A PLACE OF WONDER
Northern Quebec inspires author
“I was young, I came from the suburbs, I was looking for a bit of adventure. And I was just in awe of the place.”
Carolyn Marie Souaid is talking about a youthful decision that led via a long path to her new novel, the first extended work of fiction for a writer with seven poetry collections to her credit. The place that filled her with such awe was northern Quebec.
Born in Montreal, the child of “parents whose parents were from the Middle East,” Souaid grew up on the South Shore, attended Marianopolis College, and got a BA in English and a teaching diploma from McGill. As part of that program, she did a five-week practicum in the North in the early 1980s.
“At the time when we were told that we had the option to go up there, I didn’t know there were Inuit living in Quebec,” recalled the 58-year-old. “That’s how ignorant I was.”
It’s safe to say Souaid is ignorant no longer. That first northern stint forged what has been a lifelong bond: After getting a master’s in creative writing from Concordia, Souaid went back and taught for three years in communities along the Hudson-Ungava coast. Though her hopes to stay longer-term didn’t work out, she has maintained ties, revisiting the region as part of Blue Metropolis’s Quebec Roots. The project sends an author and photographer to rural schools to collaborate with students on a photo-essay of their community. Souaid works as an academic counsellor for the Kativik School board, helping students from northern Quebec who are pursuing post-secondary education. She has a working knowledge of Inuktitut; her Verdun home is filled with Inuit art.
And finally, there is the new novel. Inspired by personal experience but “very much a work of fiction,” Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik (Baraka, 297 pages, $24.95) is the lyrical and absorbing result of a sincere mission to come to grips with another culture. That it took decades to commit to the writing is a tale in itself.
“For a long time, I felt it would be a betrayal of the people to write about (the community)," Souaid said. “I didn’t want to be like those tourists who go to a place for a while and think they know it.”
Eventually, though, with the distance of time and some crucial encouragement from playwright Tomson Highway, the commitment was made. It was, Souaid said, largely a matter of getting into the right state of mind.
“I felt that I was writing from a pure place. I didn’t have any ulterior motives in the colonialist sense. I was trying to get at the gap between the cultures, and the attempt to bridge that chasm.”
In the love story that gives the novel its title, Yasmeen is closer to the Old World than the author — just one generation removed from a Syrian culture whose traditional values, represented by her mother and maintained in the family’s suburban household, are something she feels the need to escape. When she first arrives in her new home, one local wants to know where she fits among the “the three M’s,” the taxonomy by which some Inuit classify visitors from the south: the misfits, the Mother Teresas and the moneymakers. It turns out she’s in the middle group.
“Yasmeen is running away from something and into something that she thinks she’s going to make better,” Souaid said. “She’s a feminist who runs from one set of traditional values and finds herself in another. Another thing I liked was the idea of a woman going from the sand desert of her traditional roots to the snow desert of her adopted home. That arc and contrast appealed to me.”
As for love interest Joanasi, he does double duty in the novel: a representative of his people, but a living, breathing character with his own inner conflicts and contradictions. Souaid’s layered portrait of him is crucial to the book’s ultimate effectiveness.
“Yasmeen believes that she can have an equal relationship, with both the culture and with Joanasi,” Souaid said. “That’s one reason she wants to get so close to this person physically. She wants there to be no space at all between them.”
With the growing sense that idealistic Yasmeen might be in way over her head, a story about self-discovery and obsession also becomes a study in the limitations of good intentions. While it would be unfair to reveal much about how that tension plays out, prospective readers can hazard their own guesses based on the fact the book’s short video trailer ends with the image of a smashed windshield.
There is, of course, a subject that can’t be eased past when discussing a novel like Souaid’s. The debate around cultural appropriation, ratcheted to a new level of intensity by the ongoing Joseph Boyden case, has never been a hotter hot button in Canada than it is right now, and in Souaid’s telling it was indeed a factor in getting the book accepted.
“I sent the manuscript to a lot of publishers, and the (appropriation) question did come up, over and over,” Souaid said. “One in particular asked: ‘Why do we need to hear the white story again? Isn’t it time for the Indigenous people to tell their stories?’ and also, in the next breath, accused me of cultural appropriation. I thought, ‘Well, it’s one or the other. It can’t be both.’ ”
In the end, Souaid said, it comes down to an age-old fundamental question: Why tell a story?
“I will always believe that if you’re telling a story from a place of sincerity, if your heart is open and you want to contribute to the conversation, then you have a right to tell that story. Some people who have entered into this debate have never been to the North, have never met an Indigenous person. I have. But I make no claim to any special knowledge. In many ways, the longer I lived in the North, the less I knew about it.”
For a long time, I felt it would be a betrayal of the people to write about (the community). I didn’t want to be like those tourists who go to a place for a while and think they know it.