Ideas - 5 Canadian Writers on Subverting Identity

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Identity is a hot topic in our era, but also a complex reality. Five literary writers — all of them winners of 2023 Governor General’s Literary Awards — read from new poems, essays, and stories that consider the ways that seemingly solid identities can be altered, questioned, or entirely subverted.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. For some people, identity is a straightforward thing. It's about roots and family, a sense of selfhood and maybe nationhood. But just below the surface of identity, there are complications.

The gap between our inner and outer selves, for example, or the ways relationships and allegiances change over time. How shifts in society itself can shape new realities for us. Those grey zones of identity are often the subject of literature. Writers, those psychological detectives, seem to thrive in human complexities and contradictions. On this episode, new work by five writers, all of them English language winners of GGs, the Governor General's Literary Awards 2023. I think I was in shock. I think I just went silent on the telephone when they called to tell you that news. And the lovely person from the Canada Council was like, are you still there? I'm like, yes, yes,

I'm still there. Please continue. The authors were asked to write something on the theme of subverting identity. You'll hear what they came up with, along with the reflections on identity in this episode. It's part of an annual collaboration between Ideas, CBC Books, and the Canada Council for the Arts. The first piece you'll hear is by a Toronto author. She wanted to think about how we sometimes push past the fixed ideas that we hold about ourselves and how important that can be. I think we're kind of

raised to treat ourselves and think of ourselves in individual terms generally. I think that the way story and narrative is composed tends to kind of centralize the sovereign hero, the individual. composed tends to kind of centralize the sovereign hero, the individual. And I wanted to write an essay that really looked at what it would mean to think of ourselves in community, even when we're resistant to that idea, even if it goes against our kind of better nature or our tendencies. Because I do think that the only hope for healing and kind of any planetary survival, I know that's a really big thing to say, is if we start to think of ourselves in broader collective terms and kind of step outside of the silo of the self. That's Keo McClure, winner of a 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction.

And here she is reading her essay called Singing in December. David sings. For the 25 years we've been together, his passions have been singing and socializing. This is interesting to me because my passions are writing and tunneling into myself. I spend most of my time inside my house or inside the house in my head. David sings beautifully, and for the 25 years we've been together, music has been the feeling tone of our lives. He counts on music, and I count on him. and I count on him. Be careful what you count on, I guess. In late 2022, he began experiencing chronic breathing problems, which made sleeping difficult and solo singing impossible. After several months of tests, the doctors determined post-COVID lung scarring might

be the culprit. Time would be the best cure. David cancelled performances and, increasingly depressed, began tunneling into himself. Thankfully, depression and introversion are not his talents, so he tunneled his way back into the world and made a decision. In early 2023, still unable to solo sing, David restarted a Thursday morning singing group he had been running in an East End shelter before the pandemic for unhoused men facing addiction challenges. In December, I went with him and a musical accompanist to join the singing group. It seemed a good time to go. I had been in my head more than usual, encased in my thoughts when I wasn't out in the streets joining the movement to end a terrible

war and occupation. Shortly after we arrived, shelter residents began trickling into the singing room where chairs had been arranged in a semicircle. A man in a New York Yankees cap walked in tentatively, choosing a seat away from the others. A man in a New York Yankees cap walked in tentatively, choosing a seat away from the others. Another man in his early 20s stepped in and out, in and out, before finally committing to a lounge chair. Outwardly, it did not appear to be a group eager for social bonding experiences. Eventually, a group of seven men settled. David opened by telling a few corny dad jokes, explaining he wanted us to warm up with a little ho-ho-ha-ha to loosen our diaphragms. The man in the Yankees cap looked ready to leave. David kept talking, inviting

everyone to back him on Lean On Me, sidling up to the group, friendly but not overzealous. Then the singing started in earnest. The notes assembled. We sang songs that were new to us, comfortingly familiar songs, and other songs that those recovering from addiction should maybe not go around singing, like Margaritaville. But the men were invited to select the repertoire,

and who could refuse a song full of old feeling? The sound wasn't top-notch, or even always good, definitely more duck than songbird, but there were a few moments when the voices grew closer and closer, singing Let It Be, for example, that I felt a little swell in my chest. And when I looked around, others seemed to have caught the swell too. The singing program involves a revolving cast of participants. Some weeks, depending on the shelter's intake, there might be 20 or more people. It's not a steady, tight-knit group, but David is dedicated to that space and has managed, through the power of music and his goofy charm, to create an affable container.

People walk in with their baggage, their cool boundaries, their trust issues, their heads that live in the wounded past, and for an hour, those isolating constraints melt away. There is a science to all of this. Neurochemistry says singing boosts endorphin levels. It's a lung exerciser, a mood elevator. But in December, it was the group part of group singing that felt helpful. Every soloist has down days. We all do. We all occasionally experience burnout or loss of hope. In a culture built on individualism, there's something to be said for communality, There's something to be said for communality, even if it's not second nature, or frankly, 100% enjoyable.

To persist and let yourself be lifted. To refuse relationlessness. To show up for something bigger than yourself. And for an hour, ride with a wild and off-key ensemble. As someone who is happily group-avoidant most of the time, I'm possibly the last person to cheerlead feelings of communality. But I'm a loner, not a nihilist. And to paraphrase my wise friend Mike, a fellow loner, sometimes it's important to walk around like a weird wild duck, and sometimes it's important to aim for collective liftoff, however wobbly that might be.

So I was really moved by the singing group. These people are often on the outside of community, and to have them gather in community and to sing in this kind of choral, collective way was just so beautiful. And it was really funny at times and unexpected because they choose a repertoire, and you see these kind of hardened men

choose these very sentimental ballads, things that remind them of their childhood. And I was just really moved by the sense that everyone was very on board. No one was judging each other's song choices. And, you know, it wasn't a group of stellar singers by any means, but just that feeling when everyone sang together, that there were these moments where their voices kind of met, even like in a fleeting, transient way.

And I think everyone felt that sense of collectivity for a second. And I really felt like they walked away with a kind of lighter sense of being. My name is Keel McClure, and I'm a Toronto-based writer. I write books for big people, and I also write books for small people. I'm also a teacher at the University of Guelph, and I'm a freelance editor. I won the Gigi Literary Arts Award in Nonfiction for my book, Unearthing, a story of tangled love and family secrets. Unearthing is a layered story. It's part kind of family memoir, part DNA detective story. It's also a kind of essay on kinship. And it's a personal botanical history of my family.

And so it begins with the discovery I made in 2019 after doing a DNA test that I wasn't biologically related to the father who raised me. And that was a complete surprise to me. And so the story follows the journey of me trying to kind of unearth what happened and also discover the identity of my biological father. It's a kind of quest story and I enlist strangers to help me uncover a secret that honestly could have been solved by somebody I see almost every day, namely my mother. So it's a very kind of winding story in some ways, but it's also a story about kind of a wider approach to kinship. You know, one thing I didn't want to do when I set out to write it was repeat narrow ideas of belonging because I came

from a family that was kind of very tightly defined. It was very protective. And I think that a lot of DNA search stories repeat this idea that we have to find our true genetic family. And I really wanted to complicate that idea in part because I really think that identity and the kind of coastlines of who we are should be porous and that we're constantly changing and in flux. At the same time, I see that we're living in an incredibly intensely fence-driven moment in history and politically. And I can see that a lot of the kind of xenophobic blueprints that exist around the way we see ourselves in family and nation are getting

more entrenched. And so I actually find it quite frightening, this moment that we're living through. And so I really want to think about identity in a much more porous way and to think about what it means to have these expanding coastlines where we can include strangers that might appear midlife. In my case, I had what some would call an identity crisis where I had to reconsider what my family was in the middle of my life. And instead of seeing that as a moment of jeopardy where I had to reconsider what my family was in the middle of my life. And instead of seeing that as a moment of jeopardy where I felt threatened, I really saw it as an opportunity to kind of rethink self and family. And what I've come away with partly because part of the book is structured around the theme of the garden and plant life and so forth, is that I think we grew

up thinking that our strength is our impermeability, is our hardness, is the way we can fortify ourselves. I think that's the lesson we learned growing up through Marvel comics and through the kind of models of strength we see in film and television. And what I realized through the garden and through kind of speaking to botanists and horticulturists is that actually porousness is our strength. And that the more supple you are in nature, the kind of likelier you are to survive. Writer Keo McClure. Her memoir, Unearthing, won the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Next up, a look at Identity on the Move by an Alberta writer who grew up in Nigeria and other places too.

There was a phase between 7 and 15 where I was hopping from country to country with my family. So the immigrant experience is very much sort of etched into me right from a young age. And a lot of my formative years were spent, you know, being new in new places and trying to find myself and then sometimes moving again. I am Sarah Everett. I am the author of The Probability of Everything, which won the Governor General's Award for Young People's Literature and Text. And I am reading from a poem called Dying Thing Today, which is about my experience as a first-generation immigrant and what it means to come to a different culture, a different country, and find your identity without losing the good tenets of where you come from.

Dying Thing She is a dying thing From the moment she's born on a Boeing into a chorus of anticipation Airborne strangers Plastic-wrapped food in overpriced headphones A newborn of seven or thirty emerging, teething on mashed potatoes and gelatinous gravy. She wraps her tongue around new words. She holds them like a stranger's pinky, baby-fisted. Cheeks chubby with promise, skin warm and milky. In a few hours she'll be dead of a safe landing. Customs, welcomes. By then she'll have forgotten her mother's voice, thick with trying. Unforgivable.

Once it was comfort, a life inside the warmth. Womb, claustrophobia, three-seated sack between window and aisle, embryonic cocoon between metal appendages. This making new of all things, this wreckage of everything old. Where to live is to die, sometimes slowly or all at once. Sudden, infant, immigrate, naturalize, christen, rename. For a world that looks like home and smells like home and voices reproach your teenage dream. You forget who you are. Who do you think you are? The cells that made you and hands that knit you, let you become. Thank goodness you've become glorious, free.

Dead wrong in ways she didn't know she existed. Dead wrong on most days, the dearly deported. Terminal from the trying, but she's wearing her mother's ghost. She's choosing to live. Wrong, right, lost, and found. Cause of life, connection, jaws of death, resurrection, destined, destination. In her blemished skin, liver spotted lies. She sets off metal, just trying to breathe. But knowing eyes know she's not taking off her kin. Next of, skin, tattooed with new cities.

Passport of forgotten names, laid over with this and that. Lucky to live and die glorious free landed here grounded home you were a dying thing but you were born a thousand times. Moving to a new country or to a new culture necessitates this change in terms of how you identify yourself. You're immediately an immigrant. You leave behind a past culture. And there are questions of being accepted where you're new. But there are also questions of retaining your old identity versus assimilating into a new culture. And the idea that it's possible to do both the redefining yourself in a new culture, but also hold on to the past and to the country you might have been born in, the culture that you might call your own, and still feel like yourself or a version of yourself.

Birth and death as metaphors represent the end end of something and the start of something else. So dying to your old culture or to your old self, that idea comes from leaving a place that you've called home. birth is the sense of entering a new world, a new culture, and finding new parts of yourself, finding a new version of yourself. Dying and birth comes back and forth in the sense that at the end of the poem, it says that you were a dying thing, but you were born a thousand times because there's this rebirth every time that you lose or find an aspect of your identity. for me i particularly relate to this idea of even as you make your new home in a new culture there is this conflict between who who you were and who you are in the sense that not only are you struggling to be accepted by your new people from your new home, but you're also struggling to connect to who you

were, to your native land, to maybe extended family, even immediate family who have some idea of what it means to be, for example, a Nigerian versus a Nigerian Canadian. So there's this idea that you might be leaving behind who you are and abandoning yourself, changing your identity when you're really just trying to find a balance between the two. And so I really appreciate different forms of media that take that conflict into account and that show the different aspects of sort of the dis-ease of being between cultures. How one culture does this might be different from how that culture does that, but you can take aspects of each that are beneficial and put them together.

And you can also recognize the good in every culture because it's true that there are problematic aspects of different cultures, but there's also a lot to celebrate with every single culture. And finding the empathy to relate to those cultures in different ways and also perhaps adapt some customs so they fit into your worldview a little better. It's been something that I've learned over time. Writer Sarah Everett. Her book, The Probability of Everything, won a 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Young People's Literature.

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I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Subverting identity. That is the theme of some new writing by winners of the 2023 Governor General's Literary Awards, and they've interpreted that brief in various creative ways.

They're reading their work on this episode, part of our annual collaboration with CBC Books and the Canada Council for the Arts. Anuja Varghese of Hamilton, Ontario, took top honors for her very first story collection. I won the Governor General's Award for Fiction for Chrysalis. She wasn't quite so composed when she first heard that she'd won. I think I was in shock. I think I just went silent on the telephone when they called to tell you that news. And the lovely person from the Canada Council was like, are you still there? I'm like, yes, yes, I'm still there. Please continue.

But it obviously feels so lovely to get that kind of recognition, especially for a debut book, especially for a book of short stories that don't often get the same love as a novel. And I hope it just encourages people. Sometimes that sticker on the cover of a book really encourages people to pick up something they wouldn't have otherwise. So that's kind of my hope for it. Now Anuja has written some new fiction on our theme of subverting identity. The story may be short, but like the lake that is its setting, the scene of

a family scattering ashes has a lot going on, both above and below its surface. So I have kind of three generations of women and girls in this story, who are all, I think, of women and girls in this story, who are all, I think, subverting expectations in different ways. So there are some markers of class, of wealth in this story, which I think is obviously a privilege, but also create some very specific expectations for people as well. So in terms of how do you break those, how do you break gender norms, in terms of how do you break those, how do you break gender norms, in the context of class expectations and cultural expectations, when there is potentially a threat to your safety for doing those things. So it's just, it's a very short piece, but I hope in some ways it does play with all those ideas.

Meditations on a Lake I am watching the lake move through the open window in the kitchen. It's a million-dollar view, literally. I know this because the lady lawyer told me to have the house appraised. Harjan never spoke to me about financial matters, always said I didn't have a head for numbers. He bought the house on the lake 45 years ago, and I have been watching the water through these big windows ever since. It is blue by day, black by night, and sometimes glows purple and yellow and red by sunset. The lake is a bruise, a reflection of my skin. It is a constant violent comfort. It crashes and it shines,

and every year it erodes the foundation of this beautiful house a little more. I always thought that someday it might swallow me up, and I had made peace with that. Up there, Hoja Ma, are you ready? My son's words are soft, but his grip on my arm is too hard. He is so much like his father. I know this from the way his pretty wife flinches when he touches her, from the way she stares at the lake and recognizes her body there too. I release the urn I have been clutching and my son releases me. We named him Adam, our firstborn, then, after several failures, our onlyborn. His success, and he is so very successful, is our success. Everyone knows it. What is there to complain about when we have been so blessed? What is there left to wish for? What is there to fear?

I follow Adam outside onto the dock where my daughter-in-law is waiting. Behind us the screen door slams and my granddaughter picks her way down the hill towards the dock to join us. She is wearing ripped jeans with an oversized button-down shirt and a wide belt. A pair of gold bangles pilfered from my dresser glints on her wrist, and there is a sheen of pink gloss on her lips, a hint of shadow making her eyelids glitter. She slouches all boredom and defiance, not an ounce of grief. I see Adam's jaw tighten. He doesn't know what to do with this child, his only son, his only born. Confusion makes him angry. Anger makes him liquid, cold, changeable, a danger. I see the wave building in him, but before it can crash from his mouth, I say quietly,

come, let's begin, before it rains. say quietly, come, let's begin, before it rains. He huffs, but he is solid again, stoic, as he gives a eulogy for his father. The wind picks up and the lake smashes against the rocks, almost drowning him out. It has concealed so many things over the years, secrets and screaming and the sound a head makes when it hits a wall. Also, the silly things women chit-chat about while sipping sangria at the end of a dock, things like recipes and charity fundraisers and the name of a lady lawyer and whose children are marrying who. My son pours the contents of the urn into the lake, and we watch Arjun's ashes float, scum-like on the surface, then sink, swallowed up. He will have to make peace with that, I suppose, among other things. Adam has to go back to the city, back to work, but the other two will stay

with me for a few weeks here at the house to help me pack. He doesn't think I can live here alone with my old body and my empty head. He has a very nice senior's residence in mind for me. He is quite certain that Arjun has left the house to him. But I don't think that's true. That's not what I told the lady lawyer anyway. Poor Arjun, he was so confused at the end. It was good I was there to speak for him, to make sure his last wishes were known. It starts to rain and Adam strides back towards the house. We three remain and there is a terrible weight, a shared guilt at all that is to come, but also a giddiness, a freedom I haven't felt in 45 years. I have never been a surprising woman, nor a brave one, but it's never too late to become something new.

I take my granddaughter's hand and turn my back on the lake. I never liked the view much anyway. My name is Anuja Varghese, and I am a Hamilton-based author. My debut book is out now called Chrysalis. The theme I was kind of thinking about approaching this was sort of breaking free of traditional identities and how do we escape those? How do we create new identities for ourselves? And is that even possible, especially, you know, when you're, maybe when you're 22, it feels like you could be anybody.

But for this character that kind of came to me, who, you know, is an older woman, has already kind of raised a family, has perhaps been through some trauma in her life. Is it too late to kind of break those identity shackles that have been a part of you and your life for so long? And I hope this piece answers that question. There's sort of references to the violence she has likely experienced, that her daughter-in-law has experienced at the hands of her son. And that's a very complicated family dynamic. For me, I think,

as I was kind of imagining this family, I feel like it's the granddaughter that has really kind of pushed her to be braver than she really has been. You know, seeing this young person be true to who they are and even, you know, knowing that there is a possibility that that will be dangerous for them, I think it has sort of inspired her to also be something new. I'm really fascinated with this idea that we are all constantly, whether we know it or not, whether we want to be or not, we're all sort of moving in some direction. Hopefully, maybe that's for the better or for the positive.

I feel like I just feel like we're all constantly in that in that state of transforming in one way or another. So this this piece in particular speaks to that really clearly. But I think all my work, to some degree, is about transformations. I'm really fascinated with that. Her life and subject matter might fall under certain identity categories, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, but Anuja interprets it all in her own uncategorizable way as a fiction writer. My own mother said when she read my book is like, oh, why didn't you write nice stories about Indian people? Like, it was just this sense of like, if you're going to write these stories, why wouldn't, why are you writing these, you know, messy relationships

and, you know, people transforming into monsters? Why didn't you write a nice triumphant story about immigrants? And I, you know, that's obviously not what I'm interested in doing. We have those stories aplenty in CanLit. in doing. We have those stories aplenty in CanLit. So I'm certainly interested in portrayals, specifically of brown women and girls and queer brown women and girls that provide some new narratives for us and give us some new stories that feel a bit more true to at least my experience in the world. And her experience in the world feeds both her family and her art. I do have a full-time job.

I work at the YWCA in Hamilton, and I am also a writer. I think it's a real rarity anywhere, and especially sort of in CanLit, for anyone to be able to sort of make a full-time go of it as a writer. So it's just about sort of balancing those things for me and trying as much as I can to prioritize the writing, but also just to like prioritize life. Because I feel like when I have tried to just sort of sit down and shut out the world and focus on the writing, it's the world and the people and the experiences that feed the work. So, I don't know, it's a balance of my actual job and the writing and the living. And I guess, you know, my kids are in there somewhere, too.

and the living, and I guess, you know, my kids are in there somewhere too. Anuja Varghese won a 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. Okay, ready? That's the voice of Hannah Green. She's a writer and poetry editor in Winnipeg and a poetry winner for the 2023 GGs. Hannah's recent writing is rooted in her real-life experience with mental illness and addiction. To make artful writing from that raw material, she's already played creatively with first-person narration and adopted personas. When Ideas and CBC Books asked her to write a brand new piece, she was up for the challenge.

So I was really excited when I saw subverting identities as our theme. I really wanted to work with binary oppositions, and I work with quite obvious ones like good and evil. And in this poem, I really just wanted to be a villain. I don't want people to like me in this poem. I am intentionally ugly. I am intentionally cruel. She's experimenting with the darker aspects of personality and a different first-person voice. I think if I take the aspects I don't like of myself and I amplify them by 10 is how I get these interesting situations that are very similar to my life but extremely amplified. Here is Hannah Green reading her poem called Re-Chainsaw Aesthetic. called Re-Chainsaw Aesthetic.

Other than emails, this is the first thing I've written in a year. I hope this poem finds you well. I don't know what else you want me to say. Have you ever loved something so much you could never have it again? I've been sober for six consecutive months. There would be no truth without liars like me. There would be no binary oppositions without our messy lives in the middle. I have yet to determine the thesis statement of my life, but I'm trying. I.e. I'm a hopeless melancholic. I.e. my attention is deficit and manifests in disorderly conduct. If I have anything to argue, it is this. When I drunk drive into the sunset, it'll be legendary.

When I tattoo love on one set of knuckles and hate on the other, there will be consequences. There would be no hero without anti-hero, good without evil, order without chaos, etc. no hero without anti-hero, good without evil, order without chaos, etc. Do you see how easy it is to want to be on the wrong side of that backslash, to turn your back, lashing out at everything? To be the fist and not the bruise? To cream through drywall and bleed victorious? I don't know what's wrong with me. Is it the question itself or its cigarette burn of a mark? To be a dumpster fire of a girl who smells like smoke and likes to play with matches. To take inventory of your demons instead of taking them to therapy. Archaic. During an exorcism, the demon must be named in order to be expelled. Modern. During a diagnosis, the illness must be named

in order to be medicated. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, take this, it will help. The power of Pfizer compels you. The power of Pfizer compels you. The power of Pfizer compels you. I went through hell

and all I got was this stupid prescription. I'm my own worst villain by default. I've never been the best at anything. I wanted to be extraordinary, but I'm extraordinary instead. I'm drunk again and feeling nostalgic. Which is to say I live in the past. Which is to say the past lives in me and this exorcism isn't working. I know why I like to ruin things.

You can psychoanalyze and suck on that while the highest version of myself sits bound and gagged in the rafters of my brain. Destroying the world has more sex appeal than saving it. I mean, screw it, right? I'm stubborn, but at least the climate changes. I don't care how many teeth I have to knock out. By the end of this, you're going to believe I'm ugly. Because I could have been anything I wanted, and I chose this. Because I'm about to set fire to everything I don't believe in. I'm trying to finish this poem, but I've run out of things to say, so I'm going to go

to an all-you-can-eat buffet and drink one glass of tap water before paying my bill and driving home listening to Static on the radio. I can't think of a better way to say I'm bored with myself. I can't think of a better way to say I am bored here. Hello, I'm Hannah Green. I am a poet. I wrote a book called Xanax Cowboy. I've got the brief like so down at this point. So I'm looking at the romanticization of addiction and mental illness via the romanticization of the Wild West. I think that's why I write poetry. I'm not good at like saying the obvious and I had to write a whole book to like say the paragraph explaining it. But yeah, it's just like about like subverting identity and like it's a lot about like mental illness and expectations and addiction. And yeah,

I really put myself out there in that book. And I put so much work into it. And it was really hard for a lot of people to read. Like, I've never heard my grandma cry. My grandma called me crying and just saying, I feel like you were trying to tell me these things. And like, you were hiding behind humor. And like, I should have seen this sooner. And like, you know, some people knew the full, fully what was going on. Some people didn't. It's very autobiographical. So even though I'm amplifying an aspect, I amplify an aspect in a metaphor, unless it's like intentionally artificial. So for example, like I wrote a play within it. So that's obviously not me because

there's two characters called Xanax Cowboy and Cocaine Cowgirl who are like in a motel room together. We know that didn't actually happen. But the Xanax Cowboys is Cocaine Cowgirl who are like in a motel room together we know that didn't actually happen but the Xanax Cowboys is the character but it's also me so it's this like shifting of like between like self and like the character she's created so the final poem is actually constructed half with my medical records just from one particular night basically where I got taken to the the drunk tank and um I did not agree with what happened that night and it's just from one particular night, basically, where I got taken to the drunk tank. And I did not agree with what happened that night. And it's just going over, like, my medical record leading up to that. And my writing, like, contests it, basically. And that's where you start to see Hannah Green come out.

So, like, the cowboy starts falling apart in those final poems to really just show that, like, why I was using this character to kind of protect me. It's sort of just like, you know, we tell stories to keep ourselves safe. So even though it was me the whole time, it's kind of more openly taking off the cowboy suit. Writer Hannah Green. Her debut collection, Xanax Cowboy, won a 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. Hi, my name is Jack Wong. I'm an author and illustrator of children's books based in Chibukduk or Halifax, Nova Scotia. And my debut picture book, When You Can Swim, is the winner of the Governor General's Literary Award in the Young People's Literature Illustrated category.

To close out this episode on subverting identity. Tupelo. A story by prize-winning Halifax author Jack Wong. When I got the prompt to write a piece on the theme of subverting identity, I was actually traveling in Costa Rica, ecotourism, experiencing activities and sightseeing, that reminded me that we all tend to deal with novelty and the unknown by categorizing it. We want to know if we see something new in a foreign place. Let's say if it's a plant, whether we want to know what name it is,

whether there's a version of it back home, whether it's indigenous to the place that we're finding it, or whether it was carried over by settlers or something like that. And that led me to the story that I'm about to read called Tupelo. When Reina first discovered the monster under her bed,

she thought it a fearsome-looking thing. It had a long, rotund body pressed belly to the ground, bearing a scaly backside. Lines of knobby spikes ran down its length, flaring sharp as the ridges converged at its tail. At its head, a mouthful of sharp teeth glistened under its gnarled snout. And yet, being that it found itself so out of place in Reina's room, which was her domain. Raina also felt it a hapless creature, who, with its short, stubby legs, could only scramble clumsily along the laminate floor, and whose tail performed idle curlicues like a kitten. That's how she had found it in the first place. It had accidentally knocked over the glass of milk she put by her bedside the

previous evening. Atop that impressive head, its two yellow eyes moved like periscopes, watching Raina furtively, while its wide mouth made an altogether different impression, fixed as it was in a genial grin. Reina had seen such creatures before, though only, of course, on the internet. Tupelo, she decided to call it Tupelo, looked very much like what you'd call an alligator, or crocodile. There were ways to tell the difference between the two, but as Raina went down the list, evidently none of them applied to Tupelo. For one, you were supposed to observe whether it had a broad, U-shaped nose, like a former, or a narrow, V-shaped one, like the latter, whereas Tupelo's made a lean oval, like the

bottom of a zero. For another, crocodiles showed both top and bottom teeth with their mouths closed, while alligators had overbites, but Tupelo's jaw always hung open, not unlike, Raina thought, a happy dog, and she was not about to go trying to shut it. Alligators should be black, dark green, or slate, while crocodiles could be brown, olive green, or some ostensibly non-slate shade of gray. It reminded Raina of when her parents had tireless debates over the dozen paint chips of the same color taped to the bathroom wall. Speaking of which, none of the relative comparisons she read were of any use. Crocodiles, larger when fully grown, more aggressive, stronger bite. Alligators,

faster. But how were you supposed to tell when you had only Tupelo? As long as their bed frame, never in a hurry to go anywhere, decidedly mercurial in temperament. If you are living somewhere north of South Florida, it is probably not a crocodile, according to one webpage. She just couldn't be sure if this applied when one finds one under their bed. After that fruitless exercise, Reina grew less occupied by the question. Tupelo was, in a word, Tupelo. She got used to sharing her room with it and knowing its habits like how it was more disposed to irritability in the mornings. Apparently, being cold-blooded was one trait that crocodiles and alligators did share.

Tupelo was most amicable after having sat in the shaft of sunlight that angled favorably into Raina's room on clear afternoons. After a good sunbathing, Tupelo could be very agreeable indeed. Raina also read that both alligators and crocodiles like sweet water, so she went to the kitchen and rummaged for the stash of pop in the back of the refrigerator. Her father thought they were well concealed behind the tubs of yogurt, but it was actually because nobody else in the house cared for Dr. Pepper. Tupelo gulped this down happily, and when it was done, which only took a second, let out a loud, wet burp, then slapped its pudgy paws for more. Raina buried the empty cans under the bed so that, over time, festive rattling accompanied Tupelo whenever it shuffled to and fro. of rattling accompanied Tupelo whenever it shuffled to and fro. One day, however, Reina found Tupelo crying, its crusty snout streaked with dark lines like drips from a hose on summer pavement. A turn of countenance so alarming that, in her panic, she had no choice but to call her older sister for help.

Maybe it misses home, Reina's sister wondered. Or it's sick? A seasonal cold had been going around the household. Their mother had just put on a pot full of chicken noodle soup, which might do for either scenario, so they fetched some for Tupelo in the largest salad bowl they could find. Tupelo slurped it up with great pleasure. If it was possible, it was grinning more widely than ever. But the more it ate, the more it cried. Maybe they were happy tears. For the rest of the afternoon, Raina got to work, fetching Tupelo one bowl of chicken noodle soup after another, and so that her mother wouldn't grow suspicious at the prodigious rate of its depletion, feigning a lingering cough as she

went about the hallway. Aha, I got it, Raina's sister announced triumphantly when she returned. She had gone to do a bit of searching herself, and had finally found a beast to match Tupelo's description. One that drank seawater, could swim vast distances, even across oceans, and cried from time to time. Tupelo was a saltwater crocodile. It figured that Tupelo had to have traveled very far from home to end up under Raina's bed, where it now lived its new life of impassionately taking to savory broths and shedding the occasional crocodile tear. Raina fetched an umpteenth bowl full of soup, which Tupelo lapped up, less hurriedly now, with relish. She was just glad that it was okay. And she did like the sound of Tupelo's new nickname, given to its kind, Tupelo the Salty.

Now, her sister wondered aloud, is it an Australian or Indian? There was a whole other side of the story based on the prompt of subverting identity. identity. And it goes back to that age-old question that gets asked in an immigrant context of people like me being asked, where are you from and where are you really from? And my perspective on this question has certainly evolved over time. I grew up in evolved over time. I grew up in Vancouver when I was a kid, and it was in a place with a large Cantonese diaspora. So there were certainly complex racial relationships and racism in my daily life, but I was fairly sheltered from that base level question of where are you from? And it wasn't until I moved to Halifax in 2010 and I would walk down the street and someone would stop me and ask, you know, what kind of Asian are you? Or they would actually ask what kind of Oriental you are.

And obviously that wasn't the most pleasant thing to experience. But at the same time, I wasn't always sure that just shutting it down was the right thing to do. sure that just shutting it down was the right thing to do. And more recently, I'd often been asked that question by other new immigrants as immigration is on the rise in Halifax. And I've had multiple rides with Uber drivers who are on the first day on their job. And immigrants are often free of that politically correct baggage of certain questions you can ask and you can't ask. So they would often just come out and say like, oh, are you Japanese or Korean? And each time I was in one of those situations, I felt that sharing my experience as an immigrant with them could be wholesome and healing. And at first I would compartmentalize those interactions and think, well, this person must

be genuinely curious because it relates to their own life as a new immigrant. And the next step along that logical train of thought is just, well, shouldn't I assume that anyone who's asking is asking from a place of genuine curiosity? So now I take it in that way that someone who is asking that question is attempting to connect and there's an opportunity for real interaction. And obviously, I appreciate it being asked with kindness. Halifax author Jack Wong. His book, When You Can Swim, won a 2023 Governor General's Literary Award in the category of Young People's Literature. For more information on all the Gigi Award-winning writers and the work you've been hearing today, visit cbcbooks at cbc.ca slash books, or connect through the Ideas website at cbc.ca slash ideas.

at cbc.ca slash ideas. This episode was our annual collaboration with CBC Books and the Canada Council for the Arts. Special thanks to Ryan B. Patrick. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas.

And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.