Memory and Resistance

Lessons From My Granny

“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.” - Walter Brueggemann, Hope in the Dark

The Howe family lived behind our family in the north end of Timmins, Ontario. Their house was owned by the Ontario Provincial Police and rented out to officers stationed in town. There were a bunch of Howe kids. They were always at our place, and we were always at theirs.

Ed Howe was their Dad. In addition to being a police officer, he was an amateur country and western singer. He taught guitar, so every kid in the neighbourhood learned to sing like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash.

Bette, one of the middle daughters, was a fixture in our home growing up. The other day, she sent a beautiful note to encourage me to keep my elbows up:

“I remember listening to you and your Granny Angus discussing the injustices put on the Scottish in their own land by the British. I was hanging out with your mom in the front garden. You were playing in the little spot of sand with your cars, and Granny Angus was sitting in her chair. I may have been 9 or 10, so you would have been 7 or 8. You were listening to your Granny and answering her!!! It amazed me that she respected you enough to have such an important discussion. But through the years, I bet you two had quite the discussions about oppression!”

We did, indeed.

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My Granny was from the Hawkhill tenements of Dundee, Scotland. The First World War radicalized her. She watched too many cousins and neighbours die in the mud of Flanders. She called it a rich man’s war and sent her husband, Charlie, to Canada to find a new life for them.

Charlie eventually found work in an isolated mining camp in the snows of Northern Ontario. My Granny followed him there and never returned home again. She brought her Scottish homeland through songs, stories and Burns poetry.

Charlie died at the Hollinger Mine just before I was born. I got his name, and I am told, his politics.

My Granny was a force to be reckoned with. She loved stray cats, John Dillinger, Saturday afternoon wrestling, singing along to the Beatles on the radio and most of all telling stories.

From my youngest age, I remember sitting in her kitchen sipping tea and learning how Scottish peasants defeated British heavy cavalry at Bannockburn. She taught me what treachery meant through the rape of Glencoe.

Granny described how the people were forced off their collective lands. When the children were hungry, men were forced to sneak onto the Laird’s estate to kill deer and poach salmon. They would have been put on the prison ships bound for Van Diemen’s land if they were caught.

As a girl, she saw Churchill send the army after the dockworkers in Dundee. She never got over Churchill’s quip that he would watch the grass grow over the factories of Dundee.

My Granny could hold a grudge.

“You have to remember,” she used to tell me. “You have to know what was done so it will never happen again.”

The Angus’s were Orange because you couldn’t get a job in the trades in Scotland without a Mason’s ring, but my Granny hated sectarianism. To her, it was all about creating false divisions between working people. She said working people had much more in common than what separated them. This was why Charlie signed a union card, and my grandmother was so at home in the multicultural stew of a mining town.

When her son, my father John, married into the Catholic MacNeils, both sides got along like a house on fire. At family ceilidhs, they loved singing:

“It is the biggest mix-up that you have ever seen; my father he’s an Orangeman, and my mother she is green.”

But where my Catholic relatives didn’t like to rock the boat, Granny felt that was the only way to sail. Granny was political, opinionated and always on the side of the underdog. She was elbows up all the time.

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I have been thinking a lot about my Granny lately, which is why Betty’s note was so timely. My Granny was right: if we don’t remember the past, it will happen again.

Granny taught me history lessons not for my benefit but for the benefit of my children and the generations yet to come. She believed we had a duty to nurture the seeds of collective memory so that those seeds could be planted anew in every generation.

Until recently, few people I know felt they were part of a collective story.

Life over the last 40 years has been like an endless, flatlined present. We ignored the dangerously shifting ground because we were distracted by our gadgets. It seemed as if our world was little more than a big bubble of isolated consumers staring at their screens.

The Trump threat has upended this complacency. We have been thrust awake into a dark and frightening time. Many are reaching into the past to make sense of it, hoping to find something to get us through.

And we have been finding it – in family memories, songs and stories of our nation’s past. We invoke Juno Beach, Vimy, and Gord Downie. We are relearning hero tales like Laura Secord and finding our inner Terry Fox.

These tales not only strengthen us individually, but they make us stronger collectively.

There is no way I can tackle the scary things ahead but we? Well, we are a whole different matter altogether.

And Canadians are becoming increasingly stronger as we rediscover the fact that what binds us together is so much greater than what separates us. This is why people have no time for the snideness of the “Canada is broken” crowd.

From elbows up, we are transformed into arms linked. And that creates a force that can’t be beaten.

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In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit writes:

“The status quo would like you to believe that it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view… when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.”

She ties it together with a beautiful phrase:

“The branches are hope; the roots are memory.”

We are making history right now. And our grandchildren will hear the stories of how we handled ourselves. They will learn how we stood our ground and defended our lands. They will know what it means to be elbows up in the face of injustice.

Stand the gaff, my friends, keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

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I wrote this song about my grandmother on the second Grievous Angels album, One Job Town. Sarah Gordon was the name of my great-grandmother, who also made the trek from the Scottish tenements to a mining town in Northern Ontario.

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