1.5

“Blood sports on the edge of the world”

There is a cockfighting ring at the edge of the world. It sits on the border between the earth and the sky. It is said that it exists at the precipice between what we believe and what we can only imagine. Between reality and dream. Because as everyone who subscribes to a certain understanding of the world knows, the world has no edges. But nonetheless there exists a cockfighting ring at the edge of the world, which sits somewhere between reality and dream. It is said that each one of us has visited the ring before. But only in our dreams. And most of the time you don’t remember the dream. Nonetheless, the screams of the ring linger. The cheers of the crowd bleed their way in through the cracks in reality, becoming that buzzing in your head, that ringing in your ear, that phantom voice that calls your name in a crowd.

The people at the edge of the world are also people of the edge.  They exist between the sky and the earth, and they exist between life and death. It is unlikely you have met an edge person. But you may have felt them. Or you may have seen them without really knowing what you were seeing. You may have felt an unseen hand on the nape of the neck, and witnessed the way your hair stood on end, acknowledging someone’s presence. You may have seen them, suspended as an expression in the eyes of a human being who has lost everything. You may have only known them through story and through dream.  But it is possible to speak of a time- though so long ago that it seems impossible that there was such a time- before the edge people haunted the earth, a time when the edge people were only sky people. This was before the great cockfight that is, because everything changed after that.

The people at the edge of the world were once the sky people.  And they wanted to live on earth as the humans did. But there was no room on earth- what with the humans, and the animals, and the insects, and the plants, and the fish, and the fungi. How were the sky people to make a space for themselves on the earth? They decided to hold a contest, in the form of a cockfight (because cockfights are the only way that the sky people ever made any decision) to determine who had the best idea, and which sky person they would listen to.

There were four birds entered in the competition.

The first bird was pale gold, with feathers like wheat. “If my bird wins,” the owner of the golden bird said, “I propose a drought on earth, and all the humans crops will wither, and enough humans will die for there to be room for us on earth.”

The second bird was sapphire with teary eyes and dewy feathers. “If my bird wins,” the owner of the sapphire bird said, “I propose a great flood that will wash away the houses of the humans and the forests of the animals, which will make room for us on earth.”

The third bird was silver, with metallic feathers, and talons sheathed in iron. “If my bird wins” the owner of the silver bird said, “I propose a great war, and so many humans will kill other humans, that there will be room for us on earth.”

The fourth bird was small and unadorned. It was barely half the size of his competitors. The small rooster belonged to a sky woman whom no one recognized. She was a stranger. She proposed a story, and her only stipulation was that she be allowed to tell her story as her rooster fought. The other sky people laughed at this woman who owned this rooster and who had entered it in this blood game. How could so small a rooster compete in this game? How could a story prove more powerful than famine or flood or war? But nonetheless, they let this woman play.

The competitors prepared their roosters for the fight.

Despite his small stature, the story rooster fought valiantly.  What he lacked in size he made up for in speed. He was nimble, and his small size made it easier for him to dodge the blows of the larger birds. Before the crowd knew what was happening, the story rooster had won his first round.

And all the time, while her rooster fought, the stranger told her story.

She told a story of the earth. And how she had once been to the earth. How she had seen the humans who lived there. And she told them a story about the sky people themselves. About the sky people who wanted to become earth people. She told them that the sky people eventually go to earth, only to find that there is still no room for them. She told them that the humans already had famines and floods and wars. But what the humans didn’t have was a story. The humans didn’t have anyone or anything to blame the famines and the floods and the wars on. The sky people, recognizing that there is still no room for them on earth, try to return to the sky, but realize that they are stuck. They are trapped, stranded halfway between the earth and the sky. And this is how the sky people become edge people.

The stranger explained how the sky people would be forced to live neither here nor there- neither on earth, and neither in the sky. How they would exist on earth only as spectres, as half formed thoughts, as shadows. And so she concludes,

“It is in this way that the edge people first came to dwell on earth. And it is this way that humans first found a story for all the bad things that had no explanation. The humans finally had a way to explain all of the terrible things that happen, and all of the terrible things that humans do to each other. And because the humans had no way of knowing that the buzzing in their ears, or the ringing in their minds, or the voices in their heads that whisper awful, unspeakable things, were caused by the presence of the edge people, the humans named these happenings “Evil.” And it was “Evil” that the humans were able to blame all the awful things of the world upon.”

As the stranger finished her story, her rooster delivered the final death blow to its opponent. The small story rooster had won. The crowd grew quiet. Faces turned in disbelief to the stranger who had just won the game. Eventually, a murmur of confusion rose from the crowd. Voices called out asking the woman to take back her story. The sky people did not want to be trapped in between; they did not want to live as edge people. But the story had been told. The small rooster had won. And you need to be careful with stories, for once you tell them, once you set them loose, they cannot be taken back.

** My story mutated so many times over the course of writing, thinking and telling it, that I’m surprised it has even arrived in the form that it has. I started off with a series of fragmented images and let the story develop from there. The story revealed itself to me as I wrote it. If not for the due date deadline, I am sure it would have spiralled off in another direction. I still think there is much needed in the story to increase clarity. I guess this is merely a snapshot then- a glimpse into a perpetually moving story, one that doesn’t seem to like to be pinned down. 

In his work, If this is your land, Where are your stories? J. Edward Chamberlin emphasizes the contradiction at the heart of the concept of ‘Home.’ He writes, “Home is always border country, a place that separates and connects us, a place of possibility for both peace and perilous conflict” (Chamberlin 3). I feel that understanding Chamberlin’s concept of home as one of inherent contradiction helps us think through the problematics associated with our stories of home. “Home both binds and liberates us,” (Chamberlin 76) writes Chamberlin. In thinking about the ways in which we make sense of Canada as our home, I find this statement instructive. As Chamberlin articulates- stories of home shape us. It is through stories of home, of belonging, that we come to understand ourselves. As children, it is through understandings of home that we first come to understand the world. “Home” allows us to pinpoint ourselves on a conceptual map, to overlay an orderly schematic onto on an otherwise unruly understanding of self and world. It this sense we could say that home “liberates” us. It plays a fundamental role in the formation of our sense of self. However, as Chamberlin writes, these internalized narratives of home also bind us. They bind us to both a psychic and physical geography that risks eclipsing the psychic and physical geo-narratives of others who do not share our own. They bind us to a story of “belonging” that risks, (most likely without our awareness) perpetuating a binary of those who belong versus those who don’t. This fraught notion of home as one of both emancipatory as well as dangerously limiting dimensions, takes on new urgency in the light of Canada’s colonial history. The contradiction that Chamberlin identifies at the heart of ‘home’ aptly speaks to the feeling of unease held by many Canadians of European heritage. How am I, as a Canadian of European descent able to reconcile the fact that my narrative of home, in all the ways in which it has come to define me, is implicated in the erasure of the home narratives of others? Or as Chamberlin puts it, how do you come to terms with the way your nation’s narrative of home is implicated in a “history of dismissing a different belief or behaviour as unbelief or misbehaviour” (78). Perhaps, according to Chamberlin’s views on contradiction, home must necessarily exist in a state of tension and paradox. Perhaps this keeps us from getting too comfortable with notions of home. Maybe home needs to be perpetually held in a state of questioning to ward off the possibility of re-inscribing the “belief/unbelief” binary.  In his work, Deactivated West 100, Don McKay writes, “stories… have beginning and ends we can count on; they create little homesteads for us that, whether inflected comically or tragically, colonize flux” (McKay 44). This metaphor of story as “homestead” is one which I think serves this discussion quite well. I think that Chamberlin’s idea of ‘home’ as contradictory cautions us against the “homesteading” impulse in our own narrativizing surrounding ‘home.’ By embracing the contradiction at the heart of ‘home,’ by understanding the ways in which home both “liberates” and “binds,” we take a stance against the colonization of other people’s stories by our own stories.

Click to see a quick video of Don McKay reading from his work “Strike/Slip” 

(Chamberlin also gives a thorough discussion of how our narratives of home are steeped in a legacy of inclusion and exclusion, of belief and unbelief, of barbarian and civilized. His commentary made me think of the poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” by C.P. Cavafy. The artificially constructed nature of these binaries, and the ways in which they serve the ideologies of the powerful is illustrated in this poem.) Cavafy link

Works cited:

Cavafy, C.P. “Waiting for the Barbarians” from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press. Poetry Foundation.org. Accessed May 21 2015. Web.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If this is your land, Where are your stories?. Toronto, ON:Vintage Canada, 2003. Print

McKay, Don. Deactivated West 100. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2005. Print.