Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada Paperback - 2003

Excerpt

Introduction: Books that say Arse
The problem is, whenever a distinctive culture, like that of Atlantic Canada, is taken note of by a larger culture, like Canada, two things happen simultaneously. On the one hand, the distinctive culture gets marginalized: Newfoundlander jokes, disparagement by Upper Canadian politicians. The second is an offshoot of the first, but is much wider-ranging, seemingly benign, and therefore insidious: the culture gets fetishized. I can offer many more examples of this than I can of straightforward marginalization, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about things. You’ve got your Road to Avonlea, your “traditional” music (these days just as bland and overproduced as anything you’d hear on a Top 40 radio station), an expectation of “simplicity” which is actually more often than not an expectation of poverty and ignorance. Stereotypes, no matter how well intentioned, are ultimately never compliments. The experience is of some oblivious yahoo four-wheeling his Bronco across the complex bionetwork of your very identity. “What a cute little town!” (Actually, this was once my universe.) “I love these wooden lobster traps!” (But nobody uses that kind anymore -- they’re built specifically for you to purchase and take home.) “Look at these gorgeous old houses!” (They have been bought and restored by Germans -- or Americans, or the Swiss -- because no one from here can afford them anymore.) “Look at these quaint little houses!” (With their satellite dishes on the lawns.)

Yet this experience of fetishization is a tango, a dance that requires two. Note the enthusiasm in the expressions above, note the adjectives (“gorgeous!”) and the verbs (“love!”). It’s the hyperbole of romantic infatuation, and how can the object of infatuation not respond? We see ourselves anew in the lover’s eyes: Gee, I always thought Great Uncle Bob’s place was a shitbox, but apparently it’s been “quaint” all this time. My grandparents’ music -- the stuff that used to grate on my teenage ears -- is suddenly “haunting,” just like the landscape that was, for so many years, simply the place where I lived. It’s like being told your hair is like silk and your eyes are limpid pools. Swoon. You fall in love right back -- you give the lover what he wants. He comes home one night holding out a kilt? By God, you put it on and dance him a Highland fling for good measure. And so the tourism industry of eastern Canada was born.

But you can’t do that with art. (“Sure you can,” was the Nova Scotia government’s pronouncement recently, stamping out the province’s independent Arts Council and Frankensteining it back to life under the rubric of “Tourism and Culture.”) Okay, then, let me amend that. You can try to do that with art -- as lots of people have. The results have been unfortunate. To push the metaphor about as far as it will go, after a while the kilt starts to chafe. You start to feel silly. This isn’t me. You’d like to be able to just hang out in your housecoat every now and again like a regular person.

What I’m describing is a maturation process, I suppose; every initial infatuation must inevitably mature into respect or else degrade into contempt -- the contempt I have described above. It can also be called resentment, the other side of infatuation, when instead of fetishizing a culture that clearly differs from the one you inhabit, you become annoyed with it. You make fun of the accent, so to speak, as if it’s not genuine, but some kind of folksy contrivance affected to score personality points. Somebody told me recently of a complaint some writer made about “all these new books from the east coast that say ‘arse.’” So resentment -- the state of the disenchanted lover -- permeates the arts community too, but to me it’s like complaining about British novels for using words like “chap” and calling elevators “lifts.” Yes, we say “arse.” We also use email, collect Air Miles, and have the entire third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD.

Which is to say, Atlantic Canadians, and Atlantic Canadian writers, have grown up right alongside of the rest of the Western world. It might have taken some of us a bit longer to shed our mullets (I’m not quite sure for what I’m using the mullet as a metaphor in this instance -- perhaps it’s not a metaphor at all), but the point is, we exist in the here and now, no matter how unfashionable our hairdos. Bemoan it if you will, the way of the world, how the cultural fault lines have merged, solidified, in the past century. I choose to look at the bright side: we have matured. In time, we all of us have cut off our rat-tails. The new literary work coming from the Atlantic provinces very much demands your respect, as you will see. You will enjoy it no matter where in the world you are -- not for reasons of nostalgia or quaintness but because it’s just so good.

A word on Victory Meat

It happened like this: in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in 1994, I opened up The Fiddlehead and read a story called “Bitches on All Sides” by Rabindranath Maharaj. The story was set in Fredericton, the city where I was living at the time. Everything about it was right -- absolutely right, I thought. Meaning that everything about it seemed true and familiar to me. Later, though, I realized that what I actually liked about the story was that nothing about it was familiar at all. To break it down: “Bitches on All Sides” is the story of alienation in Atlantic Canada. It is about being alone, isolated, and utterly outside of the world you at once inhabit. My point is: everything I knew about “Maritime” literature had equipped me to expect the opposite. Atlantic Canadian writing was supposed to be about home, about belonging -- extended families, close-knit communities, and a shared cultural language and identity. “Bitches” had nothing to do with any of this. My revelation lay in the fact that I identified with it as a reader more strongly than anything I had read that accorded to the eastern Canadian formula described above. At-Can myths and stereotypes started keeling over in my mind like dominoes from that moment on. Perhaps our writing could be just as true, vivid, and familiar without following the over-trod paths hacked out for us in days gone by -- paths that served their purpose at one time, but have since been made redundant by the advent of planes, trains and automobiles -- not to mention lots of other less-tried paths. It still gives me a thrill to discover the iconoclastic core in the work of writers like R.M. Vaughan with his horrific twist on the quintessential Maritime “homecoming” story, or Lisa Moore’s Newfoundland road trip, driving the reader right up to the door of a less media-friendly aspect of eastern Canada -- parochial and moralizing.

* * * * *

Finally, about Fredericton: Fredericton is weird. It has a museum that houses, for some reason, a giant fibreglass frog. It has a place called the Victory Meat Market, which has a neon sign that looks as if it’s from another era -- not the era that defines downtown Fredericton’s overall aesthetic, which is quaint, turn-of-the-century Atlantic Canadian gothic (meaning not too gothic but gothic enough to be picturesque). The Victory Meat Market is of a more recent vintage, with an impertinent, gritty sort of toughness that has yet to be buffed over by the well-meaning architects of nostalgia and sentiment who have always wielded such power in the Atlantic provinces. Victory Meat takes no shit. It’s there to sell meat, damnit, not postcards, miniature province-of-New-Brunswick beer mugs, designer jams, or hooked rugs. At the same time there’s a post-war, can-do sort of pugnacity about the place. We’re gonna sell the hell out of this meat and who’s to say otherwise?

The Victory Meat Market is both out of, and in keeping with, the character of Fredericton -- and, by extension, the Atlantic provinces -- all at once. Which in some ways makes it typical -- if that makes any sense.

Lynn Coady