Compton tackles issues of race, gender, art and politics
One of Vancouver’s most distinguished poets, cultural activists, editors and performers, Wayde Compton has now turned his attention to prose fiction, and his debut book of stories, The Outer Harbour, represents impressive evidence that he will be an outstanding figure in this field as well.
Compton teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and has published poetry and cultural essays about the experiences of African-ancestry settlers in B.C., as well as helping to lead the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, (thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ hogans-alley) a tribute to Vancouver’s early black neighbourhood, lost to the city in an act of unreflective freeway enthusiasm and “urban renewal” in the late ’ 60s.
His publications to date include After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing and Region, Performance Bond, Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature and 49th Parallel Psalm. The short stories in The Outer Harbour reflect the issues of race, identity, the ambiguities of history and location that inform most of his earlier work, and the themes are embodied in a dazzling array of different styles, narrative strategies and tones.
Compton is capable of producing a short story like 1,360 ft3 ( 38.5 M3), a classically structured account with little or no experimental prose, of three young Vancouverites taking drugs, hanging out and trying to make sense out of the world and of their lives. He can also create a mysterious story like The Boom, made up entirely of political posters, real estate ads and a page of enigmatic urban runes or another, the hilarious Final Report, that adopts the clotted language of arts project funding applications to describe a series of imagined granting programs worthy of Borges in his most donnishly comic mode.
Compton’s approach to short fiction is inventive and wide ranging in tone, moving seamlessly from the dystopian despair embodied in the group of stories that chronicle the emergence in our city’s outer harbour of a new volcanic island rising above the waves, an island that is, in a surreal but oddly convincing sequence, first a monstrous geological oddity in the harbour, then a wildlife refuge, then the site of a First Nations occupation in which one of the occupiers is killed, then a condo tower and finally, with a kind of comic inevitability, a detention centre for a group of illegal refugees. This is dark, funny stuff, painful and provocative.
And while the targets of many of Compton’s best jokes are white settler entitlement and the many lunatic manifestations of Canadian racism, he can also be very funny indeed about the sometimes pretentious and often over-earnest world of avant-garde art.
Most notably, the story The Front: A Reverse-Chronological Annotated Bibliography of the Vancouver Art Movement Known as Rentalism, 2011-1984, is a comic gem. Not since Roberto Bolano opened his excruciatingly funny novel The Savage Detectives with the lines “I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way,” has there been a funnier send-up of the earnest tone and sometimes unjustifiably high self-regard that can characterize avant-garde art at its most risible.
But make no mistake. There is much more to Compton than a few jokes about the arts world.
While his work is often funny, ( and never more so than in the science fiction stories that feature the dreamlike intersection of fantasy role playing — à la The Society for Creative Anachronism — computer games and holographic crowd control strategies) the humour is always infused with a profound moral seriousness as it takes on the human impact of racial categories and the mechanisms of racialized oppression or the heartbreaks that occur in families of origin. (See in particular the stories in this collection that feature Albert and Donald, mixed race conjoined twins who clash over a documentary that one of them wants to do about their unusual life history) or the unthinking, squalid moral panic that recurs in Vancouver about the “threat” of offshore refugees.
Like Swift or the undeservedly little known American satirist Nathaniel West, Compton makes the reader laugh, grieve and wince uncomfortably, all often in the course of a single page.
So, this is a writer who can deftly deliver comedy, family tragedy, social dysfunction and social analysis, all without any of the lapses into over-earnest polemic that so often attend fictional attempts to grapple with social issues.
Compton can even give the reader a tender ghost story in which the waters and streets of our city are haunted by the indigenous occupier who dies on the perfectly named Pauline Johnson Island and one of the illegal refugees who has died later in detention on the harbour island, a ghost story that morphs in its last paragraphs into a science fiction twist that unites several of the story collection’s narrative threads into a surprising and satisfying conclusion.
The Outer Harbour is the work of a remarkable, mature writer at the top of his powers, creating fictions that are not only vastly entertaining but also freighted with important messages from the margins of B.C. society. We are lucky to have Wayde Compton in our midst. Wayde Compton will launch The Outer Harbour on Sunday, Oct. 19 at 2 p.m. in the Alice MacKay Room at the Vancouver Public Library, (Central Branch), 350 W Georgia St. Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. Each day he walks on Spanish Banks and keeps watch over the water, awaiting the arrival of Pauline Johnson Island. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at to s65@telus.net