In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas
The War of 1812 is rather glossed-over in Canadian history, because no national goals were gained or lost. The conflict is most often remembered for Laura Secord warning the British and for the burning down of an early White House.
Kai Thomas brings the build-up and the battles to vivid, violent life with his historical novel, In the Upper Country.
The interlaced first-person stories unfurl like a rose. The first story is like an outer petal; the next stories are nested one inside the other. We are drawn deeper and deeper into the tightly interconnected experiences told by characters in actual time or in journals or in traditional oral voices.
Lesinda is both a recipient and a teller of stories. As the novel opens, she lives in a farming village on the Canadian border, inhabited mainly by black escapees from slavery in the U.S. Her profession is collecting stories and writing newspaper accounts for a paper recording the contemporary history of the time. Thinking she had risen above the terror of slavery and its aftermath; she is drawn into the drama of an American slave hunter illegally pursuing people hiding from him. In front of witnesses, a resident old woman shoots him. She’s in jail. She wants Lesinda.
At first, Lesinda is happy enough to visit in pursuit of the old woman’s story. When the old woman insists that the journalist tells a story first, mutual antagonism puts paid to the whole project. Very unwillingly, Lesinda returns to the jail, because the townsfolk want the stories to become part of official history. She honours the process and quite quickly falls into a kaleidoscope of people, events, and locations that all led to this final moment in time.
Canadians are sensitive enough now to acknowledge that native people already inhabited the land where black people and white people lived. Individuals with parents and grandparents who had married into different communities usually veered towards one of their inherited cultures. Some, though, wandered across cultural lines as circumstances might dictate. Not everyone was benign.
The first-person telling of these conflicts and community-building is deeply affecting. We feel the wholeness of the characters and shiver when history overtakes them.
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