Four Reviews: "Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator” by Ben Brisbois; "Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau” Curated by Arin Fay, Paintings by David Garneau, Edited by Nic Wilson; "Dog and Moon" by Kelly Shepherd; and "Walking Upstream" by Lloyd Ratzlaff

“Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator”

Written by Ben Brisbois

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$34.95  ISBN 9-781779-400345

    

Dole. Chiquita. Del Monte. These banana empires are household names, and as a frequent consumer of bananas, I read Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator, by Montreal academic Ben Brisbois, with great interest. Frankly, though I’ve consumed a bunch of bananas in my lifetime, I’ve never peeled back their long and troubling story. Ben Brisbois has.

Over about fifteen years, Brisbois—an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the Université de Montréal’s School of Public Health—researched, analyzed, and wrote about pesticides’ dangerous health effects on the often exploited workers at banana plantations and farms, with his PhD fieldwork centred in the self-proclaimed “banana capital of the world,” Machala, Ecuador. He ”laboriously designed a project that would try to bring about real change by valuing the lived experiences of pesticide-affected banana workers and farmers, and by being realistic about the political and economic power relations [both globally and locally] affecting coastal Ecuador.” 

There was much to unpack, and this reader got an education, beginning with the nefarious ecological and political history of banana production, including child labour. If I only retain one image from this comprehensive text, it will be of the exploitation of children. A 2002 Human Rights Watch report included interviews with “Children as young as eight, who worked long days in hazardous conditions with pervasive exposure to toxic pesticides such as chlorpyrifos and the fungicides constantly applied with backpack sprayers and fumigation planes. These children were often not allowed to exit the fields when planes passed overhead, instead hiding under banana leaves or cardboard boxes and using shirts or their hands to hold off the falling veneno (poison).” And this was daily life. 

For as long as banana farming’s occurred, it appears major issues have existed: a “toxic soup of pesticides;” subcontracted labour; environmental injustice “(a term describing the disproportionate concentration of environmental risks in racialized, poor, and other marginalized communities);” lack of unions; corrupt governments; racism; and “brutally competitive global banana markets,” which put producers of small-scale banana farms/plantations in extremely precarious economic positions. When pressure becomes too great on banana giants, “companies have nimbly moved their sourcing to cheaper and less-protected jurisdictions,” Brisbois writes. Colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberal capitalism are part of the disparaging story, including “the granting of massive land concessions to US interests by Latin American governments.”  

Another major concern is banana farming’s “enormous carbon footprint.” And research into the medical fallout from various pesticides is challenged as chemicals are frequently combined, so it’s difficult to know if cancers, birth defects, neurological impairment, depression, etc. can be attributed to certain pesticides, or are a result of political, social and economic inequities. The global pesticide industry has continually passed the buck and “steered policy and science” in favour of commerce. 

It's grim to consider that “So long as the disparities that imperialism created … are in place, markets for fruits will always be so skewed that huge injustices will persist.” This is something to think about.

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“Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau”

Curated by Arin Fay, Paintings by David Garneau, Edited by Nic Wilson

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$32.95  ISBN 9-781779-400536

    

How did I not know about Saskatchewan-based David Garneau? The Governor General award-winning Métis artist, writer and educator initiates integral conversations about Indigenous identity and experience, colonization and the academy through politically-charged art and writing, and now 17 Canadian writers have responded to his large, compelling and highly symbolic still life series, Dark Chapters, in a striking new text. Titled Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau, the collection’s contributor list reads like a who’s who of contemporary Canadian literature, including poetry from Susan Musgrave, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Fred Wah and Rita Bouvier, and essays from Trevor Herriot, Jesse Wente, Paul Seeseequasis and curator Arin Fay.

“Dark Chapters” refers to Justice Murray Sinclair’s Reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and many of the book’s contributors are of Indigenous heritage. Editor Nic Wilson shares how across Garneau’s lifelong art-making, “Each foray is soaked in [Garneau’s] incredible attention to the codes of history, meaning, emotion, sociality, and pedagogy.” The book contains numerous colour images of Garneau’s provocative still lives, which often feature juxtapositions between mostly title/word-less books and other items, ie: skulls, stones, tense or slack twine and other bindings, and Métis sashes. We find books and a bar of Sunlight soap; an upright red book “wicked” with burning, braided sweetgrass (at first glance, the image appears to be a stick of dynamite); an open-faced Bible on a Grandfather rock; a tomahawk paired uncomfortably with a teacup; fruit and flies. Fay writes that in these “salacious mashups,” the artist is creating “a new vernacular,” and his works “expand upon and challenge the vanitas and memento mori styles, introducing a modern Métis interpretation of still life painting.”   

In his poignant response, anthropologist and legal scholar David Howes says it bluntly: “David Garneau’s artistic work typically confounds the viewer” and it requires multiple “takes.” I concur, and would add that the myriad responses, too, should be read more than once. Howes examines the role of sage smoke in Ceremony and “the treaty-making process”—“No smoke, no pact”—and explores the significance of Garneau’s painting Scientific Method Applied to the Sacred. He also discusses the sentience of rocks—objects/beings that frequently appear in Garneau’s visual conundrums. 

Jesse Wente’s clear-eyed essay is among my favourite. The broadcaster, producer and activist writes about—and personally owns—Garneau’s still life “Formal and Informal Education,” in which a red book (symbolic recurring image) dangles from a spring trap. Beyond the formal vs. informal education represented in the acrylic, Wente appreciates the painting because his great-grandfather was a fur trapper who “live[d] on the land,” and the generations of family that followed received formal education. “The painting also suggests the violence that inevitably faces us when we seek the formal,” Wente writes, noting the influence of residential school on his grandparents. “This painting is us, and I think David depicted us beautifully.”

The images and writing throughout Dark Chapters are powerful, thought-provoking and wide-ranging. As Fred Wah aptly writes, “This life of the eye is anything but still.”  

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“Dog and Moon”                                                                                                                                      

By Kelly Shepherd                                                                                                                          

Published by University of Regina Press                                                                                                

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl                                                                                                              

$19.95  ISBN 9-781779-400383

    

Quirky contradictions, interconnectedness, and more swerves than the North Saskatchewan—Kelly Shepherd’s Dog and Moon delivers an audacious selection of poems that’ll make you think and possibly cheer, thanks to wordplay concerning the natural world, domesticity, etymology, poetry workshops (“Describe snow to someone who has never experienced it before”) and metaphors against a backdrop of shadows, mirrors, moons, frogs, feathers, Canadian writers and “concrete-coloured snow.” In this third poetry collection, Shepherd’s used the ancient ghazal form for inspiration, but he gives his couplets a contemporary twist with reverberations, koan-like riddles, a dash of politics and lines that had me smiling. Even titles are a hoot: “The Poetics of Space Heaters,”  and “If Your Eyes Weren’t Prisms, Would You Notice?” Prediction: this book will earn awards. 

Firstly, the pairings and unusual juxtapositions. The book begins: “A man walks out of a forest. What walks out of him?” In the second poem: “Fish grow leafy fins and tails. Trees grow fish-shaped leaves./The trees, water, fire of childhood.” The poet takes two things, ie: fish and trees, then throws in a random third element, ie: “fire of childhood.”  

Ghazals often include questions, and Shepherd’s adopted this characteristic in several pieces, asking, for example, “Did we pray to the gods who would eat us/by eating them?” and the anti-capitalist “Happiness is only a purchase away,/but what happens when the box store runs out of boxes?” His questions range from the simple “Do you believe in dogs?” to writerly concerns, ie: “Who ever anywhere will read these written words?” 

In reviewing Shepherd’s first book, Shift, I noted several unique word combinations re: colour descriptions, and here he impresses again, ie: “sunrise-coloured seagulls,” “Daylight the colour of beets,” and “the silence goes violet.”

Childhood reminiscences can spread a warmth across poems. In “What’s it going to Be? Marie Kondo, or Tsundoku?”, we find this beauty: 

      Can you feel it? It’s the distant glitter of sunlight

      on lakewater between trees, first glimpsed from the back seat,

       in one of your earliest memories of summer.

In following lines, he leaps into a Walt Whitman quote, and a “bookstore customer, rough-bearded/and rough-handed,” and “So much fog on the lake.” Indeed, there’s much peculiarity throughout the collection, ie: the line “I prefer the onomatopoeic style of interior design.”

   

“Limn” celebrates personification: “Hands of sand hold on to the afternoon’s heat,” “The pale brown gravel road’s long legs/follow the shore,” and “The lake last night was so close/I could hear it breathe, its fingers on the glass.”  

And then there’s the humour, ie: 

   A journey of a thousand miles

   begins with a single schlep.

and “How to distinguish British Columbians from Albertans?/Look at their choice of Self-Help books.”

I can appreciate all the verbal backflips and hopscotching. The surprises. Like the Edmonton/Treaty 6 Territory poet, I believe that “A poem is a torch with a beam of shadow/instead of light.” I see the hills’ “nettle-coloured eyes,” and hear “The fire with its breaking-twig voice.” And I feel richer for it all. 

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“Walking Upstream”

By Lloyd Ratzlaff

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95    ISBN 9781771872706

Saskatoon’s Lloyd Ratzlaff—essayist, former minister, walker in wild places—has released his first poetry collection, and wow. I know this man and have long believed that poetry lives in him; I’m grateful his mostly contemplative poems—alive with water, birds and creatures—have found a deserving home in Walking Upstream.

The first two sections map “The Old Path” and “The Irresistible Forces,” while the latter two, “To Grouse like a Mountain,” and “Afloat,” ferry readers from “Coffee at Starbucks” to a “Prairie Cemetery” and “Nirvana Big Rest Motel.” At the latter, the narrator waits out “a steady rain” and concludes “I can do nothing/for my mother in her care home bed/but think,/look Mother,/I am because of you.” Whew. For a piece with just eleven lines, this unsentimental poem packs serious emotional punch, aided by an image of the “white petunias [that] sag/under the water’s grey weight.”  

Ratzlaff possesses a gift for evoking emotion in just a few poignant lines—some might consider this poetry’s raison d’être—and his poems reflect that over a lifetime, the former counsellor’s mastered the oft-ignored art of listening. “The Realm” contains just nine lines, but in the second stanza we glean humility and the quiet nature of an individual “who likes to hide sometimes/in a copse of aspens/and listen.” This keen ear’s tuned as naturally to “Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds” and a ”mud hen in the reeds,/so near yet so hidden,/only the tinks on some tiny anvil/betray the place of [its] nesting” as it is to windchimes: “A small orchestra improvises/a jazz suite for spring.” How lovely.

Ratzlaff’s frequently addressed his Christian fundamentalist upbringing, and several poems in this smart collection demonstrate that he’s still processing “the old religion,” with its emphasis on sin, fear and “holy hullabalujah.” As a child, a “travelling evangelist” with a “flappy bible” warned that “children without Jesus in [their] hearts/will [writhe] in a lake of fire/and brimstone.” In “My Quarrel with Yahweh,” Yahweh is “a night spirit./The sun hurts his eyes.” The poet refers to a beetle “multicoloured like Joseph’s coat,” and offers a short “prayer for the river.” 

I prefer the reflective poems and the intimate concerns they sometimes reveal, but the collection never feels somber, as lighter poems—about the poet’s dogs, or adolescents’ overuse of the word “like”—braid through the book. I enjoyed the farewell poem, “Goodbye Little Apartment,” in which Ratzlaff said so long to the “last of the old fridges/that wouldn’t defrost” and the “shabby carpet,” and, more importantly, to “beloved friends” with whom he “walked to the riverbank,/got three sheets to the wind,” and “played hide-and-seek till five in the morning” before they settled “on a footbridge” and “looked into the stars.” It’s a profound example of how, if we’re fortunate, the child in each of us never leaves.    

Always, there’s great reverence for avian friends. Bluejays, chickadees, “The gulls of Wanuskewin” and the mighty magpie, of which Ratzlaff writes: “our people don’t think/highly enough/of your people.” Oh, I say, indeed. 

 

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