101 Letters to a Prime Minister (16 page)

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. One of the joys of buying secondhand books is the unexpected treasures they sometimes contain. Case in point: a colour photo slipped out of your copy of
Their Eyes
when I opened it. A group shot. Nothing written on the back. Nine people camping: five women, three men, and one girl in a lifejacket. Though no doubt casually taken, note what an excellent photo it happens to
be, how the way the people are arranged is aesthetically pleasing, the eye moving in an easy circle from the seated woman on the left to the girl on the right, how the group is slightly off-centre so that the feel of the shot is unstudied, how the peripheral elements are unobtrusive yet revealing. It struck me that the group is shaped in the form of an eye. We think we’re looking at them, but, in fact, they are an eye looking out at us, winking. Perhaps that’s why they’re smiling, amused at the trick they’re playing on us, the viewer being viewed. I wonder what the story of these people is. Clearly they’re a family. Was this their book? Who among them read it? What stories do they have, what voices?

Z
ORA
N
EALE
H
URSTON
(1891–1960) was part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. She published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography and more than fifty essays, articles, short stories and plays. Her most famous novel,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, is written in a fluid and expressive vernacular, a bold stylistic choice that gave new literary voice to African-Americans. There was a revived interest in her work following a 1975 article published in
Ms. Magazine
by Alice Walker about Hurston’s writings.

Dear Mr. Harper,

So far, if there is one thing that your administration has done that will stand the test of time, it is the formal apology to the victims of the Canadian government’s Native residential school system. Policies come and go, are changed and forgotten, but an apology stands. An apology changes the course of history. It is the first step in true healing and reconciliation. I congratulate you on this important symbolic gesture.

Since your mind was recently on Canada’s original inhabitants—and since National Aboriginal Day was just two days ago—it’s appropriate that I should send you Tomson Highway’s play
The Rez Sisters
. It too is of historical importance. Of the author, there’s an unusually long bio at the start of the book, a full four pages, so you can read there about the life of Tomson Highway, at least until 1988, when the play was published.

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

T
OMSON
H
IGHWAY
(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
.

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
, which continues Marjane’s story, and there’s also a movie.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

M
ARJANE
S
ATRAPI
(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.

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.