I finished two books on the weekend: Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. Both are about individuals living in institutional environments they didn’t choose for themselves, even if those environments, and the reasons the protagonists of these two very different books are in them, are not at all the same. Both books are based in their authors’ experiences: Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in the Gulag, and as a memoir, Ducks wouldn’t be worth much if Beaton hadn’t actually worked in the oil sands near Fort McMurray.
Ivan Denisovich Shukov is a prisoner in a camp in the Soviet Gulag. His crime was getting captured by the German army and then escaping back to Soviet lines; he was convicted of being a spy because, his accusers argued, “he’d surrendered to the enemy with the intention of betraying his country, and come back with instructions from the Germans.” Nobody–not Shukov’s interrogator, nor Shukhov himself–knew what those instructions were, but nonetheless, Shukov was sentenced to 10 years hard labour; Stalin’s paranoia was omnipresent. The camp where he’s incarcerated in the novel is his second; the first one, a forestry camp, might’ve been a little easier, except that criminals and political prisoners were kept together there. That’s not the case in the camp where he is now. Shukov is eight years through his sentence, although it’s quite possible that it might be increased to 25 years without warning, or that he might not be allowed to return to his village when his sentence ends. Or that he might be sentenced to two weeks or more in one of the punishment blocks, which would kill him.
Shukhov is a salt-of-the-earth peasant, a talented worker who takes pride in laying bricks, even though the way prisoners are treated, and the way the work in the camp is organized, ought to encourage laziness and cynicism. Maybe his self-respect and hard work will help him survive the Gulag, although working too hard on scanty rations is more likely to kill him. We don’t know; as the title indicates, the novella covers only one day of the 3,653 in his sentence. The extra three days, the last sentence of the book tells us, are
I was fascinated by stories about prisons when I was a kid–Jackrabbit Parole, Escape from Colditz, The Count of Monte Cristo, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich–but I hadn’t read Solzhenitsyn’s novella in 50 years. As research for something I’m working on, I obtained a copy on the weekend and read it quickly. It’s very different from what I remembered. In fact, all I kept with me through the decades was the way Shukhov wiped out his bowl of gruel or soup with his bread, trying to capture every single calorie, and the absurd unfairness of the charges against him. Solzhenitsyn was convicted of complaining about Stalin to a friend, so by Soviet standards, he had done something wrong, but Shukhov did nothing to merit his fate. That’s deliberate, of course; Solzhenitsyn wants his readers to empathize with Shukhov.
Beaton wants her readers to empathize with her protagonist, too. She lives in a series of work camps near Fort McMurray, Alberta. She’s not a prisoner there, of course, but she can’t find work elsewhere that will allow her to pay off her student loans, so she’s in the camps out of economic necessity. She takes a year off to work in a museum in Victoria, a job which could be the start of a career that reflects her education, but it’s not well paid and only part time, so she goes back to Fort McMurray.
Life in the work camps is hard. Everyone is far from home and lonely. The hours are long, the accommodations sometimes spartan. It’s worse for women than for men, though, as Ducks makes crystal clear. The casual misogyny of the men, the ogling, the sexist comments, the sexual assaults–it’s horrific. The companies pretend to care about such things, the way they pretend to care about the ducks that get poisoned when they land in the tailings ponds, but it’s all lip service. What really matters is making sure that the bitumen is extracted with a minimum of attention to the damage the process causes–to the land, to the people who live there, to the employees who do the work.
What I really liked about Ducks was the way Beaton expresses empathy for the men she works with, even the men who assaulted her. People outside that world “don’t think that the loneliness and homesickness and boredom and lack of women around would affect their brother or dad or husband the same way,” her protagonist says. All of that, yes, and also men who have never been taught anything about consent, or about sex as anything other than a way to prove (to themselves, to their buddies) that they’re real men. It’s all so fucked up, and Ducks makes us look. I’m sure that the work camps aren’t much different from university residences, a comparison the memoir makes, except that the latter aren’t an ecological catastrophe, too.
I started reading Ducks while there was still snow on the ground, thinking I might teach it in a course on writing about place this summer, and I put it aside when I decided not to include it. I thought I wouldn’t know how to teach a graphic memoir (a groundless fear, I think), but, more importantly, I thought that some students might find the content traumatic. I’m glad I finished it, though, and maybe, if I get brave enough, I’ll try to teach it some other semester. I’m glad I reread One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, too, although I doubt I’ll return to it again. Now I know what I saw in it when I was a child. That’s worth something.