Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: What We Carry Forward

by Gillian Smith-Clark, ​for The 44 North, Editor-in-Chief

Les Misérables at the West End, featuring the 40th Anniversary London cast. Photo courtesy of the production.

A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting in a London theatre watching Les Misérables, a musical I had not seen for many years, based on a book I loved as a teenager.

I had mixed feelings about going. I knew it would be a good performance, but I had already seen the musical twice and wondered whether the experience would offer me anything new. Instead, the soaring, grief-filled music took me by surprise. Perhaps it was the perspective brought by time and distance, or simply the experience of encountering a familiar story at a different stage of life, but I found myself unexpectedly moved by both its force and its continuing relevance.

Les Mis left me thinking about memory, grief, repair and redemption: Themes echoed throughout this issue, beginning with Alaina Zhang’s thoughtful review and analysis of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

We often speak of "moving on" or "moving forward" as though healing requires us to leave the past behind. But perhaps the more difficult—and more honest—task is learning what to carry forward.

The pieces in this issue approach that question from many directions. In the Writers’ Room, Mikaela Brewer’s short story, "On the Wildfires: Of Course She Ran Back," follows a young girl walking home through wildfire smoke, confronting an environmental crisis her generation did not create but will nevertheless inherit. In Poet’s Corner, a discussion of Amanda Gunn’s "Ordinary Sugar" considers memory, ancestry and the ordinary acts through which people remain present in our lives.

Two feature essays examine darker forms of inheritance. In the first instalment of a three-part series, Randa Ali explores the environmental costs of war and the damage that continues long after the immediate fighting has ended. Temi Jolaawo’s "It’s in Our DNA: The Resurgence of Eugenics and Health Propaganda" examines how discredited ideas can return in new forms when the histories behind them are forgotten or deliberately distorted.

Elsewhere, "Dinner Isn’t Debt: What Paying the Bill Reveals About Romance, Power, and Control" considers the expectations we bring into intimate relationships, while "Searching for a Voice in Politics: Youth Are Citizens Now, Not in the Future" challenges us to recognize youth as full participants in civic life now, rather than treating their voices as preparation for some later point when their citizenship will finally count.

We also share key insights, notes and quotations from our recent live podcast event, Beyond Words: Addressing Anti-Black Racism and Discriminatory Language in Schools, along with Farhaan Batchkhan’s essay, "Racist Language Is Never Just a Joke: On Building a World Worth Belonging To."

And last but certainly not least, our spotlighted artist, Patrick de Belen, invites us into grief, memory, responsibility, silence, scars, wounds, and how they coexist across creative work and relationships alike.

Together, these pieces ask us to consider not only what we remember, but what our remembering requires of us.

We are all shaped by what came before: The stories our families tell, the histories our countries choose to remember or forget, the landscapes altered by decisions made long before we arrived, and the private joys and griefs that change how we move through the world. But inheritance is not the same as destiny. Part of becoming fully ourselves, individually and collectively, is deciding what we will carry forward, what we will repair and what we must finally learn to put down.

I will end with a recommendation to see Christopher Nolan’s recent adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey—or better yet, to read the original. I particularly recommend Emily Wilson’s translation, although Wilson herself has offered a decidedly critical assessment of the film.

Regardless of how faithfully the adaptation captures Homer’s work, the story’s enduring themes reinforce an idea that runs throughout this issue: Every generation inherits a world shaped by memories it did not personally create. We inherit stories, wounds, traditions, warnings and unfinished work.

Our responsibility is not to hand the next generation a version of the past stripped of discomfort. It is to help them carry its hard truths without being crushed by them—and to trust them to create something wiser and more compassionate from what remains.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Warmly,

Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor-in-Chief, The 44 North Media

Film Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

by Alaina Zhang ​for The 44 North, Newsletter & Reviews Editor

Via Screen Rant

“Please let me keep this memory, just this one.” —Joel Barish, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 

Last quarter, I was lucky enough to take a class called Medieval Dreams and Visions. After reading works by Chaucer, Dante, and other authors who lived centuries ago, we ended the quarter by watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 

The 2004 film follows a young man, Joel, as he revisits his diary after several years. Sitting next to the beach, the cold wind slashing against his face, he finds it difficult to recall why there are missing pages in his diary, remembered only by where they were torn away. The hollowness is all-consuming. Soon after, on a train, he meets a young woman named Clementine whom he quickly falls in love with. Later, it’s revealed that the two had previously been in a relationship, which ended poorly: Clementine had undergone a surgery to erase all memories of Joel. The disjointedness Joel feels at the beginning of the film was, in fact, the result of his own surgery to, in turn, forget Clementine.

The dream-like setting of the film lends masterfully to the theme of vulnerability it aims to portray. Not just a romance or sci-fi movie, the story is really about self-confrontation and reconciliation. Joel, upon realizing that he does not in fact want to forget Clementine, is forced to navigate his own brain and walk the memory lane of his mind. One of the most poignant moments in the film is when Joel enters the memory of being bullied by other kids and Clementine—a version of her inside his head—is watching. Childhood trauma is private and often so shameful that adults bury it deep inside themselves. Joel, however, is forced to confront those memories, which shaped who he is now. In a film, it’s healing for us to see Clementine bearing witness, whether real or imagined by Joel; Childhood trauma isn’t observable by our adult friends or partners, even if we verbally share memories with them. The scene ends with Clementine dragging Joel away, and although all of this takes place inside Joel’s mind, it’s real enough to make him—and us—feel seen in a vulnerable moment. 

Via TMDB

My perception of the film also shifted because of my class. One of the surrounding questions we were interested in throughout the quarter was why authors across the ages are so drawn to the experience of dreaming and continue to weave it into their works. In the movie, the dream world is less a dream and more a disorganized catalogue of memories, which invite us, alongside the characters, to navigate the reflection, trauma, and life that make up who one is in relationship with others. 

For me, dreams have always been a special source of inspiration—a place where I can witness my deepest desires and hopes materialize in strange ways. My dream world is also a space where I truly feel safe and free, a space available only to myself. Admittedly, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to decipher the meaning of my dreams or know whether they have meaning at all, but what I do believe is that dreams can confirm my insecurities, trauma, restrained feelings, and thoughts. What surfaces in my dreams is a combination of magic and reality in its rawest form, and the act of dreaming alone can be reassurance that my life can take on alternative endings, parallel worlds, and unimaginable possibilities. 

The idea of “making sense” of a dream is, in fact, similar to the art of interpretation itself. In our class, this was one of the reasons we attributed to the prevalence of using dreaming as a storytelling framework. When we read about dreams, there are often at least two, if not more, layers of interpretation at play: We’re simultaneously making sense of a bewildering experience and attempting to decipher why a work was presented through the lens of dreams in the first place. When creatives build dream worlds for us that don’t exist, or exist in a multiverse, the seeds are often personal or collective memory re-imagined. This unique meaning-making opportunity, via dreams, expands how we think and remember. In other words, we can see that more is possible beyond our waking, conscious hours. 

Via TMDB

That’s exactly what I felt Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind expressed. After Clementine and Joel realize what they’ve gone through, after they hear the ugly things they said about each other before the surgery, they still decide to give each other another chance—at least in being remembered if not in a relationship. They’re also choosing to give a chance to the idea of a possibility, even if it might not end in the best way. 

Relationships can be terrifying. We can never know what someone else thinks, nor what their words and actions mean. Though the procedure of memory probing and removal in the film seems cinematic and unbelievable,  we, too, probe through our own minds, equipped with nothing but fear, to dig up memories—ones we never wished to revisit—in search of some truth about ourselves. The difference between the film and reality is what makes it most powerful; the story asks: What if we were to show all of this to someone else, who we love, with an equally complex past? Would it really be incriminating? Or would it heal the ways we think we’re alone? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind provided me with a newfound perspective on what it means to be in a relationship with others, and to be in a relationship with oneself. 

We spend almost a third of our lives in deep sleep, dreaming. Perhaps, like Joel and Clementine, we’re sorting through the entangled web of our dreams, trying to find the confirmation, confidence, and reassurance we all need to move forward when our eyes open again and a new, terrifying, inevitable day awaits us. But the landscape of memory is worth walking, because as Joel and Clementine show us, we’re never the only ones there when we think we’re better off alone.

Poet’s Corner: “The First Water Is the Body” by Natalie Diaz

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“The First Water Is the Body” by Natalie Diaz, from Postcolonial Love Poem. Copyright ©2020 by Natalie Diaz. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, in Emergence Magazine.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

When I read “The First Water Is the Body” in 2020, after Natalie Diaz’s book, Postcolonial Love Poem (in which the poem appears), won the Pulitzer Prize, my consciousness felt diverted like a river around a boulder. I struggled to grasp another poem as this one settled, alive, into my body. Perhaps it didn’t settle at all, like the settler I am in Canada. The poem helped me remember the river that I, too, already am.   

At first, before reading, you may wonder: Is this a poem? The prose poem and lyric essay have much in common—often a blend of narrative and personal experience held by poetic, lyric language and juxtaposition. You might say this form is much like a river, bed, and bank—curving, compressing, and expanding. What makes it a poem, to me, is the flow: Uninhibited, and yet, tethered to a strong form: A body, if you will. It’s also a poem because Natalie Diaz says it is (can you tell I’m a fan?). 

Further, deeper into the water, the poem’s syntax, diction, and imagery lift each other. The word ‘conservative’—and the way it’s included as the last word of a section and stanza—implicates many meanings. There’s also the use of red, white, and blue—the colours of the American flag—appearing as silt, rock, sun burns, Native/white bodies, blood, and water. The body, of course, recurs, but here is my favourite example:

“If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?”

Like a river, most stanzas are only one sentence. The sentences, as water holds pebbles, carry images, descriptions, and declarations; muscles to the bones of the poem (of which there are many). The most visceral, I felt, is Diaz’s reckoning with translation, noting John Berger’s belief that true translation returns to the non-verbal. In this sense, what kind of translation is happening in the poem and outside of it? Who is it for? What has been lost in this process?

“In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both. // “If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing?”

The body and river cannot be separated—they are one. Therefore, as Diaz writes, there’s no metaphor or juxtaposition of tears, river, blood, though these appear in the poem side-by-side. This shows us the limit of language on the page, which Diaz reflects stunningly. Poems, often, tangle with metaphor and myth—which are in close relationship. Diaz writes that “What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth.” She follows this by asking, “If the river is a ghost, am I? // Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.” I’m reminded here of “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” a paper by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. 

Thus, the hope of the poem may be to haunt us via the feelings attributed to mythological spirits and ghosts—a sense of loss, grief, lingering, and fear—in a way that convinces: “If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined?” We know that the body remembers trauma spatially. So, too, does the water. If you’re curious about Indigenous ghost/horror stories, I recommend Never Whistle At Night, expanded on here. 

Alongside Berger, Diaz brings in Toni Morrison’s quote: “All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” Other voices in the poems, alongside Diaz, work formally to help us see and feel plurality: If “We think of our bodies as being all that we are: I am my body [, t]his thinking helps us disrespect water, air, land, one another. But water is not external from our body, our self.”

Lastly, Diaz uses questions throughout the poem—something that’s tricky to get right. To a few, she responds:

“Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.”

Others, she asks rhetorically, the answer implied:

“Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”

And some, she leaves, necessarily, for all of us:

“And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?”

This poem is full of life, as a river is—as a body is. Please continue spending time with it beyond this brief, surely inadequate introduction. And perhaps ask: What river am I?