind of trendy dilettantism, have not grasped the other side of globalism. Canadian novelists like Cumyn and Bush know what many politicians have failed to understand: Canadians want their country to be engaged in the world.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2000) — Fall 2000 // Automne 2000, p. 42. Read the rest of this issue →
