| Robert Finley is a long way from home. The Nova Scotia writer, who teaches at l’Université Ste-Anne in Pointe-de-l’Église near Halifax, is used to oceanscapes. But from his office as Markin-Flanagan writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary, he sees mainly Alberta sky and the grassy bulge of Nose Hill.
After barely two weeks in Calgary, he’s still settling in. Poetry books by his new colleagues are open on his desk. The big-sky view, he says, is starting to grow on him already. He’ll have plenty of time to adjust, as his residency lasts 10 months.
Finley’s book The Accidental Indies, which won the Cunard First Book Award from the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, isn’t easy to categorize. I knew that would be the case just from looking at the interesting confluence of blurb writers whose words decorate the jacket. There’s Dava Sobel, who wrote Longitude, and Hugh Brody (whose book Maps and Dreams you should read, if you haven’t already). Both authors write vividly about the shaping power of those invisible nets thrown over the world when places are named and charts are drawn up. Beside them are blurbs by Alberto Manguel and Carolyn Smart. What common elements drew this list of fellow authors together on one slipcover?
Finley answers in his quiet voice that Brody’s book has been important to his own thinking, and that Alberto Manguel and Dava Sobel share "that fascination with things, which is really what I’m after, too." The things that fascinate Finley in The Accidental Indies include stories, maps and languages, and they all have to do with Christopher Columbus’s first voyage in 1492.
In what he calls a "collection of lyrical essay-fictions," Finley’s book follows Columbus to the place now known as the West Indies and back to Spain. While based on research using Columbus’s own journals and other historical sources, the narrative evokes day-to-day life on the voyage and the strangeness of arrival in cadenced, poetic language.
For Finley, Columbus demonstrates the power of imagination – after all, Columbus really had to believe in unseen possibilities – but also its dangerous ability to cut us off from reality.
Language in particular is a double-edged way of encountering the world, Finley explains. "The way you talk about something, in a certain way, changes what you end up with." Columbus offers a powerful and tragic example of this, because "he was a gifted navigator, and navigation was all about attention, careful record-keeping and trying to see what’s there."
"On the one hand, he’s got those qualities and imaginative vision. And he’s a great storyteller," says Finley. "And on the other hand, he’s completely blind to what it is that he ends up with. After three more voyages, and being a governor in the Caribbean, he dies still thinking it’s the Indies! So you have this incredible imaginative energy and force, coupled with this dreadful blindness."
In different circumstances, Columbus’s ability to live within the story he told himself might have been a Don Quixote-like amusement. However, in this case, it literally changed the world.
"There’s always a danger, which Columbus is a prime example of, of overrunning things by speaking out our own desires," says Finley. "He wants it to be the Indies, so he calls it the Indies."
Calling the Caribbean the Indies was the end of the Caribbean, he adds. The reality of a new, inhabited world had been obscured by the desire of those who sought the fabled land of gold and spices.
A similar blindness can affect all of us, Finley argues, which is why everyone needs to be alert to their everyday language and the stories they use to make sense of their lives. "We all have stories. We live by stories, we tell all kinds of stories – astronomical, astrological, geographic, family stories. But we’re always in danger of talking too much and listening too little."
For this reason, epic narratives interest him less than the kind of writing he finds in Italian author Italo Calvino, who Finley says stresses "the importance of lightness, quickness, this sort of light touch on things that admits to its own partialness, that says ‘Here’s something to think about and it’s not the whole story.’"
Finley’s new project, which he hopes this residency will help him to complete, concerns his hometown of Halifax – something he ought to feel knowledgeable about. But in this new work, too, Finley continues to write warily, to search for "a way of speaking about things that’s also inherently like listening to them, like attending to things."
Robert Finley is reading Thursday, November 6 at 7:30 p.m. at artspace (1235 - 26th Ave. S.E.). Admission is free. |
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