In the Worshipful
Company of Skinners
by Endre Farkas
The Muse’s Company, 2003
Reviewed by Janine Armin
 In the Worshipful Company of Skinners
is the poetic record of Canada’s first years of colonization.
Perceived through an eighteenth century colonial filter it is a
catalogue of opinion and event. Farkas, through faithful testament
to the authentic journal of a real live fur trader, shows us the
manipulative reality of Canada’s incarnation as a white populace. His
research proves extremely detailed and horrifying in its brutal
accuracy.
Farkas has given the most accurate
account of the colonization of Canada by assuming the role of the
oppressor; we are able to fully engage in the travesty of his actions.
Such opinions as "the worth of a
man is his net profit" gives us incite into the root of corporate
values in Canada.
Farkas helps
elucidate exactly what "Canadian perspective" means. By
acknowledging history we may acquire a foundation. This gory track
record could account for Canadian guilt and as a collection,
historically informed literature is a refreshing change to today’s
literary trend of self-loathing and hesitant opinion.
Farkas knows how to use repetition in
order to structure a poem and intone it with the idea latent in its
content. In "Land," he presents us with this simple concept
and then takes us around to another perspective so that we see how land
is perceived differently. The excitement in this lies in the sudden
juxtaposition of personal thought and that of another, and some kind of
dislike for the narrator who forces us unwillingly to see through his
completely racist eyes when he says "if only they were not such
heathens."
The first poem introduces a solid
historical position from which to read, "By any means we’ll skin
you" (30).
Desultory twists run throughout the
series. In "The Bourgeois Children," which follows "Perchance"
we see the malicious mode of class in Canada’s incarnation. In "Perchance"
(such tongue and cheek pompous vernacular expressed in the title) the
narrator asserts the disgustingly synthetic value system of the
bourgeois and their absolute recognition of the harm they stand for. In
"The
Bourgeois Children" he speaks from a more understanding stance of the
perils of raising bourgeois children.
Farkas goes through a checklist of
everything that occurred between the natives and the white men,
including the dogs they used, the guides, and the half-breeds. It is
anthropological in its notated content. In "The Buffalo," Farkas
describes the majesty of these creatures, which from even the brute
perspective of the British colonist cannot be avoided. He ends the poem
with "And for sport, to the other side and back, from carcass to
carcass, we walk." And with this reinstils the inhumanity with which
the British regard species native to Canada, the reluctance from which
this country grew.
In "The Savage Language"
Farkas pays tribute to the purity of the native peoples through the
naive and racist voice of the narrator and says "They have no
writing to speak of. /
And all they have to read is the sky, /
The lakes, the creatures and the land." Subtle differences are
drawn between the half-breeds, plain Indians, savages and white
Canadians by the white colonist who demeans all.
In "Civilization", Farkas says,
"News of my arrival among these pale faces / spread more quickly than smallpox among
the Savages."
At the end of the collection Farkas
comments that "the repetition of these words or phrases is meant to
signify the passage of time" which is consistent with what Farkas
refers to as the "simple construct and rhythm" of the fur
trader journals themselves. Farkas really gets down to the meaning of
Canadian Identity, which is magnificently unglamorous "Trade is our
creation myth." Essentially, we were born out of trade and aspire
to be successful employees, hence the politeness and strategy in our
peaceable gaze.
Janine Armin is a
Toronto freelance writer who has contributed to Bookslut, Clamor
Magazine, Nylon and The Village Voice. She edits the
zine Hey Maurice. |
