Intertidal Polyphonies
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Wayde Compton Clip 1
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This clip starts with a discussion of Compton's book The Outer Harbour. More specifically, the idea of imagining Canadian spaces being in flux and how Compton’s imagining of spaces is connected to his personal history., Wayde Compton: My name is Wayde Compton. I’m a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and the head administrator of the Writer’s Studio at SFU Continuing Studies.
0:14
Joanne Leow: One of the things that The Outer Harbour really conjures for me, your latest book, is the way that—literally imagine this idea of Canada, but specifically British Columbia and Vancouver, as a space that is geologically in flux, right. So often we imagine this idea of the nation or the settler colony as this fixed space, but the stories, what the stories really do for me is just throw this into question, so if you could just speak a bit more about that.
0:37 [‘fishbowl’ effect around some of Wayde’s words, particularly “I come from a working-class” filtering out the background noise with his quiet voice did this; thump around 1:24]
Wayde Compton: Well, first, as a kid, I used to love just staring at the atlas, and just reading the atlas. I was a bookish kid in a house that didn’t really have a lot of books; I come from a working-class family. My mom read a lot of books, but not books that I wanted to read, so I would kind of scrounge our house for whatever I could find, like reference books, dictionary, an old encyclopedias that my dad bought me, and the atlas, and I would just stare at the atlas and just sort of memorize the different names. The maps, I was fascinated by the map of the world, and just the idea that, that you know, there are all of these places in relation to me that I’d never gone, because I’d also never really traveled so—other than to the States—so it just seemed like impossibly far away and almost imaginary. And then, I guess at some point in elementary school, I remember stumbling upon a book, I think at my school library, about Surtsey, the island off the coast of Iceland, which is referred to in there. And the idea that there could be a new island, that the map—I thought the map was just fixed for all time, and that’s just how—that’s how the world is, that’s the world itself right there, that’s what these books (laughs) are telling us, and so the idea that there could be new land, and they would name it and there would be a debate about which country it now belonged to. That left a really deep impression on me, and I just thought, “everything that I thought was fixed is not fixed, these things can change,” and I’ve never forgotten it.
2:11 [some muffled background noise]
Joanne Leow: Translating back that idea, I guess, to where you live now, or where you live for such a long time, what was that like? Because yes, this island far away suddenly appears, but in this context, how did you draw those two things together?
2:24 [thump at 2:42; fishbowl and muffled background noise around 3:11-20]
Wayde Compton: They sort of gradually came together. I was thinking about…something made me think about it again, about Surtsey specifically, and then I looked into it and looked more closely at—I think as a kid I was just amazed that it was physically possible, and then later I was thinking about it politically, and just thought that’s really interesting. There was a little bit of a debate, but it was so close to Iceland that it was never really much of a question it would belong to them. Then I saw that this had happened in other places in the world, including in the middle of the Mediterranean, there’s the same kind of volcanic spout under the water that created this little island, I think it’s called Fernandia, but it was so small that it eroded pretty quickly and it’s now below the surface. But while it was above the surface, it was claimed by everybody in the Mediterranean, the idea that it might grow larger, become a geopolitically important or strategic site or something, who knows, and so I just thought that’s really an interesting way of thinking about the land claims issue and colonization here differently. I think well, what if there’s a new piece of land, what happens, who governs it? And it kind of lays bare colonialism because, basically, it has to be…Canada is in a position where if that happens, it has to basically colonize that land now, in the present, if it’s going to maintain the idea that Canada has jurisdiction here. And so, I thought it was a good way of kind of forcing a thought experiment about what colonialism is.
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Wayde Compton Clip 2
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This second clip starts by discussing the instability of space and land. The conversation then shifts to discuss the different forms of discourse used to describe particular spaces, and the implications of such language use., Wayde Compton: Part of it was just the history of False Creek, too, and my research into Hogan’s Alley in the old black community that was there. I remember having sort of disoriented moments in my research where…because you’re getting different stories and different oral histories of what things were like down there, and I remember at a certain point getting very confused, because somebody was talking about being on the water, like living right next to the water, but also indicating they were really close to Hogan’s Alley, and I thought, “wait, that’s pretty far from the water, what are you talking about?” And then I realized that, you know, that the False Creek is not the same as it was and a lot of it was filled in for the railway. And that was another similar, weird experience, where you look at the old map and realize, oh, False Creek went way up to here. That sort of rearranges the city for you, in your mind. So, yeah, just the idea that things are not stable, even the land is not stable.
1:02
Joanne Leow: Yeah, whether manmade or, in your case, in the story that you’re writing, a fact of nature. Obviously what you’re thinking about, to me, connects with this idea, this empty land, this terra nullius—but immediately, I notice when you start writing the story—even with the scientific diction, which we know is colonial to a certain extent, but this seems to break down, because when you start to inventory and think about exactly what this new volcanic island is made of, there’s this impulse there to sort of say, “no, it’s not empty, no it’s not.” So, was that the idea behind that inventory, that constant inventory of how do you talk about this island and how do you define this island?
1:40 [thump at 2:21, lots of background noise 2:32-end]
Wayde Compton: Yeah, I was interested, too, in not just how law and power and jurisdiction takes claim over the island, but also, nature too, but then also the language of nature, so also discourse, right, different types of language to describe what’s happening to this place, right. So, yeah, it’s which people does it belong to, but say whatever you want, it’s still—it belongs to this ecosystem now all of a sudden. And it is also kind of an intrusion into that, too, when a volcanic island appears it alters everything around it physically, the patterns of birds and that sort of thing would change. If anything, I wondered if I represented how cataclysmic it would really be. It would be a big thing, it might’ve been even bigger than the way I described it in terms of how much ash would’ve been thrown up into the air, and how much that would’ve affected things.
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Wayde Compton Clip 3
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This section of the interview starts by discussing the way Compton integrates multiple genres into his works. The conversation then ties in the topic of genre theory with a discussion of discourse and language use., Joanne Leow: One of the ways, though, that you try to convey this idea of discourse that you’re talking about is this use of multiple genres, and you’ve done that before with your work on Hogan’s Alley. But specifically here you use the activist flyer, the condo ad, the floor plan, the glyphs. What were you trying to convey by inserting them into what would be more—a more like traditional work of fiction?
0:22 [thump at 1:20 & 2:13]
Wayde Compton: That does go back to my first book. In my first book, in 49th Parallel Psalm, I wanted to write about the black pioneers and black identity here from a lot of different, oblique angles. I felt that was a better way to—for me, anyway—to describe the history than, say, a conventional history. Well, okay, we need conventional histories, too, it’s not really a critique of those existing, but for me, I was more interested in—I include things like an imaginary jump rope rhyme that the kids of the black pioneers might have been singing while they’re on the streets of Victoria, and it’s those sort of…this kind of social angle, the emotional angle, on the things that are happening in history that I felt like were not accessible to me through conventional history, and I think it’s sort of the same thing here. More conventional narrative can give you one thing, and that’s good for concentrating on maybe individual characters, protagonist, but that’s not what I wanted to do with the book. I wanted it to be about the city, really, I wanted it to be much more decentered than a single character, through-line around a single character like a novel, or even multiple characters. I wanted it to really be kind of multiple types of discourse and different types of language. And the kind of power relations that I talk about in it, to me, are interesting because they’re expressed through language most of the time. I remember being a student of Roy Miki, he really taught us to pay attention to how power is expressed through types of discourse. Being someone who went through the Japanese internment here; I remember him teaching a class and saying, it’s amazing, because when they’re going to do something barbaric like this to people, they’re going to uproot families and children, and take away their property and move them across the country and jail them, and they’re innocent, when it comes down to it, in order to do that, they have to put it into words to justify that act. And the term they used for them was “enemy aliens,” and it’s just like—so just these euphemisms and sort of ways of constructing a logic that makes this thing at least feel like it makes sense. That’s absolutely fascinating to me, and I wanted that to be there throughout the book. In some ways, it kind of pings off in strange directions, like the government grant—the art grants that I have was also kind of a version of that in a way that art, that the arts admin community, we have that as well, everything is…power expresses itself through euphemism.
3:06
Joanne Leow: And code, a particular kind of jargon, or in the changing meanings of words themselves, like they use a word that, you know, is supposed to mean one thing and then they turn it on its head, right. One of the things that really struck me was that kind of…the beginnings of the intersections between the language in the condo ads with the language in the activist flyers, and that kind of Orwellian, almost, like degradation of that language, which, I mean, I think that’s how we experience power all the time. In a condo ad, you experience power.
3:36
Wayde Compton: I was parodying some of the real ads that we’ve seen here from the big developers, and they’re canny, advertisers are canny, so they will use the language of grassroots movements because it has cache. Anything that has some kind of authentic cache they’ll use, and it all kind of cycles around and becomes defused at a certain point.
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Wayde Compton Clip 4
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In this final clip of the interview, Compton discusses the nature of the conclusion to The Outer Harbour. It then shifts to a discussion of land claims and diasporic and Indigenous politics, and the experience of writing within such a political landscape., Joanne Leow: I want to talk a little bit about the ending of the book. The ending of the book, to me, is really sort of enigmatic but also hopeful, in a sense, right. So, you have the insurgent, the refugee, and the composite, those three figures on the boat, and I wanted to ask you why those three, and what sort of new, maybe, inhabitations of space do you think the book is trying to like, sort of, work towards? It feels very enigmatic and tentative, but at the same time trying to say something about that grouping of the three and their arrival.
0:31 [thump at 1:05
Wayde Compton: I think those three characters, kind of like the other experiences of the island, the way the island goes through different…has different meanings for different groups, and over time—the book spans twenty-five years—and so over time, the island is used different ways. And I thought those characters were like different…people have different interactions with the island. So Fletcher comes from the small movement that was trying to claim the island as Native land, right, and then it becomes a condo, the condo becomes a detention center after this economic collapse, and so the migrant girl is there too. It’s almost a little bit gothic in a way, right, because it, it occurred to me late in the project where I thought, “it’s almost a haunted house or a haunted condo (laughs) project” at a certain point. But the way hauntings are these kind of resonances of different people and different relationships to that space that had existed in the past, and so I thought they’re kind of this layering of three, three different people who are marginal, who’ve already had a kind of relationship to this place through repression. But for the composite, who’s a little bit different, right, the composite comes in and almost uses it as a sort of, you know, underground railroad type thing, like, they get away from their creation as part of this repressive technology, and they kind of—I imagine breaking free of it and having their own identity, and then teaming up with these ghosts. And it’s also sort of the future, too, and I like the idea that…the composite’s really interesting, because they’re a creation of, of this authoritarian, kind of response, right, or the authoritarian corporation, really, and yet they, they’re not stuck there. That you can be created out of this um very nefarious sort of background or reason, but become something good and break out of it and be your own kind of consciousness, just like people.
2:53
Joanne Leow: Yeah, it makes me think of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Basically, the cyborg that is the, yeah, the new hope. One last question maybe. We started the interview thinking about land claims in the context of an imaginary new island, and obviously it’s called Pauline Johnson Island for a reason, you’re writing back to that particular story as well. What’s it like thinking about it—thinking about diasporic politics, but then also thinking about Indigenous politics in the same—sort of holding those two things in one book at the same time, aware of all the tensions and contradictions and complexities and sensitivities around that. What was that like for you writing it and sort of expressing yourself through it?
3:34
Wayde Compton: I think that that’s another reason why it ends with those characters as ghosts, and then the sort of future form, is because—and that it ends on that sentence saying, “discuss what it means to regroup,” and I think it’s because we don’t have the answer to resolve those contradictions right now. The idea of people of colour who come from outside the continent, or whose origins are beyond here, but come here, are victims of white supremacy and survive it, and then also Indigenous people who have a completely different experience but with some parallels, like that relationship, I think, is a very fertile one, but I don’t think we’ve figured it out yet. And how we come from colonized countries to a colonized country, and are in some ways settlers, but in other ways might—could be allies to those who are colonized here. That’s an abstract idea and sometimes that works, but I don’t think we’ve figured it out yet. So, in a way, that’s why I leave it as something to come after here, and it’s something…it’s slipping further into the strange, because it’s not a concrete that I can point to very easily, if that makes sense.
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Wayde Compton Reading
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Wayde Compton reads a scene from his short story "The Lost Island." In this scene, the characters Jean and Fletcher consider the newly emerged volcanic island off Vancouver's coast and Fletcher proposes they go to the island as an act of anti-colonisation. This story appears in Compton's 2014 book of interconnected short stories The Outer Harbour.
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West Kowloon 1
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Image of a large construction site by Kowloon Ventilation Building with city skyline in the background.
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West Kowloon 10
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Image of a large construction site by the Kowloon Ventilation Building with city skyline in the background.
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West Kowloon 11
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Image of a large construction site with city skyline in the background.
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West Kowloon 12
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Image of the cloudy sky above a large construction site and city skyline.
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West Kowloon 14
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Image of thin trees with a construction site and buildings in the background.
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