3 Part I Essays on Crime and Family
Author’s Preface
This book brings together many parts of a journey that began when I was growing up poor in rural British Columbia and Virginia, struggling to make sense of my ex-con father and his past as an impoverished, largely uneducated Québécois. As I began writing about him, I became increasingly aware of both his and my place within the larger history of our rapidly changing society. But to document change, one must look at the tools of change, and as I did so, I understood the ways that the act of writing could transform cultures and that education and political knowledge could shape my life. What I couldn’t have imagined was how much my study of the historic forces that had influenced my father would help me engage with social and political change elsewhere on earth. The journey often felt faster than I could keep track of – from my earliest memories of living in a run-down trailer without running water or electricity, to earning several university degrees, to doing journalism in dozens of countries on five continents, writing about women’s rights, the environment, and the impact of war on people’s lives.
The essays and journalism in this collection offer many glimpses of that journey. They show my growing engagement with writing, my struggle to understand the impulse toward adventure and rule breaking, and how I learned to channel that desire to transgress into creativity. In these pages, art is often the instrument of inquiry and its subject. Just as I used art to extricate myself from the painful circumstances of my youth, I increasingly tried to align its emancipatory powers with the creative efforts and achievements of others, expanding the scope of my work while attempting to shed fresh light on theirs. Compiling this book, I was reminded of the circular nature of growth and the ways that learning, sharing, building solidarity, and creating art are inextricable. Similarly, just as studying my family history made me aware of larger, global histories – whether canonical or obscured by oppression – doing journalism overseas taught me how to understand the impact of North American culture elsewhere, which led me to turn a far more critical eye on the countries where I grew up: Canada and the United States.
Despite these central concerns, the writings here cover a wide range of subjects in a variety of ways. The collection begins with essays about my father and criminality before shifting to long-form journalism and then shorter dispatches from Afghanistan and other countries, among them Cuba, Iraq, and the Congo. It concludes with a series of essays that reflect on the role of writing in my life and the importance of political engagement, social accountability, and a sense of outrage at the abuses of the governments that preside over the places I have called home.
Mon Ami, Vice
(2015)
One summer, after a few years of travelling, I decided to return to Montréal, where the living was cheap. While waiting for my flight in Charles de Gaulle Airport, I arranged an apartment rental through Craigslist and arrived that evening to find it located in the Gay Village. I was thirty and broke, trying to finish a novel slated to be published in a year. Every day, I wrote until the late afternoon and then went out looking for lower rent, hearing the occasional wolf whistle from a balcony. In the supermarket, a burly, shirtless man on rollerblades followed me from the apples to the crackers. At the soymilk, I called my mother. “Is this what it’s like to be a woman?” I asked.
“Until a few years ago,” she said. “Oh, how I miss it.”
For research purposes, I got a card at the McGill University library. Walking home one evening, I passed a drab, century-old row house on Rue Prince-Arthur, in what’s called the McGill Ghetto. A red For Rent sign hung in the window. I rang the doorbell, and Henry, a tall, balding man, let me in. The house was divided into cramped student apartments. He showed me his: eight square metres that smelled of bread and cheese, a chandelier occupying the ceiling like a dusty spider. He needed someone to take over the lease. He’d been selling gourmet pizzas to a caterer, using the tiny gas stove in the corner, but gambling had gotten the better of him. He was moving back in with his parents so he could regroup. I said I’d been through times like that, omitting that I was going through one right then. I agreed to take over his apartment. With the rent only $400 a month, I could afford to focus on the novel.
For the next few months, I rarely went out. As I struggled to write, a construction company began gutting the row house next door to create luxury apartments. I sat at the desk I’d bought in a church basement sale, my apartment shaking, dust and stale pizza flour drifting down from the ceiling. The workers stripped all the floors, cut the joists out, and knocked down the back wall with sledgehammers. The long summer had ended in brutal cold, and, with the house next door open to the weather, the shared wall frosted over. I cut the fingers off a pair of gloves to type, my breath turning to mist. A few times, I ventured into the alley to watch the demolition. The foreman told me they’d bring in a backhoe to dig out the basement. Without its rear wall, the empty building looked like a dollhouse. I could stare right through it.
I didn’t go outside often. Instead, I wrote, trying to contain the hunger for living, for real life, that literature stoked in me. I prowled the stairs to the top floor and back, hoping to ease this craving, to find inspiration without straying too far from my computer. During one such prowl, I stopped on a landing. There were three apartments on each floor and one in the basement, but the only people I ever saw were two neighbours, whom I’d passed in the street and taken to be homeless before learning they lived in the building. The woman kept a shopping cart locked to the porch; the old man, who shared a wall with me, howled at night. We’d crossed paths in the hallway, his face the colour of ash, his eyes sunken.
Fred, the building’s owner, was a short, stout man with dark hair and eyes. He’d grown up in an anglophone village in Gaspésie – the descendant, he proudly told me, of United Empire Loyalists who’d left America after the Revolutionary War. I met him when he dropped by to pick up the rent, and I asked who else lived there.
“Only those other two,” he said. “They were here when I bought the place. The rest have moved out.” He’d been buying up property across the city and was now too busy to rent out the other apartments, he told me. I proposed finding tenants in exchange for free rent, and he gave me a ring of keys. He also agreed to let me move into the apartment of my choice, which was on the top floor, a larger space with canted ceilings and dormers that looked down into the street.
The next day, I put out a sign. Snooping around the building, I found a blue baseball cap and a red flannel shirt. I used them to create a concierge persona, both for my own entertainment and to keep needy future tenants at arm’s length. When someone rang – often a young woman studying at McGill – out came the flannel. With the cap pulled low over my eyes, I slouched and spoke gruffly. Fortunately, there was a long lull in construction next door, and I soon rented out all the apartments.
The backhoe arrived with the spring weather. The building shook and heaved, and the tenants knocked at my door. I reassured them the noise would soon be over. We watched from the alley as the backhoe clambered out from the basement like an insect, crawled over the blocky hill of ancient compressed clay it had gouged up, and drove onto a trailer. “All done,” I told my tenants. We went back inside. That night, the building settled, ticking and creaking, producing an occasional hiccup in the floor or a loud crack in the frame, like the popping of an immense knuckle.
In the morning, sunlight flashed against my eyelids. I looked up at a six-foot-long rift in the wall. With my eye to it, I could see through two rows of bricks and out the window of the gutted house next door. I dressed and took stock of the apartment: cracks in the walls and ceilings, window frames askew. My door was stuck, and I used a hammer to knock the pins out of the hinges. When I pried it from the frame, the surrounding