101 Letters to a Prime Minister Read online

  What is not mentioned in the bio is the synergy that developed in the Aboriginal cultural world in Toronto in the mid-1980s. Suddenly then—the time was right—some Natives came together and did what they had hardly done until then: they spoke. The production company Native Earth Performing Arts was founded in 1982 to give voice to Aboriginal theatre, dance and music. Before that, with the exception of Inuit prints and sculptures and Maria Campbell’s memoir Half-Breed, the Canadian cultural scene was practically bare of Native expression. That would change with Native Earth. Along with Tomson Highway, the company fostered the careers of such writers as Daniel David Moses and Drew Hayden Taylor.

  When The Rez Sisters opened in November 1986, the cast had to go out into the streets and beg passersby to come in and see the play. Well, those first people liked what they saw and word of mouth did the rest. The Rez Sisters became a hit. It drew large audiences, toured the country, was produced at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival.

  Like your last book, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the force of The Rez Sisters lies with its characters. Seven women—Pelajia Patchnose, Philomena Moosetail, Marie-Adele Starblanket, Annie Cook, Emily Dictionary, Veronique St. Pierre and Zhaboonigan Peterson—live on the Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve, on Manitoulin Island. Life there is as life is everywhere, with its ups and downs. But then comes momentous news: THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD is being organized in Toronto. And do you know what kind of a jackpot THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD would have? Something BIG. The dreams that winning that jackpot might fulfill is at the heart of the play. It’s a comedy, the kind that makes you laugh while also delivering a fair load of sadness. Stereotypes are set up and then mocked, but it’s not an overtly political play, hence its universal resonance. We may not be Native women on a reserve, we may not be bingo aficionados, but we all have dreams and worries.

  There is a last character in the play who must be mentioned. Nanabush, in his various incarnations, is as important in Native mythology as Christ is in the Christian world. But there’s a playful element to Nanabush that is absent in our portrayal of Christ. In The Rez Sisters, he appears in the guise of a seagull or a nighthawk. He dances and prances and pesters. Marie-Adele, who has cancer, and Zhaboonigan, who was brutally raped, are the only ones who explicitly interact with him. He is the angel of death, but also the spirit of life. He hovers over much of the play.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  TOMSON HIGHWAY (b. 1951) is a Cree author and playwright who is best known for his plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, both winners of the Dora Mavor Moore Award. He is also the author of the bestselling novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. Highway’s writing features Native characters living on reserves and incorporates Native spirituality. He continues to advocate for Native issues and expose the injustices and challenges faced by the Native Canadian population. Highway is a talented concert pianist and an entertaining stage presence, and is currently producing his third play, Rose.

  BOOK 33:

  PERSEPOLIS

  BY MARJANE SATRAPI

  Translated from the French by Mattias Ripa

  July 7, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  This armchair trip to the Islamic Republic of Iran,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  In the mid-1990s, I travelled to Iran with a young woman. In the two months we were there, we met maybe twenty Western travellers, all of them with transit visas and all speedily making their way along the central corridor that passes through Iran from the border of Turkey to the border of Pakistan. We were specifically interested in Iran, not in getting from Europe to Asia, so we had managed to get tourist visas. We wandered all over the country, visiting not only Teheran, Esfahan and Shiraz, cities you will have heard of, but others, too: Tabriz, Rasht, Mashhad, Gorgan, Yazd, Kerman, Bandar Abbas, Bam, Ahvaz, Khorramabad, Sanandaj. (Sorry for the long list of names; they may mean nothing to you, but each one opens up a volume of memories in me.) We also visited Zoroastrian fire temples in the desert. We climbed an ancient ziggurat. We took ferries to islands. We rested in oases.

  I’ve often found that, excluding war zones, a foreign place is never so dangerous as when you are far away from it. The closer you get to it, the more the distortions caused by fear and misunderstanding dissipate, so that, to take the case at hand, the image we had of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that terrifying place that brought the world full-on religious fanaticism, with oppressed women going about dressed from head to toe in black and people flagellating themselves in public and fountains spewing blood-red water, disappeared once we entered the country and was replaced by this or that friendly individual standing in front of us, eyeing us with curiosity, wanting to be kind but uncertain of his or her English.

  If Iran was challenging, it was in the way it challenged our expectations. For example, in all our time there, talking freely to men and women of all social classes, from the rural poor to the urban middle class, from the devout to the secular, we never met, not once, a person who complained about living in an Islamic republic. A government has to be a mirror into which its people can look and recognize themselves. Well, the Iranians we met recognized themselves in their Islamic democracy. The only complaint we heard, and often, was about the state of the economy. Iranians complained about lacking money, not lacking freedom.

  There wasn’t much to do in Iran in the way of leisure then. It was, by Western standards, and probably still is, an arid society, with little space or money given over to cinemas, concert halls, sports complexes and the like. And there were no bars or discos, of course. Iran was a sober place, both literally and metaphorically. So Iranians did the only thing they could easily: they socialized. As a result, they are a people with the most graceful and sophisticated social skills I’ve ever seen, a people who, when they meet you, really meet you, turning their full attention to you. The Iranians we met were open, curious, generous, extraordinarily hospitable and endlessly chatty.

  And the horrors of fundamentalism? The people who brought us Salman Rushdie’s fatwa? The oppression of women? That’s all true, too. But what place is above censure? People in Iran are like people anywhere: they want to be happy and live in peace, with a modicum of material well-being. The rules of their society, their values—the means by which they hope to become happy—are different from Canada’s, but what of that? They have their problems, we have ours. Let them muddle through theirs, as we hope to muddle through ours. Progress can’t be jump-started; it must arise organically from within a society, it cannot be imposed from without.

  such eye-opening travel as I had the luck of doing isn’t a possibility for everyone. Work, family and inclination may prevent one from ever visiting this or that foreign place. Which is where books come in. The armchair traveller can be as well informed as the backpacker roughing it, so long as he or she reads the right books. Travel, whether directly with one’s feet or vicariously through a book, humanizes a place. A people emerge in their individual particularity, miles away from caricature or calumny.

  And so Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. It’s a graphic novel, the second I’ve sent you after Maus, by Art Spiegelman. It’s charming, witty, sad and illuminating. The point of view is that of a ten-year-old girl named Marjane. She’s like all ten-year-olds the world over, living in her own half-imaginary universe—only it’s 1979 and she lives in Iran. A revolution is afoot, one that will be welcomed at first by her middle-class family because it will bring down the odiously corrupt and brutal regime of the Shah, but later will be hated because of the excesses that followed. It’s a story that has the ring of truth to it because it’s the story of an individual telling it as she saw it.

  I invite you to read Persepolis and get a hint of the Iran I visited some years ago. If you enjoy it, you should know that there’s a Persepolis 2, w
hich continues Marjane’s story, and there’s also a movie.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  MARJANE SATRAPI (b. 1969) is a multi-talented Iranian-French author. She is primarily a graphic novelist but also writes and illustrates children’s books. She is best known for her popular autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, and its sequel, Persepolis 2. In these books, she recalls her childhood growing up in Iran and her adolescence studying in Europe. Persepolis won the Angoulême Coup de Coeur Award and was later adapted into an animated film recognized at the Cannes Film Festival. Satrapi studied illustration in Strasbourg and lives in France.

  BOOK 34:

  THE BLUEST EYE

  BY TONI MORRISON

  July 21, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Oh, the mess that the heart wreaks. The pity of it all when so much was possible. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye is unbelievably short—a mere 160 pages—considering all that it carries of pain, sadness, anger, cruelty, dashed hopes, of descriptions, characters, events, of all that makes a novel great. Once again, like many of the books I have sent you, you might be inclined to think at first, “This story won’t speak to me.” After all, a story set in Lorain, Ohio, in the early 1940s, mostly told from the point of view of children; a cast of characters who are poor and whose blackness makes them not just a skin colour removed from you and me but a world removed; a perspective that is innately feminist—there is much in this story that starts where you and I have never been.

  And yet it will speak to you. Read, read beyond the first few pages, plunge into the story the way you might dive into a chilly lake—and you will find that it’s warmer than you expected, that in fact you’re quite comfortable in its waters. You will find that the characters—Claudia, Frieda, Pecola—are not so unfamiliar, because you were once a child yourself, and you will find that the cruelty, the racism, the inequality are not so alien either, because we’ve all experienced the nastiness of the human heart, either in being the one lashed or the one lashing out.

  The making of art, as I may have mentioned to you before, involves a lot of work. Because of that, it is implicitly constructive. One doesn’t work so hard merely to destroy. One rather hopes to build. No matter how much cruelty and sadness a story may hold, its effect is always the opposite. So a glad tale is taken gladly, and a cruel tale is taken ironically, with feelings of pity and terror, pushing one to reject cruelty. Art then is implicitly liberal; it encourages us towards openness and generosity, it seeks to unlock doors. I suspect this will be the effect of The Bluest Eye on you, with its many lives blighted by poverty, stifled by racism, dashed by random cruelty. You will feel more keenly the suffering of others, no matter how different you thought they were from you at first.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  TONI MORRISON (b. 1931), born Chloe Anthony Wofford, is an American author of novels, short stories, children’s literature and non-fiction. Some of her most famous publications include The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has won multiple awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and, in 1993, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Beyond her career as an author, she has been a literary critic, lecturer, editor, professor and chair at several universities.

  BOOK 35:

  UNDER MILK WOOD

  BY DYLAN THOMAS

  August 5, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Your latest book will be late this week. I’m sorry about that. The delay is not due to the long weekend. Like most self-employed workers, I’m willing to work on weekends and during holidays because if I don’t do the job, no one will do it for me. The problem lies elsewhere. The book that accompanies this letter, Under Milk Wood, by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), is such a lyrical work that it demands not only to be read but to be heard. So I thought I’d send you an audio version in addition to the text. There is a famous performance recorded in New York with Dylan Thomas himself reading several of the parts, done hardly two months before his death, and my family owns an LP of that recording, but I’m not willing to part with it, and even if I were, I doubt you have a record player at hand. The more recent performance that I’ve found for you, on CD, is a BBC production and it’s been slow to arrive in the mail. Hence the delay.

  A word about audiobooks. Have you ever listened to one? I went on a road trip to the Yukon a few years ago and brought some along to give them a try. I thought I’d dislike having a voice insistently whispering me a story while Canada’s majestic northern landscape surged before my eyes. A three-minute pop song I can handle—but a twelve-hour story? I thought it would drive me crazy. I was wrong. Be forewarned: audiobooks are totally addictive. The origin of language is oral, not written. We spoke before we wrote, as children but also as a species. It’s in being spoken that words achieve their full power. If the written word is the recipe, then the spoken word is the dish prepared, the voice adding tone, accent, emphasis, emotion. As I’m sure you will agree, the quality of oratory in Canadian and American public life has deteriorated in the last few years. Barack Obama is where he is, on the cusp of the US presidency, in part, I believe, because of his skill in making his words lofty, inspirational and convincing. His ability is unusual. Most public speakers nowadays are plodding. Actors are the great exception. Their public speaking is superb because it is the very basis of their trade. And it’s actors who read the stories on audiobooks. The combination of a writer’s carefully chosen words and an actor’s carefully calibrated delivery makes for a package that is spellbinding. Time and again on my trip to the Yukon I wouldn’t get out of the car until a chapter had ended. And then the next morning I couldn’t wait to get on with the next. As soon as one story was done, I hastened to start another. Every time I go on a car trip now, I stop by the public library to pick up a selection of audiobooks.

  There’s talk of an election this fall. That means a lot of travelling for you. I suggest you pack a few audiobooks for those long bus and airplane trips you will have to endure. My only advice is to avoid abridged versions. Otherwise, select as you please. Murder mysteries are particularly effective—as is poetry.

  Which brings us back to Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas is no doubt one of the world’s most famous poets. He had a rare quality among modern bards: a persona. His aura as a hard-drinking, hard-living writer—one who died young, to boot; always a boon to one’s immortality—has helped his poetry, which is of genuine quality, achieve a cult status. His poems are endlessly anthologized. You’ve no doubt heard of “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”

  Under Milk Wood is a radio play. That might make you think it’s a tight, fast-paced affair in which a few distinctive voices are aided by clear sound effects. Not at all. There’s no plot to speak of, just a day in the life of a Welsh village named Llareggub. Read that name backwards and you’ll get an idea of what Dylan Thomas thought there was to do in Welsh villages. But life is still good, and that’s what Under Milk Wood is at heart, a celebration of life. With an astounding sixty-nine different voices, it’s symphonic in effect. What carries the whole piece, its melody so to speak, is Dylan Thomas’s gift for language. His words describe, imitate, bubble, scintillate, run, stop, amuse, surprise, enchant. This is verbal beauty at its purest.

  Beauty—the word is much bandied about. But like many words that we use all the time—good, fair, just, for example—if we look a little closer, we find that behind the cliché lies a philosophical odyssey that goes as far back as human thinking. Clearly, beauty moves us, motivates us, shames us, shapes us. I won’t in this letter even try to define what beau
ty is. Best to leave you to think on it, or to look it up. If you are serious in your curiosity, you’ll find yourself following a strand of Western philosophy that goes as far back as Pythagoras (who associated beauty with symmetry), and of course all of visual art concerns itself in one way or another with beauty. There’s much there for the mind that wants to study, a lifetime’s worth of material.

  I’ll limit myself to a much narrower focus, and that is the question of beauty and the prose writer. A writer has many tools to tell a story: characterization, plot and description are some of the obvious ones. Tell a gripping story with full-blooded characters in a convincing setting and you’ve told a good story. Depending on the writer, one element may prevail more than another. So John Grisham or Stephen King will have much plot to show, with some description, but the characters may be there mainly to serve a narrative purpose. A writer like John Banville, on the other hand (do you know him? Irish, an extraordinary stylist), will tend to be less driven by plot, but will have characters and descriptions that are startling in their richness. And so on. Every writer, depending on his or her strengths and interests, will bring some different ratio of ingredients to the making up of a story.

  One notion that is constant in all writers, though, is that of beauty. Every writer, in some way, aspires to literary beauty. That might mean a beautiful plot device, elegant in its simplicity. Or it might mean an ability to paint with words, to create such vivid portraits of people or settings that readers feel that they are “seeing” what the writer is describing. More commonly, the writer of serious ambition aspires to beautiful writing; that is, to writing that by dint of apt vocabulary, happy syntax and pleasing cadence will make the reader marvel. I promise you, if one day you are glad-handing and you end up shaking the hand of a writer and you’re at a lost for words, if you say, “You’re a beautiful writer,” you will please that writer. They will know exactly what you mean, that you’re not talking about their shoes or their tie or their complexion, but that you’re talking about how they lay their words on the page, and they will glow, they will beam, they will nearly wilt under your praise.