Accordéon

AFTERWORD

FOREWORD

8

The flying canoe is a folkloric entity. It appears in literature for children and young adults, and in popular imagery from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the canoe is not central to today’s culture, its flight continues to be interpreted in two opposing ways. On one hand, it is understood as novelty entertainment. On the other, it is viewed as a symbolic decolonial event, emphasizing the ascent of the colonized over the highest steeples of the colonial establishment.

During the sovereignty referendums of 1980 and 1995, the Oka Crisis of 1990 and the Student Strike of 2012 — moments when the social hierarchy was contested — canoe sightings were reported, although none were substantiated.

Outside of local folklore from past centuries, this document contains the most detailed known accounts of the flying canoe. Neither this document nor the sightings that inform it constitute evidence of the existence of the canoe.

MINED

Montréal

ANONYMOUS TESTIMONIAL 1.00

12

ANOT. 1.01

I am inside the Ministry. Everything I say is my confession, which I give of my own volition.

I don’t know how long I’ll be here. Time collapses and expands, so I am also outside the pharmacy watching you exit with your Lancôme facial moisturizer, which includes a natural toning ingredient. I am equally in Berri metro watching as a man dressed like a wizard, with Celtic patterns embroidered around the wide cuffs of his shirt, practices karate on the platform. The crowd flows around him and everyone’s mind wanders. One hundred people re-enact the battle of the Plains of Abraham on Mont-Royal mountain, and I am here in front of the Jean Coutu pharmacy thinking of General Montcalm and of how he died, with a hot lead musket ball lodged in his stomach, burning a hole through him as he contorted himself and begged for water and maybe death. At the same time, snow is falling in another century and Laurier is pleading Riel’s case in Parliament. As he pleads, women sit in class in the École Polytechnique, and they do not know that Marc Lépine will enter and separate them from the men, before he starts shooting. Today the winners are inheriting their history as the losers are crushed by their own, struggling to cope by selling contraband cigarettes. Joseph Légaré is standing in his studio, imagining a wilderness and painting The Martyrdom of Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant. The Huron have the two fathers tied naked to stakes and are boiling water with which to scald their flesh, while the sky soars above them and the trees stand indifferent. The buildings downtown stand indifferent as the Arab boy is pinned to the floor of the metro by security officers. Two Québécois students hover and record the incident on their phones. They shout that the officers will become stars on YouTube. A beaver is trapped. People in France will wear its fur around their shoulders and heads, and wealthy traders will dig wine cellars under the soil of the Old Port. All of this happens at once, as night falls and the students march. In defiance, one hundred thousand pots are struck by spoons, and the flying canoe materializes on the churning water of the St-Laurent, right under the iron bridge. A woman sits alone in the middle of the canoe. She plugs a violin into a string of effects pedals. The pedals blink in the darkened hull. As she plays, her notes distort, multiply, reverberate, bounce off the water and push the canoe upward. The water drips and lengthens into strings and those translucent strings are played by the moonlight and the wind. The canoe rises higher, in a slow spiral with its bow tilted upward, and the strings tremble as the canoe hovers over the moon.

1.01.A

If you’re wondering why I’m speaking English it isn’t because I’m fond of the language. I also speak French. I prefer to speak French. French is the language to which I default when the world enters me. I have to translate myself. This act of translation is fraught. It is risky. A good translator is like a Mathieu d’Acosta, a navigator who can find their way by looking at the natural signs, like the treetops or the stars, or by sticking out their tongue and tasting the direction the wind blows, and this indicates the direction their thought ought to travel. Which word goes which way? What if a word going the wrong way gets taken? Where do things go when they get lost in translation? One possibility is that they become graffiti. Nobody ever sees graffiti being painted. It simply appears and is, to most people, illegible. If a French thought is lost in translation in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve it may appear, just after midnight, on the side of a brick building in Mile End, in Portuguese. Nobody understands how to read it, and there it stays, on the side of the building, baffling, until it is either scrubbed off or redirected from loss into clear translation.

1.01.B

Wednesday night walking through Berri metro, switching from the green line to the orange, I see the author Dany Laferrière. He is tall and wearing a navy trenchcoat, spectacles, a pork-pie hat and he is holding a notebook in front of his face. He writes as he walks. I don’t know how he sees in front of himself as he goes, but I wonder whether he closes his eyes and writes his way, lets the words guide his steps . I realize that he isn’t taking steps at all, rather he is drifting along six inches above the ground. He drifts past the orange line platform, then up two flights of stairs without looking away from his notebook. I follow his drift out of the station and into the street.

MCEach individual letter constitutes a step, while the accumulation of letters creates a drift or a passage. Laferrière writes his own passage.

MC²Possibly, although instead of writing his drift, we can think of Laferrière observing, studiously avoiding, and re-writing the passage that has been written for him. His notebook may be in front of his face, but he is not proceeding blindly.

MCThe notion of studious avoidance seems more fitting, and I prefer to think of him avoiding the overlap of steps that is inevitable in the metro, and consequently avoiding losing his way.

MC²Perhaps he is studiously recording his steps so that he, and others, can retrace them. Recording things allows us to double back and revisit, even as we advance.

1.01.U

By Berri square in the rain I saw a teenage boy. He was too young to have any stubble. He had orange hair, stringy and long. He was wearing pajama pants and a torn hoodie. He was skinny. He was wandering about the square crying. When he passed me I noticed that his fingernails were blackened and that he smelled like he hadn’t bathed in a few weeks. He asked a group of teenagers for money, and they rebuked him and laughed at him.

18

ANOT. 1.02

My parents were university professors. Their minds sprawled across academic disciplines. They were indentured servants whose lives spanned the Atlantic. They were harried scatterbrains with itchy scalps. They were mercenaries who fired primitive rifles on the Plains of Abraham. They were Métis traders who crisscrossed the prairies and finally settled here. They were traveling booksellers who raised me in a house of information. I don’t need to tell you this, but I do need to tell you. I need to tell you because it’s related to me. My parents are related to me, so they exist inside and outside of me. I’m part of the city, which exists inside and outside this monologue. I am in my monologue and outside of it. Everything is inside and outside of everything, and that is the moral of this story. My monologue has no moral. It is an uninhabitable house of information. It is the most expensive property in the exploded squalor of the imagination, which is the neighbourhood in which I grew up. I want you to live in this house in this neighbourhood until your mind collapses into footnotes. The house is really a metropolis, not a house. It is a vast, broken, glittering jigsaw stretching out in every direction. Competition and worry keep the lights burning.

I do not mention my parents as a way of raising my profile. Such mention might link me to the achievements of a previous generation, and therefore increase my status and polish my respectability. I do not want to raise myself. I have zero aims toward respectability. My parents were not respectable. I am not trying to distinguish myself from anyone else you might see on the street, although because of my parents, my circumstances are different. My parents were unemployed bookworms with rumpled clothes, soft bodies and addictions. My father chewed pan. My mother drank rum and smoked dope to relax her weary dreadlocks. They were immigrants from Trinidad by way of India and Africa and Toronto and they didn’t speak any French. One was bitter and the other was silent, and you can guess which was which. They had no friends.

They hoarded bargain-buys in the basement: clothespins, complete sets of Dollarama screwdrivers with all of the heads, boxes of candy canes crushed into shards, extension cords and power bars, computer keyboards made by companies that no longer exist, dusty cases of Fanta piled in the corner since René Lévesque was Premier, tourist posters of gorgeous Indian girls in saris posing under palm trees planted in the word Laventille written across the bottom of the poster, light bulbs, Tupperware, boxes of screws and nails, 6-packs of men’s underwear and three-packs of wool socks, wires, Christmas lights, batiks with images of elephants on them, elephants everywhere, small brass elephants, elephants on cushions, elephant-shaped cushions, books on elephants, elephants on the covers of books, National Geographic elephants, Ganesh elephant heads, curry powder to curry elephants, packs of curry powder with elephant logos, sets of cheap dishes and dollar-store flatware, garden gnomes and Québec flags, bags full of uninflated balloons of every colour, each one bearing a white fleur-de-lis and the words: Bonne St-Jean! Notebooks, pencils and BiC pens, geometry sets piled to the ceiling, everything sliding down the pile and out the door, and every weekend my mother would make her way down from her ivory tower to the basement to attempt to curate the hoard of junk she and my father amassed.

That hoard was an intellectual triumph. It included undeveloped rolls of film and plastic Polaroid cameras, toy radios and hundreds of dead AA batteries. It included buckets full of pennies that were too heavy for a boy to lift. The hoard included so many more items than I am able to enumerate here, otherwise my entire monologue would be an enumeration of objects, which would not be a bad thing. I have spent days trying to exhaustively list the objects and comings and goings of the city I inhabit.

You might be thinking that my parents don’t sound like university professors, but more like government employees, Revenu Québec, HRDC, Stats Can, Manpower. If that were the case, would that make me a liar? What reason would I have to lie to you? What would I be trying to conceal? What is the elephant in the room? And would it matter if I were a liar? It would matter more to