This lyrical text hovering between memoir and essay takes us through the terrain of grief and alarm – for her mother who is developing dementia, and for her planet in thrall to climate catastrophe. The title (no sausages!) gestures to many things: an ageing tree, crucial to the forest as it gives its last; a complication, a hitch; a vulnerable and venerated elder. The writing is contemplative and concerned, as McWatt interweaves remembrance of personal loss (her father, two friends) with detailed descriptions of planet loss (of biodiversity, from drought, floods and murderous heat).
The Snag is wide ranging. McWatt, born in Guyana, raised in Canada, and teaching in the UK, connects the global to the intimate, showing, for example, how the roots of what’s happening to Indigenous communities in the Americas are interwoven with a forest closer to home. She offers not a list of stages, but reaches toward something that may come after the work of grief. In this, The Snag is almost incantatory. ‘What is the song that this howl will eventually become?’
McWatt asks how we can continue to find joy, the sacred, love. She turns to collective responses: ‘What would the world look like if care became our organising principle?’ This is not a screed – there’s no admonishing argument – just a tender, deeply thoughtful writing of one woman’s journey that in the end writes us all toward the future.
Reviewed by Wendy Waring
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tessa McWatt is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction and non-fiction have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, and the OCM Bocas Prize. She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Her first picture book for children, Where Are You Agnes?, is based on the life of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018, for her memoir: Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which also won the Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction 2020 and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. She is also a librettist, most recently working with British composer Hannah Kendall. Their chamber opera, The Knife of Dawn, premiered at the Roundhouse, London, in 2016, and they are working on a new full-length opera. McWatt is also in the process of bringing John Berger’s novel To the Wedding, to the screen, with award-winning film director Andrea Pallaoro. Tessa McWatt is the Course Director for the Master’s in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia and is on the Board of Trustees at Wasafiri. Born in Guyana, and raised in Canada, she lives in London.
0 Comments