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The Outer Harbour by Wayde Compton (Arsenal Pulp Press $16.95)
Wayde compton, who grew up idolizing Jimi Hendrix, is a self-described 'Halfrican"; (half African) writer/performer who knows how to shrug multiple identities on and off in his readings and performances.
Currently the director of the SFU Writers Studio, Vancouver-born Compton has long been committed to black history in B.C.
In 2002, he instigated the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project, with a goal to preserving the public memory of Vancouver's original black neighbourhood, an alley running through the southwestern corner of Strathcona in the city's East End.
His latest offering of ten stories, The Outer Harbour, is peopled by shape shifters and chimeras in settings that exert special pressures.
Take, for example, his dystopian vision of Pauline Johnson Island. It's an imaginary construct which he situates in the outer harbour of Vancouver, giving rise to his book's title,
The entertainer/poetess Pauline Johnson immortalized the legend of a lost island in a short story about a century ago. Herself a shape-shifter, Johnson billed herself as a Mohawk Princess although she was only one-quarter Mohawk. She learned about the legend of an island "lost"; in the North Arm, only rarely glimpsed, from Chief Joe Capilano.
In Compton's stories this island could just as well be Ireland's Surtsey Island or Graham Island in the Mediterranean, a volcanic island that appears and disappears. This mythical symbol of the struggle for survival in the face of colonialism and bureaucracy looms in the foreground of several stories.
"Pauline Johnson Island,"; says Compton, when contacted by BC BookWorld, "is actually the primary 'figure' of the book. When I was writing these stories, I wanted to consider space itself as character-like, influencing relationships and themes in many of the ways that conventional characters do.";
So imagine a ten-storey luxury apartment atop Pauline Johnson Island in Burrard Inlet. Then picture it slightly altered to become a detention centre for migrants who wink themselves in and out, disappearing and materializing, individually or as a group.
Imagine Pauline Johnson's 'lost island' as a scene of a pro-sovereignty protest that turns ugly, a young man shot and killed by the RCMP's Counter Terrorism Unit during a subversive occupation.
In Compton's world, boundaries are irrelevant and genres merge.
Characters, places and themes weave in and out of the ten stories: themes of race, immigration, consumerism, loss of freedoms, and bureaucratic bungling.
The stories take place between 2001 and 2025, so are some of them sci-fi? Compton concedes there are some elements of fantasy and speculative fiction, especially in matters of identity and political power. "I try to take this on. I guess I would say that I use a few tools common to fantasy and speculative writing to point at current conditions.";
In The Front we're reminded that things change, forms evolve. It's pointless to wish for permanence.
In The Outer Harbour, while Vancouver is burning, a dead six-year old migrant and a young man killed years earlier by a Counter Terrorism Unit unite to save a migrant ghost and help return him to the safety of Pauline Johnson Island.
In The Outer Harbour, glyphs, sketches, an excerpt from a paper and maps are part of the mix. The maps of Vancouver, as seen by the migrant ghost, were drawn by Compton's five-year-old daughter.
In The Boom, everything is also laid out in posters, floor plans, ads, glyphs and sketches.
Although several of these stories have been printed in publications like The Fiddlehead and Event, each story feels essential to this collection. "I wrote the first story in the collection before I understood a book was coming,"; says Compton, "and the rest emerged after it, although most of them aren't necessarily derived from it.";
The Outer Harbour could be described as a literary equivalent of that old television show The Outer Limits, where life veers into creepy paranoia.
If shifting realities and a free-falling style disorient you, The Outer Harbour may not be your read. But it's a challenging collection that marks a bold step forward for Compton.
Wayde Compton has also helped to create the Contact Zone Crew, with Vancouver musician, deejay and teacher, Jason de Couto, a ten-year collaborative sound poetry project that travelled Canada performing live audio mixes of original poetry, instrumental vinyl and spoken word recordings.
As well as producing six books, Wayde Compton founded Commodore Books, a publishing imprint named after the ship that brought the first significant batch of black immigrants to Victoria. At the invitation of Governor James Douglas, himself partly black, some 600 blacks were invited to move en masse from San Francisco in 1858. Eager to leave behind racial persecution, these blacks, Douglas knew, would become loyal citizens in his fight to prevent the colony from possible annexation to the United States. When the black population of B.C. rose to an estimated 1,000 people, they briefly comprised almost one-tenth of the non-Native population.
9781551525723
Cherie Theissen reviews fiction from Pender Island.
Currently the director of the SFU Writers Studio, Vancouver-born Compton has long been committed to black history in B.C.
In 2002, he instigated the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project, with a goal to preserving the public memory of Vancouver's original black neighbourhood, an alley running through the southwestern corner of Strathcona in the city's East End.
His latest offering of ten stories, The Outer Harbour, is peopled by shape shifters and chimeras in settings that exert special pressures.
Take, for example, his dystopian vision of Pauline Johnson Island. It's an imaginary construct which he situates in the outer harbour of Vancouver, giving rise to his book's title,
The entertainer/poetess Pauline Johnson immortalized the legend of a lost island in a short story about a century ago. Herself a shape-shifter, Johnson billed herself as a Mohawk Princess although she was only one-quarter Mohawk. She learned about the legend of an island "lost"; in the North Arm, only rarely glimpsed, from Chief Joe Capilano.
In Compton's stories this island could just as well be Ireland's Surtsey Island or Graham Island in the Mediterranean, a volcanic island that appears and disappears. This mythical symbol of the struggle for survival in the face of colonialism and bureaucracy looms in the foreground of several stories.
"Pauline Johnson Island,"; says Compton, when contacted by BC BookWorld, "is actually the primary 'figure' of the book. When I was writing these stories, I wanted to consider space itself as character-like, influencing relationships and themes in many of the ways that conventional characters do.";
So imagine a ten-storey luxury apartment atop Pauline Johnson Island in Burrard Inlet. Then picture it slightly altered to become a detention centre for migrants who wink themselves in and out, disappearing and materializing, individually or as a group.
Imagine Pauline Johnson's 'lost island' as a scene of a pro-sovereignty protest that turns ugly, a young man shot and killed by the RCMP's Counter Terrorism Unit during a subversive occupation.
In Compton's world, boundaries are irrelevant and genres merge.
Characters, places and themes weave in and out of the ten stories: themes of race, immigration, consumerism, loss of freedoms, and bureaucratic bungling.
The stories take place between 2001 and 2025, so are some of them sci-fi? Compton concedes there are some elements of fantasy and speculative fiction, especially in matters of identity and political power. "I try to take this on. I guess I would say that I use a few tools common to fantasy and speculative writing to point at current conditions.";
In The Front we're reminded that things change, forms evolve. It's pointless to wish for permanence.
In The Outer Harbour, while Vancouver is burning, a dead six-year old migrant and a young man killed years earlier by a Counter Terrorism Unit unite to save a migrant ghost and help return him to the safety of Pauline Johnson Island.
In The Outer Harbour, glyphs, sketches, an excerpt from a paper and maps are part of the mix. The maps of Vancouver, as seen by the migrant ghost, were drawn by Compton's five-year-old daughter.
In The Boom, everything is also laid out in posters, floor plans, ads, glyphs and sketches.
Although several of these stories have been printed in publications like The Fiddlehead and Event, each story feels essential to this collection. "I wrote the first story in the collection before I understood a book was coming,"; says Compton, "and the rest emerged after it, although most of them aren't necessarily derived from it.";
The Outer Harbour could be described as a literary equivalent of that old television show The Outer Limits, where life veers into creepy paranoia.
If shifting realities and a free-falling style disorient you, The Outer Harbour may not be your read. But it's a challenging collection that marks a bold step forward for Compton.
Wayde Compton has also helped to create the Contact Zone Crew, with Vancouver musician, deejay and teacher, Jason de Couto, a ten-year collaborative sound poetry project that travelled Canada performing live audio mixes of original poetry, instrumental vinyl and spoken word recordings.
As well as producing six books, Wayde Compton founded Commodore Books, a publishing imprint named after the ship that brought the first significant batch of black immigrants to Victoria. At the invitation of Governor James Douglas, himself partly black, some 600 blacks were invited to move en masse from San Francisco in 1858. Eager to leave behind racial persecution, these blacks, Douglas knew, would become loyal citizens in his fight to prevent the colony from possible annexation to the United States. When the black population of B.C. rose to an estimated 1,000 people, they briefly comprised almost one-tenth of the non-Native population.
9781551525723
Cherie Theissen reviews fiction from Pender Island.
Submitted on August 26, 2014 in By David.
