Essay by Maya Brown
Art by Monica Feng
Wade Compton’s speculative collection of stories interrogates Vancouver’s landscape as a violent, historical, and internal site of confrontation. The Outer Harbour, as a collection, illustrates how Vancouver’s coasts serve as a reminder of colonial histories, thereby inhabiting a role as a catalyst of radicalization. Compton depicts this experience as being of the body, an anatomical reaction of physical uneasiness, and even sickness, to emphasize the discomfort of confronting the reality of the pervasiveness of racial histories and markers in one’s environment. Compton uses water sites intermingling with land as the space where these realizations wash over the characters, emulating the same ebb and flow of the “greedy tides” (14).
In the first story, “1360 ft3 (38.5m3),” its biracial protagonist, Riel, weathers the process of radicalization and self-actualization, which he understands as a need to escape the suppression of whiteness he is engulfed by. His radicalization is instigated through his exposure to a newspaper article titled “The Mystery Migrant,” about a woman found amongst cargo on a ship and the local media’s obsession with trying to define her origins (15). However, Riel’s physical body is depicted as undergoing this transformation before he even reads the article. Instead, when he, Kelly, and Erika go to Sunset Beach in a meth-induced haze and immerse themselves in the water. This action characterizes the tide as the source of metamorphosis. The evocation of Riel’s “optic nerve” while he is standing in the water calls directly to his anatomy—specifically, the internal functional organization of his body (15). Nerves work to send electron signals to the brain as a response to stimuli to formulate a physical reaction, with the nervous system fulfilling a primary role in the body. So, for Reil to be “chasing” his nerves suggests an alteration to the body’s order (15), a reversal of sorts occurring. Compton sustains this sentiment as he calls to mind the image of a “mirror” (15), whose existence as an object of reflection represents an inverted depiction of its users. Through his language, Compton iterates the change that is currently being facilitated within Riel, something Riel’s mind has yet to catch up to.
Compton illustrates how this transformation has affected Riel as he “wakes up” from the night before (15). Riel untangling himself from his lover’s arms parallels his consistent need to escape from his environment, all while he is motivated by his mantra: “BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY… GET OUT OF PORT CORBUS” (20), referring to his desire to escape the monolith of racism he is surrounded by. However, Riel’s body starts to understand that this unspoken violence persists in whatever atmosphere he seems to occupy. Compton takes these themes and twists them further as Riel leaves “Kelly’s embrace” (15), signifying how constrained he feels not only by her body’s entrapment but also by what she represents. Through his narrative, Compton positions Kelly as a part of the “middle-class white kids of university-educated parents” (19), reflecting her proximity to the ideologies and systems Riel wants to detach from. The choice of the word “embrace” to describe the bodily interaction between the two characters suggests a sense of comfort and sentimentality, yet, combined with Riel’s desire to escape his environment, it becomes a negative symbol of suffocating restriction (15). These notions of restriction tied to Kelly are cemented when we see Riel and her at the conference with Verŝajna. Riel raises his hand to ask Verŝajna a question, but Kelly “pulls it back down” (22), interfering with his attempt to engage and expand within a platform of colonial resistance. While Compton frames Kelly’s participation in these systems of oppression as being “unconscious” while she lies next to Riel in bed (15), her interference shows that it does not negate its consequences. Another example of subconscious participation within colonial dynamics can be seen through Erika, who was “on the other side” of Kelly, “sleeping too” (15). Compton orients her as engaging in the same systems as her friend, reflecting how extensive white supremacy’s reach is. For example, the girls’ inscriptions on the fridge asserting that “THIS IS THE LAND OF YES” and “THERE IS NO SHOULD” evoke colonial undertones, with Kelly and Erika depicted as defining borders and legislation on a territory. This is true even if that territory is the “white surface” of a fridge door (19). By labelling their inscriptions as their “own esoteric Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” Compton draws a connection between the girls and the methodologies of settler infrastructure in colonizer-built societies, reflecting that even an attempt at “peace and love” contains an instinct to mark and form a state (19).
Compton proceeds to implement metric poetics as he describes Riel, who “scratches, stretches and wretches,” with the consonance, assonance, and alliteration linking these actions (15). All of these verbs refer to bodily actions that can be read as crude, yet innately human. Riel’s bodily experience reflects the discomfort of his awakening, reflecting a similar unpleasant feeling that pervades post-colonial thought. Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony dissects “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity” that are located within “societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves” (102). Mbembe’s scholarship dissects how images of “the grotesque and the obscene” are fundamental to the characterization of the post-colony, serving as a “means of resistance to the dominant culture” (103). Riel’s identity as a half-black settler residing on lands that remain under colonial rule, with an unknown ancestral history of migration and dispossession, complicates Mbembe’s understanding of language concerning racialization and the figuration of the post-colony, as Riel contributes to colonial domination while simultaneously being marginalized by it. However, Compton’s reliance on bodily descriptions of Riel reflects how the tensions of Riel’s position as both participant in and victim of colonial oppression come to a head on the coast, and how his body rejects the “collaboration” of colonial systems he has participated in and instead chooses the “grotesque” (Mbembe 104, 103).
Specifically, Riel’s wretching underlines the urge his body has to purge all of that which is unclean and impure. Compton depicts this self-imposed, violent act of extraction as an attempt by the mind to rid the body of physical discomfort, but “nothing comes up” (15). This bodily resistance reflects just how powerful and fortifying this transformation brought on by the coasts of Sunset Beach is. Riel’s body is cemented in this change, and is powerless to escape these feelings, as “nothing [is] in his stomach” (15). The “sand and seaweed in the sheets” on the bed after the night at Sunset Beach is a physical reminder of the ocean and Riel’s interaction with it, juxtaposed with the emptiness in his interiority (15). The remnants of the beach, left encrusted in the bed, perpetuate a sense of physical discomfort and uncleanliness, sand grains and strands of seaweed out of place, asserting defiance against Riel’s sleeping state at the apartment and university. After physically experiencing the coast at Sunset Beach, Riel’s anatomy is mobilized in his radicalization, woken up from the temporary paralysis induced in him. The sand and the seaweed are traces of this transformation that the coast has offered. Riel internalizes this change, and he will never be able to look at the colonial context in which he is situated in the same way again. Sand is notoriously hard to clean and remove, persisting no matter what, similar to the dynamics of radicalization.
The image of the stomach echoes the writings of Édouard Glissant in his Poetics of Relation chapter, “The Open Boat,” where he narrates how the “Africans who lived through the experience of deportation to the Americas” were situated in relation to the transportation ship (5). Glissant describes the “belly” of the boat, how it works to “dissolve” the enslaved people, and how it exists as a “womb abyss” (6), tying in connotations of birth and the dark, unknown future that is hidden from inside the womb, with the stomach of the vessel carrying its passengers into the “unknown” (5), while simultaneously birthing a sense of solidarity in their “suffering” (6). Ruthanne Crapo Kim’s reading of “The Open Boat” situates these connotations in the “surrounding water that constantly diffracts and shifts the geography and region” (771), hearkening back to the role the ocean plays in these racial histories. Kim’s reading examines the aspiration to reach land while out at sea by redefining this experience as putting one’s fate in the hands of the water, with the future’s course as mobile as the ship’s stomach, and even questioning the concept of land as a definable thing. Her analysis of Glissant’s bodily-focused language is tied to the coast, reiterating the coast’s power as a site of strength. Glissant’s emphasis on the stomach and womb suggests a connection between the site of the ship and knowledge concerning the colonial enterprise due to its purpose in transporting bodies for slavery. In his narrative, Compton suggests this connection as well, with Riel’s stomach also being empty like an abyss, but with this emptiness having resulted from him having fully digested and processed his radicalization, and this change now being fully cemented in place. Now, the realities of the world Riel has to endure are as “sickeningly hot and bright” as the weather is outside of his “window” (Compton 15), and so his body carries him on a new path to confront these realities and forge new ones.
Reading “1360 ft3 (38.5m3)” aids in understanding the transformative power of radicalization that the coastal sites of Vancouver possess, expressed through grotesque bodily functions. However, other stories in Compton’s The Outer Harbour directly zoom into the site of transformation itself, rather than focusing on the consequences of contact with it. Compton’s “The Lost Island” examines the shorelines of Pauline Johnson Island, illustrating their materiality and significance to a group of Indigenous university students and their settler friend, Jean. One student, Fletcher, convinces his group of friends to visit the island after reading an essay written in the “language of dirt,” a term referring to the settler-colonial language, a kind of “intervention” for the militant compound now situated on the site (33). When the group sets out on their journey by boat, the “low slope on the horizon” comes into view (41), hearkening back to Christopher Hussey’s concept of the picturesque. The picturesque aims to depict the environment in a way that viewers can “deriv[e] an aesthetic satisfaction from the landscape,” a concept originating in the world of 19th-century painting (Hussey 2). Hussey finds the 19th-century inclination towards the “beauty” and the “sublime” of the natural world to be “the aesthetic relation of man to nature” (1), encouraging “the habit of feeling through the eyes” (4). By referencing scenes of natural beauty, such as the horizon in the distance, Compton engages with the picturesque, reflecting the human inclination to curate what has existed long before them, attempting to control what cannot be controlled. Compton’s mention of the horizon also acts as a symbol of the ideal, something one tries to get closer to but can never entirely reach. Horizons are an imaginary line where the sky and water meet, projecting sentiments of untouchability and negating any sense of finiteness and tangibility. John R. Gillis expands further on the symbol of the horizon as a site that “triggers the imagination,” and claims that “it is the mental construct of the horizon that draws us outward into a time and space of the beyond” due to its lack of a discrete “edge” (265). The horizon’s status as unreachable makes it the “safest repository” for “dreams and nightmare” alike (265), affirming a fantastical quality to the site. By situating the island’s slope on the horizon, Compton connects all these ideas proposed by Gillis to the island, characterizing the site as mystical and never fully reachable, an abstraction.
The imagined horizon is invaded by Compton’s conjuring of “thin towers of smoke,” swallowing the view and disrupting the illusion. Compton’s choice to describe the form of the smoke as “towers” acts as a reminder of industrial pollution (41), and like the horizon, the smoke is an intangible substance. Nevertheless, smoke can invade the body physically as something one can smell and taste. The view of the island on the horizon is thus overpowered by the pervasive violence of the smoke, being what “holds” the students’ “attention” (41). The presence of smoke compared to the “minimal emanations” of the island suggest that “the suggestion of fire” seems to hold more power over Jean and her peers than the promise of the shore (41). This imagery raises the question of whether the transformative powers in this story lie in the coasts of Pauline Johnson Island or in the damage colonial settlement has inflicted on it.
Compton complicates these tensions further as Jean reaches the “solid ground” of the island, where she experiences “a sudden pulse of nausea” (42). Jean’s physical discomfort as she “disembarks” onto the island emulates the same bodily responses inflicted on Riel in the previous narrative (42); however, the realization that is carried by these dynamics is different due to their opposing positions. When Riel interacts with the coasts of Vancouver, the awareness that he is completely engulfed within systems of white supremacy hits him, as does his racialized status as a half-black man, keeping him at the margins of society. Meanwhile, Jean is faced with her own whiteness, confronting the physical environmental realities that settler expansionism has had on the island. Compton directly juxtaposes Riel and Jean’s characterizations, one depicted as a figure of racialization and the other as a figure of settler history, with Jean’s nausea causing her to “cough until everything in her stomach comes up” (42), unlike Riel, whose stomach is physically empty. There is something toxic and undesirable within Jean’s organs that requires purging, that “something” being her “colonized thinking” (33), a realization brought on by the island’s pollution.
As Compton depicts Jean “[burying] her bile” within the “island’s moon-like dust” (42), these dynamics of the coast are layered and mixed as a site of transformation. Both the history of what the coast was and is, the violence inflicted upon it, and the reactions it stirs work together to trigger an awakening to the colonial structures of identity and oppression, while simultaneously existing as a site of survivability and a journey toward a new world order. Across both “1360 ft³ (38.5m³)” and “The Lost Island,” the meeting point between the land and the ocean becomes a site where not only material binaries are destabilized but subconscious ones are as well. All the figures who engage with the shore, no matter their identities, experience the histories of pain and oppression held in the land they inhabit, an experience of the mind that seeps into the physical form. Riel experiences an awakening to the racialized violence that constructs his existence, while Jean experiences a confrontation with her complicity in the settler-colonial project. Both of these bodies become instruments of awareness of the structures of power that surround them, registering what they are taught to resist. Situating these experiences of radicalization within a site of the picturesque challenges notions of land existing just for humans to observe, and instead positions them as carriers of dark histories and instigators of libertarian hope. Through these metaphorical displays of colonial oppression, Compton forces his readers to engage with both the comfort and discomfort of ambiguity and encourages the dismantling of the binary thinking instituted through the operations of settler colonialism.
Works Cited
Compton, Wayde. The Outer Harbour. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015.
Crapo Kim, Ruthanne. “Creolizing Place, Origin, and Difference: The Opaque Waters between Glissant and Irigaray.” Hypatia, vol. 37, no. 4, 2022, pp. 765–783.
Gillis, John R. “Afterword: Beyond the Blue Horizon.” Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, edited by Nicholas Allen et al., 2017, pp. 261–268.
Glissant, Édouard. “Approaches.” Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997, pp. 3–42.
Hussey, Christopher. “The Prospect.” The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, Routledge, 2019, pp. 1–17.
Mbembe, Achille. “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity.” On the Postcolony, University of California Press, 2001, pp. 102–141.