When the pandemic began, I began finding it difficult to finish books. I would start reading something and then get distracted and put it aside. I just didn’t have the concentration to read anything longer than an article in The Guardian or The New Yorker. It was surprising, and worrying, and I suddenly found myself wondering if I was sharing this experience with my students, many of whom find reading books next to impossible. Attention spans have changed, it seems, and although I’m no expert on the phenomenon, I would guess that those changes are related to the ubiquity of ways of getting information and entertainment other than reading books. Like anything else, reading books takes practice; the more books one reads, the easier reading books becomes.
In any case, as the stress of the pandemic’s first days has receded, I’ve found myself able to read books again. In the past couple of days, I’ve finished two very different books: Nicholas Luard’s The Field of the Star, an account of a walk on the Camino Francés in the early 1990s, and Alicia Elliott’s collection of autobiographical essays, A Mind Spread Out On the Ground. Little connects these books, or their authors, except my interests in walking, pilgrimage, and colonialism, and one formal quality that might hold true for most memoirs that are worth reading.
The Field of the Star is, as I suggested, Luard’s 1998 account of a 1,000 mile walk from Le Puy, France, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on the Camino de Santiago or, in France, Le chemin de St. Jacques. I ran across a mention of this book in The Vintage Book of Walking, edited by Duncan Minshull—one of the books I started in the pandemic’s early days and then put down—and the excerpt I read was so compelling that I decided to read the book from which it was taken. That excerpt doesn’t appear until the very end of Luard’s memoir, in an appendix that gives advice to those who would embark on a long journey on foot:
Give your feet tender loving care both before you begin and along the Way. The soles, the heels and front pads don’t need to be hard. Paradoxically as it may seem, hard feet on a long tramp are a hazard—the skin tends to crack and bleed. What one needs is an underpinning of skin that is soft and supple, that can bend with the rocks and absorb their impact. The best way to achieve it is with lavish applications of a good lanolin cream. (237)
That’s pretty good advice, and although I have no idea where to find “a good lanolin cream,” I have used both petroleum jelly and Vick’s Vaporub on my feet with good results. But that advice is only a tiny part of Luard’s book. The bulk of it is an account of his journey, which he undertook with his sister, Priscilla, and his sister’s friend Hillary, over three years. They are part-time pilgrims, according to Nancy Louise Frey’s definition, walking for a couple of weeks at a time when they can free themselves of other obligations, rather than making the entire journey in one go (see Frey 20). That journey is juxtaposed against the reason Luard is walking to Santiago—his eldest daughter, Francesca, has contracted HIV/AIDS and, in a time before antiviral drugs, has a short time left to live. (She dies partway through Luard’s pilgrimage.) It might seem strange that his reaction to Francesca’s illness is to walk in France and Spain rather than making arrangements to be with her during the time she has left, but Luard’s relationship with Francesca is rather fraught, and she sounds, from his description of her, like a talented but difficult person. One might say the same of Luard himself. I had never heard of him, but I found an obituary published after his death in 1994 which explained that he was a soldier, that he started a satirical nightclub with Peter Cook in the early 1960s, and that he was a professional writer throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The Field of the Star was his last book. The story of his walk is sometimes interrupted by Luard’s ruminations on political and theological topics. He is a rather cranky old Tory, unhappy with the changes in politics and the Anglican Church he has experienced during his lifetime, and despite (or because of) his experiences as a traveller and explorer in Africa, prone to casual expressions of racism. He dislikes Germans on principle because of the Second World War; he is apparently a supporter of Margaret Thatcher, even though he is also a conservationist; and he dislikes the European Union and complains about bureaucrats in Brussels, which suggests he might’ve been a Leave supporter if he were alive today.
Luard’s account of his journey reinforces something I’ve learned from similar books: the more miserable and difficult the journey is, the more engaging and interesting the writing about the journey will be. During the first leg of their walk, for instance, Luard and his companions experienced long, difficult days of walking in pouring rain; they got lost frequently; and Luard himself had to go home early when he contracted pneumonia. And yet his account of this part of their pilgrimage is much more alive than his narrative of the last part of the journey, which Luard finished by cadging rides from truckers and cab drivers. He had good reasons for taking those shortcuts—he was in mourning for his daughter, and he was physically exhausted by the pilgrimage, interrupted though it was—and yet, it makes for rather dull reading.
One reason I enjoyed Luard’s book is that it has little to do with my academic research. I can’t say the same about Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out On the Ground, which I read partly because I’m looking for a memoir that might be appropriate for a class of first-year students at my university, and partly because I was curious about what she has to say about colonialism in Canada—a lot, as it turns out. Unlike The Field of the Star, there is no through line or narrative in Elliott’s book; it’s a collection of essays, primarily autobiographical, but after reading the book, I have an understanding of what life was like for Elliott growing up as a white-looking, half-Tuscarora kid whose impoverished family was sometimes homeless, whose white mother suffers from uncontrolled bipolar disorder, and who, after moving to be near her father’s family at the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in southwestern Ontario, lived in a trailer without running water. For Elliott, her family’s poverty wasn’t just the result of her mother’s illness or her father’s tendency to relocate the family; it was the result of the racism and white supremacy that are part of colonialism, and that tends to limit economic opportunities for people whose skin is black or brown. We might understand that in a general way from statistics about income and unemployment, but A Mind Spread Out On the Ground puts flesh on those dry bones. For instance, until she moved away from her family’s trailer, Elliott had head lice—years and years of scratching—because there was no running water for shampooing, and no money for medicated shampoo, and no washing machine for sheets and pillowcases, and no time to vacuum the trailer’s carpeted floors. She also had to hide the infestation from teachers and other authorities, because of the chance that social services would apprehend the children (Indigenous children are taken into foster care at astounding rates, because poverty is considered to be parental neglect rather than an effect of colonialism). Elliott also describes her own struggles with depression, which she might have inherited from her mother, and her efforts to escape poverty and mental illness through education and writing.
Elliott now lives in Brantford, my home town, and she might have attended Pauline Johnson Collegiate while my sister Pam was teaching English there, but in every other way we come from different worlds. My grandparents were not rich, and they struggled, but they weren’t sent to the local residential school, the Mohawk Institute (also known as the Mush Hole because of the food served to the children incarcerated there), nor was my grandfather murdered by a white man (as Elliott’s grandfather was). Nothing Elliott says in her book should be a surprise, given what we know about the effects of colonialism, but it’s a testament to the power of her writing that I found myself sometimes catching my breath at the truths I found in this book. For example, she explains the connection between colonialism and depression in a way that helps me to understand the suicide epidemic on some First Nations:
“Can you imagine going to a funeral every day, maybe even two funerals, for five to ten years?” the chief asks. He’s giving a decolonization presentation, talking about the way colonization has affected our people since contact. Smallpox, tuberculosis, even the common cold hit our communities particularly hard. Then, on top of that, we had wars to contend with—some against the French, some against the British, some against either or neither or both. Back then death was all you could see, smell, hear or taste. Death was all you could feel.
“What does that type of mourning, pain and loss do to you?” he asks. We reflect on our own losses, our own mourning, our own pain. We say nothing.
After a moment he answers himself. “It creates numbness.”
Numbness is often how people describe their experience of depression. (6-7)
She continues:
Both depression and colonialism have stolen my language in different ways. I know this. I feel it inside me even as I struggle to explain it. But that does not mean I have to accept it. I struggle against colonialism the same way I struggle against depression—by telling myself that I’m not worthless, that I’m not a failure, that things will get better. (12)
She writes about the privilege of being able to pass as white (22) and about the way racism, sexism, and colonialism keep Indigenous women out of the literary community (25-26). She considers the connection between colonialism and gentrification, the way that early settlers looked at the land “with the eyes of enterprising tourists,” forcing out “the lands’ native inhabitants” and then going about “realizing this land’s ‘potential,’ laying roads and constructing buildings, later putting up condos and converting old restaurants into cafés” (49). She reflects on Colten Boushie’s death and how she felt when a Saskatchewan jury found his killer not guilty of anything, not even manslaughter, and how she felt when Tina Fontaine’s killer was allowed to walk out of a Winnipeg court, a free man. She compares racism to the physicists’ dark matter:
Racism, for many people, seems to occupy space in very much the same way as dark matter: it forms the skeleton of our world, yet remains ultimately invisible, undetectable. This is convenient. If nothing is racism, then nothing needs to be done to address it. we can continue on as usual. . . . We can keep our eyes shut inside this dark room we’ve created and pretend that, as long as we can’t see what’s around us, there’s nothing around us at all. After all, there’s no proof of it. (70)
She recalls the aftermath of being sexually assaulted and the way that “[u]nder capitalism, colonialism and settler colonialism, everything Indigenous is subject to extraction”:
Words from our languages are extracted and turned into the names of cities, states, provinces or, in the case of Canada, an entire country. Resources from our traditional territories are extracted and turned into profit for non-Indigenous companies and strategic political donations. Our own children are extracted so that non-Indigenous families can have the families they’ve always wanted, so our families will fall to ruin and our grief will distract us from resisting colonialism.
Then, after all of this extraction, the nation-state has the audacity to tell us we should be glad, that the theft was for our own good. Or, more recently, politicians will admit that awful things were done, but that they happened in the past and should be forgiven, despite modern-day equivalents still taking place all around us. (213-14)
Elliott’s book is tough, but it’s an important and even necessary read, I think. It won’t matter if you don’t read Luard’s story of his long walk; but it will matter if you ignore the truths Elliott has to tell.
It almost goes without saying that Elliott and Luard have almost nothing in common; he would dismiss her work as political correctness, and she would see him as yet another colonizer despite (or even because of) his honorary membership in the Zulu Nation and his support of the San people of the Kalahari Desert. And I think she would be right. However, both books have something to teach about writing creative non-fiction, about writing memoir: one’s own story needs to be placed alongside another story, another context. For Elliott, that context is Canadian colonialism and racism. For Luard, it is the story of his daughter’s short life and painful death. One might accuse him of constructing a hagiography of his daughter, although surely that is a grieving father’s privilege, but the letters to Francesca that interrupt his account of walking to Santiago de Compostela are essential; they lift his book above mere travelogue, and his walk becomes an expression of sorrow. Other works of creative non-fiction I’ve read recently—Don Gillmor’s To the River: Losing My Brother is another example—all juxtapose the personal against something larger in a similar way. I need to remember that as I write about my walks to and near the Regina Bypass.
Works Cited
Elliott, Alicia. A Mind Spread Out On the Ground, Doubleday Canada, 2019.
Frey, Nancy Louise. Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago, U of California P, 1998.
Gillmor, Don. To the River: Losing My Brother, Vintage Canada, 2018.
Luard, Nicholas. The Field of the Star: A Pilgrim’s Journey to Santiago de Compostela, Penguin, 1999.
Minshull, Duncan, ed. The Vintage Book of Walking: An Anthology, Vintage, 2000.
