Casting a Light on Whiteness

Mark Anthony Jarman’s new collection of short fiction (his fourth) is not about snow. Yes, it is by a Canadian, it is called My White Planet and the title story is set in the Arctic, but Jarman is more interested in the cultural kind of whiteness. He sees it in white things: a kitchen, a toaster, a shag carpet. He happens to mention the coincidentally “white” species depleted as a result of that consumerism: polar bears, bald eagles, white pines. The connection suggests cause and effect: the materialism of white culture spoils the planet.

This is not a revelation, and Jarman does not treat it as one. His style is not to explain, but to illustrate and imply. His style itself is his distinction. An ear for language and an eye for detail have earned him several awards, accolades from most reviewers and his current editorial job at The Fiddlehead in New Brunswick. He writes with immediacy and verve, cutting out the unnecessary to leave only the most vivid. And so his stories are full of intense events. In his previous collection, 19 Knives, a random propane explosion, a freak cougar attack, police brutality; in My White Planet, a dog mauling, a possible suicide, an execution.

Occasionally, he adds variety by shifting into an elegiac mode. But Jarman’s style is usually less meditative and more an indulgence in the subjectivity of the first person and the hyper-activity of the present tense. He breaks his stories into fragments of thought. Busts up sentences. Poetic phrases come together through sonic or mnemonic associations: “Your Reich takes a hike, your salad days turn Turk. You get depressed, run out of duct tape.” His riffs are divergent, quirky, funny. His style suits his narrators (male misfits, almost all of them), keeping us in their heads and the rest of the world indistinct.

And yet he is compelled to comment on the world—although without ever being bullheaded or strident. The spread of the “white language” of English is simply on his mind. Revisiting a setting from 19 Knives, Jarman goes back to the Old West and its acute stage of colonization. “Night March in the Territory” is a claustrophobic account of soldiers tiptoeing through the gory aftermath of one of Custer’s battles against the Native Americans. The soldiers have come so close to death that they no longer know if they are still alive. Appropriately for an introductory story, the narrator wonders “what awaits these newly created people.” He speculates that “no one will want this country the dead fight over” and eventually returns to Ireland. He understands that colonial wars set ruinous precedents.

Jarman’s insight is not limited to the United States. He sees whiteness as a global military culture of colonial consumerism. Thinking about Canada in “Swimming to America,” the narrator observes Thomas Scott’s execution in 1870—one of the reasons for the later hanging of Louis Riel. In the story’s superbly ironic closing line, the narrator feels guilty for enjoying the foods of the land he has come to occupy. He feels that he “ate the whole stricken world.” “That’s how I got to Assiniboia. You won’t believe me. It was so delicious.” Like the soldier in “Night March,” he is preoccupied with his own experience, but is more sensitive to the world than most of Jarman’s 20th-century narrators.

The arc of My White Planet ends in the world’s symbolic capital of imperial whiteness: London, England. In “Kingdoms and Knowledge,” a 20th-century tourist from Canada reflects on belonging to a colonial tradition. His relatives dead and gone, his “aunt’s rose garden erased,” her “cluttered parlour emptied and redecorated for strangers”—he “rejects” such loss. It is a “foreign” concept. His remark implies that England is about gain, not loss, and that he has learned to assume that he has a claim to a land his family does not even occupy.

The blind spots of Jarman’s narrators can also be quite funny. “My White Planet” involves seven men who find a young woman, naked and suffering from amnesia, near their Arctic outpost. Polar bears are constantly threatening the men, but somehow she survives: she blends in. The narrator refers to her “naked ass” as a “white planet,” a cheeky joke if there ever was one. The joke also exposes the narrator’s assumptions about what belongs to him. In his world, the men “own” women. But because the bears devour the men one by one, Jarman insinuates that the white men’s culture of subordinating their women and colonizing other people might be near its end, too. Poetic justice, here, is dark comedy.

Jarman seems not too worried about how the white planet will eventually fare, but I wished for slightly more concern over which stories to allow into My White Planet. “The RPM of Wolves” and “My Empty Sleeve” are unusually short, promisingly weird, but—to my surprise—not concentrated enough. Despite interesting repetition, “Fables of the Deconstruction (the Bra Story with Jacques Derrida)” does not sustain the mild amusement of teasing Derrida. When the narrator inevitably says to his crush, “you destabilize me,” the story gains little from parodying Tom Cruise’s “you complete me” in Jerry Maguire. Jarman has no need to drop names or pick fights; he has talent.

Jarman’s use of similes, for instance, is startling. There is a cluster of good examples in “A Nation Plays Chopsticks,” an evocative account of the road trips of an aging hockey team (somewhat akin to Jarman’s novel Salvage Kings Ya!). Its travelling narrator says, “I spy a deer waiting by the shoulder like a mailbox.” Near the end of the story, the narrator says that his team’s compulsion to play is “like a devotion to winless horses.” Although similes are sometimes derided for being too easy to write, hardly any technique is more instantly effective if the writer can select the comparisons that might be recognizable to the reader. Here, Jarman excels.

Some of his descriptions are also brilliant in metaphor. The narrator of “A Nation Plays Chopsticks” describes the end of a hockey game: “the last two minutes slip past too fast when you’re trying to scrabble for that one goal, to change that arrangement of bulbs glowing inside a scoreboard.” In the same way that the players desperately try to arrange themselves in a kind of scrabble game, they hope to change the arrangements of lights that would signify their win. Metaphorically, the players are those bulbs glowing. Few writers could describe with such aptness the fragility of aging hockey players and their sense of time running out.