‘Putting the strange in the stranger’

Michael Helm’s most recent novel, Cities of Refuge (2010), takes as its starting point an act of violence that reverberates through, and intertwines, the lives of a group of disparate people living in Toronto. Raising questions about contemporary regimes of racialization, art’s capacity to respond to violence, and the ethical ambiguity of fiction’s attempts to account for historical and political atrocities, the novel constitutes a challenge to familiar notions of family, justice, and truth. In this interview, Helm addresses the ‘resistance’ of nontransparent language and the power of literature to lift readers out of the ‘white noise’ of culture.