politics…

You don’t necessarily get a lot of politics at an author’s festival, unless you count who’s going first and who’s selling the most books as politics. Relatively short readings don’t lend themselves to discussions of political change, and writers tend to focus more on incremental bursts of character and whimsy to achieve maximum effect. But the tone changed last night when Tom Wayman read a searing indictment of Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan. He was followed up by British poet Daljit Nagra whose funny poems about immigrant life turned quickly bitter as he ruminated, for instance, on a particular bitter gourd his family often favoured, categorizing the subsequent dish as part of a series of “inedible historical fryups.” The festival stayed with a serious tone when, earlier today, panelists took the stage to discuss the writer’s role in depicting and coming to terms with war. Experiences ranged from Vincent Lam’s grappling with the story of his Chinese grandfather’s antics in Vietnam war era Hanoi, to Anna Porter’s discussion of experiencing the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising against the Soviets in 1956 as a child and channeling that experience to better understand the pressures on Reszno Kastner, the Hungarian Jew who negotiated with Eichmann to save Jews in the last year of WWII (he was assassinated in Israel after the war for his trouble). There was a sombre tone to the event as you might imagine. When the writers were asked to comment on the possibility that storytelling might serve as the redemptive bookend to war, Nancy Houston, whose new novel is a searing indictment of the US in the age of Iraq (she depicts a six year old accessing YouTube to view online atrocities) said dryly: “I actually don’t think the human race is likely to be redeemed.” Maybe not, but at least for a moment we were reminded that the true role of the writer isn’t to sell books, but to bear witness whether we like it or not.