WHERE IDENTITIES MEET AND GENRES COLLIDE
Kellough expands talents with cross-canada travelogue of Caribbean diaspora
Kaie Kellough might have been a musician but for the fact that, like many of us, he found it harder than expected.
“I got acquainted with frustration,” the soft-spoken Montreal writer recalled of his early attempts at learning musical instruments. “It’s that realization that you can’t just do something the way you want to do it, you have to follow a particular technique. You train yourself to the instrument, because the instrument won’t adapt to you.”
Stymied though he might have been by the violin, Kellough didn’t give up on the idea of artistic expression. On moving to Montreal from Calgary in the late 1990s, the Vancouver-born son of mixed Guyanese parents soon found a supportive community in the local spoken-word scene — where he did, in fact, find himself in numerous cross-disciplinary collaborations with musicians of various kinds. But it was in literature that he eventually found his true métier. His 2016 debut novel Accordéon, shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, was an experimental/ satirical tour-de-force that announced the arrival of a major new Canadian voice; last year’s Magnetic Equator was shortlisted for the QWF’S A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Now, expanding Kellough’s remit further still, comes Dominoes at the Crossroads (Véhicule Press, 208 pages, $19.95). An interwoven set of 12 stories occupying the fecund zone where memoir, fiction and essay meet, it’s a prismatic, lyrical, free-ranging, genre-fluid work that ends up functioning as a sort of cross-canada travelogue of the Caribbean diaspora.
“They almost all have ties to various West Indian backgrounds and places — Haiti, Guyana, St. Vincent,” Kellough said of his protagonists. “But one of the things that grounds (the book) is that all of the main characters are Canadians. The Canadian side of their identities is foregrounded; their origins form a kind of ambient backdrop. It’s their experience working the intersection of Canadian culture and the identity they’ve been brought up with that really interested me.”
When it’s suggested that the book is marked by a deep sense of identification with his characters, Kellough readily concurs. “Sure. Having grown up with those ties, these are in a way portraits of people I’ve always known, that I’ve dated and had friendships with over the years. Writing about them is second nature to me.”
Music — there’s that subject again — is a major unifying thread in a book that, in less sure hands, might have spun off in a few directions too many.
“I wanted it to take place in different parts of Canada, and for there to be a constant sense of displacement,” Kellough said. “The setting of the story is never rooted and fixed, and I found the travelling musician a good metaphor for that. When you’re touring, you hit places in a superficial way — you get a quick glimpse and a brief experience, and then you’re on to the next one. In a way it’s a fugitive existence, reflective of migrations and marooning, but also reflective of the progress of some kinds of improvised music. In a solo you’ll depart from the main melodic progression and eventually return to it. You’re never completely arriving.”
A Kellough story, while roughly incorporating the standard beginning, middle and end of narrative tradition, will often jump through holes in the timespace continuum. Historical figures like 18th-century firebrand Marie-joseph Angélique, who may or may not have deliberately burned down the colonial-era Old Port (“It was an act of resistance that I’d like to see commemorated,” said Kellough), and modern-day episodes like the 1969 Sir George Williams occupation by Caribbean students (“I don’t think it’s been properly historicized. Those events were remarkable, to say the least. They transformed people’s lives. They were part of a radical moment.”) are illuminated through recontextualization. A minor Senegalese character in Hubert Aquin’s Next Episode is transposed to an underground hallway in Peel métro station in a story inspired by a real-life African import shop.
“When someplace like that shop has been around for as long as it has, it becomes part of the imagination of the city,” Kellough said. “It gets embedded in the way we think of the place.”
Investing otherwise overlooked figures with the dignity of literary attention is a Kellough hallmark; another is his knack of shifting the perspective on a familiar subject in a way that shows it in a revelatory new light. One such case in the new book is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the generation-defining novel of Americans in search of their own country.
“In a book where so many people are on the road, I thought it would be fun to have that book make its cameo,” Kellough said. But there’s more to it than fun. The narrator of Petit Marronage, on reading Kerouac’s cult classic as an adult, is disappointed by the realization that its footloose white seekers “had free passage wherever they wanted. I wanted the narrator and Dean Moriarty to experience limitation, real life, to attempt to cross a border that they could not cross.”
A pertinent question to pose of a writer whose instincts have already led him to so many places and forms is that of driving principle. Does Kellough have an overarching mission statement?
“Yes, I do,” he said without hesitation. “It’s to find a vocabulary for my experience. When I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in Western Canada, there was the official rhetoric of multiculturalism that talked about how the state wanted to approach the existence in Canada of people like me and my parents. But it didn’t say anything about what my experience, and the experience of other mixed-race Caribbean Canadians, was actually like here. It was invisible. And when you’re invisible in the culture at large, one of the things you’re required to do is create your presence, and literature is my platform to do that.
“It’s not a question just of representation. It’s deeper than that. It’s a question of actual existence.”