Montreal Serai

 Stealing Nasreen by Farzana Doctor, Inanna Publications and Education Inc., May 2009,  230 pgs.

Every immigrant to the western world knows, or knows of, a cabdriver who was a brain surgeon or fiscal economist in his homeland. The narrative of the underemployed migrant goes something like this: lured by promise of fluid upward mobility and unfettered capitalism, professionals move west, only to find that their prior work experience doesn’t count. The educational qualifications earned in their homelands via sweat and blood (and sometimes an organ donation) aren’t recognized. Their alien accents and unfamiliar cultural codes further solidify entry barriers into the workforce.

Toronto-based writer and therapist Farzana Doctor takes a long hard look at this depressing phenomenon in her debut novel “Stealing Nasreen“. And yet, I was chuckling as I read, for Doctor’s clear-headed, witty narrative is never overpowered by the weight of the issues tackled. The novel’s other running theme-the (non-)acceptance of GLTB  South Asians by this community-is again a profound topic treated in a knowing, humorous manner.

Shaffiq Paperwala and his wife Salma have moved from Mumbai to Canada in search of the proverbial better life. Shaffiq, an accountant, felt his (Muslim) religion clouded his career prospects in India. Salma, a school teacher, was more sanguine, but was eventually persuaded to emigrate. The only employment Shaffiq finds in Toronto, however, is a janitor’s post in a hospital. Salma meanwhile works at a dry-cleaning outlet, and teaches Gujarati on the side.

In moving countries, Shaffiq has moved down the social ladder; as a janitor and a new immigrant of color, he is invisible to most eyes. Attempts to assert his former class position are met with indifference or suspicion. In one scene,  Shaffiq, while taking out the recycling, finds a budget sheet with an accounting error. When he points out the error, the administrator informs him that the documents are confidential.

“…I’m not sure that cleaning staff should be scrutinizing them.”

“You see I am not really a janitor. Well I am here, but back in Bombay I did this kind of thing in my job-”

“Oh, well, I suppose I should thank you for noticing my mistake. But please, for future reference, you really shouldn’t be-” She frowns, not able to hide her irritation.

“You see I am an accountant,” Shaffiq adds, wanting her to understand.

“That’s what I really am. I guess my eyes were just drawn to what used to be so familiar to me.”

“I see,” she says, with a frozen smile that tells Shaffiq that she doesn’t…

Canada looked far better from far away; now, Shaffiq longs to crowd into “a city bus with a hundred Indian men” again. But just as he’s questioning his move to Canada, he encounters Toronto-born Nasreen Bastawala, a therapist in the same hospital. As a contemporary of Shaffiq’s ethnicity and a successful Canadian professional, Nasreen appears to be the Canadian migrant’s dream gone right. Shaffiq develops a fascination with Nasreen, and starts purloining small objects–a dropped earring, a discarded travel itinerary-from her workplace.

Nasreen is initially too preoccupied with her troubles to notice Shaffiq. She’s just lost her mother to cancer, her father seems increasingly needy, and her girlfriend (now her ex) cheated on her. But when Nasreen enrolls for Gujarati classes with Salma, her intersection with the couple takes on a unforeseen dimension. Salma is attracted to Nasreen, and the discovery that Nasreen is lesbian opens up a world of sexual possibility inconceivable in conservative India.

All kinds of complications-all touching, all believable, mostly hilarious-ensue when Salma impulsively acts upon her feelings.

Doctor’s book is driven by the issues of the day, and such books, by their very nature are perishable. But Stealing Nasreen is first a novel, and only then a social manifesto. The book is energized by its characters, and Doctor has a real gift for crawling into her protagonists’ heads and recording their emotions. I was nodding in recognition as I read, finding echoes of myself and people I know in almost everyone of the characters– Nasreen’s dietary habits, for instance, uncannily matched my own weakness for Jalapeno kettle chips followed by Nutella followed by more chips… The book thus engages the reader in a very personal way even as it indicts some of Canada’s (and immigrant communities’) failings. The story’s denouement, while featuring a too-long exposition by a secondary character, is as farcical and delirious as a Noel Coward play. And like these plays, comedy is the leavening force for exploring serious issues such as marital discord, the repression of homosexuality in “polite” society, and class conflict.

Stealing Nasreen is published by Inanna Publications, a small Canadian non-profit feminist press. (Inanna, by the way, is the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare.) Stealing Nasreen reminded me anew why I love small presses so much. These folks are willing, even eager, to address the issues nice people don’t talk about.

Notations 21 by Theresa Sauer is a collection of musical scores, beautifully written, drawn, painted, etched, computer generated, and so on by composers using non-traditional techniques for musical notation. Not long ago a friend was telling me about how his grandfather used to “read” musical scores at bedtime, engaged in the distraction as one might enjoy reading a short story before slumber. Another friend (with perfect pitch) describes how musical keys that contain a lot of sharps generally sound “brighter” to her. In his chapter on musical synesthesia (Ref 1), Oliver Sacks explains that for the general population the relationship between colour and music is metaphorical, but for the musical synesthete it is quite literal. What does all this have to do with Theresa Sauer’s 2009 collection of works (explorations) of musical notations? I swear there is a connection….give me a few paragraphs to figure it out with you.

Notations 21 encompasses Sauer’s research on musical notation and how the commonality “of notation comes from its purpose for the creation of music, a phenomenon that can allow for spectacular variations of musical scores” (p. 10). She solicited composers for samples of compositions with the option of including a statement or description. Some composers were also commissioned to write essays relating somehow to “notation, contemporary music, graphic scores, or the compositional process” (p. 8). The resulting 300-odd page book comprises an astounding collection of notations for musical compositions, essays on related topics, and inspirational and visual fodder for musicians and non-musicians alike. It is an exploration of the modes and media of contemporary music. The contributing composers hail from over 50 countries and diverge immensely in the style, intent, and essence of their musical notations; however they have one common thread, non of them use what we know as standard Western musical notation - although many do co-opt, distort, and subvert such notation in their own way.

The book is directly inspired by John Cage’s similar collection of the late sixties called Notations (Ref 2). In fact, it is in essence a continuation into the 21^st century of the archiving process that Cage undertook to preserve 20th century notational forms. His book (co-edited with Alison Knowles) was partially conceived to benefit the Foundation of Contemporary Performance Arts and he solicited hundreds of composers, visual artists, and writers to contribute to the book (Ref 3). The selections used in the book and further manuscripts spanning the years 1884-1990 are part of the John Cage Collection in the Northwestern University Music Library (Ref 4).

I was previously unfamiliar with this endeavour of John Cage. I know of him (admittedly quite naively) as the person who influenced Yoko Ono in music and performance art, who in turn influenced John Lennon, who ultimately influenced all of contemporary pop music (and beyond). The recent exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John and Yoko, had numerous examples of Ono and Lennon’s use of differing media apart from sound to express musical ideas. In fact Cage’s Notations book and collection include contributions from the Beatles’ canon.

The first thing I did upon opening Notations 21 was to go to Theresa Sauer’s own piece in the collection called Parthenogenesis.

Excerpt from Parthenogenesis (2009) by Theresa Sauer. For da’uli da’uli and an unspecified number of female voices.

The title refers to the Komodo dragon’s ability to reproduce without the aid of males. The piece is intended for da’uli da’uli (an instrument that is struck) and female vocalists singing in Bugis (a language of Komodo Island). Sauer chooses to give a fairly detailed description of the inspiration for the piece, and some rudimentary instructions on how to interpret the score for improvisation.

Although no piece in the collection is “typical” of the others, Sauer’s piece, like many of the others, has an inherent visual beauty independent of its function as a guide to the performing musicians. Someone seeing (not hearing) the work on its own, with no explanation, would be at pains to decipher its pragmatic role. Sauer’s instructions and description serve as a guideline of her intent (e.g. “the vertical lines should intuitively guide the strikes of the da’uli da’uli”), but no one “reading” her score can predict how the music will sound. Granted that this is partly due to the improvisational nature of the piece, but herein lies a major difference from the notations used in the anthology and a more standardized form of notation. Remember my friend’s grandfather who read scores? He could hear an orchestra playing in his mind’s ear. I am a musician, but I don’t read music (or I don’t read it very well anyways). Apparently learning to sight read music is not so difficult a skill to learn - and even those that don’t have the skill can imagine what it is like. If you are having trouble imagining it - watch this animation of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kotK9FNEYU

But many of the scores in Notations 21 rely on an intuitive rather than literal translation from the notation to the music.

1. Excerpt from Versus (1997) by Kerry John Andrews. For solo voice and piano. Andrews is a visual artist whose scores explore, amongst other things, linear time and stasis. The excerpt above is the vocal part while the piano part is in traditional notation.

2. Excerpt from Museik No. 9 (1979) by Henrik Colding-Jorgensen. For any instrumentation. The word “Museik” is a combination of the Danish words for “museum” and “music”. This series was originally conceived for very young instrumentalists.

3. Excerpt from Das Licht im Dunkel der Wolke (2006) by Peter Hölscher.

4. Excerpt from Paprika King (1996) by Joe Pignato. For any number of improvisers.

5. Excerpt from Picnic (2006) by Cilla McQueen. For violins, oboe, and bass guitar. A poem beginning “Two violins, the first smelling of roses, the second holding a sword” guides the piece.

6. Excerpt from “mapping space in sound” itself from Pavilion Scores 1-5 (2005-2006) by Steve Roden. For children’s glockenspiel. Created as a site-specific work for the Serpentine Gallery’s Summer Pavilion - mirroring the architectural construction of the space. In this case the colours guide the set notes but timing etc. is up to the performers.

This intuitive process of interpretation might be akin to the musical synesthete seeing music, except in reverse, and thus hearing pictures. Perhaps my friend would play more sharps during the brighter parts of some of these notations. It is more likely that each musician, when left to interpret such a visual notation uses personal metaphors to translate the score.

Many other composers decided to subvert more familiar notational forms playing with either the visual aesthetic of such notation or the semantic notions.

1. Excerpt from Lunar Cascade in Serial Time (2009) by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz. For tenor guitar. In the essay accompanying the piece the composer writes “Music notation engenders disagreement and passion because it is so tightly bound to legibility, meaning, and especially physicality”.

2. Excerpt from “DreamFrame” itself from Five Terrestrial Projections for Guitar and Other Instruments (1989) by Joe Catalano. For guitar alone. The graphic content is a reworking of celestial diagrams by Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler.

3. Excerpt from Zones of Coherence (2003) by David Rosenboom. For trumpet virtuoso. In the detailed essay accompanying the piece the composer writes “The title refers to how zones of musical meaning emerge from a form in which the parts are modular….”

4. Excerpt from Val Comonica: animali (2002) by David Young. For solo violin. In the detailed instruction to the violinist the composer writes “While by its very nature this notation has many freedoms, every attempt should be made to realize the graphics’ contours and shapes as carefully as possible”

Other composers have chosen to make the medium a game where musicians can improvise in a playful manner.

1. Excerpt from Ink Bops (2000/2007) by Ellen Burr. To be played alone or in a group, Ink Bops are musical improvisation cards presented on a poker-deck size of 56 customized cards.

2. Excerpt from Hexagonie (2007) by Gaël Navard. A musical game for 2, 3, 4, or 6 players. The composer writes “the score itself is…mobile because it evolves in real-time with the game.”

Still others have chosen a more technical interpretation when creating a score.

1. Excerpt from “Graphic Score Number 9″ itself from 21 Graphic Scores (2001) by Mike Langford. For tape and computer. The methodology of creating the scores originally begun in a technical drawing class this excerpt is based on a tape of birds singing and a Fibonacci spiral.

2. Excerpt from Grid (2002) by Vagn E. Olsson. For variable instrumentation. The composer states “Every section/square in the compositions can be rearranged and played in any order whatsoever.”

Obviously with the enormous range of composers and works included in this book it is impossible to give more than a meagre taste of the wide range of notations included within. Interestingly, many of the composers cite John Cage as an influence in their work and a piece of his own is included in the collection. Sauer is also respectful of Cage’s original method, for example revealing the composers in alphabetical order rather than by any particular theme. The presentation of the scores is also true to the spirit of Alison Knowles montage-type presentation in the original Cage collection, but it is definitely more stylized in 2009. The book is well indexed including composer biographies listed at the end.  

Although the collection was apparently put together in a matter of months I feel it would take me much, much longer to fully reflect upon and absorb the works within….I have yet to attempt performing any of the pieces. But to leisurely wander through these scores is a pleasure - picking up on themes and ideas by chance with a random flip of the page. Incorporating chance into art was a constant theme in John Cage’s work, and it is probably appropriate to end with a quotation from the preface of his original anthology. Although he is talking about the way in which pieces of text accompanying the notations were truncated by chance - I think it also applies to the mind-frame when exploring these scores:

A precedent for the absence of information which characterizes this book is the contemporary aquarium (no longer a dark hallway with each species in its own illuminated tank separated from the others and named in Latin): a large glass house with all the fish in it swimming as in an ocean (Ref 2).

More information (and more complete images!):

http://www.notations21.net/

p.s. For a similar exploration of notation and composition that is local - check out Hearing/Visions/Sonores - an exhibit of contemporary Quebec music composers who incorporate notation and improvisation into their work.

http://www.improvcommunity.ca/hvs/home_eng.html

References

1. Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Revised and expanded. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2008.

2. Cage, John and Knowles, Alison, Notations. New York: Something Else Press, 1969.

3. John Cage (1912-1992) Collection. Series II. Notations Project p. 1. <http://www.library.northwestern.edu/music/archival-collections/Cage-Series2-Notations.pdf>. Accessed August 2009.

4. John Cage Collection Northwestern University Music Library <http://www.library.northwestern.edu/music/archival-collections/cage.html>.

 Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy

When long-time Liberal “busboy” and former “rat-packer” Don Boudria was briefly minister for International cooperation and the Francophonie, he invited me to lunch during “Development Month” in 1997 to get some exposure in La Presse about his new portfolio and plans.

“Canada is received with open arms in Africa, you know. That’s because we come without the colonial baggage of the French and the Brits”, said he, a History graduate.

I could not let that delusional mantra go unchallenged. “That’s not true”, I said, “Canada is the very model of successful colonialism, or we’d be speaking Cree, Ojibwe or Inuktitut, instead of English and French”.

“Vous avez un point là”, he conceded after some thought, translating literally from the English: “You’ve got a point there”.

Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy is chockfull of such “points”, that demolish, as he writes in his Introduction, “Canadians’ self-appraisal of their country’s foreign policy (as) more positive that (that of) any other country”.

Consider the following hidden gems highlighted by Engler and his editors, Fernwood and Red Publishing, in promoting the book’s launch in the Spring:

• After World War I, Canada asked Britain for its Caribbean colonies;
• Washington did not press Ottawa to break relations with post-revolutionary Cuba because it wanted Canada to spy on the island;
• Canadian companies were heavily invested in apartheid South Africa;
• Canada helped overthrow Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of the Congo (Kinshasa), who was then murdered;
• Canadian “aid” has often been used to rewrite mining codes to benefit Canadian mining companies;
• Days after the September 11, 1973 overthrow of elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, Canada’s ambassador in Santiago called the victims of the military coup “the riffraff of the Latin American Left”;
• Canada has been the 5^th or 6^th largest contributor to the US war against Iraq;
• On many occasions since 1915, Canadian gunboats have been deployed in the Caribbean and around Central America’
• Canada had between 250 and 450 nuclear-armed fighter jets in Europe in the 1960s;
• Leftist US intellectual Noam Chomsky considers Peace Nobelist Lester Pearson, the icon of Canada’s “peacekeeping diplomacy”, a war criminal because of his support for the US war on Vietnam.

These are not State secrets anymore. They are facts available to any researcher.  But few are interested to go there. And that’s the beauty of Engler’s nearly 300-page book: it draws its contents from the public record, churning and sifting the material for gems that, strung together, present a shining mirror to Canada’s dark side, and the reality check is devastating.

It is a measure of Canada’s ambiguous role in world affairs - an appeasing discourse to go with its well-polished image of a peace-loving “middle power” ever-ready to mediate in conflicts, coupled with a dark record of its treatment of its First Nations and a loyalty to Britain going back to the Boer War, a loyalty then transferred to Uncle Sam with World War II, as befits this major offshoot of the British Empire - that its intellectual elite has not produced any comprehensive and sweeping History of its Foreign policy.

What exist in print are scattered and partial studies of specific issues, like Canada’s role in the two World Wars and in UN peacekeeping or its relations with Europe or Latin America, or more recently on its part in the eight-year Afghan War, written by career-driven academics or journalists in line with the official or at least the dominant view.

Engler, like many other Canadians, was amazed at the poverty of the existing literature and at the total lack of any critical analysis of Canadian foreign policy as a whole. But unlike them, he set out to fill that need, an endeavour perfectly in line with his political activism.

Engler, who is not yet 30, has a thick record of arrests and suspensions related to his militancy on topical issues as campaigns against the WTO and the FTAA, Canada’s 2004 intervention in Haïti to topple the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Palestinian rights.

He was suspended in 2002 from Concordia University for his role in  blocking an address by Benjamin Netenyahu. Other suspensions followed for “breaches” of the initial order. He was seen distributing leaflets on campus. He argues he was there not as a student but in his capacity as elected VP of the Student Union, an exemption granted by the court. All this led to a five-year suspension in 2004.

He also made headlines un 2005 by smearing Foreign Affairs minister Pierre Pettigrew with cranberry juice during a press conference and shouting: “Pettigrew lies, Haitians die”. He was again arrested later that year for heckling Prime Minister Paul Martin and shouting: “Paul Martin lies, Haitians die”.

These are the burning concerns that drove his research. He points out in his introduction that he is neither a foreign policy expert nor a veteran diplomat. And that’s a very good thing too. He delves into the material unfettered, informed by his basic commitments and thirsting for a critical grasp of Canada’s behavior on the world scene.

The result is fascinating. Engler tackles his subject as a conscientious student and, even better, as a probing journalist. He uses classic tools of investigative journalism and presents his material through quotes from media articles, journals, books and electronic interviews and statements, injecting himself editorially to the strictest minimum.

Individual chapters deal with the Caribbean, the Middle East, Latin America, East Asia, Central and South Asia, Africa, and Canada’s international alliances. Each chapter comprises essays on individual countries, alliances and topics, and concludes with a discussion where the author sums up his insights, and a long list of footnotes giving the sources of quotations used.

But Yves Engler remains first and foremost a political activist. His Black Book is obviously not intended to adorn library shelves. It is meant as a tool for reflection, discussion and action. The penultimate chapter is in fact entitled: “Why our foreign policy is the way it is and how to change it”. The book closes with an 18-page bibliography.

Yves kindly invited me to say a few words at the Montreal launch of his book. I said it was the best gift I could have hoped for as I retired after 35 years as a foreign affairs journalist with La Presse. I tried over the years to bring a Southern sensibility to the readers of La Presse in trying to understand current affairs, way and beyond the simplistic dominant media and official discourse of Canada and its wealthy partners as “good guys” and the rest of the world as “evil, bad, unpredictable and all incompetent”.

I also said that a vote of thanks should go to Concordia University for giving Yves Engler the time and further motivation to write this book, following Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical, and Canada in Haïti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (with Anthony Fenton). To be fair, he has earned his degree.

[From the book The Men Who Killed Me: Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence, © 2009, by Anne-Marie de Brouwer & Sandra Ka Hon Chu, with photographs by Samer Muscati, published by Douglas & McIntyre: an imprint of D&M Publishers Inc. Photographs reprinted with permission of the publisher.]

             Marie Louise, Marie Odette, Marie Jeanne, Jeanette, Adela, Marie Claire, Pascasie, Marie, Immaculée, Faustin, Françoise, Gloriose, Clementine, Hyacintha, Béatrice, Francoise and Ernestine are the names of 16 of the women and one man who spoke out against the sexual violence that was perpetrated on anywhere between 250,000 to 500,000 women and a smaller number of  young boys and men between April and June of 1994, in the aftermath of  Rwandan President Habyarimana’s death when his plane was shot down on April 6, 1994. These women have names and they also have faces whose enduring  beauty, still etched with pain and suffering, has been recorded by the sensitive lens of Samer Muscati.

            “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict”.

            They also have voices which fifteen years after the genocide aimed at “cleansing” Rwanda of its Tutsi population and the sexual torture and violence inflicted on the women and some of the men, have spoken out loud and clear against this ugly chapter in Rwandan history and the sins of omission of an international community that kept quiet. As Stephen Lewis, co-director of Aids Free World, stated in his foreword, “…the stories in this book, however painful, are exactly what is needed to jolt the world into sanity”.

            “…so much pain still lives inside us.”

            They have survived, but barely, because the have received no compensation for their monumental losses: they have lost their partners, their extended families, their homes, their livelihood,  their children, their self-respect and most importantly, their health since most of them have contracted HIV and little is being done to help them.

            “I do not love the person that I am.”

            Yes, there are organizations trying to help like Solace Ministries, providing practical assistance, solidarity and the greatest gift of all: their self respect, for they, and their Tutsi men folk,  have been called cockroaches by a propaganda machine aimed at turning Hutu against Tutsi thus  making possible  this massive process of dehumanization. One might wonder whose interests this bestiality serves.  What we do know for sure is that this process of labeling people and turning them against each other started with Belgian colonialists in 1916 when they favored the Tutsi minority  over the Hutu majority. The Belgians viewed the Tutsi as more European and therefore deemed them to be more intelligent. The clergy were complicit in this process of maintaining this division by means of a separate educational system and better jobs for the Tutsi, an injustice which the Hutu came to resent later on.

            “I want the world to know what happened here in Rwanda and what we had to endure and I want to heal myself by unburdening my heart.”

            Each woman’s story is unique and yet the commonalities with other women’s stories are striking. Women witnessed their relatives’ deaths, they had to flee on foot with their babies strapped to  their backs, they hid in outhouses and bushes where they were then raped, they were repudiated by their friends and relatives, mostly out of fear, they were assisted by their friends and relatives  in spite of the fear,  their genitals were destroyed, they contracted AIDS,  they suffer from nightmares and paranoia, they have lost faith in humanity, they have forgiven, they can never forgive. Most of them have children, their own and orphans, under their care and do not have the means to look after them properly.

            “I can’t forgive a man who thinks forgiveness can be bought. Why should I forgive him? I don’t want to be corrupted for forgiveness’ sake. I can forgive but not in exchange for money or a cow. I just want sincerity.”

            A truth and reconciliation commission has been instituted, following the example of post-apartheid Africa. Its aim is to unclog the courts and to facilitate social integration and healing. Perhaps its aim is also to salve the conscience of  the perpetrators and to allow the United Nations to continue doing what it does best: passing toothless resolutions.  On June 19, 2008  the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1820 to end sexual violence in conflict.  However, as was pointed out by Catherine A. Mackinnon in “Rape, Genocide and Women’s Human Rights”:

            “This is not rape out of control… . It is rape to drive a wedge through a community, to shatter a society, to destroy a people. It is rape as genocide.”

            Paradoxically, Rwanda’s population was 70% female immediately following the genocide and women now occupy 56% of seats in the Rwandan Parliament. Let us hope that Rwandan  women, who have been robbed of so much, are able to radically change a society that has inflicted so much harm on them and therefore on itself as well. And that books such as this one, with artistic photography and heart-felt first-person accounts, can break the silence of the international community that would like to forget what  these women can never erase from their minds and hearts.

At a conference on April 15, 2009 at Concordia University, Adrienne Clarkson, former governor general of Canada and now biographer of Norman Bethune, suggested that one of the reasons the internationally-known surgeon, medical inventor, visionary and humanitarian might not be recognized to the degree he should be in Canada is because he became a member of the Communist  Party in 1935. Certainly this is a well-timed biography of Norman Bethune as it coincides with the seventieth anniversary of his death which is being celebrated in the city of Montreal with special events and exhibitions.

            This volume is part of a series entitled Extraordinary Canadians edited by John Ralston Saul. He is the husband of Clarkson and their collaboration has turned out a brilliant book. In his Introduction, Saul states there is a need for this series whose aim is to “produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada.” Other “ethical leaders” chosen are as diverse as Lester B. Pearson, Big Bear, L.M. Montgomery, and René Lévesque.

            Certainly Clarkson’s Norman Bethune stands on its own. The stunning cover portrait by  Canadian artist Carl Shinkaruk paints Bethune as a fiery tortured figure with the gaunt cheeks of the tubercular. This arresting image evokes a self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh, another haunted extraordinary man.

            Clarkson writes with analytic acumen of Bethune’s childhood on the Canadian Shield. He was born in Gravenhurst, Ontario from “generations of doctors” and “men of peace.” Bethune was the grandson of Norman Bethune, a surgeon whose life became a template for his namesake. In the 1850s, his ancestor had tended to the wounded soldiers on an Italian battlefield and was described by a government official as a “generous foreign volunteer …spurred to help us out of a deep sense of human generosity.” Similar admiring words were applied to his grandson in 1939 by government officials in China where he died. Bethune was given the name Bai Qiu En which translates to The Light which Pursues Kindness.

            Clarkson convincingly discusses how Bethune’s Presbytarian heritage shaped him for a life of service. His rebellion against his fundamentalist father, Reverend Malcolm Bethune, whom he claimed he “hated,” was an early visceral reaction against any form of oppression. This rebellion took on a wider scope in his adulthood as he fought against the medical establishment’s status quo and later the forces of fascism.

            At the Concordia University conference, Clarkson mentioned that it was time that Bethune be written about “from a woman’s point of view.” In her extensive research, Clarkson is the first biographer to make use of the journals of Marian Dale Scott, the well-known Canadian artist. As Clarkson defines her, she was Bethune’s “unique love of his life.”  At the time they met in 1935, Bethune was divorced from Frances Campbell Penney, a conservative woman from a prominent Edinburgh family. Marian was married to the well-known Montreal lawyer and poet, F.R. Scott. In a sensitive chapter with the title ” A Tiger of Sweetness, Fierceness and Delight,”  a line by Marian describing Bethune, Clarkson reveals through Bethune’s love letters and poems to her the depth of their creative and platonic relationship.

            As a young stretcher-bearer in the First World War, Bethune had survived a severe leg wound in France and had been hospitalized for six months, returning to continue his medical studies in Canada. At the age of thirty-six, he faced a far more difficult physical diagnosis that was like a death sentence. He had contracted tuberculosis in both lungs. TB was then epidemic as cancer is today and there was no known cure. Under the stress, Bethune and his wife divorced and she returned to Scotland. Unable to practice medicine, Bethune was admitted to the Trudeau Sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York. His will to live was shaken and he planned his suicide. As an instinctive form of therapy, Bethune began to paint the interior walls of the cottage he lived in with murals he entitled “TB’s Progress.” When he heard of an experimental operation, he sought a doctor that was willing to perform it. The operation was a success though it left him disabled with only one functioning lung.

            This didn’t deter Bethune who decided to use his medical skills to eradicate this disease. In 1928, he accepted a prestigious position at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal where he worked alongside the “father of thoracic surgery in North America,” Dr. Edward Archibald.  Soon, Bethune clashed with his traditionalist mentor. Even though Bethune proved himself as a surgeon and even invented surgical tools that are still in use in the operating room today, Dr. Archibald decided to transfer him to another hospital, in effect dismissing him. As Clarkson explains, Bethune’s eccentric character could have been another reason:

            “The fact that Bethune changed his clothing as quickly as his moods was irritating to many as well. An apartment mate of his said that “his clothes (were) bought from the most expensive tailor in town….(he was) always insisting on white tie and tails at every appropriate occasion.”He was just as capable, however, of going out to a party wearing shoes, trousers, and an overcoat but no shirt or jacket; once, in response to a dare, he dressed as a lumberjack to do his hospital rounds.”

            Bethune didn’t agree with the concept of profit in medicine. In his practice in Montreal, he was often heard saying: “there are two kinds of tuberculosis: the rich man’s and the poor man’s. The rich man lives and the poor man dies.” At medical congresses he gave electrifying speeches that challenged his colleagues on this subject. In 1936, Bethune spearheaded a group of like-minded professionals, the Montreal Group for the Security of the People’s Health, which produced a manifesto for socialized medicine but it was ignored by his peers and the Quebec government. Not a man to be defeated, Bethune decided to go to Spain to fight the fascist army of General Franco. He was sponsored by the Canadian Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. In Spain, Bethune organized, with his Canadian team, the first mobile transfusion unit. Clarkson points out that this important contribution to the history of blood transfusion has yet to be fully recognized.

            The seeds for Bethune’s journey to China were planted in his religious childhood as Clarkson recounts how in the early twentieth century, China was regarded as the place for evangelization and many churches and institutions collected alms so they could sponsor missionaries to that country. In 1938, Bethune felt compelled to go to China under the auspices of the Canadian-American Medical Unit to help the Chinese in their fight against the Japanese invasion. Accompanied by the Canadian nurse Jean Ewen, who spoke Chinese fluently, Bethune trekked for weeks through rough mountainous landscape to get to his post as medical adviser to the Eighth Route Army. Ewen wrote a book about her experiences in China and Clarkson includes Ewen’s vivid account of the famous meeting in Yan’an between Bethune and the young Chairman Mao. In this chapter, Clarkson conveys the physical and emotional hardships that Bethune encountered as he performed his medical duties operating on the front line, setting up a model hospital, training Chinese teenage boys and girls as rudimentary nurses and doctors. One of Bethune’s inventions in China was a mobile operating room for the battlefield: “All the equipment was placed on three mules: the collapsible operating table, a full set of surgical instruments, anaesthetics, antiseptics, twenty-five wooden legs and arms.” Bethune spent much time typing letters to authorities and friends back home requesting urgently needed medical supplies. He also wrote articles for the Canadian and American newspapers, and medical texts and training manuals. His portable typewriter is now kept in the Bethune Museum in Shijiazhuang along with his stethoscope and other memorabilia.

            Danger never fazed Bethune whose dedication to saving the lives of the wounded included operating bare-handed if no surgical gloves were available. In the fall of 1939, at forty-nine years old, Bethune was frail from months of gruelling living conditions and overwhelming work, and when he nicked his finger during surgery he soon fell ill from blood poisoning. He’d been planning to return to Canada to raise funds for the Communist Army, but once he knew he was dying, he wrote his will which concluded: “So the last two years have been the most significant, the most meaningful years of my life.”

            The biography ends a bit quickly but more details can be found in the useful Chronology such as that Bethune’s remains are at the Martyrs’ Tomb in the same city as the Bethune Museum in China. There is an error that needs correcting for future editions which is the location of the memorial statue of Bethune in Montreal: it is not at the corner of Guy and Dorchester, but Guy and De Maisoneuve Streets.

            In Norman Bethune, Clarkson debunks myths and media sensationalism to capture the essence of this extraordinary man and Canadian. Like all larger-than-life people, Bethune transcended labels or contradictions and could be Communist and Christian, scientist and artist,  temperamental and tender. Clarkson advocates for Dr. Bethune’s further recognition in Canada and surely this volume will do this.

Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art.  Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. By Ruud Priem and others. Vancouver Art Gallery and D & M Publishers Inc, 2009. 

             Art is often likened to a gadfly hovering over society’s dung heap. Conversely, it is also universally recognized as society’s most sublime expression. The latter is particularly true for the Golden Age of Dutch art, a five-decade period during the 17^th Century that produced painters such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hal. It was the confluence of political events and the advent of mercantilism, banking and maritime exploration that led to the creation of unprecedented wealth in cities like Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leiden and Utrecht. Not to mention, of course, the infamous slave trade that flourished later on.   This wealth, in turn, was invested in art, not in land, a scarce resource in tiny water-logged Holland. Moreover, unlike other European countries, power in the Netherlands was vested in the hands of merchants and craftsmen and not in the landed aristocracy, a not surprising phenomenon in a country that had become a republic.

             The Netherlands had been part of the Spanish Empire until William I of Orange revolted against  Philip II of Spain. This revolt led to the formation of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. In this republic, cities and provinces had a greater say in local as well as international policies. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602 and the first commodity exchange opened in Amsterdam in 1611. Well-crafted household goods and art, mainly in the form of paintings, were objects of great value and were considered investments, not goods to be consumed. Artists were well paid although some of them, like Rembrandt, became victims of financial mismanagement.

             In this new democratic (for the historical period in question) society, the artists organized themselves into professional guilds to protect the quality of their products and their own professional worth. These guilds also served as educational as well as social security institutions. Artists did not depend on the patronage of the nobility or the church. It was City Hall or other artists or members of the bourgeoisie who commissioned their work. Many artists painted their self-portraits in which they documented their own success as part of the composition of the painting.

             The Rijksmuseum has lent many of these masterpieces to the Vancouver Art Gallery to be exhibited from May 9, 2009 to September 13, 2009. This book is a beautifully annotated and printed introduction to this collection as well as an overview of how democracy in 17^th Century Holland gave rise to such masterpieces.

“I wonder what it must be like

To fuck with a severed penis.”

 
Montrealer K. Gandhar ‘Ginsburg’ Chakravarty knows his penis from his elbow.  He knows the stuff that Bengalis shy away from. He knows that he must say what should not be said. Yeah! Because expatriate Bengalis are just that.

Well! He calls a dick, a dick. Plain and simple. No fig leaves to spare. He did the road trip thing to Calcutta, now Kolkata, lived there for half a year at the age of twenty one and probably did the stuff his parents would not be proud of and probably would have made Allen Ginsburg squirm with delight. (PS: You may want to know that Allen Ginsburg and his partner Peter Orlovsky spent a lot of time in Calcutta and here is a blog about the famous Calcutta Coffee House’s 50^th anniversary. It was in Calcutta that the Beat Generation found their contemporaries in The Hungry Poets -http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/calcutta-college-street-coffee-house.html).  But Gandhar did what every Bengali of Montreal origins or every hyphenated Canadian of Indian origins should have done when they realized the smells, the decay, the blessed protuberances in the body and mind of the Indo-Canadian entity. Travel alone, without your parents, without advice, avoid your kakas (uncle in Bengali) and pishis (Aunt in Bengali) and give a wide berth to the maternal and paternal well-wishers.  Sounds like this Montreal PhD student in religion and prolific musician as well, hogged the streets and suburbs of Kolkata and got neck deep in its noises, filth, poetry, religious absurdity and the ranking insensitivity of its middle-class. In verses and shout-outs that ring out a thunderous simplicity, Gandhar says this in one of his poems -

Ode to a Riksha-Ola

Oie Riksha-Ola!How much to take me to Chuchra station?

That much!?

No, I’ll give you only twelve.

Yes, I know that you can barely feed your family,

And your feet have calluses two inches thick,

And I know that it must hurt your back

To keep peddling around these fat cat pricks

And, sure, you can barely feel your own ass

After each day’s work.

But three rupees mean just that to me.

 Hell! This sounds so familiar. It is just the type of riposte one would hear from a CPI(M) (the Communist Party in West Bengal has ruled for thirty years)  supporting, raging bull Calcutta middle-class charlatan liberal.

 Gandhar Chakravarty covers a wide spectrum of Kolkata reality in a mordant, acerbic  and extremely entertaining style.  He picks up on Kolkata, where the Hungry Poets left off. And he is only in his twenties.

 “Öne poem, two poems, Under a tree he sat, Finding Rhymes To pass the time.”

Starting out from Kalifornia, slowly Gandhar winds his way into Kolkata, right past Dom Dom– that is how Bengalis pronounce Dum Dum, the Airport town where the Brits developed the bullet with the same name.   

Kolkata is falling apart.

Destruction would be a welcome fresh start

To resurrect a city that’s falling apart.

A welcome relief

From years of breathing

Diesel grief.

Chakravarty covers it all from the cutting of Coconuts for life-giving fresh water inside, the marauding mosquitoes, the topsy-turvy world of Park Street discotheques, roadkill, Gandhi on bills, the green suburbs and the inevitable Ma Kali-

Now the tongue,

Stuck out and bitten,

Serves as the nation’s expression

For wrath and shame,

All the same,

Almost blood red

When stained by Paan.

Kolkata Dreams is a great read, especially for those who are always looking for new voices  in Montreal’s various spoken word scenes.

Picture from "Urban Iran"

Urban Iran

Mark Batty Publisher

www.markbattypublisher.com

130 pages, hard cover, $27.95 US/ $32.95 CA/

Urban Iran is a beautiful book. Its eye-catching stark black and white hard cover with embossed lettering and mixed patterns invites the hand to a pleasant touch. A large part of the book is devoted to the art of a children’s book illustrator who was admired by the artistic director of the book. The images are magnificent examples of the art of an era that saw a splash of the creative scene in art galleries, books, and on the stage.

The book is a celebration of the “golden age” of the arts in Iran; the days when beautiful art and music flourished. Those were the 60s and 70s of course. Under the vigilant eyes and ears of the Shah’s oppressive regime there was little that could grow and flourish. Books were censored, arts and writers jailed and tortured, publishing houses shut down and voices silenced. For a brief period in the last two decades of Shah, oil revenues and international interest gave rise to an active art scene.  It was a short-lived burst of creative energy that was suddenly aborted when the men of cloth pronounced it un-Islamic. With the end of that era, people went back to decorating their homes with cheap Chinese posters of Eagle Brand tea imitating the art of Gainsborough and postcards of the prophet and his successor saints.

In 1979 there was a change. Shah’s monarchy ended and the Islamic Republic took the throne. Over the past 30 years, the Islamic regime has failed to prove it is any more open to intellectual freedoms than Shah was. As a matter of fact, decrees from factions in power at times have openly opposed the idea of democratic freedoms based on the “ideological” argument that democracy is a western concept and is not mentioned in the Qur’an.

Music became “corrupt” and art became simply “blasphemy”. If you had something to say, you should whisper it in your daily prayers. The middleclass intelligentsia that had critiqued the undue influence of the west on the Iranian culture, was now bullied out of the political scene by the clergymen who had not read the books, nor had they heard the music, but had deep roots in the neighbourhood mosques. They promoted themselves as the only option out of the “modern corruption” and rode the waves of the rebellion into the royal palaces.

 The book is a testimony to the fact that despite the regime’s best effort at closely controlling all modes of cultural expression, the young under-thirty generation, naturally thirsty for inspiration and ways of expression, is looking for models to emulate or icons to unseat. Bored and unhappy with the deserted scene, some of them look to the bygone years. And for others, emerging from the fanatic repression means reaching for the West for inspiration; ironically the opposite of the very same thing that had united their “revolutionary” fathers for a while. Heavy metal, Goth style, and graffiti have taken root in the land of meditative music and tiled architecture. Various artists desperately seek validation and a sense of belonging by producing work that would win in festivals abroad but is soon forgotten at home. Alone, the spray-paint artist somewhat glorified in the book, uses English words or slang in his street graffiti. How widely is he understood? Does he keep his message private in a public realm to show off his membership in the elite club of those who “dig it”?

 In other words, Urban Iran is in part a brief and hasty report on the art and music produced in basements or back alleys by those rejected by the mainstream media and in part a shallow social commentary. These artists find company in the long line of those the masses on the street never adopted as their own; from the medieval illuminators of the Islamic texts to the avant-garde urban artists under the Shah, to the hiphop/metal/graffiti art/music scene mentioned in the book. It is ironic that most of the art and music discussed in the book bear strong cultural meanings for the Westerner; whether the artists manage to use the existing popular art forms for fresh and locally significant content remains to be seen. For now, private basements hold the practice sites for metal and hiphop, or for risky graffiti, or riské parties.

Unembedded. Two Decades of Maverick War Reporting. By Scott Taylor.  Douglass & McIntyre, 2009.

Review by Maya Khankhoje

Unembedded is the mid-life autobiography of a toy-soldier-playing boy turned real soldier, of a soldier  turned journalist, of a fervent admirer of the military turned its acerbic critic, of a proud Canadian turned whistle blower on  his own  armed forces. It is a riveting book which can be read at two levels: as a personal account of a  man’s life and  as a journalistic account of  life on the other side of the trenches. When the publisher’s representative expressed the hope that I would enjoy reading this book, I cringed. After all, how can one enjoy reading about duplicity, death and desolation?  She was partially right and I was partially wrong. I enjoyed reading the story of  Taylor’s  journey through life as much as I enjoyed reading his clear and honest prose. What I did not enjoy was the insight he gives his readers  into Canadian defence policy  “what we see in them [Americans and their militaristic nationalism] we do not wish to see in ourselves; yet the Canadian government continues to largely follow in lockstep with the US State Department’s directions”.

            Scott Taylor was born into a working class family whose parents skimped so that the children could travel all over the world. They wanted their children to understand otherness. This wide-open childhood gave Scott a desire to join the military to continue seeing the world. What he saw was that the world was not black and white, but different shades of grey. After three and a half years of soldiering he and his wife became publishers (both had a background in arts and writing) and ultimately established Esprit de Corps, a military magazine originally aimed at providing entertainment and information.  It morphed into the voice of the rank and file and then into the conscience of  decision makers of  Canadian military practices and policies.

            Taylor exposed the double standard of the Canadian Armed Forces:  one for the rank and file and one for the officers. He decried the injustice of a system that denied pensions to some veterans while providing some officers all-expenses-paid golf vacations in the Caribbean. Taylor rejected the corruption of an autocratic hierarchy and the blatant racism of some soldiers who belonged to white supremacist groups. And his heart went out to all victims of war, whether victors or vanquished.

            Taylor’s journalistic career has taken him to many hot spots in the world including the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. He interviewed, or rather was  interviewed by Slobodan Milosevic as a potential witness for the defence (Taylor’s take favors Milosevic) in Milosevic’s trial for genocide. He believes that  Louise Arbour undermined the credibility of  The Hague Tribunal by  indicting  Milosevic as a war criminal without supporting forensic evidence.  He criticizes Kim Campbell’s performance as Minister of Defence in the Somalia cover-up and  holds Michael Ignatieff responsible for  the misunderstandings that led to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo.  Taylor also holds the mainstream media accountable for perpetrating myths.

            Since Scott Taylor has warned his readers that they should not believe everything  they read and hear, why should his readers believe him?   Especially since he has let them know  that he is savvy in military intelligence yet denies having been a spy.  We should believe him because he writes about what he saw with his own eyes and felt with his own heart. We should take him seriously because he writes from the perspective of a man who has hobnobbed with the powerful and shared the extreme conditions of  the man in the trenches. We should honour him because he has risked his own life to live up to his own dictum: “Knowing the truth is not enough. We must have the conviction to act upon it.”  In his quest for the truth, he was held  captive, tortured and sentenced to beheading in Iraq. Apparently it was his record as an honest journalist that  in the end saved his life.

            Regardless of our feelings about all things military,  we should  read Unembedded, because at the end of the day Taylor had the courage to trade his heavy machine gun for a light  but powerful quill.

[In 1996 Scott Taylor was awarded the Quill Award for his outstanding contribution to Canadian communications. In 2009 he received the “Unembedded Reporter” award.]

Chef by Jaspreet Singh, 2008, Vehicule Press, Montreal.

Jaspreet Singh drips tomato juice from his lips and sucks on mangoes, in a delicious  and  intricate exercise in culinary commitment and infatuation with an unrequited sexuality that runs through his new novel, Chef. Nearly every chapter if not every other page recounts the brush of a fumbling non-performer, the chef-in-training, with the dominationist sexual advances of a counterfoil character, male or female, while the political and debilitating complexity of India, Kashmir race through the novel in all its bleakness. Cuisine as sexual metaphor, the act of preparation of food, as foreplay, has been used indiscriminately over the years both in fiction and cinema, but Jaspreet uses it with a delectable north Indian ecoutez-moi bien rudeness. A precision military foulness makes gali (abusive language) depravedly sexy, lucid and yet poignantly craving for secularity in the cultural mess that is India. Nothing vibrates more in India’s cathartic duel with itself, than the sexual metaphor of communities screwing each other and deriving absolutist pleasure out of it. And the majority Hindu community excels in berating, deriding and generally second-classing all others including of course Muslims, and then Sikhs and then Christians and so on and then lamenting the loss of Kashmir to Pakistan-inspired militants.

The forlorn beauty of Kashmir, so often depicted in photographic essays, has never been portrayed so elegantly as in this novel. And being a despondent Sikh, Kirpal or Kip, the sous-chef on the rise, portrays Kashmir with an intelligent sentimentality. In the final analysis, India’s attempts to cling on to Kashmir while  endlessly and brutally controlling its people has led to all the mindless acts going on in India, including the latest carnage in Mumbai. Jaspreet Singh  meticulously portrays the nearly silly and decadent lifestyle of the British nurtured colonial Indian Army, whose class hierarchy and servant-lord dichotomy remains an impediment to its ability to perform and in effect be taken by surprise by both the Kashmiri militants and the Pakistani military’s hide and seek games.

Somewhere in the Siachen glacier in a dark cavernous black hole, aptly illustrated on the cover, the Head chef ultimately douses himself in kerosene and takes his life, somewhat inexplicably. A suicidal “screw you!” act that could have been better developed.

In essence, an excellently luscious novel that fritters away towards the end with the hope that newer and younger people with intelligent secular notions and a sense of poetry could perhaps turn the tables on the colonel-sahib/saffron nexus that has occupied the Indian mindset towards Kashmir.