Emerging Fiction

Adrienne Fitzpatrick reminds her readers that places have memories in The Earth Remembers Everything, a series of interwoven narratives about visiting massacre sites in British Columbia, Poland, Vietnam, and Japan. Fitzpatrick also intimates that our identities are intimately bound up with our sense of place, and an associated haunting phrase from her preface, “that the profound is possible,” echoes throughout her text. The intense experience of visiting massacre sites is transformational but not in a passive or abstract sense: Fitzpatrick regards place as part of a continuum of subjectivity: “In my view, the memories and deep emotion the earth holds is the same as what exists within all of us.” In other words, simply travelling to a place reveals not something entirely new but rather the interconnected nature of what was already part of our identities. Sites of experiential intensity do exist for Fitzpatrick, clearings where subtle traces are also subtle personal transformations, reflected on or written about poetically but invisible to modern technologies: “River fills the whole frame, smudged green reflects on the brown. Peter takes our picture but it doesn’t turn out; we are blocked by light, just an outline of bulk and smiles.” The representation of these sites can all too easily fall into touristic banality, but here there is the possibility that the modern camera fails, burning through the materiality of what is present with a light that shines too brightly. But an ambiguity remains with this image – where the characters are “blocked by light” – an ambiguity of the light’s alternative sources: it could be the sun, with the photographer attempting to take a picture with the sun behind the people in the frame, or it could be an intensity that emanates from what is disclosed by this attempt at visiting the past, the “burn” on the ground burning through to the present. Regardless of this ambiguity, the material traces of the past are subtle, such as the “burn” on the ground that “stops at the edge” indicating “where the trail is, where it always has been. Carrier feet made the original trail that we’re walking on.” Other traces could be seen, such as footprints, but only through a gentle uncovering: “you can still see footprints if you brush away leaves and topsoil, careful excavation revealing scuffs of toes and heels. Raw years marked with fire, tough feet holding to the edge.” Massacres are sites of catastrophe, earth scorched by fire and tragedy. At Mosquito Lake, Nigel has visions of bodies being dragged from the water by Lucy, whom he sees “wading through flaming arrows untouched somehow.” Visiting Hiroshima, the narrator asks, “How many bodies are buried here? Bones, ashes beneath pavement, deep in the ground.” Later, in the museum, the narrator discovers “a slab of stone emblazoned with the shadow of an incinerated body,” while in Vietnam she experiences such an intensity of fear in the Viet Cong tunnels that she feels that she “combusted to the pressure.” As a teenager, the narrator is taught about massacre sites as subjects for archaeological study, “a place of artifacts, of memory,” but they are also places to visit, for students and other visitors to lark around, making profane the location’s sacred nature: “There were photographs in the school yearbook of campsites and clowning students and I heard stories of haunting, shadowy presences, sleepless nights.” As an adult visitor this profanation gives way to the “unknowable” that, as the narrator observes, “hovers at the entrances, the gates, the railroad” to the Nazi death camps called Auschwitz-Birkenau. But this “unknowable” also “rises up through the soles of my feet,” the experience being bodily registered and somehow absorbed. Fitzpatrick’s goal of writing “a phenomenological experience of place that transcends boundaries and barriers” is achieved with such observations, which, woven together throughout the novel, also create a poetry of place. But she also manages to meditate on that constant question of Canadian literature, “where is here?” with the subtle attempt at locating sites of cultural and historical importance via the traces of trauma. The narrator asks, “Where is Mosquito Lake?” as she examines a map, realizing...