When the three of them are settled in the boat, the insurgent works one oar in the chuck until they are turned around, and he begins the labour of going back.
Blades in the air. Blades in the water. Forward and back.
His body makes a hinge.
From “Counter Clockwise and the G25 Riots: Fighting Fabulism with Fabulism?” by Verŝajna
“In the months leading up to the recent G25 Summit in Vancouver, a group of performance artists came together to form a collective called Counter Clockwise. The group was formed in order to conceptually examine what has become a grotesque pas de deux of the long twenty-first century: the governing heads of state conspire regularly to meet in the form of G7, G8, G20, and now G25 summits, and the people answer back by attempting to disrupt their meetings by all means possible.
“The members of Counter Clockwise did not come together with any strongly developed critique of this political tradition. But we wondered if the responsive pattern—they act and we answer—might be limiting our thinking and our appreciation of the scope and scale of the problem. Initially we were merely seeking to estrange a pattern that seemed too rote, as artists are wont to do. The political implications, we believed, would follow from there.
“Our idea was to stage a pre-enactment of the G25 riot we all assumed would happen. We decided we would pantomime, as it were, the riot we expected, one whole month before the start of the summit. We choreographed a group of performers to act out our imagined civil disorder on the streets of downtown Vancouver, as a fore-echo of the real thing we believed would likely come.
“As it turned out, and as we are all well aware, a large-scale riot did in fact occur later, during the summit—leading to the largest mass arrest in Canadian history and upward of $20 million worth of property damage. Scores of people were injured, at least one critically, and there are currently 718 people with charges before the court.
“The most obvious difference between our pre-enactment and the actual riot is the size of each. We used fifty actors in total, divided into one group of fifteen mock-police and thirty-five mock-rioters. As a site, we chose Canada Place at the foot of Howe Street, near the primary site of the scheduled summit—the Pan Pacific Hotel and the adjoining convention centre. Our group occupied the street on a busy Saturday afternoon and quickly formed two groups: a line of uniform-clad, baton-wielding, shield-thumping ‘police’—though we were careful to use only generic, unmarked uniforms to avoid charges of impersonation; and a crowd of ‘protestors’ with banners and placards, who immediately began throwing papier-mâché bricks and bottles at the ‘cops.’ The performance of the skirmish lasted about ten minutes, after which all the participants shed their costumes, dropped their props, and left in different directions to avoid being ticketed or arrested.
“In stark contrast, the real G25 riot was massive and prolonged, covering most of downtown Vancouver, with incidents at all of the G25 meeting sites, in some cases over a kilometre apart—Canada Place, the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the Wall Centre, and the Hotel Vancouver. It lasted for nearly nine hours on Friday, with a partial resurgence the following day. Unlike our pre-enactment, real bottles, bricks, and batons were used, and fires were set at three banks. But the most surprising and bizarre weapon used was a new non-lethal crowd-control device called the Multiple Perception Immobilization Device (or the MPID), which was employed at the Wall Centre during the height of the fighting there. As this is the first time the device has been used for crowd control in Canada, I want to discuss our experience in detail, as several members of Counter Clockwise, including myself, were there, and experienced its effects directly.
“It is important to note the chronology of events that afternoon: the protests on Burrard Street, a block away from the Wall Centre, which was sectioned off behind a series of reinforced fences, had taken an angry turn when the information reached us that the police had shot and killed a protestor at the Hotel Vancouver just a few blocks north. While it was later clarified that the victim, Jue Ma, a postdoctoral international student who was participating in the demonstration, had been shot by a plastic bullet, resulting in a cracked rib and perforated lung, the rumour on the street was that the police had fired live rounds at unarmed demonstrators, killing at least one. (In fact, although Ma was seriously injured, he ultimately recovered.) But when the group at the Wall Centre broke away and started moving north along Burrard, in the direction of the shooting, the police decided to use the MPID to stop us. Riot police on the ground at the Hotel Vancouver were at that moment attempting to evacuate Ma, whom they had apprehended after he went down, in the face of a crowd made increasingly hostile by this use of force. Anticipating our contingent’s addition to that situation surely caused a degree of panic in the ranks of the police, and we believe led to the use of the MPID device.
“The MPID was employed as our group was passing northbound on Burrard through the intersection at Nelson. The effect was immediate. Although we did not realize it, several cameras, as part of the MPID, had been scanning the demonstrators, creating composite images digitally stitched together out of our randomized features, and loading them into the device’s projectors. In an instant, the crowd moving through the intersection appeared to triple in numbers, and I can attest that it was impossible on the ground to discern the three-dimensional holographic ‘bodies’ around me from those of my real companions. I did not see where the projections were coming from, though people later reported that projectors were spotted on nearby rooftops, aimed down at us.
“The operators of the MPID were apparently programming the holograms to either stand still or walk in the reverse direction the crowd was originally moving, clearly intending to confuse our progress north, and to ultimately cause us to halt. It worked. The effect was like standing in the middle of a sea of people, and though I could pass through the holograms, and we realized projections were being used, the realism of the imagery was enough to make me hesitate significantly, and after colliding with more than one person I’d taken for fake, I moved more slowly and uncertainly, which is the machine’s intended function.
“But by far the strangest moment was when I noticed a particular hologram that I am certain was created out of a combination of my own features with that of my partner and fellow Counter Clockwise member, Riel Graham, who was there with me at the demonstration. I saw a particular ‘person’ in the crowd and immediately felt a sense of recognition, seeing some of my own facial features as it passed; but in its face I also saw Riel’s—his eyes, my brow, his cheekbones, my chin, and our clothes patchworked into one outfit. It was transfixing. Our holographic ‘child’ (as I think of it now) was walking in the opposite direction, south on Burrard, away from our destination, moving, it seemed to me, with purpose. I eventually lost sight of it in the crowd.
“After the program ran for perhaps ten minutes, I realized the riot police had intervened, each wearing the special goggles that cancel the effects of the holograms. As confused and disoriented as people were, it was not difficult for them to arrest particular targets and disperse the rest of us with violent force, charging some with shields and hitting others with batons, as they pleased. We managed to flee west on Nelson, though our bloc was effectively broken, with multiple arrests and injuries.
“What are the lessons learned? What is the result of the initial experiment and performance in light of the events that followed? It is difficult to say. But it is hard not to notice that we appear to have entered a moment in which the weapons and tactics on both sides seem to be verging into phantasm, simulation, and fable. Perhaps this is only logical—the economic crisis that was the subject of the summit itself and the source of the anger that led to these riots is, like each crisis that preceded it, a matter of illusion failing in the light of verisimilitude. As we stare down each impending collapse, their only answer is that the show must go on. So how might we get around, above, or outside it? What is the way forward?
“Counter Clockwise was our best shot this
time to edge closer to some sort of answer, as inadequate as our efforts ultimately were. We can’t tell what the future holds, but it will surely include a protracted campaign of clashing imaginations”
THE GIRL AND the composite are quiet as the insurgent rows. He guides them away from Sunset Beach and through English Bay, to the most open waters of the harbour.
When their island is in sight, the composite disappears then reappears. The girl notices, and looks at the insurgent, worry on her face. It happens again, a strobing or flickering of the composite’s form. The insurgent stops rowing, puts the black oars up.
The composite looks at the girl, then looks at the rower, all the while being there, not there, being there. An expression of terror.
The insurgent says to the girl, Are they like you?
How do you mean?
Blinking, he says.
She looks at the composite, going in and out of presence, breaking up.
No, she says. The projectors.
He looks at where they’ve come from. We’re out of range. It’s amazing we’ve made it this far.
They drift for a while, the composite going on and off, exchanging glances with both of them. Finally the composite says in a fracturing voice, Ke. ep go. ing.
The insurgent considers this. The girl looks at him, her eyes pleading, No, filling with water. He looks away from her.
Ple. ase.
The insurgent regards the city from the drifting boat. It goes up and down with the swells, and the composite goes on and off through the play of some fantastic wave of light. The tether will eventually break, whatever he does.
He sets the blades in the water.
Pulls. Lifts.
Leans. Sets.
Pulls again.
The composite shudders once more, then is gone.
The insurgent keeps rowing.
The girl sobs.
She screams at him to turn the boat around. But he keeps going.
He works till they close in on the island. He remembers the last time he approached this place in that other boat, and the memory suffuses him. He rows the vessel in, till the oars touch the bottom and he can go no more.
He stands, then jumps into the surf. Offers his hand to the girl. She rubs her eyes and lets him steady her disembarkation into the knee-deep water. He’ll let the boat drift away. But just before they abandon it, they see: the composite is sitting inside, at the bow.
The girl smiles and splashes through the water, reaches, embraces. The composite, with her help, steps over the hull and into the tide with them. No more flickering. Dead. There. The three walk through the waves until they reach dry land. They stop and survey their progress.
The composite wants to walk around, see all of this place. The girl is excited to be a knowing guide and takes the composite by the hand, to show the detention centre, the research facilities, the other shores, her parents, the people who can’t perceive them. But the insurgent stays behind at the landing site. He has memories to sort through, brought up by the boat, the journey, and all its echoes. He looks out there, feeling them.
At dawn, he and she and the newcomer will make plans to rendezvous with those yet to come. They will discuss what it means to regroup.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Anne Stone, my first reader, who helped immensely in bringing better versions of these stories forward. Thanks to the following people and groups who contributed directly or indirectly to the development of this book: Hari Alluri; Elizabeth Bachinsky and the editors at Event; Jonathan Chen; Andrew Chesham; la Coalition large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE); Jason de Couto; Jen Currin, whose poem “A Human Place I Visited Recently While Traveling from Wind to Light” scored the composition of the last half of this project; Stan Douglas and Michael Turner for Journey into Fear (2001); Leslie Hill; the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project; Mat Johnson, Tayari Jones, and the 2007 Callaloo fiction cohort at Texas A&M; No One Is Illegal (Vancouver); Occupy Vancouver; Chandra Prasad; Renée Sarojini Saklikar; R. Murray Schafer; Danzy Senna; Betsy Warland and everyone in the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University Continuing Studies—in particular my 2006 Non-Fiction students, who generously responded to the earliest of these stories; and Jennifer Zilm.
I am particularly grateful to those who contributed their visual art to the creation of this book: Diyan Achjadi, for allowing us to use a detail from “Merapi” (2007) for the cover; April Milne, for her illustrations in “The Boom” and “The Outer Harbour”; Roger Hur, for his photograph in “The Outer Harbour”; and my daughter, Senna Stone Compton, who is five years old, for her maps of Vancouver as seen by the migrant ghost girl in the story “The Outer Harbour.” The poster “Justice for Fletcher Sylvester” in the story “The Boom” includes an adaptation of a photograph of Surtsey Island by Worldtraveller (CC BY-SA 3.0), and the poster “Demonstration Against the Rezoning of Pauline Johnson Island” incorporates a photograph of a microphone by Chris Engelsma (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Thanks to the whole crew at Arsenal Pulp Press—Brian Lam, Robert Ballantyne, Cynara Geissler, Gerilee McBride, and Susan Safyan—wonderful people, all; Susan’s editing strengthened the project enormously as a unified whole.
I would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Simon Fraser University Ellen & Warren Tallman Writer in Residence Program, and the Vancouver Public Library’s Writer in Residence Program for material support that made it possible for me to devote time to writing these stories.
PHOTO: Ayelet Tsabari
WAYDE COMPTON is the author of 49th Parallel Psalm (a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Performance Bond, and After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region (nominated for the City of Vancouver Book Award). He also edited Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. Compton is the program director of Creative Writing at Simon Fraser University Continuing Studies. He lives in Vancouver. waydecompton.com
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