eople who read the ingenious and imaginative
articles of Jeet Heer, or have the pleasure of seeing
him engage in intellectual debate, find it difficult to
believe that as a little boy he was no star of the class-
room. We can accept that Albert Einstein, an
accredited genius and therefore an oddball, had trouble learning
arithmetic, but we tend to assume that the merely clever and
talented people among us were clever and talented from the start.
Jeet wasn’t, so far as anyone could tell. Today, a 38-year-old
scholar and journalist, he writes for publications as different as the
Boston Globe, the Literary Review of
Canada, the National Post, Slate.com
and the Comics Journal. But he didn’t
learn to read till he was nearly eight
years old, and his primary-school
teachers thought he needed remedial
English. This was partly because Eng-
lish was his second language, and per-
haps also because he was working out
his attitude to the unfamiliar society
into which fate and his parents had
dropped him in his sixth year.
As it turned out, he learned English
in a way that foretold some of his
future concerns as a writer – by read-
ing comic books. Parents have tradi-
tionally feared that comics would
undermine literacy among the young, but Jeet became a reader by
picking his way through stories about superheroes and evil scien-
tists. They were among his best teachers as well as a source of plea-
sure. He calls them his “bridge to literacy.”
His life and career embody two big changes on the Canadian
landscape in recent times. The first is the appearance of intellectu-
als from non-European countries as cultural leaders, people like Neil
Bissoondath, a Trinidadian Canadian who has published much-
admired books and now teaches creative writing at Laval Univer-
sity in Quebec City, and Irshad Manji, who grew up in Richmond,
B.C. (because Idi Amin expelled her family from Uganda), and has
now become famous around the world as an analyst of her religion,
Islam. The second change is the emergence of popular culture,
including comi