Desde el Invierno

Edited by Margaret Atwood & Graeme Gibson

Recently a group of Canadian writers, including Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, made their way to Havana to celebrate the publication of an anthology of English Canadian literature in Spanish. The production of the anthology was generously supported by McClelland & Stewart Publishers,
and External Affairs and International Trade Canada.

Below is the introduction to the anthology, by Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson:

Northrop Frye, Canada’s most prestigious and magisterial critic, once observed that, whereas the European imagination
is haunted by Time, it is Space that haunts imagination in the Americas.

Canadians, in particular, have good reason to be preoccupied with Space. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Canada became the world’s largest country, with an area of almost ten million square kilometers. The city of Victoria, on our Pacific coast, is roughly the same distance from St. Johns, Newfoundland, on the Atlantic, as Havana is from the fringes of the Arctic Ocean – or Mexico City is from La Paz in Bolivia. In this huge space, there are fewer than thirty million of us. Which is to say the total population of Canada is about the same as that of Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires combined. Or to put it another way: for each Canadian there are ten citizens of the United States of America.

The history of Canada, and therefore of Canadian literature, has been profoundly influenced – and not always for the better – by the almost nine thousand kilometer border that we share with the most powerful country in the world. Once a colony of Britain, now very close to being an economic and cultural colony of our huge neighbour to the South, Canadians have always been preoccupied with their identity. Several years ago a radio station ran a playful competition among its listeners for the Canadian equivalent to “as American as apple pie.” The winning entry, “as Canadian as possible under the circumstances,” has become a rueful catch-phrase.

We gave up some time ago trying to isolate the gene for “Canadianness.” In a country thousands of kilometers wide and almost as tall, which covers terrain as diverse as the frozen Arctic, the immense Prairies, the majestic West Coast mountains and rain forests, and the timeless rocks of Newfoundland; in which fifty-two aboriginal languages are still spoken, and a hundred or so other languages are also in use; and which contains the most cosmopolitan city in the world, the erstwhile ultra-conservative Toronto the Good – it’s kind of difficult to pin such a thing down. If you write about Cuba, have you written a Cuban story? If a Cuban comes to Canada and writes a story about it, is that story Cuban or Canadian or both? Does a “Canadian” story mean one about the country, or a story by one of its citizens, or something else entirely? This used to be a problem of self-definition peculiar to New World countries, but increasingly – as people move from here to there and back again, sometimes feeling more and more uneasy and uprooted every time – it’s simply the state of the world. Canadians are no longer the only people who have a feeling of exile, or who consider themselves – in the words of Canadian poet P.K. Page – to be “permanent tourists.”

At the same time all Canadians share a northern land which can be harsh and unforgiving. Eleven feet of snow fell on the city of Thunder Bay last winter. Even in the most temperate parts of southern Canada the darkness and extreme cold of Winter last from November to March. All water, and even the trees, are frozen. When traveling in more temperate climates, Canadians take an extravagant pride in telling of temperatures falling to minus forty-five degrees, with the result that tires freeze on parked automobiles and the flat part that rest on the road goes thump-thump as you drive away. Sigmund Freud said that biology is destiny; had he been a Canadian, he might have said that geology is destiny.

Perhaps because of the need to work together in the face of a hostile environment, Canadians are known for a public politeness that has often been the subject for comment, and even for jokes. Such as: What is the first thing a Canadian says when making an obscene telephone call? “;Is this a convenient time for me to call?”

Canada has two official languages: English and French. The mother tongue of twenty-four percent of Canadians is French. The majority are Quebecers; however, there is a significant number of long-standing French-Canadian communities in other provinces. Despite the richness and variety of literature in the French language, this collection is restricted to writers in English. It has been hard enough to give a introductory taste of contemporary English-language fiction; to try and introduce French-Canadian writing as well would have been presumptuous and foolish.

As it turns out, five of the twenty-three contributors to this anthology were born outside Canada. Twenty-one percent may seem high; however, the ratio between Canada’s five million foreign-born residents and our twenty-four million native-born ones, is almost exactly the same as that in this book. It is interesting to note that we did not plan this tidy correspondence, but only discovered it after we had made our final selection.

With the exception of Mavis Gallant, who resides in Paris, the writers in this collection live and work in cities or small towns all across our country. Although there is a considerable older literature in Canada, we decided to stick to contemporary writing; therefore, all of the writers in this anthology are still alive. The youngest was born in 1963 and the oldest in 1922. We also decided not to confine ourselves to the “short story” as a genre; thus we have included some excerpts from novels. Some of the writers, like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, are predominately short story writers. Others, such as Timothy Findley, Audrey Thomas and Rudy Wiebe, are primarily known as novelists.

The United States of America separates Canadians from the nations and cultures of Latin American and the Caribbean. When we look south (which we do rather often in Canada), our gaze is blocked by the United States. The same thing happens when Latin Americans gaze far enough to the north. As a result, Canadians and Latin Americans know too little about each other. We very much hope this small volume will serve the reader as an entertaining and useful introduction to the riches of contemporary Canadian writing in English.

Margaret Atwood & Graeme Gibson
Toronto, 1996