1. B o o k s i n R e v i e w
 Canadian Literature  / Spring 
draws upon, meaning that the curious
reader must expend considerable energy to
track down the sources of specific passages.
One hopes that subsequent editions of these
books will strive to better combine respect
for the prodigious research each author has
undertaken with the needs of academic and
non-academic readers alike.
In spite of these minor quibbles, these
two books remain essential reading for any-
one interested in prairie waterways and
their histories as economic instruments,
transportation and communication routes,
sources of hydroelectric energy, and as
metaphors. “What is a river for?” asks
Kostash in her conclusion: it is a question
that will demand rigorous thought and con-
versation if these lifelines of the prairies are
to be wisely nurtured and enjoyed by gener-
ations to come.
Black and Bruised Blues
Pamela Mordecai
The True Blue of Islands. Sandberry .
Pamela Mordecai, ed.
Calling Cards: New Poetry from
Caribbean/Canadian Women. Sandberry .
Louise Delisle
Back Talk: Plays of Black Experience. Roseway
.
Reviewed by Katherine Verhagen
Blues singers will rarely sing of their hard-
ship just for their own emotional release.
The blues reach down deep and when Billie
Holiday sings “Good Morning, Heartache,”
many souls are waking up, drying their eyes.
But the blues are not just about people
singing about and identifying with suffering.
The blues are about “keepin’ on, keepin’ on”:
preserving determination, strength, and
wisdom.
No one can write sorrow like Pamela
Mordecai. As a poet, she evokes the slow
and difficult process of accepting personal
trauma in many shades of pain: smelt blue
for a firing gun, indigo blue for a night that
witnesses murder, and flame blue for the
shots that are fired. In The True Blue of
Islands, the ninth book in the Sandberry
Press “Caribbean Poetry Series,” Mordecai
sings her loss as a chorus in a ballad of grief
and determination. The song is not only
hers and it is not without hope. She opens
with the tale of Great-Granny Mac, an ex-
slave, who survives physical brutality, famil-
ial separation, and rape by using cunning,
creativity, and medicinal skills to buy her
freedom. Mordecai propels her characters
forward, allowing them to gather sure-footed
strength and understanding along a treach-
erous path that they often must walk alone.
The most cutting wounds, Mordecai sug-
gests, are those inflicted by one’s “own,”
whether as a result of being the property of
a slave owner of African descent, being
molested as a girl by a priest while seeking
sanctuary, or being a shunned member of a
community because of mixed-race identity.
She challenges any downpressors who seek
to overcome her spirit, whatever race or
gender they may be. She speaks for those
who have been silenced too soon in their
own struggles. With a versatile voice,
Mordecai sings in harmony with a ballad, a
child’s nursery rhyme, a dub rhythm, but
she attunes the ear to the blues within the
melody.
Calling Cards is the first anthology in the
Sandberry Press “Anthology Series.” As edi-
tor of the anthology, Mordecai creates a
collection of chapbooks or “calling cards”
of Caribbean-Canadian women poets who
mostly have not yet published their own
collected works. Just as there were too few
opportunities for Anglo-Caribbean women
writers to publish when Mordecai was the
editor of Jamaica Woman (1980), so too are
the opportunities few for “new writers
[especially poets] to get published, even in
Canada where small presses abound.” Times
are hard for poets writing “in the vernacular
Englishes of the Caribbean,” more likely to
192CanLitSpring2007-6 3/22/07 3:29 PM Page 136

2. find specialized small press publishers to
take on their work, like the late Sister Vision
Press. The poets use a combination of
Standard English and vernacular English
from Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados,
St. Vincent, and the Grenadines. Celia
Ferrier, Nan Peacocke, Keisha Silvera, Janet
Somerville, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes, and
Jennifer Walcott use Standard English like
an instrument. They use it as Mordecai does
in The True Blue of Islands:
We control this
supposed English
language employ it.
Yet, I find it too simplistic to say that there
is a sharp distinction between the poets’ use
of S.E. (Standard/supposed English) and its
vernacular. For instance, when Celia Ferrier
invokes the (S.E.) epic voice in her recollec-
tion of her father, that section is one verse
among many in a ballad to her childhood.
Though the register is changed, the rhythm
is unbroken. Throughout the anthology, the
poets demonstrate seamless code-switching
between two languages, S.E. and vernacular.
By doing so, they suggest that an imposed
and imperial hierarchy of Standard English
as a language over vernacular as a derivative
dialect is as “supposed” and inaccurate as it
would be to say that because blues is deriva-
tive of gospel, it is not music.
In the long time of slavery, gospel lyrics
often held clues for African American slaves
to follow the Underground Railroad to
Canada and to freedom. However, not
enough has been written about the history
of African Canadian enslavement, a discor-
dant note in our multicultural song of racial
harmony. Louise Delisle performs in and
writes plays about that too-often-unheard
subject and is the founder of the Black
Pioneers Acting Troupe. George Elliot Clarke
trumpets her praises in his foreword to her
work, being one of the few public intellectu-
als to sing out that, yes, there were slaves in
Canada. Therefore, Delisle is an important
 Canadian Literature  / Spring 
playwright to read as she records and per-
forms that hidden history which is an
important part of our Canadian heritage.
As well, she is a virtuoso of keeping time,
pacing her plays in either abbreviated
glimpses into pain and suffering or long,
dark gazes into family tragedies. For instance,
in “A Slave’s Day in Court,” Delisle encap-
sulates hope and despair within a few simple
stage directions, as in the heavy incline of a
defendant’s head. Though sympathetic
characters like the Magistrate attempt to
promote justice, their small efforts are often
overcome by the mercilessly quick pace of
courtroom proceedings. In “The Days of
Evan,” Delisle writes a slow movement for
bittersweet family memories and the private
time of Susan and the ghost of her husband,
Evan. Subsequently, the tale of his indict-
ment, legal processing, incarceration, and
hanging is brutally quick as the four jurors
decide his fate even before the proceedings
begin. Time moves forward and Sandra, in
“Winnie’s Elephant,” asks “[w]hat is the use
of talking about it now?” A slave-spirit who
haunts the present, literally, replies “[y]ou
are free.” That freedom has been earned by
those forgotten from the past. Therefore,
Delisle writes these plays so that all Canadians
will hear their lost hope and freedom.
Green Liberalism
Simon Hailwood
How to Be a Green Liberal: Nature, Value and
Liberal Philosophy. McGill-Queen’s UP .
Reviewed by Graham Good
Liberalism is at present under attack from
several quarters. For the Left (especially in
Europe), “neo-liberalism” is the ideology
of global capitalism, which exports injustice
and exploitation around the world. For
the Right (especially in the United States)
“liberalism” is a fatal weakness in the culture,
a cause of irreligion, moral decay, and social
decline. Both of these views reflect partial or
192CanLitSpring2007-6 3/22/07 3:29 PM Page 137