‘Industrial Roots’: Penury, paucity, and pain of working-class women are unmissable in these stories

“Like walking off a cliff.”

That is how the Industrial Roots by Lisa Pike ends. That is how the reader feels too. Suspended mid-air. A deep sigh, not one of relief though, perhaps, of hope.

Industrial Roots, written by Lisa Pike, and published by Héloïse Press is a riot of colours – cement grey, slate grey, smoke grey, charcoal grey. Three generations of women living through the tumultuous 1930s right up to the scattered second decade of the 21st century, take turns to present the struggles of the working-class community in Ontario, Canada. The Detroit River that forms the border between Canada and the United States is witness to the crests and troughs of existence and survival that the women in this book navigate and negotiate to make their living slightly bearable.

Integrated yet independent

As a writer, Pike is blessed with a mind of a poet and the soul of a painter. The stories that she weaves have the strength to stand on their own as separate entities; yet, there is a thread that connects one story to the other in an unassuming, effortless manner. It can be a tad bit unsettling for the reader to keep pace with the multiple timelines crisscrossing each other but what shines through is the narrator’s voice in every story, the unheard voice of the invisible woman, who is at the core of everything which unfolds and reveals itself in Industrial Roots. So, even if you get mixed up with the “Stellas, Walters, and Wandas” and lose count of the generations, it hardly matters because the embodied reality of each woman taking a leaf from the previous storyteller feeds on each other’s lived experience. The solidarity in the diverse stories of penury, paucity, and pain is unmissable.

The binding force is, in fact, the intersectionality that Pike offers and urges the reader to look at closely while moving from one story to the next. Much like the Detroit River, situated at the intersection of two regions, Pike’s stories too take shape in a web of intersections. It resembles the act of burning something and what is left behind is the grey smoke that has now blended with the air. It is invisible but its existence cannot be denied. It gets mixed with the air you breathe. Similarly, in these stories, knowingly or unknowingly, the women are breathing the same air, sometimes, toxic, other times, bearable, separated by time zones, space, conflicting relationships.

Bizarre is the new normal

The book begins with an announcement of Tom’s death by a freight train. Tom is someone’s husband, father, brother. Now, the response to this news is varied for all the relations associated with Tom. There is regret, there is relief, and there is resentment too, but the commonality is that Tom’s death affects everyone in some degree. When you finish this story after getting a sneak peek into Tom’s family and his extended family whose members are settled here and there, you are left wondering whether Tom’s death was an accident, or did he deliberately come in front of the freight train? A secret which possibly gets buried at Tom’s funeral.

Relationships are most often messier than merry. The fault lines, cracks, and bruises become more prominent when solutions to problems seem distant and unreliable. A wife waits for her husband to return so that she could strike him dead with a Coke bottle; but, does she eventually? A granddaughter wants to meet her uncle because “blood is thicker than water(or, as the author puts it blithely, “We almost seemed like a family”; a 40-year-old woman wants to steal a baby because “it happened all the time”; a woman’s ashes are delivered by her second husband “in a shoebox with ADIDAS written on the side”; two sisters fall in love with the same man, a teacher makes more money “writing essays for students” than actually teaching at a university, which eventually hires someone with no experience, and so on. The beauty lies in the fact that nothing seems bizarre or random. Remember, it all began with a freak accident in which Uncle Tom was killed by a freight train.

Death over life or vice versa?

There is a death every few years, and it seems as if the bloodline of this book derives its fodder at funerals that happen frequently to an extent that death becomes a more normal reality than life. Life is scary. Death is imminent. So, pick one to be afraid or wary of. While morbidity is a recurring theme in this well-knit collection of stories, the motif of gardening is another spectrum that the author explores with utmost sensitivity and awareness. Amidst all despair, despondency, and dejection, there is a hint of life lurking somewhere that the characters are not willing to give up, after all. For instance, in her designated garden patch, a grandmother would throw away the dead rose heads together with the cigarette butts; the rose bushes were once mere “clippings” that she had started growing in a glass jar.

The sense of nurture, resilience, growth is present even in the face of the harsh realities of capitalism, gender divide, class struggle, and more. When a child asks the mother, “but Mom, what has feminism really ever gotten you?”, the woman, who had applied to teach a course in Women’s Studies, but was not hired with the excuse of “interdisciplinarity” is amazed by the realisation that it has, after all, given her nothing. As a perfect example of someone working three contractual jobs in a gig economy, she is left to wonder – where do ideology and politics fit in in the real, practical, and patriarchal world?

The mother who wants to steal a child cannot be judged because once you understand the motive behind her desire, you end up arguing with your own inner self. In one of the poignant scenes, the narrator, understanding the protagonist’s state of mind, reveals: “It was the child in the baby swing though, that made her feel the pang. A small baby smiling, laughing, arms and legs outstretched and open, body free…” What is extraordinary about this event is, motherhood is not the desire or goal here, it is the unapologetic need for freedom that the woman, already in her 40th year and divorced, with three children (all unplanned), deeply craves.

Industrial Roots defies chronology and focuses on the coherence in the disjointed. Read it and feel the pang.

Industrial Roots, Lisa Pike, Heloise Press.