Reviewed by Derek Eidse
In a Time of Drought and Hunger is a collection of short stories about alienation, estrangement and the search for home. These themes are explored as both the cultural divide between Indigenous northerners and white service workers, as well as the homesickness Indigenous Canadians feel for land they still occupy but over which they have no sovereignty. With the utmost of care and craft, author Gerard Beirne uses these thirteen narratives to both sift through experiences as “alien” in the North, and to show the elusiveness of home.
Beirne is an accomplished novelist, poet and editor. Originally from Ireland, he moved to Norway House in 1999. In an interview with literary magazine The Fiddlehead, of which he is fiction editor, Beirne reflects on his time in Northern Manitoba: “I came as a visitor, a tourist of sorts. I evolved into an observer, an inhabitant.” His settling in to the northern way of life is made evident through this collection’s exhaustive (exhausting?) descriptions of forest ecology, hydroelectric generation, winter road construction and the fur trade. This textbook-like monologue has a particularly interesting effect in the title story. The main character, Tom, speaks to his wife, Clara, “of the climate sensitivity of flowering, of pollination, seed formation, germination, and the competitive success of seedlings.” This has an arousing effect on Clara, which leads to their first love-making in months. I can’t say his exposition had the same effect on me, but to each his/her own. Scientific complexity aside, his tales do embody an admirable respect for the land and waters and make clear the necessity of ecological health in the North’s environmental and cultural survival.
To give some geographical and historical context, Norway House, the implied, and sometimes stated, setting for these short stories, is the second oldest community in Western Canada. It was colonized early, as a move by the Hudson Bay Company to curb the nomadic Cree into a stationary workforce. The relationships between the Swampy Cree, neighbouring Métis, and non-Indigenous service workers, as Beirne portrays in nearly all of his compositions, are tenuous at best, to say nothing of the connection to colonial Canada that is implicitly lurking around the corner. One exchange, particularly pertinent to these tensions, occurs in “A Way of Life,” when traditional dancer Charlene asks narrator Rob, a teacher visiting the powwow, if he can buy her a hot dog.
“We can trade,” she says. “Just like the old days.”
“What have you got to trade?” I asked.
She held her hands out by her side, the wings of her fringed sleeves opening wide.
Above her, the red burning sky. The sound of drums, the wail of the song. “You already took it.”
Like Rob the teacher, the protagonists in Beirne’s stories occupy the myriad of white service-worker roles on reserves—cue Sesame Street tune “these are the white people in your neighbourhood.” From a hydro worker in “What a River Remembers of its Course” and an engineer in “Winter Road,” to teachers in “A Way of Life” and “Wild Fur,” and a Northern Store manager in “Wrong Direction,” these characters struggle to find a home on the fringes of a community that is not theirs. Ironically, many of them had arrived in Canada’s hinterland because the more populous south offered them no sense of belonging. Just like Herzog’s filmic exploration of Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World, the wide assortment of characters who end up on the geographic edges are rarely running to, and mostly running from.
Beirne’s strength as a writer is his pacing. There is a rhythm to his work that feels like a controlled inhale… exhale… Think of the type of breathing you do while walking a wooded trail with a destination in mind: an even, purposeful stride—a regular, steadfast breath. Don’t assume that because of this steady pacing, his work is linear. There is plenty of meandering in his prose. “A Life No Harder Than You Would Expect” jumps between the freezing death of a young woman and the disappearance of an elderly trapper. The story offers soft prose exploring the harsh reality of people living their lives in the bounded set of their expectations, with little understanding or desire for anything broader. Because of this, these characters’ deaths are not unpredictable. “The end when it comes is rarely that surprising. Water wells up out of the earth and flows overland to the ocean… And like the water reaching the ocean, it dissipates then into something larger where its existence, while not in doubt, is no longer discernible.”
I was hesitant to like this collection, as on first glance I assumed it to be the work of yet another white man documenting the lives of Indigenous peoples, reminiscent of early twentieth century photographer/costumer/voyeur Edward S. Curtis. Who needs another colonial-lensed portrayal of the hardships of Canada’s First Peoples, whether it be sympathetic or patriarchal? Beirne’s awareness of the tendency to romanticize or demonize Indigenous ways becomes evident in “A Way of Life,” as a former student challenges his teacher: “You don’t want to end up like every other fucking white man, seeing only what you want to see.” Unlike Curtis’s stoic portraits, Beirne’s “photographs” are all self-portraits, and therein lies this collection’s redemption.
In an era where books by Indigenous authors like Richard Wagamese, Thomas King and Joseph Boyden are found on bookshelves across the country, Beirne’s collection of short stories offers a unique view of a tentative, curious and introspective outsider who finds himself sharing space with the First Peoples of this land. With the lens turned on himself, Beirne artfully examines his role as guest, as his characters continually search for that elusive sense of belonging and connection.
Oberon Press | 158 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-0778014348
‘In a Time of Drought and Hunger’ by Gerard Beirne
Book Reviews
Reviewed by Derek Eidse
In a Time of Drought and Hunger is a collection of short stories about alienation, estrangement and the search for home. These themes are explored as both the cultural divide between Indigenous northerners and white service workers, as well as the homesickness Indigenous Canadians feel for land they still occupy but over which they have no sovereignty. With the utmost of care and craft, author Gerard Beirne uses these thirteen narratives to both sift through experiences as “alien” in the North, and to show the elusiveness of home.
Beirne is an accomplished novelist, poet and editor. Originally from Ireland, he moved to Norway House in 1999. In an interview with literary magazine The Fiddlehead, of which he is fiction editor, Beirne reflects on his time in Northern Manitoba: “I came as a visitor, a tourist of sorts. I evolved into an observer, an inhabitant.” His settling in to the northern way of life is made evident through this collection’s exhaustive (exhausting?) descriptions of forest ecology, hydroelectric generation, winter road construction and the fur trade. This textbook-like monologue has a particularly interesting effect in the title story. The main character, Tom, speaks to his wife, Clara, “of the climate sensitivity of flowering, of pollination, seed formation, germination, and the competitive success of seedlings.” This has an arousing effect on Clara, which leads to their first love-making in months. I can’t say his exposition had the same effect on me, but to each his/her own. Scientific complexity aside, his tales do embody an admirable respect for the land and waters and make clear the necessity of ecological health in the North’s environmental and cultural survival.
To give some geographical and historical context, Norway House, the implied, and sometimes stated, setting for these short stories, is the second oldest community in Western Canada. It was colonized early, as a move by the Hudson Bay Company to curb the nomadic Cree into a stationary workforce. The relationships between the Swampy Cree, neighbouring Métis, and non-Indigenous service workers, as Beirne portrays in nearly all of his compositions, are tenuous at best, to say nothing of the connection to colonial Canada that is implicitly lurking around the corner. One exchange, particularly pertinent to these tensions, occurs in “A Way of Life,” when traditional dancer Charlene asks narrator Rob, a teacher visiting the powwow, if he can buy her a hot dog.
“We can trade,” she says. “Just like the old days.”
“What have you got to trade?” I asked.
She held her hands out by her side, the wings of her fringed sleeves opening wide.
Above her, the red burning sky. The sound of drums, the wail of the song. “You already took it.”
Like Rob the teacher, the protagonists in Beirne’s stories occupy the myriad of white service-worker roles on reserves—cue Sesame Street tune “these are the white people in your neighbourhood.” From a hydro worker in “What a River Remembers of its Course” and an engineer in “Winter Road,” to teachers in “A Way of Life” and “Wild Fur,” and a Northern Store manager in “Wrong Direction,” these characters struggle to find a home on the fringes of a community that is not theirs. Ironically, many of them had arrived in Canada’s hinterland because the more populous south offered them no sense of belonging. Just like Herzog’s filmic exploration of Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World, the wide assortment of characters who end up on the geographic edges are rarely running to, and mostly running from.
Beirne’s strength as a writer is his pacing. There is a rhythm to his work that feels like a controlled inhale… exhale… Think of the type of breathing you do while walking a wooded trail with a destination in mind: an even, purposeful stride—a regular, steadfast breath. Don’t assume that because of this steady pacing, his work is linear. There is plenty of meandering in his prose. “A Life No Harder Than You Would Expect” jumps between the freezing death of a young woman and the disappearance of an elderly trapper. The story offers soft prose exploring the harsh reality of people living their lives in the bounded set of their expectations, with little understanding or desire for anything broader. Because of this, these characters’ deaths are not unpredictable. “The end when it comes is rarely that surprising. Water wells up out of the earth and flows overland to the ocean… And like the water reaching the ocean, it dissipates then into something larger where its existence, while not in doubt, is no longer discernible.”
I was hesitant to like this collection, as on first glance I assumed it to be the work of yet another white man documenting the lives of Indigenous peoples, reminiscent of early twentieth century photographer/costumer/voyeur Edward S. Curtis. Who needs another colonial-lensed portrayal of the hardships of Canada’s First Peoples, whether it be sympathetic or patriarchal? Beirne’s awareness of the tendency to romanticize or demonize Indigenous ways becomes evident in “A Way of Life,” as a former student challenges his teacher: “You don’t want to end up like every other fucking white man, seeing only what you want to see.” Unlike Curtis’s stoic portraits, Beirne’s “photographs” are all self-portraits, and therein lies this collection’s redemption.
In an era where books by Indigenous authors like Richard Wagamese, Thomas King and Joseph Boyden are found on bookshelves across the country, Beirne’s collection of short stories offers a unique view of a tentative, curious and introspective outsider who finds himself sharing space with the First Peoples of this land. With the lens turned on himself, Beirne artfully examines his role as guest, as his characters continually search for that elusive sense of belonging and connection.
Oberon Press | 158 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-0778014348