[First published in A. Rivista anarchica, anno 40, n.2 (352) aprile 2010, pp. 47-49, Milano, Italia. Translation  by Maya Khankhoje]

           Imperialism is a phenomenon which dates back all the way to antiquity, its epicenter having  changed throughout the centuries. When conditions have permitted it, it has matured in the West, with England standing out  amongst the most rapacious nations, which, before becoming  a model of democracy (a notion which is contested by many) had gone through long periods of expansionism. The so-called Commonwealth is nothing else but the heir of old colonialism.

            India  was one of the largest and oldest nations to free itself from the tutelage of the British lion and its independence was hailed by the United Nations Organization in 1947. But in fact,  the prevailing Mountbatten plan  did not satisfy Gandhi whose misgivings were confirmed by the events  that followed: the Indo-Pakistan war and the assassination of the Mahatma.

            Today, in spite of its instability, the country is slowly transforming itself into a modern democracy even though it is still torn by religious, political and linguistic intestinal wars.

            India has been the scenario of many violent confrontations of a repressive and irredentist nature and the struggle of its people against internal and external oppressors is full of episodes. Revolutionaries have devised  new methods of revolt and, for the first time in history, a very large collectivity has been able to avoid subservience to foreign powers  by adopting original mechanisms that date back to the nineteenth century  and which find their roots in non-violence.  Gandhi, the guru, was inspired  directly by the christian anarchism of Tolstoy,  who in turn was influenced by Proudhon, a libertarian federalist.

            Be it as it may, if the Indian people embraced the non-violent solution, it happened after a long journey of hesitations and not before having practiced other forms of struggle. Independence-seeking intellectuals experienced this slow evolutionary process and  wound up either  resigning themselves to it or enthusiastically adhering to the “Gandhian method.” Amongst these we have the fine example of Pandurang Khankhoje who typifies the conversion of the Indian people to the precepts of the Mahatma.

            The recent publication of I Shall Never Ask for Pardon: A Memoir of Pandurang Khankhoje (Penguin Books India, 2008) edited by Savitri Sawhney, daughter of the author who passed away long ago in 1967, is noteworthy. During my only trip to India, in 1987, I had the honour of being received  by the Khankhoje family and had the pleasure of meeting his widow (now deceased herself), his daughter Savitri (sister of my dear friend Maya who resides in Canada) and her husband and daughter. At that time this book was just a vague project.  After twenty years I am pleased to see that it has been realized  and authored by one of the daughters (both of them with a skilled pen). In order to avoid falling into panegyric, Sawhney has availed herself of  the hand-written memoirs of her father, her  family as well as official archives, ample collected correspondence, newspaper cuttings, testimony by third parties, personal reminiscences. In sum, it is a rich combination of elements that rely on news, direct observation, always supported by objective confirmation, primary and secondary sources, wisely interwoven. A vibrant portrait of humanity and wisdom becomes evident.

            The life of Khankhoje is rich in unusual events. Just to begin with, journeys that take him from India to Indochina, then to Hong Kong and Japan, the United States. Then again Asia, Afghanistan, Persia, Tashkent, then Mexico (where he gets married and where his two daughters are born).  During these shifts and long stays in various countries, he learns many languages and even acquires  scientific knowledge graduating in agronomy (a field in which he would become a great specialist). He meets outstanding personalities: Sun-Yat-Sen (to whom he would teach English), Lenin (who held him in high esteem), Pandit Nehru (who hailed him as a freedom fighter), Diego Rivera (who would paint him in a fresco and would become his close friend), Rajendra Prasad (to whom he would write a report on the agricultural problems of India), Tina Modotti (exiled Italian political figure who would become a great photographer in Mexico) and so on. He frequents Indian anarchists in exile, amongst whom is the well known M.P.T. Acharya (later editor of Indian Libertarian of Bombay) and the very active Har Dayal (expelled from the United States for his anarchist militancy) as well as American and Mexican  comrades amongst whom stand out the Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón brothers, as well as William C. Owen, editor  of the English  page of  Regeneración, sympathizing with the Mexican revolutionary cause which, by the way, was very similar to the Indian one. Pandurang Khankhoje even joined the Industrial Workers of the World who found him work as a lumberjack in Astoria, while he studied at Corvallis, in Oregon State University. Pandurang Khankhoje, even though he appreciated the anarchist point of view and sympathized a lot with the ideas of the Magón brothers, and above all, with those of Har Dayal  — who became his right-hand man within the Ghadar party  (founded by them in California and Portland in May 1913) –would not fully join the anarchist movement, just as he would not join the Communist Party even after 1917 and in spite of his enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution and for Lenin.

            Ever since he was young  Pandurang decided to devote his life to achieving India’s independence.  He plunged into politics  very early on and at the age of ten already founded a secret society: Bal Samaj which then became Bandhav Samaj. He created cells with four members who swore to fight for independence. It is a question, of course, of armed struggle, because this precedes the Gandhian period. When his father chose a bride for him (as was then the tradition in Indian society) he refused with the pretext of  wanting to offer his life to the imminent revolution. His father was indignant but shortly afterwards he tried again so his son was obliged to run away from home, turning down the money for expenses that his mother offered him. However, he did accept some sweets that she made for him just before leaving, with the warning to only eat them when suffering great penury or dearth. When the time arrived to resort to those snacks, Pandurang realized that  each one contained a gold coin. It sounds like a fable from other times…

            His journey would last decades during which he would not stop fighting for the independence of his country by any means. Side by side with his agricultural studies he would also develop a military career convinced  that the handling of weapons  was essential to achieve victory. In America he was able to register at the Mount Tamalpais Military Academy. During his student days he was active and founded in Berkley the league for Indian Independence. British authorities were keeping watch over him intercepting his correspondence (straightaway arresting the addressees of his letters). The Portland chapter of that League was very active and had 400 members. Pandurang envisaged disembarking with a thousand volunteers in a neighbouring country and from there initiating  armed struggle with a cross-border invasion, but the British counterespionage services were  well organized, thwarting  all attempts at revolt by means of intrigue, preventive arrests, systematic repression. In order to increase membership, Khankhoje became associated with Sikhs. To be able to communicate with other revolutionary and freedom fighting factions he learned other Indian languages. His mother tongue was Marathi (in which he wrote his memoirs), but he started studying Punjabi and Urdu while he had a smattering of  Afghani and Farsi, a bit of Chinese and Japanese, to which he later on added Spanish and French. But by then he had a high-profile and could not go about incognito under any circumstances even if he changed his address to hide. He was fighting powerful and astute enemies and all his movements were under surveillance, noted, foiled. He finally realized this and wound up embracing the Gandhian solution, the opposite of his own. The Mahatma faced his enemy head on. One must remember that every time Gandhi organized a protest demonstration he advised the British authorities. He would not ask for permission, he merely informed the enemy of his intentions.  Passive resistance was not for everybody, it requires a tremendous inner discipline, but when it is practiced seriously, systematically and stoically, it may end up in unexpected results.

            Khankhoje took to heart his extraordinary  and, perhaps even contradictory experiences: the violent revolution in Mexico in 1910 and the non-violent one in India about thirty years later. Too wise to settle for provisional and incomplete results he was able to foresee the drawbacks  of both  that might ensue from a  merely political victory.  It was necessary to intervene at an economic and social level. The conquest of power or the instauration of parliamentary democracy picked up  morale but did not, in and of themselves,  solve the practical problem of survival. It is no coincidence that he completed agricultural studies and wanted to put them to good use. Rivera precisely painted him  in his fresco surrounded by ears of corn. We can imagine Khankhoje followed in the work started by my acquaintance and fellow citizen Prof. Mario Calvino (father of Italo, the writer) who had understood that Mexico should develop its agriculture, be it to feed the population, be it to lead it in the right path towards self sufficiency and economic independence. They did not listen to Calvino so he went off to Cuba and Khankhoje would face the same situation decades later. Having returned to India in the fifties he would in fact try to apply his Mexican discoveries to local conditions but his efforts would be hindered by bureaucrats and politicians.

            Pandurang  reacquired his lost citizenship but he had by then reached retirement age, so he turned to writing his memoirs, proud of having left traces of his work in  Mexico and  in India and proud even of having  brought the two countries closer to each other politically. Mexico was, in fact, the first country to recognize the sovereignty of India, henceforth independent from British domination. He died in 1967 at the age of 81, leaving behind, like a true internationalist, a European wife (Jeanne Khankhoje was Belgian), an Indian daughter (Savitri) and a Mexican daughter (Maya). His heart and his mind, on the other hand, did not belong to any country, but rather to humanity.

From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond. Images of India in International Films of the Twentieth Century, by Vijaya Mulay. Seagull Books, 2010, London, New York and Calcutta.

[Vijaya Mulay, a.k.a. Akka, or Elder Sister, was  born in 1921 in  Mumbai, India. She  is a documentary filmmaker, film historian, writer, educationist and researcher. In 2002 she was awarded the  V. Shantaram Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Indian Government. She is already working on her next book on education.]

            
           From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond, RYGB for short, is Vijaya Mulay’s magnum opus on one hundred years, not of solitude but of multitudinous films  made by foreigners smitten with India or by Diaspora  Indians reluctant to forget her. It is also a history of cinema, the story of the author’s love affair with it and an initiatory  journey through the  land whom  the gypsies call bara than, or big place. At 554 pages and with an impressive collection of stills, archival material and documents from private collections, RYGB is worthy of  a Rajah’s library or  a Yogi’s morning meditation. It is also worthy of Satyagraha, or strict adherence to the truth, an ancient principle of Indian culture taken up by Gandhi as his strategy against the British Raj. However, what exactly is truthfulness in film? Cinema is, after all,  the archetypal  purveyor of dreams  and illusions as well  as  the insidious vehicle for propaganda. The author tries to decipher these questions for her readers. She succeeds admirably well.

            RYGB starts off with a foreword by Thomas Waugh, from Concordia University in Montreal, who explains that he particularly loves “Akka’s introspection on her schizophrenic identity as simultaneous film buff and film censor.” The book is broken down  into ten chapters, laid out chronologically so that the reader may enter directly into a specific subject. There are also several appendices containing Louis Malle’s correspondence, a list of German films and synopses of selected films. Chapter 1 is a delightful foray into  Short Films of the Silent Era, with particular attention to so-called Durbar films which,  according to Stephen Bottomore, were  “part of a political and military strategy for keeping India in submission”. They were also the precursors of modern-day historical documentaries. Chapter 2, Rajahs and Yogis, explains  how India was depicted as part of the exotic and mystic east by a “rational” west, with particular attention to why Germans where so interested in the Aryan origins of Indians. Chapter 3, as the title suggests, is about Empire Films of the Colonial Era, because “the need of empires to construct an acceptable public face means that knowledge has to be arranged so as to present a favorable view of those who dominate”. Chapter 4 transitions into Empire Films of the Postcolonial Era. Here the author explains how a changed post-Second World War Scenario necessitated a redefinition of strategies by colonial powers like Britain. Films like Bhowani Junction slyly suggest “that Indians may not prove equal to the task of keeping India independent”. Chapters 5 and 6 honour the  Seekers, as Mulay calls them, or the four directors who did not see India as exotic but rather as the cradle of all Indo-European civilization.  The transformation of Jean Renoir and Louis Malle from France, Roberto Rossellini from Italy and Arne Sucksdorff from Sweden in the arms of an all embracing India is  studied in great detail. This is particularly true of Louis Malle whose life was turned around by India and who  became a life-long friend of the author. Chapter 7, labeled Insiders-Outsiders is a nod to the work of  foreign filmmakers who either lived in India for a long time or made films in collaboration with Indians. The enduring partnership of James Francis Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are important examples of this category. Chapter 8,  New Trends: From Gandhi to the Diaspora, covers the last two decades of the Twentieth Century.  In this new vision, India is not treated at the Other but as a microcosm of the universe. Mahabharata (1988), a metaphor for the history of humanity -directed by Peter Brook- is based on the well-known Indian epic of the same name.  Chapter 9 is a study of Gender Roles and Relations. Here it is interesting to note that European films did not consider a romance between an Indian and a Caucasian taboo, whereas American films considered it miscegenation.

            Chapter 10, the author’s Conclusions, neatly ties up the apparently disparate themes of the previous chapters. It also provides Vijaya with a forum to delve into the nature of truth (“Everything is correct and so is its reverse”, she notes wryly, quoting Rabindranath Tagore), the deleterious effects of the narcissism that all cultures are guilty of  and  the amazement of modern-day filmmakers who “wonder that India continues to exist as a single entity despite its amazing diversity”. Vijaya Mulay concludes with the realization, as expressed in these films,  that  “happiness is dependent not on material wealth but on maintaining a balance in human relations”. Her insistence on the need to return to India’s culture of integration with nature and its long-standing close relationship with animals, is the author’s final message.

            From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond is an obligatory text for libraries and  cinema schools and  a wonderful read for movie buffs and India fans. It is a formidable book written by a formidable lady.

Soul Mountain, by Gao Xingjian. Harper Perennial, 2001. 

[NB: The reviewer has chosen to stay attuned to the Chinese style of the original to enable readers to better capture its flavour.]

            Although I had heard about the controversial Nobel Prize winner Soul Mountain years ago, it is not until recently that I was able to read it. And I only got a rough idea of it, as the book was borrowed for a limited time. As the Chinese proverb goes: “see a leopard spot, see a leopard.”

            I read the original Chinese version first. The best way to get the original and authentic impression of a book is from its original and authentic language version, for each language has its own uniqueness which can not be fully converted into another. The work of translation, no matter how precise it is, will more or less lose the authenticity of the original. And the more outstanding the book, the more this could be the case. It is with the expectation of an outstanding book that I opened Soul Mountain. Seeing is believing. As a reader, I believe the true appraisal of a book should be from one’s own eyes.

            At first I was disappointed, either because I am not a good reader or I am too good. My first impression of Soul Mountain was that it was not worth reading and that it was as difficult to reach a conclusion about it as it was to reach the unreachable mountain from which the book gets its name. As we say in Chinese: “like a chicken rib, it is tasteless to taste and a pity to discard.” The book does not read like a novel, or a travelogue, or a diary, or prose, or a biography or an essay or anything in particular. It would be more interesting to say that it is philosophic al prose like  Nietzsche’s genius work Thus Spake Zarthustra. .

            Enjoying great popularity should be the key element of a good novel. In terms of readability, Soul Mountain lacks artistic charm with its disordered, obscure, tedious and story-less story. It is known that Gao is a multi-talented artist with multiple titles, play writer, painter, translator, director, critic, etc. However, in the words of the ancient Chinese sage Mencius: “one cannot expect to catch and to enjoy the two delicacies of fish and bear’s paw at the same time,” Gao had no choice but to become a second-rate playwright,  a third-rate interpreter-translator and a fourth-rate painter and writer, among which his gift of story-telling is obviously the weakest. This reduces Soul Mountain  to a mere soliloquy by Gao. Frankly, I really doubt that the book could attract any publisher in the Chinese market before winning its Nobel Prize.   

            Yet as an afterthought, I think we cannot simply say that Soul Mountain is  “not good to read.” Needless to say, a masterpiece’s value lies in the perfect combination of both ideological content and artistic quality, thus can it be gifted with maximum and eternal charm and can stand the touchstone of time and space to become immortal, just as the famous four Chinese Classic Masterpieces mentioned in Gao’s Nobel Lecture and the masterpieces of the world. The problem is,  this kind of rare work is becoming even rarer nowadays. Even Gao himself admitted, “Now I seldom read novels. They are not interesting. The new novels are generally uninteresting. I feel that there is basically nothing worth reading.” All his geese are swans. I wonder whether Gao realizes that his readers might have exactly the same feeling? In the great modern time and with great expectations of the world there have seldom appeared great  masterpieces.  What’s wrong with this time and world of ours? This would be a big question mark itself. It seems that people can only make the best of things from the following choices: Grade A, Perfect Work. Excellent both in ideology content and artistic charm; Grade B, Imperfect Work. Excellent in ideology content but regrettable in artistic charm; Grade C, Superficial work. Charming in art but shallow in thought. Soul Mountain could be classified into Grade B, personally, a typical imperfect, imbalanced work where its core is much prettier than its unattractive shell.

            In my opinion, among Gao’s multifarious artistic attainments, the most anonymous yet the most valuable one is as a thinker. Though a bit nihilistic, morbid and cynical, he is a man of great concern and ardent exploration, and this is just the most important quality of a good writer. He said that what concerned him was  “men’s problems, their existential environment their inner being,” and he has been showing this care and concern through various artistic explorations throughout his artistic career. His explorative eyes went  from man to society to environment to nature, and eventually his spiritual journey arrived at Soul Mountain. Just as its inspirational title, the message of Soul Mountain is all about the almighty spirit of nature, and its metaphor could go far beyond a sick modern man’s searching for his final destiny of redemption and regression to mother nature. It could be a review of man-nature relationship, an insight into this very troubled world.. So, despite the insufficiency of Soul Mountain, Gao has still made a valuable experiment with its ideology as I see it.

            Furthermore, Gao’s idea is not water without source, or a tree without roots, but stemmed from the profound sediment of Chinese culture. He said he attaches a lot of importance to the ancient books and records, namely ‘The Book of Changes’ (more than three thousand years old) and ‘Laozi’ and ‘Zhuangzi’. (more than two thousand years old). These are the very source and crystal of the splendid ancient Chinese civilization and wisdom. “Their cognition and interpretation of the relationship of man and nature, is  primitive man’s earliest way of looking at his  existential environment, and it is not the political way of looking,” he said. Is the development of human beings getting closer to or farther away from this ultimate truth, the way of nature, the “Tao”? This is a universal problem. Soul Mountain is just an examination and ponderation over this problem with “primitive man’s earliest way of looking at his  existential environment, but not the political way of looking.”

            Being one of the earliest pioneers and explorers of history, this ideological system of returning to the simple and plain lifestyle of nature state is the kernel of Chinese culture resulted from the vicissitudes of history. The peaceful and self-sufficient mode preserved by Chinese for thousands of years is deemed one of the most reasonable to the way of nature. However, man was confused by his own growth and ignored or kidnapped the sagacious ancient civilization and chose the vain and dangerous mode, and the world has been in a mess ever since.             Now, along with the prevailing waves of globalization and capitalization, rises the global crisis of existence. How to avoid the more and more intricate and complicated contradictions caused by violating the way of nature? The answers are nowhere to be found by the exhausted people but are buried in the deserted old treasure. It is a priceless value not only for the Chinese but also the world to excavate and develop in order to resolve common problems. Soul Mountain is just a glimpse into the lost treasure, how far are people from fully discovering it? The whole world seems still confused and “knows nothing” as the author said at the conclusion of his book.  Yet, the glimpse itself is worthwhile.

            Last but not least, Gao is not only a scholar of Chinese language and culture, but also a learned person of French and foreign culture. This rare specialty among Chinese writers broadened his vision and enriched his thought, and enabled him to understand and communicate between different languages, cultures and mentalities effectively. This is even more important in today’s world, for many conflicts and contradictions are actually misunderstandings and suspicions caused by cultural differences and miscommunication, especially between the two poles of culture, the oriental and the occidental. In this sense, the winning of the Nobel Prize by Soul Mountain could be deemed as the expectation and confirmation of this importance, and the expectation and confirmation of the traditional value of Chinese culture.

Reading A Woman Among Warlords you may find yourself forgetting on occasion that this is, in fact, a work of non-fiction, so extreme are the terms of its author’s life and homeland.  The youngest MP ever to be elected to Afghanistan’s parliament, Malalai Joya was kicked out in 2007 amid cries of, “Take this prostitute out of here!”  Her crime had been to challenge the legitimacy of a parliament and judiciary, largely composed of warlords, drug barons, fundamentalists, qualified by the participation of intellectuals and justified by the protection of NATO countries such as the US  and Canada.  Here is the one of the women NATO governments claimed they were going to war to help.  There is a certain shock value in the details of just how far from such a mission our governments have strayed, how far from grace they have fallen.

The beauty of the book Malalai Joya has co-authored with Derrick Okeefe is that it rings with reality, as lived and understood by an Afghan woman, wise with words by dint of an education and politicization.  The truth of that reality here brims with good people, bad people, and fearful people, crimes of the most egregious nature are detailed and their perpetrators named.

Sure to be one of a kind as it mixes diverse genres: personal anecdote, history, socio-political analysis and political manifesto.  It is also a personal appeal to the reader, to understand both the historic and present roles played out by foreign governments, occupation forces and corporations in both funding and implementing the tormenting and terrorizing of ordinary Afghan people and the destabilizing of their country. 

To this end, tragedies are spelled out: wedding parties are bombed and civilians killed in the thousands, the infrastructure wasted, food crops turned to heroin crops, children forced into labor, women forced into abusive marriages, women who self-immolate in sheer despair.  This is the country with the lowest longevity where most people still do not live beyond the age of 43, thanks to a grueling poverty, that in itself testifies to the contradiction and futility of aid carrying a gun.  

There are victories too, so few and so hard won that they are indeed precious and moving.  Malalai’s election and this book must surely count as two of these.  The subject of hate campaigns, attacks and death threats, Malalai is kept constantly on the move and her precise whereabouts a secret.  The blue burqa she must wear becomes a life saver, as it blends her into a sea of other burqas.  This paradox also provides a useful metaphor, for though on the one hand she cuts a heroic figure, on the other, as Malalai readily maintains, she is just one among an ever growing number of Afghan women and men, fighting for women’s rights and a democratic Afghanistan.  This is a movement largely growing underground, demonstrating great courage and community in the face of mortal threats by warlord militias, and fundamentalist policing that preaches a woman should be “in her house or in the grave”.    

Not surprisingly, Malalai speaks and writes with the urgency of a woman who counts every day of life as a day won and not to be wasted.  She writes with great pride and affection of an Afghanistan that’s rarely ever been mentioned in the western corporate media that prefers to cast this land in the light of a primitive country full of backward people with neither the inclination nor the culture to manage themselves in a civil fashion; a people who must, therefore, be bombed into the sort of democracy that only criminals are fit to defend. 

Malalai’s book serves as a counterweight to such constructed news and views, citing history and culture of the struggle for Afghan democracy, with the likes of Amanullah Khan and Queen Soraya, the parties and organizations in the Afghanistan of the first half of the 20^th century. All of which sowed the seeds of a constitutional monarchy and a more egalitarian society, that saw women enter parliament and many areas of the labor force.  Such homegrown evolution suffered serious setbacks however under direct Soviet influence in the 70’s that culminated with Soviet occupation in ’79, all amid the cold war machinations of the US and the latter’s funding and arming of extremists that would, in turn, fuel the bloody civil war of ‘92-’96 and ongoing instability.

The democratic urge has surely taken a severe beating and yet Malalai finds reason to be hopeful. She writes, “The support I received in the election campaign proved that the inequality between men and women was not some kind of permanent part of Afghan culture – things could be changed for the better.”  Most of the religious leaders in her province of Farah supported her too.  And she recounts many expressions of Afghans passionate longing for an end to corruption and violence and the beginning of a better world for their children.  One man tells her, quite simply, “I want to put my hat on your head and your scarf on mine.”  

The poignancy of this voice stands in stark contrast to the cynicism she encounters elsewhere. In the interests of realpolitik, Malalai has frequently been asked to forgive and forget the “mistakes” of the past, the contradictions of the present, and to compromise a little.  To the Italian journalist who asks her why she doesn’t try a more diplomatic approach, she replies with the question, “Would you have compromised with fascists like Mussolini in your country?”

Malalai maintains that guns are clearlynot the best way to win a democracy.  She argues as an educator who understands democracy as a matter of process, discussion, education.  Nevertheless, she does distinguish democracy from freedom.  Where Afghan freedom is concerned, she is prepared to do what Afghans have done before, as they did with the British and the Soviets, and that is to defend it to the hilt. 

Presently, Afghans remain “trapped between two enemies”, NATO forces and the Taliban.  Malalai reasons that leaving Afghans with the one enemy invader to conquer would give them a fighting chance for a free Afghanistan and the eventual possibility of diplomatic resolution of her country’s regional differences, in an Afghan way, at an Afghan pace. With this in mind, she urges “democracy loving people”, Canadians among them too of course, to do whatever we can to get NATO forces out of Afghanistan. Evidently, large anti-war demonstrations and opinion polls here in the West do not go unnoticed among the “democracy loving people of Afghanistan”. 

The thing about Malalai Joya is that she really believes that when enough people become aware, “they will rise like a storm that brings the truth.”  Her book ends with an Afghan proverb, “Our enemies can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of spring.”

PERFECT HOSTAGE. Aun San Suu Kyi, Burma and the Generals. By Justin Wintle.  Arrow, 2007.

In Burma there is no prejudice against girl babies. In fact, there is a general belief that daughters are more dutiful and loving than sons and many Burmese parents welcome the birth of  a daughter as an assurance that they will have somebody to take care of them in their old age. Aung San Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma, 1997.

PERFECT HOSTAGE is an imperfect biography of Suu Kyi in the sense that the author devotes almost half of the book to the life and times of  Bogyoke (General) Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father as well as the  father of modern Burma,   and the generals that have controlled the country ever since. Yet the author could not have done otherwise. In order to understand what has made  Suu Kyi the modern-day  symbol of peaceful resistance,  it is necessary to be acquainted with  Burmese history and the events that catapulted her from an ordinary life as the wife of an academic to the extraordinary position of Prime Minister Elect (but never in office) of her besieged country.

            The general public is very much aware of the fact that she has been under house arrest for more than fourteen out of the 20 last years. It also knows that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, as well as a panoply of prizes from other countries, including the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the Jawaharlal Nehru Prize for International Understanding. This same public also knows that her political achievements came at great personal cost: prolonged separation from her children and husband and her husband’s loss  to cancer without having had a chance to visit him at his deathbed. In fact, she has been criticized for not being a wife and mother before being a political creature. What is not so well known is the exact nature of her achievements and that again, is understandable, for they are intangible, although no less worthy of admiration for that.

            Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father,  was assassinated on the eve of Burmese independence when she was barely two years old. He was instrumental in bringing about Burma’s independence from the British and is credited with creating the modern day army which still controls the country. Suu Kyi, like any Burmese citizen, was brought up to revere him and seeing her father’s picture in public spaces and on bank notes must have reinforced her sense of destiny as her father’s political heir. However, as she grew up she realized that the army had strayed from its original role of protector of the people.

            From an early age she knew she was called to serve her country but was not clear as to the exact role she would play. After having obtained a  degree in political science and economics she worked for the United Nations in an administrative capacity and then married Dr. Michael Aris, a British citizen  specializing in Tibetan culture. They lived in Bhutan for several years and  then settled down in England with their two sons. There she obtained a   doctorate in Oriental Studies. When her mother had a massive stroke in  1988 Suu Kyi returned to Burma to nurse her and the rest is history, as the saying goes.

            The last twenty-odd years have been marked by civil unrest in Burma, brutal repression by a succession of generals and a general awakening of the population to democratic alternatives. Throughout all this Suu Kyi has stood her ground, been arrested and tortured and remained  under house arrest on and off. During this period, Suu Kyi has continued rallying the people around her either openly in her house or  in front of the family compound  through clandestine messages. She even  managed to win the first –and only general elections- held in Burma but was never allowed to take up office.

            The international community, through the United Nations and diplomatic negotiations, has continued to support her peaceful movement. It has awarded her accolades in the form of  honorary degrees and prizes which she has funneled back into her humanitarian work. However,  author Justin Winkle’s appreciation of her role is not so simplistic. While admiring her courage, determination and integrity, he believes that armed struggle is sometimes necessary to topple violent regimes and that passive resistance has actually played into the hands of the regime. In fact, his contention is that her intransigence has resulted in the death of many of her supporters and bolstered the dictatorship  that has in her “the perfect hostage” who serves as a bargaining chip with the outside world.

            The Nobel Prize Committee citation prefers to look at the broader picture:

“…In awarding the Nobel peace prize for 1991 to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honour this woman for her unflagging efforts and to show its support for the many people throughout the world who are striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means”.

The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning, edited by George Bowering and Jean Baird, Random House Canada, 2009. 351 pp.

                   
           The Heart Does Break is a Canadian anthology of personal stories on grief and mourning that immediately attracted my attention since I experienced a heart breaking loss myself  a few years ago.

            In his Introduction, “May I Bring You Tea?,” George Bowering, Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, explains that this book came out of a personal need. His wife, Jean Baird, a well-known magazine publisher, lost her thirty-five-year-old daughter, Bronwyn,  in a tragic car accident in June 2005, a loss that continues to affect their daily lives deeply. As Bowering notes, people who become impatient with mourners and say “get over it” (something I have experienced too) don’t understand the grieving process. After doing some research on the literature available and finding little in Canadian publications, the couple decided to collaborate on this project.

            They began by commissioning Canadian writers of various degrees of fame  to share their own experiences with loss. Many declined to contribute due to the difficulty of the subject. The stories now gathered in this book are uneven in literary quality but are powerful, some more eloquent, intimate, perceptive than others. Overall, each writer offers some insight that illuminates the darkness that is mourning a mother, a father, a sister, a longtime friend, and most painful of all, a child (whether adult or unborn.)          

            In The Heart Does Break, similar reactions are shared among the writers, for example, how death changes the perception of time, how there is no more “ordinary” time since the death of the loved one. And time doesn’t ease much of the pain in recollection. The mourner, whatever her or his age, experiences a profound identity crisis.

            The late Paul Quarrington, the prize-winning novelist, musician and film maker, who died in January of this year of lung cancer, wrote “The Bluesman”, a personal story that reads like a meditation on the death of his mother when he was a teen. Her death made him feel “abandonned and monstrous,” and angrily he told his father that he “wouldn’t cry.” Vulnerable, shunned at school, he fell under the spell of Paul, an adolescent who was a petty thief, in and out of prison. This Paul offered him some friendship but also his “first drink”, the alcohol that soothed his grief but turned into an addiction. As Quarrington remarks, he then became a “fifteen-year-old hard-drinking bluesman from Don Mills, Ontario.”

            In a very different story, “Waiting to Grieve,” Montreal poet and playwright, Endre Farkas, writes about mourning in our contemporary society and how the funeral home has become a conglomerate cultural center with café, art exhibits and other activities. He questions the appropriateness of this trend to “celebrate” a death and presents the Jewish burial rituals in contrast. As a  child, he reluctantly accompanied his family to the cemetery every year to mourn relatives such as his aunt Margit, a strong, hard-working woman who owned a “hole-in-the wall” restaurant on Prince Arthur Street where many Hungarian immigrants congregated to eat goulash, stuffed cabbage and other homemade dishes. To ease his sadness at her death, he wrote his own eulogy for her, “a satisfying act.”

            Some of the writers suffer more than one loss in a short span of time which complicates the grieving process even more. Linda McNutt, a novelist and teacher, writes that the day of her father’s funeral, she learned that she was pregnant. This explained why she was ravenous at the funeral buffet. Months later, due “second trimester infant death,” she tragically gave birth to a lifeless baby. Like many of the contributors, McNutt notes how people say the wrong things or “platitudes” that fail to ease the grief. For her, anger is not a stage of grief, but what “keeps me alive. It feeds my hunger.”

            Other similar experiences described in these stories are the physical reactions to the loss such as vertigo, panic attacks, or even breakdowns. Some write of vivid dreams of the deceased or supernatural occurences.

            Austin Clarke, author of ten novels among other writings, and winner of the 2002 Giller Prize and the 2003 Trillium Prize for The Polished Hoe, describes in “There is no Good in a Black Night,” a poetic prose piece, how upon his return home to Toronto after the funeral for his mother in Brooklyn, the doorbell kept ringing. Though there was no one there, he felt certain it was his mother’s “presence.” An affecting picture of Gladys Irene Clarke Luke, Austin Clarke’s mother who died at ninety-two years old, shows her at a table eating, laughing, sponge hair curlers still on her head. Each contributions (save one) offers an accompanying photo of the deceased which adds visual poignancy.

            Rituals for the dead are less traditional than in the past. There are still funerals and wakes but one ritual often described in this anthology is the disposal of the ashes of the dead. In Marni Jackson’s “Just Cremation,” in memory of her father Clyde Bruce Jackson, she describes with some dark humor, how she travelled with his ashes from southern Ontario to Saskatoon where she found the bridge her father, an engineer, helped build in 1930. “I had left behind the vase, thinking that a woman with a vase on a bridge might draw attention. The ashes, in a plastic bag tied with two garbage twists, were as heavy and big as two bricks.”  As she empties the bag into the river with some difficulty, her cousin takes pictures with her disposable camera.

            One of the most beautifully written stories is “On the Material, or, Gail’s Books”, by B.C. poet and teacher at Simon Fraser University, Stephen Collis. He remembers his sister, Gail Victoria Tulloch, who died of cancer in 2002. They shared a love of books and as they grew up, she was the first to make him feel that writing poetry mattered. As in many of the stories in this anthology, intimate details of the last days or even last moments are shared which may make for uncomfortable but powerful reading. In a style that might recall the strokes of an Impressionist painting, Hollis begins his story this way:

            “Just after our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary – an August day, garden sun, her flower print dress -my sister Gail learns she has cancer and I recall that dress her smile and the sun. On December 19, 2002, she dies. Enduring her final lucid moments trying to talk and something in her tongue seems gone and as a kind of resignation the only word that comes out again and again is “okay “okay.”

            During the three-day wake, Hollis recalls how he sat in the room alone by her body and read verses from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass out loud. He includes poems that he wrote to his sister as a way to honor her and continue their relationship beyond death.

            Other outstanding stories are by Erin Mouré, Brian Brett, Catherine Bush, George Elliott Clarke and others. I found The Heart Does Break  to be an engrossing, disturbing  ultimately beneficial book that can enlighten those of us who dare want to learn more about grief and mourning.

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>.

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.