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In Case I Go
In Case I Go by Angie Abdou (Arsenal Pulp Press $17.95)
A vivid evocation of place is one of the pleasures of Angie Abdou’s work. Her fifth novel, In Case I Go, is set in the Crow’s Nest Pass, a mountainous region with a history of climactic and industrial catastrophes.
One of her characters describes the mountains on every side of the fictional town, Coalton, as feeling like a cage. “When the clouds settle down below the mountain peaks, it’s as if someone has closed the lid.”
Coalton came into being as a mining town when immigrants from around the globe flooded into the region, displacing and dispossessing the Indigenous population.
In the present day it attracts tourists and those in flight from the suburbs seeking a simpler life, only to bring condos, monster homes on ski slopes, gourmet restaurants and all the amenities of suburbia they hoped to leave behind.
Among the newcomers are Lucy and Nicholas Mountain, an academic and an environmental scientist respectively, hoping to save their troubled marriage and help their ailing, asthmatic son, Elijah (known as Eli).
Because Nicholas has deep family roots in Coalton, they are able to repossess his family home—a miner’s shack built by his great-grandfather; Nicholas finds work in the open surface mines that have replaced the old ones. Through the mountains, Abdou peels back the layered past with all its secrets and abuses.
Ten-year-old Eli, the namesake of his great-great-grandfather, Elijah, is the prism through which the past is revealed.
Eli is an “old soul,” whose premature birth and early struggle to breathe have endowed him with special gifts. Described by a doctor as having “so much empathy, it’s like telepathy,” he has an uncanny ability to read unspoken communications. In Coalton, he is disturbed by forces more amorphous than his physical disabilities, as he becomes literally haunted by the spirits of his restless ancestors.
Being haunted is not entirely a negative experience. As a friend tells Eli “the people without ghosts are the ones haunted. And maybe their kind of haunting is worse than ours.”
Eli learns that the realm of the dead is not separate from real life.
In his effort to come to terms with his ancestral legacy, Eli also learns a lot about “official stories versus real truths.” The official stories are presented in a television documentary and in the local museum, replete with old photographs and the simulated voices of the dispossessed First Nations and the immigrants. From his window he sees the cemeteries of conflicting religious denominations. There is also sinister evidence of another graveyard below the town. Construction work on new subdivisions churns up skeletal remains from the desecrated burial sites of the First Nations.
Eli finds guides to the real truth in his neighbour, Sam Browning, a biologist and spokesperson for the Ktunaxa First Nation, and Mary, his mute niece, whose non-verbal communications only Eli can interpret. The lives of his forebears and theirs are inextricably linked, and it is through Mary that Eli reconnects with his great-great grandfather.
The relationship of the first Elijah and Mary’s foremother is the central story.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the original Mary was abandoned as a young girl by her parents. Having no family or community protectors, her job as a cleaner in the local hotel made her easy prey for unscrupulous customers. She and Elijah, a foreman at the mine, were unwittingly brought together by Elijah’s charitable wife. They were star-crossed lovers, doomed from the start. Their spirits penetrate Eli’s consciousness, fill his dreams and carry him back to an earlier era, the memories flooding through him in raging waves.
“Imagining all those Mary’s, at once different and at once the same makes me dizzy,” he says.
Describing Eli’s simultaneous experience of then and now, “the present-past-present whiplash of lives buzzing by in the wrong direction,” is a technical challenge that Abdou handles skilfully.
At the same time, the interwoven Aboriginal and immigrant lives inject another challenge into Abdou’s creative process—that of cultural appropriation. This is territory that has proved a minefield for writers, and adds a new dimension to the traditional anxiety of authorship.
In a prefatory note and again in her acknowledgements (the repetition testifies to her anxiety) Abdou establishes her awareness of the problem, makes clear her sensitivity to the subject, and explains her respectful handling of it. She acknowledges at the outset that the Ktunaxa people do not want their spirituality represented in fiction or used for profit. Accordingly, she does not reproduce the tribal wisdom transmitted to Mary by her mother “in case I go.” Abdou sought permission for the use of the Ktunaxa name and language and land; she expresses gratitude to the Ktunaxa people who read the manuscript and to the Ktunaxa National Cultural liaison officer and to the Elders Advisory Council.
She found crucial inspiration in the advice that the late Ojibway writer, Richard Wagamese, gave in a lecture to a white audience:
“You can’t undo the past. You don’t have to feel guilty about the past. You don’t even have to apologize for the past. All you have to do is say YES. Yes, this happened.”
Those words brought her work into focus. She frames her novel, which is dedicated to Richard Wagamese, as her “yes.”
9781551527031
Biographer and novelist Joan Givner writes from Victoria.
A vivid evocation of place is one of the pleasures of Angie Abdou’s work. Her fifth novel, In Case I Go, is set in the Crow’s Nest Pass, a mountainous region with a history of climactic and industrial catastrophes.
One of her characters describes the mountains on every side of the fictional town, Coalton, as feeling like a cage. “When the clouds settle down below the mountain peaks, it’s as if someone has closed the lid.”
Coalton came into being as a mining town when immigrants from around the globe flooded into the region, displacing and dispossessing the Indigenous population.
In the present day it attracts tourists and those in flight from the suburbs seeking a simpler life, only to bring condos, monster homes on ski slopes, gourmet restaurants and all the amenities of suburbia they hoped to leave behind.
Among the newcomers are Lucy and Nicholas Mountain, an academic and an environmental scientist respectively, hoping to save their troubled marriage and help their ailing, asthmatic son, Elijah (known as Eli).
Because Nicholas has deep family roots in Coalton, they are able to repossess his family home—a miner’s shack built by his great-grandfather; Nicholas finds work in the open surface mines that have replaced the old ones. Through the mountains, Abdou peels back the layered past with all its secrets and abuses.
Ten-year-old Eli, the namesake of his great-great-grandfather, Elijah, is the prism through which the past is revealed.
Eli is an “old soul,” whose premature birth and early struggle to breathe have endowed him with special gifts. Described by a doctor as having “so much empathy, it’s like telepathy,” he has an uncanny ability to read unspoken communications. In Coalton, he is disturbed by forces more amorphous than his physical disabilities, as he becomes literally haunted by the spirits of his restless ancestors.
Being haunted is not entirely a negative experience. As a friend tells Eli “the people without ghosts are the ones haunted. And maybe their kind of haunting is worse than ours.”
Eli learns that the realm of the dead is not separate from real life.
In his effort to come to terms with his ancestral legacy, Eli also learns a lot about “official stories versus real truths.” The official stories are presented in a television documentary and in the local museum, replete with old photographs and the simulated voices of the dispossessed First Nations and the immigrants. From his window he sees the cemeteries of conflicting religious denominations. There is also sinister evidence of another graveyard below the town. Construction work on new subdivisions churns up skeletal remains from the desecrated burial sites of the First Nations.
Eli finds guides to the real truth in his neighbour, Sam Browning, a biologist and spokesperson for the Ktunaxa First Nation, and Mary, his mute niece, whose non-verbal communications only Eli can interpret. The lives of his forebears and theirs are inextricably linked, and it is through Mary that Eli reconnects with his great-great grandfather.
The relationship of the first Elijah and Mary’s foremother is the central story.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the original Mary was abandoned as a young girl by her parents. Having no family or community protectors, her job as a cleaner in the local hotel made her easy prey for unscrupulous customers. She and Elijah, a foreman at the mine, were unwittingly brought together by Elijah’s charitable wife. They were star-crossed lovers, doomed from the start. Their spirits penetrate Eli’s consciousness, fill his dreams and carry him back to an earlier era, the memories flooding through him in raging waves.
“Imagining all those Mary’s, at once different and at once the same makes me dizzy,” he says.
Describing Eli’s simultaneous experience of then and now, “the present-past-present whiplash of lives buzzing by in the wrong direction,” is a technical challenge that Abdou handles skilfully.
At the same time, the interwoven Aboriginal and immigrant lives inject another challenge into Abdou’s creative process—that of cultural appropriation. This is territory that has proved a minefield for writers, and adds a new dimension to the traditional anxiety of authorship.
In a prefatory note and again in her acknowledgements (the repetition testifies to her anxiety) Abdou establishes her awareness of the problem, makes clear her sensitivity to the subject, and explains her respectful handling of it. She acknowledges at the outset that the Ktunaxa people do not want their spirituality represented in fiction or used for profit. Accordingly, she does not reproduce the tribal wisdom transmitted to Mary by her mother “in case I go.” Abdou sought permission for the use of the Ktunaxa name and language and land; she expresses gratitude to the Ktunaxa people who read the manuscript and to the Ktunaxa National Cultural liaison officer and to the Elders Advisory Council.
She found crucial inspiration in the advice that the late Ojibway writer, Richard Wagamese, gave in a lecture to a white audience:
“You can’t undo the past. You don’t have to feel guilty about the past. You don’t even have to apologize for the past. All you have to do is say YES. Yes, this happened.”
Those words brought her work into focus. She frames her novel, which is dedicated to Richard Wagamese, as her “yes.”
9781551527031
Biographer and novelist Joan Givner writes from Victoria.
Submitted on August 28, 2017 in By David.
