Tuesday, September 14, 2010

On The Art of Canadian Literature part II

I will never take the floor representing my nation as their pristine poet or their affirmed author. I will be their man, but I refuse to be their voice.

I am my own voice.

I love her though I would sooner move to some place more disturbed and more creative than the cold hallowed halls of the Canadian iceberg. To me it shall always be a place to rest my head and NOT feel the sting of the universe. But these days I crave more, and I wont get it in Canada for that is not what she is about.

Potatoes used to be so bored, they never had a damn thing to think about, nobody paid them much attention. Then they moved to Ireland, and they had a whole famine on their hands. A catastrophe of political and spiritual debates that were splish splashed with blood and holy water. The Potatoes never looked back.

Write yourself a folklore, about the first human man or woman who stepped out of their hut into the glory of the sunlight - saw the corrupt city skyline and said "I accept you."

Write a legend about a family that hitched their station wagon to the stars and left earth and never came back.

Scroll me out a parable where everyone forgot their national identity and had to sculpt a new one that had no borders or boundaries. That had no us and no them, simply a we.

Write me a script where all the actors stand up, fall down, and disappear, every last one of them. And as they rise up, they smile, hold hands, and repeat the one line "I have no home but right here and right now."


Write about what you are, not where you came from.





I suppose I agree that Canada doesn't have the history of violence and disruption that America has, or the antiqued worth of Europe that has become a living relic.... Its not that kind of country.

But I'm happy for I am a citizen of the world.





S. Sparling

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