LIVES: Whole & Otherwise

World Literature Today—July-August 2011pp 169-170.

In his new collection of stories, Lives:Whole and Otherwise, H Nigel Thomas (author of Spirits in the Dark and Return to Arcadia) continues his exploration of the lives of Caribbean immigrants living in Montreal.

Already known for his Caribbean-Canadian chronicling, Thomas’s characters struggle to live in a hyphenated state between multiple worlds—prostitute, outsider, agenda pusher, homosexual. It’s to his credit that Thomas is able to write skillfully about such complicated lives.In “Maude,” Thomas takes aim at multiple powers—the Catholic Church, the Canadian government— as a powerful prostitute outlines her proposed memoir. Aging yet cunning, she lists key figures in order to influence political power to her favor. A young, biracial woman at the center of “Shaky at the Knees”wrestles to find inner strength after growing up in an unstable household where her white mother and black father constantly flung racial insults at each other. In “Graduations,”an immigrant mother and her stern employer constantly fight with the immigrant’s adolescent son; but when he finally receives his graduation certificate, both are surprised to find out the true results of their battle. In one of the strongest stories of the collection, “Percy’s Illness,”a woman recounts her friendshipwith a troubled young immigrant, beginning with their shared sexual miscue and progressing to his serious mental illness stemming from an identity crisis.

If there’s one complaint about the collection, it’s that the stories tend to be too short. This is meant to be a compliment: one wishes Thomas would spend more time exploring the fascinating lives he’s created. Years filled with rich emotions and events are often abbreviated into short paragraphs. Where writers such as Edward P. Jones and Deborah Eisenberg will spend pages exploring pivotal moments in a character’s life, Thomas tends to compress. As a result, his stories leave emotional surface dents where they might have left craters. But these are minor complaints. Lives: Whole and Otherwise does an admirable job of investigating lives lived in secrets and honesty, complication and simplicity.

Armando Celayo

Norwich, United Kingdom

*****

Maple Tree Literary Supplement

Fiction review by Jackie Wong

Lives Whole and Otherwise
by H. Nigel Thomas
Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2010
147 pp. $20.95

Here is an essential short story collection that reveals aspects of Canadian life rarely explored in literature. Lives: Whole and Otherwise chronicles the experiences of Caribbean immigrants in Montreal, a world author H. Nigel Thomas knows well.

Thomas himself emigrated from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent at age 21 to start a new life in Montreal. Like the characters in Lives, Thomas had many reasons to leave. Throughout his life, he witnessed the extreme physical violence routinely exacted upon children in his hometown’s schools, homes, and courts of law. He was fed up with the insular, often damaging traditions of small-town island life, and he wanted badly to educate himself in a place that was welcoming to people who are gay.

It seems fitting that Thomas’ eighth book and second short-story collection is dedicated to a friend named Jimmy Cross. Thomas says Jimmy saved his life. He also dedicates the book to Jimmy’s brother John, who lost his own life for being gay. Small as it may seem, the dedication sets the tone for the rest of the book, which deals with the everyday abuses, despair and small triumphs that would resonate with immigrant life anywhere. But it is the specificity in Thomas’ writing that makes Lives resonate.

The stories unfold in the cramped apartments, home kitchens, and tangled streets of Montreal, where Thomas sheds light on Black life seldom discussed in other writings on the city. The collection opens with “Graduations,” a story set in a hot, crowded high school gymnasium where two Jamaican women wear their Sunday best to watch one of their sons graduate. The mother, Greta, cannot believe her luck. But the celebration is underscored by the limiting realities of her son Dalton’s new life in Canada.

“These boys have not won the chemistry prize, the literature prize, or the French prize,” the high school principal says as Dalton approaches the stage with his technical-vocation classmates. “They will pump your gas, sand your furniture and so on. What will society be without them?”

Something in the principal’s tone makes Greta uncomfortable. Small, indescribable indignities such as these are part of her and her son’s daily life in Canada. Later, amidst the celebratory hubbub after the ceremony, Greta discovers her son can’t read his own graduation certificate. “Them that work with me in the factory how proud I is o’Dalton ‘cause he reach plenty further than me,” Greta cries. “Lord what sort o’cross this? Is what sort o’country this we live in? Why everywhere you turn people lie so?”

The people who populate Thomas’ stories have been sold lies of a better life in Canada. Despite the promise of money and freedom in Montreal, Thomas’ characters toil in thankless jobs cleaning people’s homes, working in factories, and selling their bodies for sex. The abuse and subtle racisms they face in working life drives them to exact emotional and physical violence on what small worlds they control at home.

Despite the cruel realities of immigrant life in Canada, the project of surviving here despite the circumstances is often considered a pursuit of the highest order. Even the prospect of becoming a landed immigrant here seems so important that it drives one man to violence in “Another Trip.” Like many stories in this collection, “Another Trip” is told from the perspective of a woman, Margaret, a 39-year-old former social worker in Montreal who sent a plane ticket to a 26-year-old lover she met on a visit home to see her parents in Kingston, Jamaica. The two married in Canada, which gave him a work permit. But he wants more permanent, landed-immigrant status. Like other men in Thomas’ collection, the man quickly becomes violent in their frequent quarrels, choking her on the bed, threatening to “kick the fucking guts” out of her if she takes action against her. After a neighbour phones the police during a particularly explosive fight in which he slams her head against the wall, she does, with difficulty and guilt.

Domestic abuse is rampant in Thomas’ collection, which often reads as a sharp critique of misogynist traditions that leave women with few places to turn but to the solace of friends who have suffered similarly. Thomas’ own experiences as a mental health worker, a secondary school teacher, and a university professor are clear influences in his work.

This well-crafted, clear-eyed collection is often ruthless in its criticism of the untold cruelties of Canadian life that take place behind closed doors. Thomas’ condemnation of the Canadian immigration system and the cold, look-but-don’t-touch aspects of our culture that allows violence to persist sometimes reads more like a polemic essay than a work of fiction. But aside from that criticism, it’s a lyrical collection of stories that need to be told. Canadian literature is the better for it.

Jackie Wong is a freelance writer in Vancouver, B.C. Her work has appeared in OpenFile Vancouver, This Magazine, The Georgia Straight, BCBusiness, WE, and others.