Imagining Imagining by Gary Barwin

Small book of wonder tales … This collection embodies the generosity and intimacy of the essay form at its best.

“There is an intimacy to walking with my dog at night,” says Gary Barwin, in this small book of wonder tales. Writing an essay is also an intimate act. This collection embodies the generosity and intimacy of the essay form at its best. Gary Barwin invites us into the thoughtful imaginings of his inner world, offering stories of family and love, spirituality and religion, the Judaism of his youth and adulthood, his grief over the death of a beloved dog, his affinities with saxophones, trees …

And language. Imagining the possibilities of language — written, spoken, sung — for harm and for good: “its beauty, its mystery. Its power to make us think and feel things. Its power to make and remake the world.” Among the threads of connection that sew together this collection, language shines brightly.

I was not surprised that someone born in Northern Ireland to South African Jewish parents of Ashkenazi heritage who has settled and raised his family in the diverse Ontario city of Hamilton would nurture in himself an imagination that interrogates assumptions about the boundaries of language and culture — and would encourage his readers to do the same.

Not surprising either that essays on “Language, Identity and Infinity,” should be notable for the humour, wordplay, curiousity and sharp-witted delight in the absurdities and ironies of everyday life that are also the distinctive markings of Gary Barwin’s novels, poems, and social media posts. Humour, he says in “Sunshine Kvetches of a Little Parrot”, “isn’t about minimizing life’s struggles, it’s about not allowing them to be in charge of our life, if only for a little while.”

What was less expected and so very welcome is a throughline of compassionate insistence on the importance of imperfection; his faith in and trust of “the crack in everything” that brings light into and through this troubling world. There is a stubborn persuasiveness to Barwin’s argument that in the light of that crack, it behooves us all to see ourselves clearly and with honesty and vulnerability and a resilient sense of humour. And to be seen. In “Letter to You as if You Were Kafka”, he says, “I’m trying to think without the carapace, to speak from the squishy, un-deflecting, unguarded self …”

Berlin, late summer 2019. I am walking in ignorance of the already-simmering pandemic down cobbled sidewalks past houses and apartments and the muralled remains of the Berlin Wall; visiting Holocaust memorials and museums and laughter-filled restaurants, cafés and bars. In front of one small apartment building, I literally trip across a stumble stone. Stolperstein: a small plaque placed on certain cobbles in front of homes and businesses where people were taken during the Holocaust. Murdered, the stones say simply. Or: disappeared. Then the names and dates of the births and deaths of women, men, babies, and seniors. If known, the death camps where they were sent are named. Artist Gunter Demnig started the memorial with the first Stolperstein in 1992. Now there are over 100,000 Stolpersteine set in the sidewalks of European cities and towns. In Berlin there are about 5,000. Once I saw one stone, I began to see many. How did I miss them at first?

“We must always look very carefully,” says Barwin, in speaking of what it means to be an artist, a writer, anyone who dares to imagine, anyone who thinks in words: “language can be a Stolperstein, a stumble stone. A marker which remembers, which reminds; which draws your attention to time, place, history, culture—to the world.” An invitation to see what might otherwise be unknown, unobserved, unmarked.

Personally, I don’t find it easy to speak, write and live truthfully into the broken light of all I can see. As I write this review, events in the past five months in Israel and Palestine have already taken thousands of innocent civilians to their deaths. War has been ongoing in the Ukraine through two terrible winters. In Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Congo, human conflict is resulting in famine and death that has become so commonplace that it is barely mentioned in newsfeeds. Canada has yet to successfully implement restitution or reconciliation measures for Indigenous peoples, and has been complicit in International conflicts. A partial list. Quoting Charles Bernstein and recalling the Holocaust, Gary Barwin responds,

“the question isn’t is art up to this but what else is art for?”

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multidisciplinary artist and the author of twenty-six books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long-listed for Canada Reads.

Publisher: Wolsak & Wynn (November 21, 2023)
Perfect Bound 8″ x 6″ | 192 pages
ISBN: 9781989496794

Susan Wismer

Susan Wismer (she/her) is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog.She is a poet whose recent workhas been published in These Small Hours(ed. Lorna Crozier) a Wintergreen Press chapbook,Pinhole Poetry,Orbis International Literary Journal,Poetry Plans(Bell Press),Qwerty,Prairie Fir,,and inPoets in Response to Peril (eds. Penn Kemp,RichardSitoski). www.susanwismer.com.