ONCE YOU START reading him, it's hard to get enough of Fred Ward. His stories are addictive, a quality that has to do with their subtle, insistent rhythms, and with their not being about anything but human life in all its wild sweetness. There's also a critical shortage of Ward's work at the moment. Of his three books of fiction, all critically acclaimed and all published by Tundra Books of Montreal, Riverlisp, published in 1974, is out of print; and it's not easy to find Nobody Called Me Mine (1977) or his most recent title, A Room Full of Balloons (1981).
And yet it's a long time since a writer in Canada managed to create a world this mysterious and familiar. The result of superb artistry, his stories contain the barest shudder of deja vu -- or is it voodoo? They allow the reader to peer through the gauze of cultural preconception into a realm of -- dare we say it, in 1992? -- universality.
The stories deal with survival, but not the puritanical brand that calls for defiant endurance when death might be preferable. In Ward's timeless world, nothing is born, nothing dies -- and nothing happens but birth, death, and all the sad, hilarious accidents in between. His characters rarely get a chance to sell out and grow cynical. They're too busy suffering, laughing, picking themselves up, and struggling on.
There's Aaron Strutter, whose various loves turn to ashes till he finds the kind that lasts with Pemba Jade, who embodies "the essence of the doe-deer in spring planting time." Or I I -year-old Samuel Whit, whose teacher locks him in a closet after he refuses to read aloud from Little Black Sambo:
From hind his desk, Mr Howell were a giant-blue-pinstripe-
suit with a bald clean head that leaned off its neck; had a face
carved on it like them that's done on mountain-sides some
where. Yellow-grey it were: stone eyebrows that caved over
pebbly eyes, stone beaked nose, stone jaws that pushed out
stone lips what worked a stone finger at me...
"I HAVE DECIDED TO EXPEL YOU, YOUNG SIR! FROM THIS..."
(I come'd a mad prune! Lifted me chin and closed me hands over me ears. Defiant!)
Some characters grow old and, in Ward's own phrase, "come the distance," turning up in later stories as spirits and ghosts, no less human for lacking a body. Others are remembered in poems and songs by those who remain behind.
We get what seem to be frequent glimpses of the spirit world, and the meeting hall with its rattling transports of ecstatic prayer or maybe this is just ordinary life, lived at full tilt. In almost every story, a character appears whose wasted, aged, deformed, or mutilated body is a temple of faith. Toddlers and old people come together in complicity and communion, their spiritual ramblings rendered in fluid, musical prose -- the language of childhood, of delirium, of suffering and consolation. And yet earthiness is everywhere, in the flora and fauna, the sense of landscape, and a haunting kind of faithfulness to roots and origins.
Ward says of his characters that they "grow out of the landscape, out of the soil. You won't find anyone in Nova Scotia who talks like this but you won't find anyone where I come from who talks like this either." The language itself is invented, "composed," pulled together from different places, times, and influences.
JAZZ HAS A LOT to do with it. As a child in Kansas City, Missouri, in the 1940s and '50s, Ward met the legendary Charlie Parker. "He was walking down the street. And my father, who never stopped and introduced us to anyone before or since, said to me and my brother, 'Sons, I want you to know who this is.'"
And Ward once appeared as a little flower singing "A Tisket, A Tasket" in a show with Ella Fitzgerald.
"Every artist of that time would come to Kansas City, visit the schools, shake hands with us," remembers Ward. "The city when I was younger was segregated, so all the artists usually had to live in the Black neighbourhood. It was like living in the vineyards. There was always something to sweeten your life."
Ward's teachers introduced their students to writers Such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. "Our schools taught us all the things that in the '60s and '70s became 'racial pride.' But in the '40s and '50s, it was part of our life -- it was automatic."
Later, he won a Dizzy Gillespie scholarship and studied music theory and composition at Oscar Peterson's school in Toronto. He moved to California in the early '60s to pursue a career as a composer.
In 1968, he came to Quebec, where he first heard joual. His musician's ear recognized its tonal patterns as similar to those he had grown up with in Missouri. The African-American writer Richard Wright had also lived in Quebec City, and written about it. Wright had been intrigued for the same reason: he found the people sounded very much like people from his home, Mississippi.
"There was this little island outside of Quebec City, Ile d'Orleans," Ward recalls. "I went there, and the people were kind to me. There wasn't much we could say to each other, but it was lovely, what we did say. So I thought, Richard had been here, and heck, I'm stepping on good ground.
"I was looking for the oneness in things. I wasn't looking for separation. And I found that. That was one of the great things about being in Canada. I could stretch mentally here."
Upon moving to Nova Scotia in 1970, he discovered a world that was both foreign and hauntingly reminiscent of communities he had known at home in the American South.
At Dalhousie University and the National Film Board's Challenge for Change program, Ward met and connected with local people. "I was sort of sparked. All my major work started in Nova Scotia."
While teaching a course on minority cultures, Ward began studying patterns of migration from Africa, and discovered some little-known facts about Black history in Canada that date back to the 1500s. Black people lived in Acadia in the 16th and 17th centuries, which may explain why Samuel de Champlain had a Black interpreter who spoke Micmac. The Inuit name for Black person came from the Portuguese, and Ward theorizes that some of the first African-Canadians might actually have been Angolans who jumped the Portuguese trading ships.
"Some of them started to live among the Native people and the Scottish-Irish settlers," Ward says. "When you trace them further, you find there were -- and probably still are -- Black Nova Scotians whose only language was Gaelic. It's a tremendous history that has not been delved into."
His sense of discovery was such that he began to think of writing. Exposure to French in Quebec City had heightened his feel for language. In Lunenberg County, where he bought a house, the ocean added another level to the poetry he was beginning to write.
"I started out with one of my theories, which was to find out if I could, in a literary way, put on paper what I knew musically. What I've tried to do, from a jazz point of view, is image the language according to continuous lines, you know, melodic lines that are improvised. I literally sit down and say, 'Alibalibalibalibalibalibalup!' And then try to see what that is if I slow it down."
The result, over the years, has been a unique fictional universe based in poetry and the sense of place. His first book, the muchpraised Riverlisp, was set in a community Ward describes as "real, but not." Inspired by the people he met in Nova Scotia, it recreates a world that has now vanished, if it ever existed at all.
At a time when Native peoples are defending a threatened heritage, Ward cautions against a too narrow approach. "Everything is in the process of progressing," he says. "And you simply have to go along with it. Because if you go back far enough you're going to get to a point where you realize that what you've gone back to didn't exist."
Ward's work, and sense of identity, are based on openness. "It has never been an accusatory writing. It has been an invitation to come into the human realm."
He adds an observation from personal experience. "If a culture is to survive, it has to evolve. And it must be exportable. That's the only way to keep it alive. Black culture has done that -- evolved, and exported itself -- through its music, which is a form that can allow a lot of things to happen in it. And now they happen all around the world."
Current varieties of ethnocentric thinking may argue against this view, but Ward suggests that this protectionist phase should be seen in a historical context.
"For many years, most of the cultures that have a sense of oppression offered what they had as a compliment to the majority culture," he says. "And of course the majority never accepted it and in fact put it down. And these cultures in turn put themselves down because the whole idea was to fit into the majority society. A few years ago, most of the Indian youth didn't want to hear anything their elders had to say."
Ward adds, "We are living in a period where some things are being strengthened, and certain old ties are being brought back together, This is just part of what man has done to himself."
If culture has been a form of salvation for Black people, it might also work for Canadians. All societies depend on art to create the subtle chords that unite people rather than divide them.
Ward sums up his aim as a writer: "The whole idea is to touch the sky. People grow out of the landscape into the 'WHERES.'"
The WHERES?
Among the many pleasures of Ward's writing are references to states of being, evoked but never quite explained, which gather authority through offhand repetition in story after story. The WHERES, for instance, is a never-defined location, a force that embraces people while acting on them in peculiar and powerful ways.
"It's a funny kind of word because it can include all of you, part of you, it can surround you, or be somewhere else," Ward says. "It's that sense of being in touch with some kind of spiritual dimension."
The WHERES seems to grow out of a deeper reality and transcend the brutal details of oppression and poverty. Black culture, time and again, has responded to the threat of extinction with immense gifts to a white society too preoccupied with its own machinery to get the message. But it's never too late to recover the basic principles of generosity that Ward feels he teamed in childhood, growing up in a poor community.
"There was a sense of belonging and a sense of being, that for me is equal to having been in a tribe of people who had rituals that they celebrated as a group together.
"Those artists came and gave to us, and now in turn we're giving it back," Ward says. "And I think that's how our culture has gone on. All these experiences sort of intertwine and come together, and you feel a link which goes beyond...."
Beyond?...
He pauses and, for a second or two, Fred Ward seems to be gazing off into the WHERES.
