excerpt
…stacks and stacks of them – why do you even want me to keep them?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just put them away somewhere – I have a feeling.”
But Diane continued to fret, and Ken walked down to his favourite park
to sit on a bench and watch the city ducks paddling toward him as they
searched for handouts. “What’s good about these negative responses?”
he asked himself. While he waited for an answer he observed the ducks
and thought about Diane. Like so many people she abhorred rejection.
The word “rejection” captivated him and a phrase sprang to mind: “The
world’s most rejected man”. He imagined a media campaign: “Come and
meet the world’s most rejected man!” It was bound to succeed. The first
three pages of any newspaper were full of tragedies and disasters. The
world’s most rejected man was a grand tragedy.
He walked back. “We’re going to turn this into a game,” he said. “Rather
than hoping for a positive result, we’ll up the ante. We’ll send out more
letters – hire someone to help you. Their job will be to send out letters –
that’s all. And we’ll pray that we don’t get any positive responses. We want
rejections. We’re going to get filing cabinets and fill them with rejection
letters and prove that I am truly the world’s most rejected man and then
we’ll send out a press release and have a huge media event.”
Diane sighed.
One day, Ken was introduced to Keith Sharp who had come to Canada
from northern England to explore the Arctic. He too had fallen in love
with a dream of the Arctic. He arrived in Halifax as a tourist and made
his way north, where he met and married an Inuk woman and had several
children with her. Through him, Ken learned that several committees had
been struck by the Inuit to promote the idea of creating their own territory
called Nunavut – the Nunavut of the grandmother’s song! While the
idea heartened Ken immensely, and conjured the story the grandmother
had told, it also discouraged him when he discovered that not a single
member of the press knew about it. His contacts in government were also
ignorant of an idea called Nunavut.
Ken vowed that Isumataq would have one purpose and one only – to
promote the creation of Nunavut. His job was to raise public awareness
and bring attention to that forgotten part of the country. Whatever was
required – if he had to stage a three-ring circus to get attention, he would
do it. He would be relentless.
“Relentless” – he tasted the word on his tongue and found it oddly
pleasing. It suited him so perfectly that he painted the word in foot-high
letters on the white wall of his studio. Then he added words in a rainbow
of colours: “Don’t forget to be relentless. Never quit!” As he painted he
recalled the words uttered by Bill Bennett more than twenty years ago in
the Peace River country: “If I could give you some advice young man, it
would be legislation by exhaustion. The last one standing wins”.
Libros Libertad 