An Interview With Writer Clark Blaise

Former Director, University of Iowa International Writing Program; Author, Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time and Co-author, The Sorrow and the Terror

By Steven Boyd Saum, Editor-in-Chief, The Commonwealth

Until September 11, 2001, notes Clark Blaise, "the bloodiest terrorist attack of modern times, and certainly the bloodiest air attack of all times, was the blowing up of a plane off the coast of Ireland in which 329 people were killed." That was in 1985. The plane - Air India flight 182 from Toronto to Bombay with a stop in London - was blown out of the sky, killing hundreds of Canadian citizens, primarily of Indian origin. Another bomb was set to go off almost simultaneously on an Air India flight to Japan. But the second plane reached its destination early, and the only fatalities from its explosion were two baggage handlers. Had the timing worked as the terrorists hoped, the two bombs would have killed more than 700 people.

"These were bombs that were placed on planes by Sikh separatists," Blaise said, "which we call Khalistanis." Blaise chronicles the story behind this terrorist attack in The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, a book on which he and his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, collaborated, tracing the connections of terrorist cells across the oceans, and across the border between Canada and the U.S. As we move into the fifth month of the declared war on terrorism, from this terrorist attack there are perhaps lessons to be learned - and similar causes to be understood.

Bombs from Khalistan to Vancouver

When Blaise mentioned Khalistan, I noted that occasionally I see a bumper sticker on a taxi demanding a free Khalistan. "Indeed you do," he said, "especially in Berkeley."

As for the Air India attack: "The Canadian government was well aware that in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island in particular there were cells of Khalistanis that were intent on bringing down a plane or exploding some device that would cause some major disruption for India. There were assassination cells in the U.S. as well that were intent on killing Rajiv Ghandi, that planned on poisoning drinking water in the city of Bombay. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Intelligence Service were in fact eavesdropping on those Canadian cells and simply assumed they would never think of doing something in Canada. There was time for them to assemble a case and then forward it to the Indian government. In fact, it happened to a plane load of Canadians. The reaction of the Canadian prime minister, Mulroney, was that these were Indians." Mulroney actually telephoned the Indian prime minister to offer his condolences.

One of the refrains about the U.S. war on terror has been that it might take a long time. "It's been 16 years now since [the Air India attack] happened," Blaise noted. When I spoke with Blaise in December, the trial was slated to begin in February. A few days later, the trial was postponed until November 2002 to give lawyers more time to prepare. The BBC reported that it will be "by far the largest case ever heard in Canada," with up to 1,000 witnesses and a score of lawyers taking part.

Those facing trial are Sikh Canadians - Inderjit Singh Reyat, Ripudaman Singh Malik, and Ajaib Singh Bagri - and charges include first degree murder. "Most involved in the original cells are dead," Blaise said. "They've been killed by the Indian security forces, border forces. They went back to Pakistan where they were trained and were filtered into India. They were apprehended and shot on sight. The men who actually put the bombs on the plane - they're all dead. But the man who funded it, and several other men who were very important, they will stand trial."

With the war in Afghanistan, and with recent attention focused on the drastic rise in tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the reference to terrorists trained in Pakistan has also become a familiar refrain. "This is another fallout of the American money going into Afghanistan in the 1980s," Blaise said. "All the money and arms made their way to Peshawar, where they were distributed by arms dealers. The Khalistanis were the big arms buyers for the insurrection against India. Pakistan was ready to help."

But we haven't heard much of Khalistan in the news of late. What's happened to the drive for independence?

"It's now a historical entity," Blaise said. "It was ruthlessly dealt with. It was a secessionist movement that was dealt with as the Kashmir liberation movement was dealt with. Punjab was put under martial law for a number of years. The Congress Party loyalist, Ray, brought in with him the central authority. That means no habeas corpus. That means we either shoot you or we put you in jail and we'll tend to a trial when we get around to it. It's not pretty."

Also not pretty is the realization, Blaise said, that "a lot of the terrorist incidents in the U.S. had their origins in Canada or were fed by immigrant cells in Canada, especially in Quebec. That's a result of Canada's pride in being amnesty-granting, presumptive of innocence." Canada has long been a country of immigrants. Toronto, Blaise noted, has a larger percentage of foreign-born residents than any other city in North America - around 50 percent, compared to around 40 percent for New York. But welcoming immigrants, or refugees, has not been without cost. "There are an enormous number of violations of security by people claiming they are seeking amnesty or claiming they are in peril if they return to their homes. All they have to do is say they are, for the most part, and they are granted asylum in Canada. Now we are seeing the downside of that Canadian self-image. It's been used, just as we discovered that some of our American guarantees have been used, by those who are intent upon subversion of the West or of civil rights."

Control Your Belongings

Immediately after September 11 and again in recent weeks there were measures taken at U.S. airports to increase security. With the Air India tragedy, the attack succeeded in part because there was a bag that was interlined that shouldn't have been interlined. Not only that, Blaise said, "but also because a man didn't board the plane. They put his bag on but he didn't board it.... He was persistent, he was obnoxious. The woman at the ticket office could have said, 'Sir, I find you reprehensible, get out of here.' But she probably thought it would be racist to say that, so she obliged him." When Blaise and Mukherjee spoke with her afterward, "she felt terrible about it." After the attacks, however, security precautions were put in place in Canadian airports, Blaise said, which are still in place today. "It's a permanent part of the Canadian flying experience." With clampdowns in the U.S., one of the concerns that Blaise shared is the potential impact on international educational exchanges. In his work heading the International Writing Program at Iowa, he said, "We had a lot of countries that were nominally hostile to the U.S. I know we were creating good will with people just by showing a good face, just by showing an Iowa face. They kept expecting I would turn from friendly, avuncular Clark into Colonel Blaise of the CIA.... The educational system has been the greatest conduit for understanding throughout the world. For millions of people it has worked. If now we're seeing that for a few thousand it hasn't, it would be a shame to scrap the program."

As for changes in Canada, "They're not going to allow people to essentially put in their papers for amnesty and then simply disappear into the country," Blaise said. "Tabs are going to be kept on them. I think down the line they are going to interface with American and Interpol and other agencies. Canada had always thought it could handle its appeals process free of verification from other countries. The great sin of Canada has been complacency: that we're too small or too good or too honest to ever be taken advantage of. We have always played so fair with everybody that no one would ever treat us with contempt."

Time Lord

Blaise was born in North Dakota, the son of one Léo Roméo Blais of Québec, and spent a childhood. Before Lee R. Blaise died in 1978, after decades of chasing the American dream, he'd taken his family through failed endeavors in Montreal; Florida; Atlanta; Pittsburgh; Cincinnati; Springfield, Missouri; and Manchester, New Hampshire. Blaise's adult life has taken him back and forth across North America as well: from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he met Bharati Mukherjee (they were married over a lunch break), he moved to Montreal, then returned to the U.S. in the 1970s. While he was once lionized as one of the hot young Canadian writers, it's more accurate to recognize him as a North American writer: his first volume of Selected Stories, published in 2001, is the Southern stories - growing up in North Florida. Volume II grows out of Pittsburgh, volume III from Montreal. "I sometimes call myself a border person," Blaise said when we spoke last year. "In my mind I inhabit that place on thirty miles either side of the border."

In the afterword to Time Lord, one of the stories Blaise tells is set in 1947 in central Florida. "My father and I were standing on the art deco main street of Leesburg, next to our prewar Packard. He was dressed in his bright, Harry Truman-style Hawaiian shirt and high-waisted gabardines, stuffing pennies into a parking meter. I asked, 'How can they be renting time?' And he'd answered, 'They're renting space. It just comes out time.'"

A broad theme of Time Lord is the way that time and its standardization have so profoundly shaped the modern consciousness and enabled global commerce. "Before the world was divided into 24 time zones, and before each day began at midnight on the Greenwich prime meridian, and before the international date line kept the calendar in balance, every settlement with a need to know kept its own official clock," Blaise writes. "New York's 'day' started and ended five minutes before Philadelphia's, a minute before Newark's, twelve minutes after Boston's... If the Oakland Bay Bridge had been built in the 19th century, the Oakland end would have been 30 seconds 'faster' than San Francisco's." The disparate collections of time didn't matter, though, until the advent of the railroads.

At the center of Time Lord is the story of Sandford Fleming, a Scottish-born Canadian engineer who was the driving force behind the creation of a single, unified time for the world, and the impetus behind the Prime Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C. in 1884 at which the world (or at least those who drawing the maps) created a standard time. And, in fact, what launched Fleming on the mission to standardize time was an occasion when he missed a train in Ireland because of a confusing schedule.

The Toronto Globe and Mail selected Time Lord as one of the top ten books of 2001. One reason: No one had written about Fleming before (though three people had started, and all died), despite the fact that he is seen as a "great, floating glacier of a presence in 19th-century Canada, mentioned in every conceivable way: engineer, thinker, political person, friend of the mighty and all the rest of it; facilitator of many great things, in that great Victorian manner. It was a matter of the right time having come. The ongoing need of Canada to find heroes within itself is one thing that's a permanent part of the Canadian consciousness. But also Canada has so changed from his Canada - which was French and Scottish."

In the U.S., time was first standardized by and for the railroads, to enable more efficient commerce. "Nature's time is fine for religious observation," Blaise writes, "but it's a rotten way to run a railroad." Americans also sold time, which appalled Fleming. "Observatories made a lot of money selling time to Western Union," Blaise said. "Western Union made even more money selling time to subscribers."

But Americans who understood the role of standardizing time domestically didn't become global thinkers overnight. A year before the Prime Meridian Conference, Simon Newcomb (Canadian by origin, in fact), head of the U.S. naval Observatory, responded to Fleming's question, "'Do you favor the idea…of bringing the Standards of Time of all countries into agreement?'" with, "'See no more reason for considering Europe in the matter than for considering the inhabitants of the planet Mars.'" Eventually, though, "the overwhelmingly positive record of U.S. railroad standardization showed the American delegates - even politicians - it was politically safe, maybe even necessary, to bring the same kind of relief to the rest of the world that America enjoyed."

While the idea of one time was appealing, nationalist politics led to wrangling over whose time to use. "England had established its own standard time in 1850, just as it was embarking on its golden age," Blaise said. But at the conference the French refused to cave in to using Greenwich as the source of world time. In fact, they held out on changing over to standard time until 1911.

Time, Politics and Democracy

Blaise writes about how "owning" time gives one control over others. "Time has to be democratically apportioned," he said. Without that, "travelers become nomads, workers become slaves. It's the ability to trust that there is an end to every relationship that can be mutually negotiated. Tyrants want to impose through power to have it never returned, have it never completed, never renegotiated."

We don't live in a society where an emperor decides on a whim whether he will hear our petition or keep us waiting for years with no audience. But Blaise is quick to point out that the change hasn't been entirely one of empowering the masses. With the way time began to be used in the 19th century, and more so now, "There is a premium paid on improvement." But, he said, in the workplace, "The owner is not sovereign, the worker is not sovereign; time is sovereign."

In rationalizing the world, Blaise noted, through time and other ways of constructing their worldview, "Victorian people thought they had banished God as an explanation for things, but we realized they hadn't. They just created a pool of deeply resentful folk. And so along with developments in physics and psychology you had a resurgence of Biblical fundamentalism." You also had, as Blaise notes, terrorists who literally tried to destroy time.

Blow up the Temple of Commerce

In Time Lord, Blaise reflects on Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, in which anarchists plot to blow up the Greenwich observatory, where official time is kept for the world. This is fiction, but it's based on a real event. "This was Conrad as Tom Wolfe," Blaise said, "looking from an 1894 plot that was uncovered. The idea is that the temple of commerce and the organizing principle of the state is by then time. It's a provocative and somewhat visceral statement this is making."

Following September 11, some drew parallels between The Secret Agent and the attacks on the World Trade Center. While the observatory served some of the same functions as a symbol 100 years ago as the Twin Towers did in the late 20th century, Blaise noted that a cyberattack on the world's banking system today would be much more effective at truly crippling international commerce - an attack that could do something as seemingly insignificant as confusing the time signals through which computers constantly communicate with one another.

One World, One Time

"My secret agenda here is to talk about time," Blaise said, "temporality, and to put it back on everyone's agenda. Time is a part of the social sciences, physics - a part of all the sciences, part of all the arts." The Victorian world, Blaise underscores, "didn't have rationality at its core yet. I wanted to make this almost palpable so that the reader can understand what a world without Standard Time was like."

Fleming devoted himself to changing that world because of a larger vision: "Everything he ever wrote was rooted in an idea of a single world, a single time, a single empire, a single set of humanistic foundations."

More recently, with WTO meetings in Seattle, Prague, and now New York, we see manifest parts of the revolution against globalization and the vision it offers. "But also in the kinds of struggles we're dealing with in Afghanistan," Blaise said, "there is a struggle against modernism in general."