Periodically, I like to feature local books which, in the case of nouspique, means books with a connection to Toronto and environs. I do this, not to tout the virtues of my hometown, but to help cultivate the local in a global medium. I feel bound by an unwritten contract: I blog Toronto books in exchange for the pleasure of reading about other people in their locales. While a few Toronto-based books find mainstream publishers and go on to become global commodities, most of them find Toronto-based small presses and enjoy a more limited reach. Already, I hear readers muttering: “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Not at all. On the contrary, cultivation of the local, the particular, the fine-grained view of the idiosyncratic and the quirky – this is an essential habit if we are to resist the McDonaldification of our culture.
One such book on offer this spring is Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement published from Dundurn Press. With this, her second novel, Doctor has attracted a lot of attention, most recently from the Writers’ Trust of Canada which has selected her for the Dayne Ogilvie Grant for Emerging Gay Writer. See the press release on her blogwala. The award will be presented on June 20th at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
Six Metres of Pavement imagines what life would be like for the father of a young child who succumbs to “hot car death”. Ismail Boxwala is an alcoholic engineer working for the City of Toronto in a job more appropriate for a younger man. Now in his early fifties, Ismail should have moved up the ladder to a management position. Instead, his life came to a halt twenty years ago when he forgot to drop off his infant daughter, Zubi, at her daycare before going to work. Since that day, he has felt himself judged by everyone around him. His wife divorced him. Word of his misdeed spread like wildfire through Toronto’s Indian community. Even now, he fears that people will remember the old news reports and continue to ostracize him. To evade judgment, Ismail has drawn a tight circle around himself, limiting his after-work life to drinking sessions at the local pub and home renovation projects that keep him indoors.
Six metres of pavement is the distance which separates Ismail from his neighbour, Celia Sousa, a recently widowed woman of Portuguese descent who was forced for financial reasons to move in with her daughter and son-in-law. In her grief, she has developed a case of the agonias, a condition specific to the Azores which doctors in Toronto would most likely describe as depression or anxiety disorder. Although tradition dictates that Celia should wear black and assume the role of widow for the rest of her life, she was born in Canada and feels uncomfortable mimicking the other grandmothers who pick up their grandchildren from the local school. She watches Ismail through her curtains. She is curious. She fantasizes about what life could be like if she asserted herself instead of passively accepting her daughter’s decisions.
Rounding out the cast of characters is Fatima Khan, a twenty-year-old queer activist who meets Ismail at an eight week writing worship. As with Ismail, Fatima finds herself subject to the judgment of the tight-knit Indian community. She has been outed by an article that has been passed from person to person until it falls into the hands of her parents. Conservative in their views, they see no choice but to throw Fatima out of their house and to cut all support. If she wishes to remain in their home, she must renounce her queer identity and be a “good girl”.
Six Metres of Pavement weaves these three stories into a single strand. Brokenness and grief lead to healing. Solitary figures who stand on the margins find themselves drawn to one another and define on their own terms what it means to be a family. At the same time, Doctor shows us how each of them must stretch to accommodate the others. Ismail struggles to understand what a young woman means when she speaks of her bisexuality and queerness. For her part, Fatima struggles against the temptation to dismiss parental authority altogether, a move that might preclude any possibility of healing. And Celia struggles against her dependency upon others, working to put distance between herself and her daughter without rupturing the relationship. Their stories illustrate the wise observation that the healing power of compassion comes from our wounds.
The novel handles with a delicate touch the emotional nuance of its characters. However, I have mixed feelings about the proliferation of detail. In a book rooted in loss and absence, I find it ironic that so much is rendered present to the reader. I would call it “worry detail”. It’s almost as if Doctor worries that her readers won’t believe she can create characters so different from herself, so she has overcompensated by undertaking to prove just how well she can identify with a straight middle-aged man and a Portuguese widow. The worry is unwarranted. It is quite evident that Farzana Doctor has a compassionate eye. She could have pared away much of the detail and her characters would have seemed no less real. On the other hand, a proliferation of detail affirms that the novel is local. It belongs here. It is irrefutably situated. It is of this place and no other.
I wonder if one day Farzana Doctor will write a queer novel. By “queer novel” I don’t mean a novel about queer issues or featuring queer characters, but a novel which queers the novel, a novel which takes the novel as a form, and sets it on its head using queer strategies. No carefully constructed plot. No nuanced exploration of emotion. No ultra-realistic proliferation of detail. Or at least not in service of commercially accepted conventions. I see such a project as an act of resistance against what I referred to above as the McDonaldification of our culture. Intellectually, Doctor appears to be up for the challenge.
I look forward to more novels from Farzana Doctor and hope she keeps it local, keeps it real.