TSR Author Interview — Stephen Henighan

Posted 28 April, 2008 in Author Interview | 7 comments

Novelist, short-story writer, translator, and literary critic Stephen Henighan is the author of ten previous books. He is a regular columnist for Geist magazine, and his work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Walrus, the Globe and Mail, and the Montreal Gazette, among other publications. His new book of criticism is A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, published by Biblioasis. Henighan agreed to be interviewed for TSR about the current state of Canadian literature and the exigencies of living in the afterlife of culture.

In the opening essay in A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, you draw a connection between the killing of a Japanese tourist and his guide in Guatemala and José Saramago’s novel Baltasar and Blimunda to illustrate how the transition from a spiritual culture to a technological, consumerist culture occurs, and what effect this transition has on the broader society. Does this transition serve as the tipping point beyond which we are necessarily in the “afterlife of culture”?

Not necessarily. The presence of technology — factories, automobiles, trains — of earlier eras in Europe or North America didn’t immediately dispatch the written cultures which grow out of a spiritual vision. Even in the 20th century literature supplied the forms and governing assumptions behind much radio programming.

I suppose this begins to change with television, but it’s only when digital culture becomes dominant in the 21st century that we begin to lose the ability to perceive experience in terms of historical chronology and traditional cultural forms become empty vessels, even though people still use them — the conditions I identify as defining the “afterlife of culture.”

The chronology works differently for the Maya, of course, because they were colonized in the 16th century and their Spanish colonizers burned their written literature, leading them to become illiterate in their own languages. I evoked the Maya as an example of people whose belief systems have been shattered. This is in the process of happening to the rest of us now, even though we’ve done it to ourselves, with our own technology.

In your essay “The Reshaping of the Canadian Novel” from When Words Deny the World (2002), you quip that you “had failed to realize that in the climate of the 1990s, ‘reactionary’ had become a compliment.” But, given the fact that it’s impossible to put the genie of technology back in the bottle, is the yearning for a return to a more traditional (pre-afterlife) version of culture not by definition reactionary?

I made that comment after I called Carol Shields a reactionary and her publisher slapped the quote onto the cover of the paperback edition. It’s possible that the person choosing quotes for Random House didn’t know what the word meant and assumed it was laudatory.

I think your question is asking about a different kind of reactionary posture — that of someone who longs for cultural forms which have been relegated to the past.

It may be true that in thirty years’ time a writer of novels will be a throwback, rather like someone who makes stained glass windows and has survived into an era in which people have stopped building cathedrals.

At the same time, a concept central to my definition of the afterlife of culture is that, even when the conditions which created the cultural form have evaporated, the form itself goes marching on. Part of what facilitates this is the increasing fragmentation of society. This ensures that there will probably always be novel readers, just as there will always be people interested in wood carving or knitting. But they’ll be just one sect among many. The more difficult question is whether the novel is still “the novel” after it’s been stripped of its essential capacity to gobble up and define all of society.

You point to Michel Houellebecq as a French author whose narrative work “has consumed technology.” Japan has Haruki Murakami; England has David Mitchell and, recently, Steven Hall; why has Canada not been able to breach this barrier outside of the genre fiction of William Gibson or Cory Doctorow?

People have been asking this question since at least the 1970s, when the neighbours had Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barth and we had Robertson Davies and Margaret Laurence. The answer goes back to the fact that Canada was never an imperial power like Britain or Japan, nor did it have an 18th century revolution like the United States or France. Our writing is post-colonial in its need to make sense of our history and enshrine our myths. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s more troubling is when we act like flat-out colonials, pandering to the international market by suppressing our history to create no-name historical romances, or erasing the details of our present.

The kind of writing you mention depends on a confident, clear-eyed, unashamed grasp of the quirks of one’s own environment, if only as a taking-off point and a source for off-beat insights. Many Canadian writers — and, sadly, many more now than thirty or forty years ago — are too embarrassed by their own marginalized reality to lend it the attention it warrants. Such writers — we all know them — long to be somebody else. The writing reflects that. Even so, some of Douglas Coupland’s work might fit into the Mitchell-Murakami-Houellebecq category. But it’s telling, I think, that Coupland gets reviewed more seriously outside Canada than he does at home.

If the afterlife of culture involves the marginalization of artists — in particular, writers — is this necessarily a problem? Isn’t being on the margins of society and critiquing it what writers have always done? Could the argument be made that it’s impossible for artists to function usefully anywhere other than on the margins?

Yes, yes! God help the writer who becomes a corporate courtier and grows too cautious to speak or invent freely!

But I see the marginalization of the writer under the afterlife of culture as being qualitatively different from that of bohemian cultures of the past such as Paris in the 1920s, Bloomsbury in the 1930s and 1940s, or Greenwich Village between the 1940s and the 1960s. Those formations had an internal, literary coherence and trafficked in a high-art form of the written culture that was the stuff of daily cultural and social debate. This gave them influence on the centre from an outpost on the margins. The Refus global manifesto in Quebec in 1948 is a good Canadian example of the same phenomenon, even though many of the participants were visual artists.

It’s different today because literacy itself has lost its centrality and the countercultural pretensions of a “marginalized” bohemianism have been gutted by the voracity of a globalized capitalism that turns even the most wild rebellions into one more drab commodity. Just as Greenwich Village itself has disappeared from the geography of New York in recent years as a result of rampant property speculation, so has the cultural position represented by that sort of self-selecting marginalization.

In A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, you write: “The transition from a sacred world defined by the word to a technological world defined by the image promotes the primacy of urban life.” Is one of CanLit’s primary problems not a refusal to grapple with exactly this modern urban experience?

Absolutely. It’s precisely that period of civilization — which I’d say we’re now approaching the end of — when you’re living in the urban world but still have access to literary languages elaborated in a sacred, ritualized context which gives you great potential for literature, offering a dense variety of experience and the opportunity to rev up literary language in response to the beat of the city, to collisions between people from different cultures who’ve flocked together in close proximity and so on. At the same time, I think it’s important to avoid falling into the common trap of Canadian cultural commentators of contrasting the “cool, multicultural downtown” to the “white, reactionary hinterland.”

We can’t write urban novels for the same reason that we have difficulty writing any kind of novel about our present, namely a neo-colonial shame of recognizing and playing imaginatively with the details of Canadian social and cultural realities. That’s a Canadian problem, not a specifically urban or rural one. The urban versus rural duality so beloved of journalists denigrates our history and distorts the problems of our present.

You point out that the volume of literature in translation is distressingly thin in Canada. Given that we live in an officially bilingual country and some of the best Canadian writers working today (Gaétan Soucy, Élise Turcotte, Christianne Frenette, Nicholas Dickner) are Francophone writers writing in French, why is this resistance to works in translation so endemic in this country?

As the larger partner in this bilingual country, English-speaking Canadians have the responsibility to make the smaller partner feel secure. In spite of the adoption of official bilingualism, we’ve never made the move to a more open mentality.

And our history is bad, bad, bad.

Remember that from 1913 to 1928 it was illegal to teach in French in Ontario public schools. Well-off English-speaking parents leapt on French immersion in the 1980s as a way of segregating the public school system between rich and poor and achieving private schooling without having to pay for it; few people have shown much interest in whether French immersion actually teaches kids French (which in most cases it doesn’t). The snob appeal was always more important than whether little Tara or Tyler would be able to converse with a logger in Moncton or Chicoutimi.

When someone speaks French on television, the CBC dubs their voice as though they were speaking Klingon. If we had a “bilingual” mentality, the CBC would let us hear our Francophone compatriots’ voices, providing subtitles if necessary. The shocking editing-out of Claude Dubois, one of Canada’s greatest singers, from the English broadcast of the Canadian Songwriters’ Hall of Fame Gala in March 2008 is typical of this: the CBC execs were terrified that the Anglo bourgeoisie would channel-surf over to CNN at the sound of a song in French.

The hard — very hard — work that needed to be done to challenge and break down the ingrained francophobia of the old-stock Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie has never been completed and now many of those insular attitudes have been transmitted to people of more recent immigrant backgrounds who have assimilated into English-speaking Canadian culture.

At the same time, the peculiar form taken by Canadian nationalism has resulted in a situation where, unlike both Great Britain and the United States, we have no national institution which funds incoming translations from other countries. The result is that we fund Canadian translations from French, then bury them, and we close ourselves off from the rest of the world, leaving it up to the Brits and the Yanks to decide what gets translated into English. The combination is stultifying.

What is the most pressing challenge facing Canadian literature and Canadian writers and critics in the afterlife of culture?

Probably the survival of literary education. Even students whose interests lie in the humanities often graduate from high school these days without having read a book. There’s more and more pressure to divert library budgets into buying computers which will be obsolete three years after their purchase, accompanied by a strengthening credo that reading is elitist and teaching literature is demeaning to kids whose parents aren’t English-speaking or whose primary interests lie elsewhere, or that classroom discussion of novels, poems, and stories risks calling into question various vested belief systems, from fundamentalist Protestantism to market capitalism to Islamic dogmatism, which, of course, is part of what literature does best and one of the reasons to immerse yourself in books.

There’s a confluence of interests between elements of both the right and the left which promote these suffocating views. Rather than reinforcing kids’ mouse-click attention-spans, schools should be working to instill an ability to engage in extended concentration. Without this, kids will be trapped in an eternal present, lacking the ability to put their experience in context or make effective judgements. Incidentally, they won’t vote or read either. Then, to return to the image of the Maya with which A Report on the Afterlife of Culture opens, we will be living in a culture whose literary experience is no longer accessible to its citizens.

(Author photo by Lorena Leija.)

Starving Gangs of Oxygen: Michael C. Chettleburgh, Part 2

Posted 16 August, 2007 in Author Interview | No comments

TSR presents part two of its interview with Michael C. Chettleburgh, author of Young Thugs: Inside the Dangerous World of Canadian Street Gangs.

You advocate a combined program of suppression and prevention to combat street gangs. Suppression, which the Canadian Conservative government seems to endorse, involves putting more police on the streets and engaging in frequent and visible gang sweeps to round up gang members (which you refer to in your book as being akin to “ridding your lawn of dandelions by snipping off their heads”). Prevention, on the other hand, involves dealing with the root causes of gangsterism: systemic racism, poverty, hopelessness. In other words, suppression deals with existing gangsters; prevention tries to stop new gangsters from ever being created. Why does there seem to be no political will to deal with the root causes of gangsterism in Canada?

The frame of reference for governing politicians is four, maybe five years, less if there is a minority government like we have now. Unfortunately, this time frame is inconsistent with the five-to-ten year period required for good prevention programs to produce results.

There is a much more cynical, if no less accurate, explanation, however. The Harper government, as well as other right-of-centre politicians, tend to take comfort in assuming both the role of youth-crime fear-mongerers and champions of tough on crime measures. Despite crime having declined in Canada since the late ’90s and the relative safety of our big cities, we are told we need more, much more, taxpayer investment in police, courts and prisons, and an expanded if not militaristic approach to street gangs.

This manipulative disconnect between perception and reality is regrettable and will continue, I surmise, because there are so few Canadian politicians who have courage to tackle the root causes of crime. Why? Because the tough-on-crime agenda plays to our fears and it generates votes. Who among us does not want a safe community? Who among us does not feel safer when we see more cops on the street? Tough-on-crime messaging is politicking at its worst, and shunts all that we know about crime prevention to poor, second-class-citizen status.

So faced with the need to garner votes from fearful constituents, and demonstrate that you’ve produced results, it is easier to spend big on suppression, which you can see and feel, rather than tackle prickly and seemingly intractable problems like poverty, discrimination, income inequality, lack of affordable housing, our emerging McJob economy, and the like, which continue to fuel the gang problem.

Writing about Toronto’s troubled Jane-Finch neighbourhood in the June 16, 2007 edition of the Globe and Mail, columnist Joe Friesen remarks,

[I]n their planning sessions, community workers refer solemnly to “boundary issues” that impede program delivery. When the police hold consultations with youth, they have meetings in each distinct area to prevent rival gangs from mingling. It’s as though the kids have redrawn the neighbourhood map and forced the adults to adapt. As a result, the teens from Palisades, who often complain of having nothing to do, don’t use the well-equipped community centre that’s a block away in Crips territory.

How does society counteract this apparently intractable division among certain of its youth?

In the communities in which gang rivalries are most acute, these boundary issues can be quite real, but I am not convinced they are intractable. When you speak to youth who are faced with these issues, they will most often say that they do not venture to areas claimed by specific gangs because they don’t feel safe there. This speaks to the issue of inadequate adult oversight and control of these areas and the community assets within them. So, as simple as it sounds, we need to do more to enhance young people’s sense of community safety, which can be augmented by the presence of caring and committed adults – police, parents, community leaders, community centre staff, outreach workers and volunteers. Together, we need to take a stand and no longer accept the gangs’ control — which is tenuous at best — of entire communities.

In addition, we ought to consider a novel approach which is showing promise in some U.S. cities ravaged by gangs: the gang injunction. Essentially, a gang injunction is a restraining order against a group. It is a civil suit that seeks a court order declaring the gang’s public behavior a nuisance and asking for special rules directed toward its activity. These injunctions are a good way of dealing with various gang nuisances, which may not necessarily be criminal in nature, but are nonetheless responsible for a diminished sense of community safety. For instance, if a gang is known to police as being in control of a specific area, a gang injunction could be sought to prohibit suspected gang members from such things as the use of cell phones, loitering around public buildings, being out between 10 p.m. and sunrise, the wearing of gang colours, or assembly of three or more individuals. With monitoring conducted by police using tips from the public, breaches of these injunctions result in immediate sanction from fines to community service to jail time, which sends a message to gangsters that they are no longer in control of the urban experience.

Pardon the pun, the jury is still out as to whether injunctions prevent crime or simply drive it underground or to a different community. But to the community that is covered by an injunction, the evidence is that people feel safer and therefore gain a sense of confidence that their community is no longer run by gangsters.

Before Young Thugs was published, your editor warned you that the chapter in which you advocate legalizing marijuana in Canada as a means of starving gangs of oxygen would be the most contentious part of the book, even though it represents only nine pages out of 276. Was he right?

My editor, Jim Gifford at HarperCollins, did not so much warn me about how contentious this small chapter would be, but reiterated how contentious we all knew it would be from the outset of our work together. I have presented my views to others in the past about drug reform and I was well aware of how provocative they were for some.

The interesting thing I have experienced is that the response to these arguments depends on the context or environment in which I make my case. If I present these arguments one-on-one or to a small, private group, the majority of people either agree with my position on marijuana legalization, or accept that my argument has merit (even some of my cop friends!). However, in larger public or media settings, at best I win over about 50% of the audience, with my detractors accusing me of advocating the unrestricted legalization of all drugs (which I have never advocated).

There seems to be a lack of courage on the part of some Canadians to admit we have not, and cannot, win the war against drugs, that marijuana is not as harmful as alcohol, or that there is an inextricable connection between street gangs and the trade in illicit drugs. With this small chapter I wanted simply to stimulate debate. It achieved this in spades and page for page, has done more to get the word out about my book than any other section.

The case you make for legalizing marijuana seems fairly strong to me. Why do you think this is still such a contentious issue?

Many people get caught up in a moral quandary and fail to understand that there is no contradiction in being pro-drug reform AND anti-drug at the same time, as I am. With respect to marijuana legalization, I believe that the issue is growing less contentious every day. We know from Health Canada data that several million Canadians over the age of fifteen will consume marijuana this year, which is and will always be the illicit drug of choice for Canadians. When we look back to the former Liberal government’s move to decriminalize small amounts of pot for personal consumption, there was no great consternation among the majority of Canadians, which speaks to the growing societal tolerance for marijuana use.

However, there is still much misinformation and ignorance surrounding pot use, which makes the debate unnecessarily contentious. For example, many of those who hold strident views against pot have not taken the time to understand that judged on the basis of harm, pot is less harmful than other socially acceptable drugs. These same people hold fast to the view that pot is a so-called “gateway drug” that leads to other, more harmful drug consumption (also known as the stepping-stone hypothesis), despite the fact that this has never been conclusively proven. If this hypothesis were true, we would have several million hard drug users in this country, but we don’t, because marijuana satisfies almost all curiosity for most Canadian drug users.

As long as emotion and mythology are accorded the same probative weight as scientific evidence and logic, the drug reform debate will continue to be an incendiary one.

In a Globe and Mail column published on June 26, 2007, Margaret Wente writes about the deadly nature of today’s marijuana, which she claims should not be confused with the milder marijuana smoked by the “peace and love” generation:

How did such a nice drug turn so nasty? Blame a revolution in greenhouse technology along with genetic engineering and cross-breeding of seed stock from Asia and the Middle East. This potent stuff now dominates the market. The UN says it is “distinct enough in appearance and potency to be considered a separate drug.” The evidence shows that it can be highly addictive, especially for kids who suffer from depression, behavioural problems or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It causes paranoia, aggressiveness and psychosis, and it sharply elevates the risk of schizophrenia. It is very bad, indeed, for people with asthma or multiple sclerosis.

How would you counter Wente’s argument?

I had no idea Ms. Wente was an expert in illicit drug pharmacology and its long term effects!

Look, the Wentes of the world make their case on fear and misinformation, just like people of days gone by who said pot would make you crazy or lead you down the line toward the use of more powerful drugs like heroin or cocaine.

Today’s marijuana is deadly? Then show me medically documented deaths as a result of marijuana use (they don’t exist). Today’s marijuana is more potent? This is hard to know for sure, since today’s highly accurate testing protocols and technologies weren’t around in the peace and love generation when scientists could at best only approximate THC content in pot. Today’s marijuana is more addictive? Then show me the numbers and explain why over the past decade, illicit drug consumption has roughly doubled in North America (with marijuana being the leading drug of choice by far), yet the number of people classified as drug addicted (about 1.3% in North America) remains consistent with 1930s levels.

Setting aside my counterpoints above, assume for the sake of argument that I agree with everything Ms. Wente states. Well, so what? If people want to consume drugs and harm themselves – and the numbers show that demand is growing unabated in Canada and elsewhere – is that not their sovereign right?

We must frame this discussion about pot with a simple question: should the government be our master and not our servant, and therefore be in the paternalistic business of protecting us from harming ourselves? I think not, and we need only point to two other drugs – alcohol and nicotine delivered in cigarettes – to prove that the government has no philosophical problem with regulating drugs that collectively kill fifty thousand Canadians every year.

Ms. Wente and her ilk can’t seem to get their minds around the unstoppable momentum of demand for drugs, despite the attendant dangers of the drug trade (gangster salesmen, dubiously doctored substances, etc.).

Rather than treat illicit drugs as a criminal justice matter, let’s treat it as what it really is: a public health issue. And rather than letting criminal organizations control what gets sold, where it gets sold, and to whom it gets sold, let’s control the big business of drugs and invest the multi-billion dollar fiscal dividend in dealing with the downstream health effects as well as investing in proper prevention and harm reduction. Scaring people about the dangers of pot hasn’t seemed to work all that well, so why not try a different, more rational approach?

If marijuana were legalized, would gangs not simply find other criminal means of raising money, say by increasing their traffic in prostitution, becoming more involved in carjackings and break and enters, or more closely integrating themselves with organized crime units?

Of course, if marijuana were legalized, gangs would turn to other criminal enterprise, first and foremost other illicit drugs like cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and ecstasy. However, these other drugs are decidedly niche products, which most Canadians do not seek to consume. Of these drugs, I would also advocate for the legalization of heroin and cocaine under medical supervision (prescription), which would again stunt the income potential of drug-dealing criminal enterprises.

As far as other criminal activities are concerned – prostitution, fraud, auto theft, and the like – taken together their economic potential is tiny in comparison to the huge business of drugs. So through intelligent legalization, we cripple the economic potential of dealing drugs and ergo the incentive that attracts many young people to join gangs. This is not a complete solution to gangs, but it is one way to upset the relatively attractive risk-reward proposition that confronts young people today.

One of the reasons that gangs feel they can act with impunity has to do with the culture of fear that surrounds them. Many members of afflicted communities are afraid to come forward as witnesses to gang violence because they fear reprisals. (The Amon Beckles killing was a reprisal killing.) How do we counteract this culture of fear in our urban communities?

That’s a great question, for which there really is no easy answer. The “stop snitchin’ ” culture within the gang world is a real one and major gangs make it known to those around them that there are consequences for helping the police or even, if you are a victim of a gang crime, seeking redress through the criminal justice system. Down in the U.S., witness intimidation is a factor in upwards of 90% of gang crimes and is increasingly a problem here.

There are several things, however, we can do to counteract this phenomenon. After a gang crime, a highly visible police presence is essential, and by that I mean cops out of their cars talking to many residents, which will create uncertainty in the minds of gangsters as to who may be talking to police. Another thing we need is a truly national, accessible, and more coordinated witness protection program, although I would note that many people who witness a gang crime are not prepared for the level of commitment (relocation, new identity, leaving behind family members, etc.) contemplated under a witness protection arrangement. As well, we need to make penalties upon conviction for crimes like obstruction of justice and criminal contempt of court much more severe (like fifteen or twenty years), which may provide a deterrent effect for gangsters who may wish to intimidate others. We should consider introducing “hearsay exception” legislation that would allow some out-of-court statements by intimidated witnesses to be used as evidence, even if the witnesses doesn’t come to court to testify (normally such statements are inadmissible and rejected as hearsay). And while this may sound glib, residents need to “take back the streets” and cooperate with police, even at the risk of peril to themselves. In my experience, the communities that turn the corner on gangs are those that simply stop tolerating their behaviour and criminal activities.

You posit a ten-year window before Canada’s incipient gang problem becomes a full-blown epidemic. What practical actions can Canadians take to avoid this problem spiralling out of control?

In my book I propose a sixteen-point approach to dealing with gangs, which incorporates some of the best international thinking on targeted police suppression, prevention, diversion, re-integration, and community mobilization. If we were to properly fund and work the plan I propose, we would prevail over street gangs in the long run.

The biggest barriers we face to dealing constructively with street gangs, however, are the willingness of Canadians to act and our culture of complacency, which prevails when we are faced with big problems (think: global warming). The majority of us see the street gang issue as either a police problem or a problem that affects only troubled communities, and we therefore sidestep personal involvement in solving it. Many Canadians bitch and moan about gangs and violence at the office water cooler or on AM radio call-in shows, but won’t lift a finger to do anything about it.

So, you are concerned about the gang problem? Well then do something, anything! Mentor a child, provide meaningful employment to an at-risk youth, clean up your community, volunteer at a homework club or sports league, stop buying street drugs from gangsters, share information with police, be a sterling role model to your children, hold politicians accountable for their justice system investments and their continual downloading of services to cash-strapped city governments, stop exporting quality manufacturing jobs offshore, stop looking the other way.

There are no magic bullet solutions to street gangs, and what is simply required is the engagement of all citizens who are concerned about the health of their community and the future livelihood of young people.

Shattering the Myths of Street Gangs: Michael C. Chettleburgh, Part 1

Posted 15 August, 2007 in Author Interview | No comments

Michael C. Chettleburgh is one of Canada’s foremost authorities on street gangs. Since 1991, he has run his own consultancy specializing in criminal justice issues. He wrote the 2002 Canadian Police Survey on Youth Gangs for the federal government and has also developed street-gang awareness programs for law-enforcement agencies. He is the author of Young Thugs: Inside the Dangerous World of Canadian Street Gangs, an unflinching and eye-opening exposé of the makeup, workings, and politics surrounding Canadian youth gangs.

Michael C. Chettleburgh agreed to be interviewed for TSR. The interview is long, and Chettleburgh’s responses are thorough and comprehensive. Accordingly, the interview has been broken into two parts. Part one, below, deals with the composition of Canada’s street gangs and dispels some common myths surrounding youth gangs and gang crime. Part two, which will be posted tomorrow, offers some suggestions and policy options intended to starve gangs of oxygen and combat the growing problem of youth gangs in Canada.

How did you first become involved in researching Canadian street gangs?

Back in ’96 I was retained by the Ottawa Police Service to evaluate the effectiveness of a police-run youth centre in a so-called “troubled” community that had persistent gang, drug, and violence problems. During this project, I became quite intrigued by the street gang phenomenon and the broader question of why some young people chose to participate in a street gang. As they say, one thing led to another and later I developed street gang training programs for police and conducted the first ever national survey of youth gangs for the Solicitor General of Canada.

What first convinced you that this was a pressing issue for the Canadian public?

In 1995, two tragic incidents signified to me that the street gang problem was growing and that we needed to pay better attention to it. In July of that year, thirteen-year-old Joseph “Beeper” Spence of Winnipeg was murdered by three gang-involved teenagers who mistakenly thought Spence was from a rival gang. In October, in the City of Ottawa, another innocent young man, seventeen-year-old Sylvain Leduc, was murdered by members of the Ace Crew gang.

These murders were widely covered in the media and sparked fierce discussion and debate about youth crime, the “crisis” of youth gangs, and, of course, what we should do about it. The interesting story to me was not the murders, per se, however tragic they indeed were. Rather, I found it curious that public attention to the issue of gangs disappeared rather quickly, as if the “average Canadian” felt it was not a problem after all. The complacency of Canadians on this issue was telling, and portended a worsening problem in my view.

In Young Thugs, you suggest that the tipping point in terms of the public’s perception of the gang problem — the point at which “the street gang issue morphed into a public crisis” — was the murder of Amon Beckles on November 18, 2005. Why do you think that this particular incident, coming several months after the “summer of the gun” in Toronto, was the tipping point?

Well, I should say that prior to the Beckles murder, our country was littered with various “tipping points” on gangs, which invariably did not produce any meaningful change in either the manner in which we dealt with the problem or the engagement level of everyday Canadians. The Beckles murder was different because of its sheer audacity. Here was an eighteen-year-old black man, attending the funeral of a friend shot in an alleged gang crime in which the Toronto Police suggested Beckles was a possible material witness, gunned down on the steps of a church! The murder certainly highlighted the troubling issue of witness intimidation, and this struck a chord in the general community because, after all, anyone of us could one day be a witness to a gang crime.

Irrespective of one’s faith, we respect places of worship and expect them to be safe bastions from all manner of harm. Because he was shot on church property, however, his murder was a gross violation of this sense of sanctity we accord to places of worship and signified to Canadians that gang violence respects no boundaries.

What about the murder of Jane Creba on Boxing Day 2005? Did this have a larger impact in the public consciousness because Creba was white?

The Creba homicide hit much closer to home for most Canadians, in part because of the manner in which she died. I believe that both race and gender in the Creba case conspired to produce a larger impact than the Beckles homicide.

When a black man is shot, many people jump to conclusions and assume that it was gang related. Many also assume that somehow, the victim may have played a part in his own demise, that, in some perverse “live by the sword, die by the sword” karmic way, he may have deserved his fate and that he was dispensable to society. Is this racial prejudice? Absolutely. And we have to recognize that however tolerant we pride ourselves to be, racial prejudice and stereotypes endure. Certainly, when a white girl is shot, no such similar conclusions are made and we struggle to comprehend the gravity of the situation and how it occurred in the first place. When we can’t reconcile a devastating incident with some kind of easy-to-understand causality, we feel the impact much more.

Much of Young Thugs is devoted to shattering myths about gangs and gang membership. You point out, for example, that the traditional notion of racial homogeneity amongst gangsters is not always true, but that many gangs are ethnically diverse. How and why does the stereotype of the black gangster in the hoodie and low-riders persist?

The notion of ethnically diverse gangs, where members are united less by shared culture and heritage and more by economic pursuit and self-protection, frankly is not as sensational or troubling in our minds, or in media circles, as the violent and marauding inner city black gang, the cunning and secretive Asian gang, or the desperate and dangerous western Aboriginal gang, among others.

Many people try to understand the gang issue by compartmentalizing it (like the perceived dominant category of “black gangsters”), which helps those outside these ethnic groupings rationalize that it is a problem that doesn’t concern them, or that somehow it is a problem that these communities have brought upon themselves. When people begin to understand that street gangs are ethnically diverse, they are troubled by the fact that youth (including their own children) who heretofore have not traditionally been considered “at-risk,” may indeed be so.

As far as the specific stereotype of black gangsters is concerned, the Canadian media apparatus is concentrated in Toronto, a city that for the past few years has led the country in gang violence, the majority of which has featured the black community. It’s no wonder, then, that inside and outside our city, the casual observer sees this largely as a problem created and prolonged by the actions of the black community, somehow as if other ethnocultural groups are immune from the problem.

Yet, across the country, we see similar gang violence affecting the white community, the East Asian community, the young Aboriginal community, the Arabic community, and others. But these incidents don’t get the same play as Toronto’s “epidemic of black-on-black violence.” So the stereotype continues.

When did so-called “hybrid” gangs develop in Canada?

No one can say for sure, but I began hearing about and seeing this hybridization of street gangs around the late ’90s.

What led to the development of hybrid gangs? Was this simply a practical, economic concern, or were there other factors at work?

In part, the hybrid nature of many of Canada’s street gangs reflects the multicultural nature of our populace. While racial strife has been a feature of the postwar American experience, Canada has largely been a country of ethnocultural harmony and this has been reflected in the composition of our street gangs.

Generally, however, I think the underlying economics of gangs has been responsible for most of this hybridization. When you look at the myriad illegal ways in which gangs of all description try to make their money, you are also faced with a myriad players from virtually all ethnic groups. Traditionally, many of these “lines of business” have been controlled by specific groups –Jamaicans controlled crack and pot, for example, South Americans the cocaine trade, Asians the heroin business, white outlaw bikers the prostitution business, etc. – so if you are a profit-hungry street gang, you need to learn to get along with other diverse gangsters.

Birds of a feather still flock together, indeed, but if an economic purpose is served, then collaboration is assured and we see that reflected in the composition of street gangs.

Another myth you shatter in your book is the “myth of migration,” that is, the notion that gangs export themselves and their members across national borders. The Crips in Toronto, you suggest, are a very different entity from the Crips in South Central Los Angeles. Why has this not been made clear in the media?

In fairness, some media outlets have begun to make this distinction, but you are correct in your premise that not enough has been done. In some respects, the media operates at the Grade 8 “lowest common denominator” level – they produce meaningful news stories but they don’t overwhelm the reader, viewer, or listener with too many esoteric facts, of which the true provenance of Canadian Crips may certainly qualify. As well, the Crips “brand” has a rich historical pedigree, a certain media gravitas that conveys fear, danger and suspicion. Some in the media use this as a convenient backdrop to their stories to give them weight and a sense of foreboding, which is lost if you explain that Crips in Canada are composed of young men who are only borrowing the name of the world’s most famous gang identifier!

Does the lack of a centralized organizational structure (like, for example, that of the Hell’s Angels) make street gangs easier or harder to combat?

From a suppression perspective, the relatively disordered nature of the average street gang, combined with the often fluid nature of an individual’s gang affiliation, make it more difficult for police to piece together the DNA sequence of a street gang and define its leadership structure relative to the tightly controlled and hierarchical nature of traditional organized crime (TOC) organizations. However, the fact that street gangs are largely “disorganized crime” makes them easier to combat on balance.

Unlike their more organized TOC counterparts, street gangs lack the financial wherewithal, sophistication, and contacts to fend off police and other criminal justice system actors who are committed to their demise. At the same time, unlike members of TOCs, who tend to be so-called “career criminals” with virtually no chance of exit from their gang, many young street gang members either leave their gangs with no repercussion or are willing to take the chance. So, from a suppression and intervention standpoint, it is possible to show street gang members that there is a way out.

On your website, there is an article about the apparent migration of the Latino gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), which Newsweek has called the “most dangerous gang in North America,” into Canada. Does this indicate that the myth of migration is beginning to become a reality?

No, not really.

By “myth of migration,” I referred to large U.S. street gangs purposefully exporting members to Canada to establish new footholds. There is still little evidence of this and I cannot see this ever being a major factor in street gang expansion in Canada. However, U.S. street gang members do migrate throughout the United States and even, from time to time, to Canada – to escape police pressure, to get away from violent rivalries, to simply move with their families for a better future.

In the case of MS-13 members who are mostly of Salvadoran and Honduran descent, the gang boasts perhaps the most robust social network of any other major U.S. gang. So, if you are an MS-13 member in Los Angeles and are wanted for a crime, and if a fellow gang member has relatives in Canada, you may take an extended trip up here just to let the situation cool down. But this kind of move cannot be equated with a conscious decision, on the part of major MS-13 gang sets in L.A., New York City, or Chicago to export their “franchise” to Canada.

Tomorrow: Starving Gangs of Oxygen

Claire Cameron Talks to TSR

Posted 11 June, 2007 in Author Interview | 3 comments

Toronto native Claire Cameron’s first novel, The Line Painter, tells the story of Carrie McDonald, a woman who flees the city following the death of her boyfriend. When Carrie’s car breaks down on a lonely stretch of highway in northern Ontario, she is forced to seek help from Frank, a subcontractor who paints the lines on the highway at night. In a story that straddles the line between psychological character study and a particularly Canadian kind of thriller, Cameron traces the shifting and often-uneasy trajectory of Carrie’s relationship with Frank. Cameron agreed to answer some questions about the book and her writing process for That Shakespeherian Rag.

Where did the inspiration for The Line Painter come from?

I was driving the Yellowhead highway in Manitoba and got stuck behind a line painter who was doing the middle line on the road. My impatience turned to fascination as I watched the paint go down on the road in a perfect, crisp line.

That image stuck with me. About ten years later, I was writing a song about a line painter and started doing a bit of research. That’s when I discovered why the lines glow at night. They spray a fine layer of glass beads into the wet paint that reflects the light from the headlights of your car back at you. I loved that idea and went from there.

You write songs as well? What prompted you to pursue novel writing as opposed to songwriting?

I am terrible on the guitar and have a so-so singing voice, meaning I couldn’t make the idea in my head turn into anything worth listening too. I sound much better when I am silent and typing.

The Line Painter is atypical of what has come to be identified as “CanLit” in a number of ways: it’s set in the present, the writing is not overly descriptive or lyrical, and the story has genre overtones. Were you conscious of trying to buck any specific trends while you were writing?

No. I had been out of the country for twelve-plus years and was living in London, U.K. when I wrote The Line Painter. I was aware of Canadian writers, but I certainly wasn’t conscious of trends here. I thank my lucky stars for that. Such a self-conscious aim would cause me to crawl under my desk and roll into a ball.

The protagonist in The Line Painter is a Toronto woman on the run from a traumatic incident in her past. She winds up in the town of Hearst, Ontario, which is a very specific location, but the author’s note at the book’s beginning points out that the story is completely fictional. Nevertheless, Carrie is a Toronto native and shares a given name that is arguably similar to yours (especially with the hard-c sound at the beginning). Were you worried that readers might too closely identify Carrie’s experience with your own?

The beginning of my book has an author’s note that says, “Hearst is real, but this story is not. I made it up.” That is partly my idea of a good joke, but I was thinking of small business owners and the people who call Hearst home. Many people who read the book will never visit Hearst. Their perception of the place will be entirely based on Carrie’s and she, as Frank so aptly puts it, has her head up her ass. I worried about that.

As for people thinking I am Carrie – if they want to think that, they will. I’m not worried about it. Some of her experience is mine. Some of Frank’s experience is also mine.

Actually, that is what I should really worry about – people thinking I’m Frank …

Place is very important in The Line Painter. The specifics of the Kapuskasing area of Ontario – the town of Hearst itself, the Husky truck stop, the King’s motel – are all carefully drawn and vivid, yet you were living in London, England when you wrote the novel. Do you think that the experience of living across the Atlantic helped or hindered your ability to render the book’s setting?

I think living in London gave me enough separation to write a story. I could imagine the setting in a way that suited what I needed it to do. My job is to write a story in a setting with the convincing details, but not necessarily to create slavishly accurate record of a place.

One of the most impressive aspects of the novel, for me, is that neither Carrie nor Frank is one-dimensional. I’ve read responses to the book from readers who have complained that some of Carrie’s decisions render her unsympathetic. Do you think that your characters need to be sympathetic in order to appease a reader, or should readers be willing to embrace Carrie’s more Machiavellian side, for example?

I did not intend for Carrie to be entirely sympathetic. I hope the reader, at times, might be put off enough by Carrie to find his or her loyalties shifting toward Frank. This puts the reader in the same position as Carrie, questioning their perception of Frank, trying to reconcile their disapproval of him with, perhaps, attraction or, at least, compassion toward him.

Both Carrie and Frank have lost loved ones, and there’s a sense that both of them are trying – with little success – to outrun their respective pasts. Is it fair to say that this is one of the things that bring these two disparate characters together?

Carrie is trying to resolve her past relationship, as is Frank. They have a parallel experience and try to find relief in each other. But, they are both trying to take something from the other, rather than give as you might in a healthier relationship. And, of course, they are brought together by their love of smoking too.

Do you see the attempt to outrun the past as a futile, doomed endeavour?

I would say outrunning your past is futile. You have to learn to exist with it. I have a great distrust for people who attempt a sharp break from their past. It can make for a very unsettled person.

Carrie attempts to escape by leaving the city and striking out for the west. This lends her journey an almost mythic aspect – the pilgrim striking out for the frontier. In doing so, she also sloughs off the civilizing aspects of the city and encounters a kind of wildness for which she is totally unprepared. How and why was it important for you as a writer to thrust Carrie into this alien environment?

I have done quite a bit of mountaineering. I love being outside, but the most interesting thing about climbing is the group dynamics. People change, or reveal much more, when they are tired, hungry, and scared and in an alien environment. You learn much more about a person in a short period of time.

You’ve cited Margaret Atwood as an influence. In her book of literary criticism, Survival, Atwood writes, “Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back, from the awful experience – the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship – that killed everyone else. The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except gratitude for having escaped with his life.” Do you agree with this assessment, and do you think this is true for Carrie in The Line Painter?

Atwood is clever, isn’t she? As for The Line Painter, I don’t know. That’s the honest answer.

But, perhaps it’s the opposite. Carrie has lived a fairly cushy life up until the death of her boyfriend. Her actions thrust her into a place that forces her to start making decisions and taking responsibility for her life. Many people, when put in a position where they are forced to cope, come out the other end, if they do, with more tools to tackle the future.

This is especially true of someone from a more privileged background, like Carrie. If you are less privileged, like Frank, there is often less slack in the system. Life, in this way, is not fair.

In Survival, Atwood posits “a superabundance of victims in Canadian literature,” but this description doesn’t seem to apply to Carrie. For better or worse, she is the author of her own situation, which is one of the aspects of her character that may render her unsympathetic to some readers.

Carrie is not a victim. She makes her own bed, so to speak. She comes to understand this by the end.

The structure of The Line Painter is fairly subtle, and doesn’t yield itself up to close analysis on a first reading. With a second pass, however, the parallels and repetitions that have been built into the story become apparent and the moments of foreshadowing take on a more symbolic resonance for the reader. Were these aspects of the story that you shaded in during rewriting, or did you have a very detailed structure in mind when you sat down to write?

The backbone of the structure appeared during the first draft, which I wrote quickly and fairly spontaneously. I then rewrote endlessly, which mostly involved trimming back, but I did some shading in as well.

Is this your preferred process, or could you see yourself doing something else with another story?

I don’t know. I hope I keep trying new things.

When I was writing The Line Painter, I was very worried about the process and convinced I was going about things the wrong way. I didn’t, for example, realize that many writers don’t outline before they start. My lack of outline worried me deeply. This time I hope I can relax a bit more – but angst is clever and evolves. It finds new ways to attack.

What are the advantages of structuring your novel as a suspense story? How does this allow the reader a different experience than would be the case with a more straightforward, chronological telling of the tale?

I wasn’t aware I was writing suspense until I was writing the final draft. I went to visit my agent’s partner, Bill Hamilton, at A.M. Heath in London. I asked him how he would categorize the novel and he said “suspense.” I was surprised to hear it. I think of The Line Painter as a love story with a dark comedic undertone. Or, perhaps the end of a love story is more accurate.

I think this has got me into some trouble. The story looks a bit like a thriller, but it does not have a classic thriller structure. If you pick up the book hoping for Stephen King, the end is going to disappoint you.

I wrote a book that I hope a few people will love. The rest can go buy Stephen King.

The last word in the novel is “home.” On one level, the entire story could be seen as Carrie’s attempt to find her way back home. How important is this notion of home for you?

I grew up in Toronto and had no question about where I called home. Then I moved to California and became very attached to the place. I moved to London, England, and, after several years, started to feel it was home. There is something comforting about knowing where “home” is and I was disconcerted to realize I didn’t know and probably never would again. These things were on my mind while I was writing.

So would you say that your definition of “home” has changed as a result of your moving around?

Yes, the idea home has become a decision, rather than a place.

What brought you back to Canada?

There are all sorts of complex reasons we moved to Canada (my husband is from San Francisco) that I’m not sure I know myself.

The simple reason is that selling our flat in London meant I could be a writer in Canada and still have enough money to eat.

The Line Painter is written in a spare and stripped-down style, which is reminiscent of Raymond Carver and Ian McEwan, two writers you point to as influences. What attracts you to this style of writing?

I am attracted to the risk of trying to say more by saying less.

(Author photo by Ryan McIntosh.)