Bookworm, no. 136
Amanda Perry reviews Fred Anderson’s “Eyes Have Seen.” Emily Mernin on Ashraf Zaghal’s “Seven Heavens Away.” A page from “Richard Johnson.” Inside the March issue.
Rights Angle
Eyes Have Seen: From Mississippi to Montreal
Fred Anderson
Baraka Books
240 pages, softcover and ebook
Fred Anderson’s Eyes Have Seen provides a thrilling first-hand account of activism in the 1960s and ’70s. As a Black teenager in Mississippi, Anderson participated in the civil rights movement, only to find himself conscripted into the Vietnam War. In 1966, he refused to serve and fled to Montreal, where he lived under an assumed identity and witnessed the Quiet Revolution.
Anderson begins by describing his childhood in Hattiesburg. There, segregation was enforced through violence: police murdered his cousin Sammy for supposedly eyeing a white woman. At fifteen, Anderson became an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, brushing shoulders with Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, the former SNCC leader, who went into exile in Montreal before moving to Tanzania. The strongest chapter details Anderson’s participation in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, a 1964 campaign “designed to crack the iceberg of white resistance to black voter registration.” The internal debates around the decision to use more than a thousand white college students as volunteers are fascinating. That June, two activists and a volunteer disappeared after they left to investigate the arson of a Black church; an FBI inquiry eventually revealed that they had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. “You will be forced to define what America is to you,” Moses told the others. “There is no guarantee that you will get out of this summer alive.” The volunteers stayed. (The associated risks gain tragic contemporary resonance with the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.)
In Montreal, Anderson stepped back from the fray. Impersonating a Nova Scotian, he avoided the attention of immigration agents and the FBI. Though less action packed, these chapters shed light on a draft dodger’s precarious life, as well as the social dynamics in Little Burgundy, the heart of the city’s anglophone Black community. Ultimately, Eyes Have Seen is a timely reminder of how some struggles are continuous across borders.
—Amanda Perry
Boiled Over
Seven Heavens Away
Ashraf Zaghal
House of Anansi Press
328 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook
Before anyone else is awake, fifteen-year-old Aziz slips out of his house in Jerusalem with a can of spray paint and takes to his neighbour’s wall: “Nuha is a traitor and a whore.” He had spent years yearning for Nuha, only to discover that she was sleeping with his father. He channels his rage—at his parents, his friends, the Israeli settlers taking hold of his neighbourhood—into this act of revenge, which sparks gossip about Nuha. Ten days later, she moves away. “The writing on the wall had done more damage than I had expected,” Aziz realizes, albeit too late.
Ashraf Zaghal’s Seven Heavens Away considers how misguided anger impacts young men. Presented as sections of Aziz’s diary from 2015 and 2016, it’s an immersive look at the psychological strain of growing up Palestinian under Israeli occupation. In the opening pages, he witnesses the senseless murder of his friend Hassan. Aziz’s anger festers, driving him to confront the oppression that enshrouds his life and family. Even the most normal thing that happens to him—a crush on a Jewish co-worker—becomes a symbol for his ideological turmoil.
Aziz navigates the political influence of the mounting resistance and that of Hassan’s father, who leads a Muslim youth group. As is often the case in this grim setting, harsh consequences find Aziz long before he has sorted out his beliefs. There is nothing soft or logical about coming of age in this world.
—Emily Mernin
Book Tasting: Richard Johnson
Richard Johnson spent more than a decade photographing root cellars in Newfoundland and Labrador and ice huts across all ten provinces. His wife, Lucie Bergeron-Johnson, and the curator Tom Smart collected no less than 200 of these images in Richard Johnson, which we review in the March issue.
Excerpted with permission from Richard Johnson: Resilience; Ice Huts + Root Cellars, 2007–2021 (Figure 1 Publishing). Read more about this book in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada.
Inside the March Issue
“All the time I was working on it, a little voice in my head was asking the obvious question: What are your siblings going to think about this, a novel concerning four sisters and an absent brother? Call it magical thinking or wishful thinking, denial, or simply writerly hubris, but I managed to convince myself that it would be all right.” Cecily Ross writes about family and fiction.
David Marks Shribman reviews Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance, edited by Elamin Abdelmahmoud.
“With a wavelike force, the narrative moves through a cast of individuals as they go about their daily lives.” Sophia Ohler on Together by the Sea, written by Marie-Claire Blais and translated by Katia Grubisic.
And much more!
I'm so sorry Cecily Ross didn't publish her novel. I loved what Lionel Shriver said. This was an excellent, thought-provoking read. I went Lionel Shriver's way and lived with the consequences. And although it was very difficult, I needed to have my say, as it were. The book was autofiction but there was enough to stir up the familial pot. However, that was 15 years ago and we've moved on and found peace. Still, it is there.