re: colonize

“Stay calm and decolonize”: Part 1, Part 2

Somewhere in this house is a box full of paper — a completed first draft of a novel I wrote in the early '90s. Back then I was not much interested in exploring Mennonite matters, but the plain reality was that the only successful writers in my acquaintance were hammering Mennonite matters pretty hard, 24/7. I threw in a character who was stubbornly refusing to sell the housebarn he lived in — the last intact housebarn in the village — to the car dealer next door, who was keen to tear it down and expand the business.

It's humble but it's home: source.

Flash forward thirty years. Blue Heron Books calls to inform me that my copy of Andrew Unger’s Once Removed has arrived and is on hold for me. I bring it home, and lo and behold, Unger’s protagonist Timothy Heppner is quixotically obsessed with preserving the remaining housebarns in his rapidly “modernizing” village.

I am still in the early pages of Unger’s sputtschreft. Unger is the Putzendoona responsible for The Daily Bonnet — anyone who makes a habit of his website, or its various social media tributaries, should have no difficulty enjoying his book. But more anon, once I’ve finished it.

It’s curious that Unger and I seem to be channeling the same wavelength, somewhat. In '91 I would not have been much moved by the plight of a villager fighting to preserve the last standing housebarn at the centre of a booming agri-industrial prairie town. But I would have been decidedly less moved by a proposed carlot expansion, so my authorial sympathies were very much with my fictional holdout.

This was just gratuitous culture-signalling on my part (“Hey, but now I’m related to Miriam Toews and David Bergen, yet!”) a short episode that didn’t even qualify as a subplot in my larger work. But that I included it at all in the manner I did suggests a contemplation of a possibility that never really left me.

The possibility — the potential desireability, even — of a return to the colony.