Why Boyden's 'aboriginalness' doesn't matter.

If certain notorious examples are anything to go by, Joseph Boyden's quick rise from obscurity to literary stardom should be followed by a Manhattan loft, hipster friends, fabulous parties, literary pissing matches, unstable girlfriends, a nasty drug habit and increasingly bad writing. Fortunately, this is not likely to happen.

For one thing, Boyden doesn't like New York. It also helps that the author of Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce -- which won the Giller Prize last month -- only looks like a pretty young thing. "A lot of writers who've had success in their 20s really hit a hard place," he says on the phone from his home in New Orleans. "But now I'm 41 and I know who I am and what I am. It's never really gotten to my head."

Temperament also has something to do with it.

I knew Joseph when he and I were undergrads at York University. We met in a poetry workshop. (Yes, dammit, a poetry workshop.) He was always calm and gentle, as if he had a bit of St. Francis in him. I would not have been surprised to see doves cooing on his shoulder and woodland creatures sleeping at his feet.

Not that he was saintly in any other sense.

Joseph had a ponytail, an easy charm, and dreamy eyes that made all the girls smile that special smile that means they're thinking things they wouldn't discuss with their mothers. He did not lack for company.

After university, Joseph wanted to be what he is now but the distance between there and here was greater than he could have imagined. Or wanted. "When I was younger, I had such a desire to publish and make my name as a writer. But that route seemed near-impossible."
[Top]

So Boyden got on a motorcycle and went places, teaching writing to pay the bills. One job took him to Moosonee, near James Bay.

Moosonee is not Manhattan. It's not even Moose Jaw. Many would-be writers in Boyden's position would have felt like British convicts exiled to Australia but Boyden embraced this new world.

"One of the greatest experiences of my life, and also the hardest, were the couple of years up in James Bay," he says. "I never felt like an outsider there, not after the first month or so." He has returned ever since, spending at least part of each year hunting and fishing with Cree friends.

The north transformed Boyden and made his writing. Three Day Road -- arguably the best Canadian war novel every published -- is the story of two Cree soldiers who make the unfathomable journey from life in northern Ontario to the charnel houses of the First World War. Through Black Spruce is another physical and cultural journey, this time from the fly-in reserves of today to the New York Boyden has no use for.

With writing so infused by aboriginal experience, media stories invariably play up his "Irish, Scottish and Métis roots." I recall a CBC radio host who seemed to think Boyden grew up on the rez.

In reality, Boyden is a Toronto boy raised in a white-bread-and-mayonnaise culture. "My father was a doctor and his practice was in Toronto. But in the summers and for big chunks of the winter, he closed down the practice and we travelled all over the Georgian Bay area and the Great Lakes. We had a boat that we lived on for months of the year."

Boyden's connection with aboriginal people and culture is very real and there's no question it's a big part of his identity. But he wasn't born into it. He sought it out and lived it.

This is what makes the constant references to Boyden's ancestry troubling. They seem to suggest blood is the source of his connection to the aboriginal lives he writes about, a notion that is simultaneously racist and ridiculous.
[Top]

In any event, Boyden's "aboriginalness" is not particularly relevant. Writing is good or it's not and good writing inevitably requires the writer to imagine beyond himself. "I write from a woman's voice," Boyden says. "Am I allowed to write in the voice of an old Indian woman from the turn of the century? Absolutely, but only if I do it with respect and with a deeper understanding of where these people come from. If writers only wrote what they know and where they come from and who they are, we'd be losing out on all kinds of great novels."

A little distance can even help a writer. Living in New Orleans while writing about Canada provides perspective, Boyden says. "It allows me to write about my country in a much clearer way."

He pauses and adds, "I'm trying to come up with a new way to say that because I've said that before many times."

It's a telling comment. A successful novelist has to give interviews. Lots of them. And anyone who gives lots of interviews has to repeat the best lines even though doing so feels artificial and silly. Stars quickly get comfortable with it. It's part of being a star.

But for a decent, considerate person -- the sort of person known in Yiddish as a mensch -- it never stops feeling artificial and silly.

The Joseph Boyden I knew all those years ago was a mensch. So is Joseph Boyden, literary star.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

Back to Columns

Home

Copyright © 2005  Dan Gardner
Website Design & Management by:  GRA Web Site Design Ottawa