Smoke
Michael Greenstein reviews a short story by Madhur Anand
After The Big Smoke
“Why make smoke the door?” asks Kaie Kellough in his award-winning poetry collection, Magnetic Equator, published by McClelland & Stewart (2019). Because it provides an epigraph and an entrance: Not so long ago, René Lévesque, Peter Gzowski, and Mordecai Richler chain-smoked their way through Jack McClelland’s office. Some of that smoke lingers in Kellough’s line: “pours out of lévesque’s nostrils the night of the long knives.” Almost gone are those days: in place of Montreal’s cabal of Richler, Irving Layton, and Leonard Cohen, the editorial offices of McClelland & Stewart now welcome writers from the University of Guelph – Dionne Brand, Canisia Lubrin, and Madhur Anand. Each one adds to feminist perspectives in contemporary Canadian literature. Much as Cohen paid homage to Layton, so Lubrin acknowledges Brand’s influence on her experimental work in Code Noir. Although Anand is best known for her poetry, her short story “Insects Eat Birds”1 illustrates her interest in the intersection between the two cultures of science and art. A cigar is the smoking gun in her mysterious story.
The story is divided into seven sections – each a paragraph in length, each a slow dance and parasitic oscillation. The opening sentence balances the relationship between teacher and student – in this case, between a nameless female Ornithology Museum Specialist and an over-named patron, Mr. Woodrow: “Teach me something, demands Mr. Woodrow in the Woodrow Southeast Asia Wing, and she obliges.” In this postcolonial lesson “she” teaches him about wing motion in contrast to the fixed wing of the museum named after him. The lesson includes colour patterns with her brown skin opposed to Woodrow’s whiteness: “The iridescence of the peacock’s tail is generated not by pigments but by optical interference.” This exotic tail fans out in the next sentence, as she details the science of optical interference between the status of the two characters: “The two-dimensional photonic-crystal lattices within the layers of barbules cause amplification or extinction of light waves – Bragg reflections, as in William Henry Bragg, she adds, because Mr. Woodrow likes names, his own, those of other humans, and otherwise, Pavo cristatus.” Anand addresses the two-dimensional short story with its limited plot and character development, layering genre and gender, various species, and the otherness and otherwise of names and identities.
Feedback, light waves, and sound waves exemplify parasitic oscillations in “Insects Eat Birds,” as hyphenated photonic-crystals dash to Bragg reflections.
Feedback, light waves, and sound waves exemplify parasitic oscillations in “Insects Eat Birds,” as hyphenated photonic-crystals dash to Bragg reflections. The narrator mediates the dialogue between ornithologist and Mr. Woodrow, and between Latin names and English nuance: “Slight changes to the spacing of specimen parts results in diverse appearances – more or less beauty, flee or fight stance, better or worse exhibit.” Sibilance in this sentence captures the aesthetic theme of fleeing in contrast to what is fixed, whether in avian or human species. Dialogue is a call and response in English and Latin nomenclature: “Starling? he asks, and she answers, Sturnus vulgaris.” The narrative interruption barely prepares for the sudden shift away from the museum to a nearby hotel. “American woodcock, tufted titmouse, et cetera, in the bistro attached to the hotel three blocks away.” The narrative flight path from Woodrow to Woodcock is a mere three blocks, tufted between museum drawers and hotel beds.
The next sentence shifts to French in the bistro where harsh “c” sounds belie any delicacy on the menu: “He orders oeuf croustillant, fenouil croquant, crème et chips d’ail, and when they arrive, a mini-ecosystem in an absurdly large and asymmetric white ceramic bowl, everything looks disgusting.” This story exhibits its own mini-ecosystem where insects eat birds, and humans participate in parasitic and symbiotic oscillations. In the story’s colour scheme, white belongs to Woodrow’s world, whereas the nameless female ornithologist is brown-skinned. Like the white ceramic bowl, the hotel bed is “impeccable white;” white-necked Jacobin hummingbirds provide evidence that “things can reverse quite easily,” that insects can eat birds in a cryptic ecosystem. Feminist and postcolonial, “Insects Eat Birds” is a story of reversals where a woman of colour triumphs, where the complexity of sexuality introduces the Kama Sutra, which includes advice on how to teach starlings to talk. The speech pattern returns to Latin at the conclusion of the first section, as she teaches Mr. Woodrow a lesson: she “lays out a good amount of diversity, Scolopax minor, Baeolophus bicolor, a skin for every mood.” A moody story of diversity, “Insects Eats Birds” is a self-consuming artifact.
Just as “slight changes” apply to biology and mystery, locales within a sentence from museum to hotel, so the shifts between sections of the story reflect its flight patterns. The final phrase of the first section, “a skin for every mood,” barely prepares for the beginning of the second: “A woman calls to ask if it is possible to taxidermy her cat after he is put to sleep.” The Specialist’s answer includes the phrase “ambiguous grief,” which points to other ambiguities and skins for every mood. This ambiguous mood also points to her “ambivalence toward motherhood, or at the very least toward ova.” Ova picks up the earlier oeuf croustillant and prepares for “a small blue egg” in a poem about a girl at Easter tempted by two boys: “The girl pops it into her mouth and the bloodied contents spill across her tongue.” The experience in the poem resembles the Specialist’s childhood, as the distance between poetry and life shrinks: “She will never forget that taste but it comes rushing into her mouth now.” Oral and oval fixation highlights ambiguity: “She is not sure if it represents simple evil or misdirected karma.” From Kama Sutra to karma she thinks twice about what is supposed to be delicious, “About mistaking something real and containing the potential of life itself for the risen Jesus manifested in milk chocolate.”
From that mistaken reality, the next section jumps to “These incursions or excursions with these visitors – too wealthy, too grieving, or otherwise in need of animal companionship – if not for them, she would remain in her office on Level Four Mezzanine getting bored to death by the oversights of others.” In Anand’s world of oversight and otherwise, the Specialist remains hyper-vigilant, correcting names of species and occasionally preparing skins, which is usually the work of men. In the “real world,” “Birds eats [sic] insects,” but “things can reverse quite easily.” Feminist and postcolonial reversals consume the museum and story of “Labels” and “false negatives.” The natural history museum is a vulnerable place with possible ghosts and a filthy exterior on the threshold of invasion. An entire ecosystem is threatened: “The giant park across the street magnetizes migrating birds, while the museum is a magnet for dead ones, each with their respective north and south poles, invisible fields.” Migration is fated and fateful, grief-stricken in museum and mausoleum with their optical interference and invisible fields. Each sentence and section of the story migrates and magnetizes.
In the final section, Mrs. Woodrow suddenly appears in the museum where “she suspects intergenerational ecological trauma.” The two women “enter into their privilege, the filthy freight elevator.” Like privileged filth, a warm breeze enters the climate-controlled wing “like a warning.” The story has slowly prepared for this warning, which is also an abrupt epiphany: “a half-smoked cigar on the ledge.” Mrs. Woodrow identifies the expensive cigar as her husband’s brand. The Arturo Fuente Don Arturo Gran AniverXario is immediately followed by Mrs. Woodrow’s other revelation: “Cryptic birds display their large wings with patterns that resemble eyes when threatened … to attract prey to within striking distance.” Large wings and large cigar collide in a predatory pattern and unlucky strike. As each woman puffs the cigar, “It moves from one female mouth to the other, along with the Latin names of birds.” The cigar joins fictional migration and female mystery. The cryptic final sentence offers a synopsis of sexuality and fabled identity: “It tasted on the one tongue of broken eggshells, and on the other of salvation, but as these things were entangled long before they met, no one will say which is which.” Smoke migrates across the museum’s horizon where Woodrow wings get clipped and taxidermied.
Magnetic smoke infiltrates invisible fields to return to Kaie Kellough where “it permeates pores, cells, cultures / coils round our fingers, inhales us, binds us to this act.” The drift of smoke wafts through McClelland & Stewart.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Best Canadian Stories 2024, Biblioasis