Tuesday, 4th October 2005, 6:18pm
An opinion by:
NoemiGo Further West, Young Woman by Noemi Lopinto
This is my last IMHO entry from Saskatchewan... Doesn't that have a nice ring? I remember when I wrote about leaving Montreal, and that first sentence had an ominous, sad note to it. But “this is my last IMHO entry from Saskatchewan” sounds kind of chirpy, hopeful and determined. (Trust me.) The reason it is my last entry from this province is because I was finally hired by the Edmonton Journal. (Remember a job interview I did a few years ago? Well, two years later, I got the job. Somebody must have filed me under “Z” or something, in 2003).
At any rate, I am trying with all my might to come up with something thoughtful and profound about all that I learned in eight months in a small, rural town on the 55th parallel. After all, I have a week left here. I should usher myself off the stage in style, with much pontification about rural life. But the best I can tell you is that I am a city girl, born and bred. I took me out of the city, but I couldn't take it out of me.
I kept trying to adjust to Meadow Lake, and love it. But I allowed myself fuzzy feelings for it only under certain conditions, like if I imagined it with a bookstore. Or with a video store with foreign films in it. Or if there were internet cafés and espresso machines, libraries, immigrants, public transit, proper restaurants and sidewalk sales. After a while I realised I had just transformed a prairie farming community of 6000, into Montreal, Quebec.
What was so hard about it? I have theories, but no real answer. I am a judgemental person, is the easiest answer. The rest is details. The racism drove me nuts, and it was my first real experience of it. Canadian racism, as the people of color are always trying to tell us, is more subtle than what you see on television. It's not Alabama, and it's not Soweto. It's a very English kind of prejudice, where the sidewalk is used by all, but not shared. It's like that town I heard of once in Nova Scotia, where all the escaped slaves' descendents lived. The town wasn't on the provincial map. The white people never hung the blacks from magnolia trees, castrated their husbands, or encircled their houses while burning crosses--they just made them invisible with a stroke of a pen. That's Canadian racism for ya: ignore 'em and they aren't there. In a side note, none of the reserves were on provincial Canadian maps until very recently. Whenever I had to drive to Big River, or Patuanak, Saskatchewan, I had to get verbal directions from someone.
Meadow Lake is cut right down the middle between the natives and the descendants of Europeans, and the tension between the two groups was constant. From my very first day, the “native problem” was the first thing off of people's tongues. It was exhausting to see the results every day, the poor, fucked-up aboriginals clotting in front of the town's only soup kitchen, the lousy housing, the kids in the street and the terrible stories people told about their childhoods. Because everything was so segregated, I would travel in native circles and hear their stories, and then travel in white circles and hear their rebuttals, and it nearly made me nuts. Over and over again, I saw natives with a lot of anger, and Euro-Canadians with a lot of denial. And on it went, the pendulum swinging back and forth between the two, and never coming to rest. I learned to live with it, but I never liked it. And in a small community, if you don't like something that huge, you have to just walk around it, like everyone else.
But to be frank, the biggest reason all this drove me nuts was because I was living in a small community with wide streets and few new faces. It's so much easier to see what is going on in a small town. After all, there is racism and social strife in the city, but the traffic drowns it out. Passing thousands of people in the street every day necessitates a mental and optical filter, which means it is easier to isolate yourself from other people's pain. You expect to see misery in the city; you also automatically drown it out. But a small town is like a family; you can really have an impact on another person, either by talking to them or talking to someone else about them. And that makes you answerable for your actions, and your neighbors' as well.
For example, in a city there are supposed to be homeless people. They form a community and a way of life all their own. Even the most dedicated urban activist knows he can't eliminate homelessness; he or she just wants to keep these people from freezing to the sidewalk in the winter time. But in a small town, one guy sleeping on the street is extremely visible, an eyesore and a very high-profile example of the community's failure to save someone. It's also a very public statement of suffering. And if no one takes care of this man, it shows a collective, willful blindness that calls out for Claritin.
I also learned about my profession in Meadow Lake, which I have determined is a weird one. I always thought of journalists as noble people, a sentiment that was not shared by most in town. I have a very intricate theory about reporting, which amounts to this: there are writers, and there are journalists. The best journalists are both. Otherwise you are just parrotting who went where and why, like a gossip columnist. Those of us with writerly inclinations have a bit of a social worker's soul. You write the articles because you want to reflect something about the world, and you want to tell the stories that matter. But you also want to change the world in the telling. So part of what drove me nuts was that I couldn't change it fast enough. I see that as a personal character flaw. Rome wasn't built in a day, and I lived in Meadow for nine months, altogether. But then I never was the patient sort. The publisher of the competition paper, called the Northern Pride, has much better staying power. He set up the paper on his own, and works like a dog, week after week. He is respected for his work, but also because he is related to 70 per cent of the population there. In twenty years, he will have had some real impact.
The main hardship was writing for people who didn't read. I am not saying people were illiterate, because they weren't. But they were plain-spoken folks, without that all-important love of language, without the need to play with words and watch them squirm. They saw me as a kind of bulletin writer, a town crier. I could have written Hamlet's soliloquy, and they wouldn't have appreciated it as much as if I had written: “Dead guy's skull found excavated--Prince Hamlet wonders why.”
When I was younger, I might have stuck it out here a bit longer, delayed and dragged the struggle on until I was exhausted and I had burned every bridge in town. But I have matured enough to know the value of quitting while I am ahead; while the division between those who liked me and those who wanted to wrap me in a bale of hay and leave me under the hot, prairie sun, was still pretty much 50/50. So before the Journal even came a-calling, I gave notice. I had no idea where I was going next, but I had figured out two things: it had to be a city, and it had to have at least one espresso machine.
Later,
N.
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