The North-South Project: An Anthology of the Lost

By Noah Richler

The North-South Project is an original work of collective storytelling made up of prose pieces that consider what it means to be lost, the significance of memory, imagination, and history, and how all of these intersect and contribute to our sense of place and belonging. Edited by Noah Richler, author, journalist, cultural critic, and Literary & Ideas Curator of Toronto’s Luminato Festival, this anthology brings together thirteen acclaimed writers who take us across the Americas, from the Arctic to Argentina. These original pieces, which were performed in Toronto as part of the Luminato Festival on June 20, 2015, represent an array of experiences of the Americas and remind us that understanding what it means to be lost is one of many stories.

With contributions from

Carmen Aguirre
Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory
Joseph Boyden
Ins Choi
Edwidge Danticat
Alain Farah
Ferréz
Nalo Hopkinson
Mariano Pensotti
Beatriz Pizano
Richard Rodriguez
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Antonio Skármeta

The North-South Project was commissioned by Luminato Festival as part of its celebration of the Americas in the year of Toronto’s hosting of the Pan American and Parapan American Games. It premiered on June 20, 2015, at the Festival Hub in David Pecaut Square in Toronto, Canada. Find out more about Luminato at luminatofestival.com.

All proceeds from the sale of The North-South Project e-book, available free to ticket holders of The North-South Project through Luminato Festival and House of Anansi’s websites, will be donated for the care of victims of Mexico’s drug war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anansi Digital
• Release date: Jun 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781487000424

Noah Richler

One of Canada's public intellectuals, Noah Richler was a prize-winning producer and host of documentaries and features at BBC Radio before he returned to Canada in 1998 to join the founding staff of the National Post as its first books editor and later as a literary columnist. He has written for CBC Radio's Ideas, for the Op-Ed and cultural pages of the Globe & Mail, the Toronto Star, and the National Post, and for the Walrus, MacLean's, and EnRoute, for which he has won several national magazine awards. He is the author of This Is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, finalist for the 2006 Nereus Writer's Trust Non-Fiction Prize and winner of the 2007 British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. He lives in Toronto and in Digby, Nova Scotia.

Book preview

Is a thing ever truly lost, or simply hidden and waiting to be revealed? The lines and shape of a baby’s face resemble an uncle or grandparent that has passed, the stories we encounter in a particular topography appear to repeat themselves, the discarded thought returns, and the germane in history is often an occurrence that is constant despite the changed appearance of the players. There are only so many stories (that’s been said before) and understanding what it means to be lost is one. Maybe we are all lost, as it is. Maybe that is our story — that being lost is the primal condition. Expelled from the garden, or condemned to finding our way in modern systems pretending that we are, at all times, somewhere, we are lost amid networks of direction that head all places and none. The brutal message of humans’ sheer multiplicity of being may be that the very idea of belonging, of occupying a place that is somehow home, is the Grand Fiction. We are all strangers. We are all lost. Anonymous. Brown.

Simple map of the Americas with California shaded in green

JUNO HD VISION

REMOTE SYSTEM 180

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

San Francisco, USA

I am only halfway down the stairs when I see my train pull away. Alas. So I am late. Time is lost. Or the train was early; or the departing train is late, and my usual train is still to come.

Juno’s surveying grey eye rotates within a bowl, scanning Platform 4 horizontally from west to east, from east to west.

I bring news to Juno. Hyperopic Mother: While you preoccupy yourself with yeast and vest, the vanquished children of Eve are swarming the earth in vertical migrations, from south to north. Necessity is immense.

The bodies of the creatures of the shifting, drowning, burning world are black and brown. There is no secret in this, no distinguishing mark. Juno must decide, Fusiform Gyra, which among us have come for her protection — for daily bread — and which of us have red wings folded beneath our backpacks.

Slow moving and black lines go ceaselessly over the earth. That’s old Walt. (Whitman — I found a paperbound book under the train seat: Leaves of Grass. Bantam Books. New York. July, 1983. $3.95. It has become my prophetic book.)

My body is brown.

Of necessity I have come to inhabit a new language. Two soldiers in a black-and-white war movie. They are in a trench. One soldier says to the other, Well, don’t forget me, old duck. Then he climbs a ladder and is gone.

I have made some studies of Juno. I have recorded your relay limits; your remote capabilities; your alarm frequency; your sweep radius. I know how to blind you, divert you, lull you. Pattern pleases, movement lulls.

The threads that were spun are gathered, the weft crosses the warp, the pattern is systematic. (Old Walt.) But — here’s a worry — Juno is utterly amnesiac. Juno cannot compose a narrative. Juno’s memory is erased every 24 hours. You have no idea, do you, old duck, if you have seen me before?

One moment I am standing here, the next moment I am gone. It is like playing peeky-boo with an infant. Or I can change my coat. Watch. The act of changing my coat might draw your attention. Once accomplished, the fact of a new coat is calming to you, a fresh story.

When the detective-inspector on TV says to her subordinate, I want the surveillance tapes from North Park Station for the week of August 14th, she is asking for the impossible, as well as the antiquated — if, that is, North Park Station employs Juno 180. I happen to know it does.

We are well-matched, then. You strain to forbid the future. I have relinquished the past. End of story.

I can’t expect you to remember, Prosopagnosic old Mater — (that is a word for someone who cannot recognize faces — I read an article about this) but the other day there was a man dressed as a woman, standing here, who might have been a woman pretending to be a man, but wasn’t. I knew this innately and certainly — biologically. He had full lips, upturned eyes, a piquant face, I would say, rather like Michael Jackson’s, if Michael Jackson had at any point decided to stick. She wore a cotton dress and a fedora hat, which I suppose is what reminded me of Michael Jackson in the first place. About a size 42 coat. Green stockings, shredded. Large hands. Red nails. Work boots. There was something sacred about her, something demanding awe. I might once have preoccupied myself with the sinfulness of wanting to be other than what God intends. Now, I don’t care. Juno notices only how long I stare.

I heard a policeman being questioned about racial profiling on a radio show. The policeman said in his experience there is nothing racial about most surveillance. People in crowds are preoccupied, he said; they don’t look around a lot. Pay attention to the guy who is watching everyone else, he said. He’s up to something.

Several months ago at Union Station, I was desperate for a toilet. I searched beneath staircases and around corners. I saw a policeman at the opposite end of the lobby. I made a bee-line for him. Truly desperate. When I got within twenty feet of him, the policeman dropped one hand to his holster and with the other, palm outward, described a barrier: Hey, there, he barked. Back off! Intention, you see. I was intent.

I am reminded of that boy in Ciudad Hidalgo, that very dirty boy, also a piquant face. I noticed him, perched in a tree near the footpath from the Guatemalan checkpoint. He was appraising everyone who passed beneath him. The Artful Dodger lives, I smiled to myself.

I am always making up stories about people. That old lady in the grey coat, for example. What do you suppose her life was? She pulls all her belongings behind her in a wire cart. She sorts her belongings obsessively, even on Platform 4 — a mess of tinfoil and plastic bags.

I had always thought if I had enough imagination to make up stories about the people I study, I could never do them harm. Have any novelists been murderers? Dostoevesky was a murderer, I think.

Juno wouldn’t know a murderer from Adam. She only notices what people carry, what people put down, what people place in the trash, what people walk away from. Juno will track someone who searches for a trash can or a restroom, but she could care less if that old lady dumps her trash on the platform and begins to sort through it. I think the old lady doesn’t even remember what she is looking for.

Juno