“On Stage with Maara Haas” by Maara Haas
It’s a good thing that this book is available on a sound cassette because as soon as I began to read it, it struck me that Maara Haas is better for listening than for reading.
This book is a pot-pourri of oneliners, quips, (hopefully) quotable quotes, poetry and prose, sometimes descending to a hodge-podge, occasionally rising to the heights of some significance.
Maara Haas was virtually a household word some years ago when she was a regular contributor to This Country in the Morning (now Morningside) during Peter Gzowski’s first term as host. Haas was an effective radio performer and her theatrical sense has remained with her, even when she’s writing for the page and not for broadcast. Her book, then, is appropriately titled: On Stage with Maara Haas, and readers who hold the memory of her voice will probably like it better than those who don’t.
Maara’s short essays and stories, vignettes and poems include historical and contemporary pieces on the role and treatment of women, Native Indians and immigrants. She also discusses multiculturalism, where her satirical wit is used to best advantage.
One of her best pieces is “Immigrant women of the prairies” where she moves successfully from historic prose to poetry. But then she leaps, almost without taking a breath, into “The ballad of Seven Oaks”, even though she admits no women were involved in that massacre.
After completing her rhyming Seven Oaks ballad she jumps—this time without continuity, subtitle or even a little white space—into an essay which begins: “The collective dream of 170,000 people who mass-migrated from Canada between 1896 and 1914 … ” and so on. She must mean “to Canada” but by this time she’s rushing ahead so quickly that she forgets to go back and correct herself. She is talking/writing seriously about how the Ukrainians settled in Canada with understandable emphasis on the role of women. As she reaches “the era of the hired girl which has not been chronicled” she introduces a satirical chronicle of her own called “the year of the drought”, whch is representative of her short-take pieces. Here’s an example:
We sit and drink our beer. I drink the foam. He drinks the kicky part.
And after a three-line paragraph comes a real kicker:
Restore your manhood in five short days with the application of Dr. Zorba’s salve to affected part. SNORT.
Concluding this piece with two versions of how the drought ended, she moves, again without subtitle, back to serious comments about immigrant women. But before the reader has time to absorb the change in style she introduces a poem “siniti” which traverses Canada’s “mountains of snow” to the oriental Gods, Vishnu, Rama, Sita and Siva.
The scene shifts quickly again to a short piece about Indians in northern Manitoba, followed, not unreasonably, by another poem “Ningeeyook” about a tale-telling Inuit woman. This poem is followed by a little more white space but no title to introduce a mocking essay of self-identification which begins: “I seem to invite people’s curiosity even when I’m not trying.”
In fact, this book gets curiouser and curiouser and no one can say that Maara Haas is not trying to make it so.
Still and all there are good pieces in this Haas-story book, among them a short story “A way out of the forest”; a poem, “Who killed fantasy”; and a satirical essay, “In search of multicultural woman”. And I heartily endorse the Maara-view of Folklorama.
I don’t think she will convince anyone that she’s writing in jest with her untitled “nose-picking” attack on Canadian poets. And her play “Beyond the razor’s edge”, will of course never see stagelights except as part of a Haas-person show. Only she would have the chutzpa to do it.
P.S. In case anyone is wondering about Lilith publications, the new feminist publishing house which produced Maara Haas’ book, Lilith, in legend, is the name of Adam’s first wife. She refused to place herself beneath him and was forthwith cast out of Eden to become a demon! ■
Abraham Arnold is a frequent contributor to this and other Canadian periodicals.