Daniel Coleman, Yardwork

Humility may be an odd thing to look for in the writing of someone who's written at least a few memoir-ish and/or self-focused books, as Daniel Coleman has, but unquestionably it's one of the elements I treasure in Coleman's work. Things are no different in his 2017 Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place, and I'm here for it:

"I offer you fair warning: take my words with a grain of salt, because they are as mixed up as the sand and cobble of the ridge upon which this yard is built" (p23).

I'll confess, however, that even though this book's acknowledgements section shouts out one of my favourite ecocritical fellow travellers, Matthew Zantingh, my heart remains with Coleman's In Bed with the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural Politics. With Yardwork, I kept underlining good bits and dog-earing pages, nodding along and wishing I had someone to read passages to (most of my reading being done in the night, while the family sleeps), but his earlier book set a very high bar for anything else to have to clear.

Yardwork is easily summarized, into a summary at once accurate and inadequate. In brief, Dan and Wendy Coleman moved to Hamilton in the conventionally self-uprooting way of academics, and then devoted themselves to learning enough about their own yard, as a single small node in the larger region's cultural, natural, and geographic histories, to feel that they might eventually deserve to say they'd made new roots for themselves there. This book is a snapshot of how that work had gone to that time, work that Coleman has only intensified since then.

This means, inevitably, or at least it should be inevitable, that Coleman starts with Indigenous history: "Without an active awareness of First Peoples and their stories, it's easier to think of our ocean-crossing founders as peaceful settlers and to ignore the culture killing that was part and parcel of land theft" (p24).

Let me clarify here: I struggled some with this section. Although I really appreciated learning about the Six Nations, my deeply limited connection both to the people from that region and to the region itself made the section feel useful rather than intimate. When I'm reading about BC, and more so about Vancouver Island, I'm an engaged reader, not merely an observing one, though "observing" isn't the right word. I have multi-generational roots here, though, which I flatter myself to think aren't totally dissimilar from the ones Coleman's trying to grow in Hamilton. To some extent, therefore, Hamilton and the Six Nations are to me a bit like Italy, or Costa Rica; this thing called Canada is a very large country, and it contains a great many nations that need to be recognized as separate from each other, so we can't possibly grasp it all equally well.

This discomfort actually went away in other sections, I think mostly because I didn't feel as obligated to take on those other lessons as personally. The chapter on water, for example, put me at ease because it's clear that as someone who has never visited Coleman's home, there's no way that I could know it all:

"never mind the Great Lakes. Never mind Lake Ontario and the rain that falls across our city. Let me start with what I can see in this yard: What happens to the rain that falls right here?" (p93).

Because I don't feel obligated to know Coleman's yard, or the geographic region that surrounds it, I found myself able to relax into the natural history sections in a way that I couldn't with the sections on Indigenous history. (I don't always want to relax when I'm reading, and I do want to learn what's there to be learned, but anyway. Just trying to articulate my experience!)

I don't want to give much away about this book, so I'll cut this review short. Honestly, though, it really is just an intensely intimate comment about how the Hamilton area's cultural and natural history looks from a single backyard, but you shouldn't take that "just" as a minimizing adverb.

This book's goal is a significant one, so let me end by quoting some of Coleman's words about that:

"What needs reanimating isn't nature.... What needs reanimating is our ability to see, to perceive what's already going on, to hear what's already being said. And to do that, we need to change who we think we are, who we think is doing the hearing and looking" (p237).

Coleman spends a lot of time in this book letting us watch his hearing and looking, offering something of a model for how settler readers like me might want to adapt their way of being-in-the-world, in this country. I'm really pleased to have been able to spend time with Coleman's words about this subject, words which as in his other works are unfailingly thoughtful and generous, and Yardwork definitely deserved its finalist status for the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize (losing to the thoroughly deserving Tanya Talaga's Seven Fallen Feathers).

Anyway, now I'm going to have to order his newest book, also from Wolsak & Wynn, which is entitled Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding Our Future Through the Wampum Covenant and looks kind of amazing. You should get a copy as well, because I guarantee that it'll be worth your time, and while you're at it, take a close look at getting Yardwork, too. I'll be thinking about it for a while yet, I suspect.