The North-South Project

by Noah Richler

  The North South Project was commissioned by Luminato Festival as part of its celebration of the Americas in the year of Toronto’s hosting of the Pan American and Parapan American Games. It premiered June 20th 2015 at the Festival Hub in David Pecaut Square in Toronto, Canada. Find out more about Luminato at luminatofestival.com.

  THE

  NORTH-SOUTH

  PROJECT

  13 Writers from the Arctic to Argentina

  Explore Their Uncertainty of Being

  With Carmen Aguirre, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Joseph Boyden, Ins Choi, Edwidge Danticat, Alain Farah, Ferréz, Nalo Hopkinson, Mariano Pensotti, Beatriz Pizano, Richard Rodriguez, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Antonio Skármeta

  Edited by Noah Richler

  CONTENTS

  “Juno HD Vision Remote System 180”

  by Richard Rodriguez

  (San Francisco, USA)

  “Dog Children”

  by Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory

  (Nunavut, Canada)

  “Akiden Boreal”

  by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

  (Anishinaabeg First Nation, Canada)

  “Iko Iko Indian”

  by Joseph Boyden

  (Ontario, Canada and Louisiana, USA)

  “A Rendering”

  by Nalo Hopkinson

  (Canada and Jamaica)

  “Fathers of the Land: Scenes from a Work-in-Progress”

  by Edwidge Danticat

  (Haiti and USA)

  “The Job Slave”

  by Ferréz

  (São Paulo, Brazil)

  “Retracing the Steps”

  by Beatriz Pizano

  (Colombia and Canada)

  “Open Fire”

  by Carmen Aguirre

  (Canada and Chile)

  “The Assassin”

  by Mariano Pensotti

  (Argentina)

  “A Year Without Light”

  by Alain Farah

  (Montreal, Canada)

  “How to be a North American Writer”

  by Antonio Skarméta

  (Chile)

  “Mine Eyes are Lean”

  by Ins Choi

  (Scarborough, Canada)

  Is a thing ever truly lost, or simply hidden and waiting to be revealed? The lines and shape of a baby’s face resemble an uncle or grandparent that has “passed,” the stories we encounter in a particular topography appear to repeat themselves, the discarded thought returns, and the germane in history is often an occurrence that is constant despite the changed appearance of the players. There are only so many stories (that’s been said before) and understanding what it means to be lost is one. Maybe we are all lost, as it is. Maybe that is our story — that being lost is the primal condition. Expelled from the garden, or condemned to finding our way in modern systems pretending that we are, at all times, somewhere, we are lost amid networks of direction that head all places and none. The brutal message of humans’ sheer multiplicity of being may be that the very idea of belonging, of occupying a place that is somehow home, is the Grand Fiction. We are all strangers. We are all lost. Anonymous. Brown.

  JUNO HD VISION

  REMOTE SYSTEM 180

  RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

  San Francisco, USA

  I am only halfway down the stairs when I see my train pull away. Alas. So I am late. Time is lost. Or the train was early; or the departing train is late, and my usual train is still to come.

  Juno’s surveying grey eye rotates within a bowl, scanning Platform 4 horizontally from west to east, from east to west.

  I bring news to Juno. Hyperopic Mother: While you preoccupy yourself with yeast and vest, the vanquished children of Eve are swarming the earth in vertical migrations, from south to north. Necessity is immense.

  The bodies of the creatures of the shifting, drowning, burning world are black and brown. There is no secret in this, no distinguishing mark. Juno must decide, Fusiform Gyra, which among us have come for her protection — for daily bread — and which of us have red wings folded beneath our backpacks.

  Slow moving and black lines go ceaselessly over the earth. That’s old Walt. (Whitman — I found a paperbound book under the train seat: Leaves of Grass. Bantam Books. New York. July, 1983. $3.95. It has become my prophetic book.)

  My body is brown.

  Of necessity I have come to inhabit a new language. Two soldiers in a black-and-white war movie. They are in a trench. One soldier says to the other, “Well, don’t forget me, old duck.” Then he climbs a ladder and is gone.

  I have made some studies of Juno. I have recorded your relay limits; your remote capabilities; your alarm frequency; your sweep radius. I know how to blind you, divert you, lull you. Pattern pleases, movement lulls.

  The threads that were spun are gathered, the weft crosses the warp, the pattern is systematic. (Old Walt.) But — here’s a worry — Juno is utterly amnesiac. Juno cannot compose a narrative. Juno’s memory is erased every 24 hours. You have no idea, do you, old duck, if you have seen me before?

  One moment I am standing here, the next moment I am gone. It is like playing peeky-boo with an infant. Or I can change my coat. Watch. The act of changing my coat might draw your attention. Once accomplished, the fact of a new coat is calming to you, a fresh story.

  When the detective-inspector on TV says to her subordinate, “I want the surveillance tapes from North Park Station for the week of August 14th,” she is asking for the impossible, as well as the antiquated — if, that is, North Park Station employs Juno 180. I happen to know it does.

  We are well-matched, then. You strain to forbid the future. I have relinquished the past. End of story.

  I can’t expect you to remember, Prosopagnosic old Mater — (that is a word for someone who cannot recognize faces — I read an article about this) but the other day there was a man dressed as a woman, standing here, who might have been a woman pretending to be a man, but wasn’t. I knew this innately and certainly — biologically. He had full lips, upturned eyes, a piquant face, I would say, rather like Michael Jackson’s, if Michael Jackson had at any point decided to stick. She wore a cotton dress and a fedora hat, which I suppose is what reminded me of Michael Jackson in the first place. About a size 42 coat. Green stockings, shredded. Large hands. Red nails. Work boots. There was something sacred about her, something demanding awe. I might once have preoccupied myself with the sinfulness of wanting to be other than what God intends. Now, I don’t care. Juno notices only how long I stare.

  I heard a policeman being questioned about racial profiling on a radio show. The policeman said in his experience there is nothing racial about most surveillance. People in crowds are preoccupied, he said; they don’t look around a lot. Pay attention to the guy who is watching everyone else, he said. He’s up to something.

  Several months ago at Union Station, I was desperate for a toilet. I searched beneath staircases and around corners. I saw a policeman at the opposite end of the lobby. I made a bee-line for him. Truly desperate. When I got within twenty feet of him, the policeman dropped one hand to his holster and with the other, palm outward, described a barrier: “Hey, there,” he barked. “Back off!” Intention, you see. I was intent.

  I am reminded of that boy in Ciudad Hidalgo, that very dirty boy, also a piquant face. I noticed him, perched in a tree near the footpath from the Guatemalan checkpoint. He was appraising everyone who passed beneath him. The Artful Dodger lives, I smiled to myself.

  I am always making up stories about people. That old lady in the grey coat, for example. What do you suppose her life was? She pulls all her belongings behind her in a wire cart.
She sorts her belongings obsessively, even on Platform 4 — a mess of tinfoil and plastic bags.

  I had always thought if I had enough imagination to make up stories about the people I study, I could never do them harm. Have any novelists been murderers? Dostoevesky was a murderer, I think.

  Juno wouldn’t know a murderer from Adam. She only notices what people carry, what people put down, what people place in the trash, what people walk away from. Juno will track someone who searches for a trash can or a restroom, but she could care less if that old lady dumps her trash on the platform and begins to sort through it. I think the old lady doesn’t even remember what she is looking for.

  Juno is the same.

  If I put down my backpack to re-tuck my shirt; if I yawn; if I look at my watch — a phantom gesture, I no longer have a watch — if I lean slightly forward to look down the tracks; if I pause to read a poster in its entirety, Juno thinks I am only pretending to be a passenger, like Charlie Chaplin.

  There is a human intercessor between Juno and me — a fat young man in a blue uniform sipping coffee. (I get that from TV.) He sits in a windowless room, on a chair that swivels, facing a bank of screens. That is what you say, a bank of screens. The young man leans back in his chair; he has learned to glaze his eyes like a cat, to sip images, focusing on no one screen, unless he notices some still point in what should be unimpeded flow. He thinks of himself as an agent of the normal. I am a ghost to him. A blurred intention. Who reads posters in train stations?

  The other day a young woman, quite nice-looking, kept staring at me. This was on Platform 5, northbound. I have noticed that people in this country, when telling anecdotes, prefer a condensed present tense: this woman approaches — I can smell her body. She asks if I am from where she is from. First of all, what makes her think I am “from” somewhere? She says I look just like her cousin. By now, I am sure old Juno is calling all cars — Boris and Natasha exchanging state secrets on Platform 5. Natasha starts fishing in her purse. She wants to show me a picture of her cousin. Why would I want to see her cousin? Her lips are full. I am suspicious. Why is she so interested in me? I am not looking for a love story, or anything like that.

  When the train comes, I think of stepping away, waiting for the next one. But that would look suspicious. She gets on the car. I follow her. She sits down in front; I move to the back. End of story.

  Here is a story for you, Juno, old duck. It is my mother’s story: My mother dropped a gold ring into the hole of the latrine. My mother was a little girl, a leaf of grass; she wasn’t yet my mother. She didn’t mean to drop the ring, it just slipped from her finger, as in a fairy tale. There are many desperate attempts to retrieve the precious ring. Who cares, right? Who cares. There are two morals to my mother’s story. Things get lost. (Do not invest your heart in earthly treasure.) Forgiveness is possible. (It was her forbidding aunt’s ring. But her aunt turned out not to be so forbidding.) And all this time the golden ring has been sinking downward toward the center of the earth, where it was born.

  Why should I burden you? That is my mother’s story, alive only in the muck of my memory. Perhaps that is one reason one wants to have children — to burden them with stories. I have no children. Therefore I have no story. People get lost. Forgiveness? I don’t know. I am not “from” anywhere. I am a ghost. I am erased. I am here. Do not forget me, old duck.

  Shipwrecked, we take our bearings from that which we can see, smell, hear, taste and touch. Our senses are provided their cues from phenomena we describe as real, as objects, because they are out there in the open and mysterious to no one. But we also position ourselves according to a whole lot of stuff that we imagine is not real because the ghostly presences — the absences — make themselves known only to you or a few. The fuller world is one that includes what has happened before, and what is about to happen. It is a world dense with spirits — and lessons. The lessons of elders and relatives and friends and of knowledge that was never really lost. “Lost” is what happens to things. Like a boat — the boat that a young Inuk mother depends on in the brief months when water, not ice, provides the road to hunting grounds.

  Qilakitsoq, says Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, is a place in northern Greenland, where a group of women, some pregnant and some elderly, and children too, met a mysterious and tragic end sometime in the fifteenth century. Qilakitsoq means “low sky” and refers to cloudy conditions that are normal along this part of Greenland’s western shore. The bodies of the women and children were carefully buried on a hill and discovered in a mummified form in the 1970s, all wearing intricate clothing and tattoos and evidently from the same family. Why only women and children? How were they separated from their menfolk? What happened to them? We will never know exactly. All we can surmise is what is still true today — that the Arctic weather is powerful, and fickle.

  DOG CHILDREN

  LAAKKULUK WILLIAMSON BATHORY

  Nunavut, Canada

  We flew into a mountainous Arctic town. Massive lichen-covered boulders dotted the steep slopes on the south-facing side of a fjord where wind and light had exposed the tundra, snow still covering the north-facing flank. I stood barefoot. The late spring mud was bitingly cold and my feet started to ache as I walked away from the airport. Icy clay was making the skin between my toes crack. Some bleached seal skins were dangling from the roof of a nearby house porch and I removed them and tried to tie them around my feet for rudimentary protection. But the skins kept slipping off as we walked downhill on the muddy trail. My family was trundling down the hill with me, all of us taking delight in the fresh air travelling down from the sharp-edged mountains surrounding us.

  At the bottom of the hill was a river that rushed so quickly, the water was white. We heard a great cry as a young man shot through the rapids. We looked around and saw that the river was full of young men, fishing and laughing as they helped each other through the fast spray of water. Both the young men and fish were muscular and agile. I could see the fish skin flashing silver in the white water and hear the matted thud of fish bodies hitting the hulls of the boats. The men were so good at what they were doing, that they had turned the work of fishing the rapids in their little boats into a game. They were catching fish easily as they took turns in the cascade and each of the men gave a shout of delight, laughing if he tumbled into the cold water.

  Our family had landed somewhere fun and amazing. I looked around some more and realized that the house with the dangling sealskins that I had found was not the only one — in fact, all the houses had skins stretched out, bleaching and tanning. What powerful people lived in this community!

  There was a bridge across the river, a hairpin turn and then another bridge that led towards the houses in the lowland. As we crossed the bridges, we watched a twelve year old boy row his little boat, towing the small seal he had hunted. His mother was waiting for him on the shore. I marveled at how the houses in the lowlands were right by the river and that beyond the small community was the sea. The houses had access to water and food right at their doorsteps and didn’t have to worry about pressure ice in the winter. What utopia was this? And why didn’t I have boots? The stress of my achingly cold, dirty feet slipping around on soggy pieces of sealskin was beginning to agitate me.

  And then I woke up. We were at the cabin in the late winter — our little haven we had built by hand about thirty kilometres away from town. We all sleep together on one big platform at the cabin, and so I lay in the bed watching the family of my real life breath heavily in their deep sleep. Even my baby was dreaming, her little fists curled up above her head and her eyelids twitching — milky dreams, I was sure. I shifted so that I could look out the window without disturbing anyone. The wind had woken me up with a start and immediately filled me with the anxiety I’d had in my dream about my cold bare feet. Not without cause. The sky was still bright, but I could see wind blustering across the sea ice. The last time I’d experienced such strong winds was when
my mother and my children and I were at the cabin alone and my boat was swamped in a summer storm. Nervously I listened as the cabin creaked in the same way it had done then.

  In this part of the Arctic, when there is a fuzzy fog on the line between land and sea on the other side of the bay it means there is bad weather coming within the day. That time we lost our boat, the sky was dark green, the ocean the same colour, and the line between land and sea was a blurry dark grey: nothing good. We were waiting for the tide to come up and make the boat float and then two big waves went over the top of the aft and that was it. Hurriedly, we threw our gear and food onto the shore, and we’d worked through the wind and rain to try and keep the motor above water, but to no avail. I’d screamed in frustration and started to slap the encroaching waves, pleading with them to stop coming up, but the ocean was relentless. There was no point to my outburst, my mother said, and instead we focused on bringing the kids back to the cabin and getting everything dry. With the heater seeping warmth reassuringly, and everyone set up with warm soup, I left my kids with my mother. I climbed the highest peak in the vicinity and found enough of a cellphone signal to get help. Eventually, the tide and the waves receded and revealed our beleaguered boat. Then, after the weather broke the next day, my husband and two friends came to get us, the sun shining on our relieved faces.

  The family was still sleeping and I had a minute to myself to sneak off the platform and go outside and pee. The snow had snaked around the rocks frozen in the ground and I couldn’t shake my anxiety. Will our snowmobiles run smoothly, I wondered. Will the wind pick up so much that we won’t be able see the trail home? Will my kids be warm enough? Will my baby be able to breathe as I pack her into my amauti, stuffed with warm fur and fleece and wool? What if something happens?

  I forced myself to take in as much of our surroundings as possible. We were not alone — there were three other families camping in the area — and though I couldn’t make out the far side of the bay, the snow was hovering above the ground only when the wind gusted. I was shivering in my thin sweater, but it was not that cold. We had lots of extra clothes and besides, I can always feel my baby breathe on my back. In my mind’s eye, I watched myself turn around and push my unease away. We are okay, I told myself.