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Rough and Plenty

A Memorial

By Raymond A. Rogers
Series Life Writing Hide Details
Paperback : 9781771124362, 332 pages, February 2020
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781771124386, 332 pages, February 2020
Audiobook : 9781771125277, April 2021

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Explores the parallel processes of dispossession in the Scottish Clearances and Canada's East coast fishery.

Description

As a commercial fisher in Nova Scotia in the early 1990s, Raymond Rogers experienced the collapse of Canada’s East Coast fishery first-hand. Afterward, while preparing to leave the province to find work elsewhere, Rogers noticed a lone gravestone across the road from his home in Shelburne County that commemorates the life of Donald McDonald, a crofter from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, who “departed this life” in 1881. Rogers wondered if there might be a connection between the necessity of his own departure, and McDonald’s lonely presence on the nearby Atlantic shore, linking them as members of local communities that were displaced in the name of “economic progress.”

In Rough and Plenty: A Memorial, Rogers explores the parallel processes of dispossession suffered by nineteenth-century Scottish crofters expelled from their ancestral lands during the Highland Clearances, and by the marginalization of coastal fishing communities in Nova Scotia. The book aims to memorialize local ways of life that were destroyed by the forces of industrial production, as well as to convey the experience of dislocation using first-hand narratives, recent and historical. The author makes the case that in a world where capital abhors all communities but itself, remembering becomes a form of advocacy that can challenge dominant structures.

Reviews

Rough and Plenty is a moving testimony to the tragedies and griefs of dispossession that can result from the modern(izing of) capitalist economies in the old world and the new. ” -- Rosemary E. Ommer, University of Victoria, author of Coasts Under Stress

"As brilliant, evocative, and narratively complex as a Stan Rogers song blended with the gritty, exacting realism of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, this book grabs you slowly, but then won’t let go, as it draws portraits of communities now lost in the “merciless and self-congratulating power of progress and improvement. ”

- Ruth Bradley-St.-Cyr, Canadian Literature