Derek Walcott

To my students at the local university I announced that we would be reading the essay “My Canada,” and, who is the author (I’d told them previously)? “That girl from India,” blared out one student at the back.  That girl from India–I corrected–is Canadian writer Anita Rau Badami; she definitely isn’t the Other; and, indeed, her essay emphasized the positive view of Canada from a new immigrant’s perspective with her intriguing view that Canada is “like a shy coquette.”  Ah, more than a shy coquette, I think, with all our polarities and diversities, in an inexorably changing land:  “the first post-modernist country,” as former Prime Minister Paul Martin called it in his inaugural address a few years back; and, I believe, he really had in mind the contributions made by our artists and writers of diverse backgrounds.  In deconstructing Canlit, if just the conventional view of it with writers like Austin Clarke, Rohinton Ministry, M.G.Vassanji, and Larissa Lai making their mark–in what’s being called the “international” phase of our writing (David Staines)–everything seems tied to identity a la multiculturalism, albeit Michael Ignatieff’s urging us to consider “the narcissism of our small differences” in a country with a “triangular foundation”–English, French, and Aboriginal heritage–as John Ralston Saul describes it.

Not unexpectedly, literature plays a formative or foundational role in nation-building; Aldous Huxley puts it best: “Nations are to a large extent invented by their poets and novelists,” no doubt by just evoking “a sacred memory from childhood” (Dostoevsky), which lots of immigrant writers–so-called–bring to bear in their narrative form and craft. But, I ask: Is the talent coming from multicultural communities be any real surprise? Demographic changes, seen markedly in our cities–where most Canadians now live–lead us to the expectation of a dynamic country as more talented people keep coming to our shores; and, I will argue this is where our new readership (of books) lies because of the changing cultural fabric and the challenge to sustain and foster a viable reading culture, especially among new ethnocultural communities. Of relevance, too, is the view that all our peoples wish to see themselves reflected or actualized in the shaping of the country, beyond mundane nation-building or political terms as we keep coming to grips with what Margaret Atwood calls “the idea of the north” (geography is destiny–as has been said so often). But gone are the days when Indian novelist Bharati Mukherjee (when she’d lived in Montreal) had been told by a CBC interviewer–that you have “to play in snow as a child to be considered Canadian”; or, as I was asked at the University of Miami a few years back that I couldn’t be considered Canadian if I didn’t write about the Franklin Expedition.

New histories, mythologies, are now all before us: burgeoning in our changing imaginative landscape with metonymy and metaphor coming from sources other than the Bible a la Northrop Frye’s the Great Code.  Psychological-cum-artistic expression is integral to who we are, and are becoming, as we go beyond Eurocentric ways of apprehending reality and conceiving our world, though with inchoate or organic  Canadian idioms and simultaneously embrace our humanity, perhaps in more than post-modernist evaluation; and, this should supplant the view of our seeing immigrants as just fodder for economic growth (people as mere utility) in governmental policy frameworks.  Our beingness is an essential paradigm integral to our lives as humans with mind, spirit and emotion as we strive to build communities and social cohesion while sustaining a culture of the arts with reading at the core and keep defining ourselves.

No longer is artistic taste defined in elitist universalist terms, I may argue, by those obsessed with maintaining power-structures and the status quo; this is simply counter-intuitive, in view of where our country is heading as we welcome change; and, salient too, is the fact artists have always tended to be in the forefront of developing new ways of seeing, as it has occurred to me, with an inherent sense of antithesis and paradox. New vision, or just different angles of seeing have helped us interpret our world with new or nascent imaginative streams, as notions of national identity continue to be dynamic. Indeed,  Brazil is a classic example of a country where diversity lends vitality to a culture, as nothing is tied to a soul-destroying homogeneity. And as demographic shifts continue, it will necessarily lead to re-definitions of our cultural and psychic space.

With some of these seminal views in mind, more than two decades ago I edited  A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary  Landscape (Mosaic Press, 1987), and Another Way to Dance: Asian-Canadian Writers in Canada and the USA (TSAR Publications, 1990), to give attention to our writers coming from diverse backgrounds.  Others have done this too in varying ways in promoting what appears to go beyond the traditional cultural phalanx; and, as I see it, it also circumscribes or accommodates Aboriginal writers and artists very much in the mix as we capitalize on the range of myths and traditions stemming from the human spirit’s far reach stretching from the Arctic to the Amazon to Rajasthan. My latest anthology, Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today (TSAR) aims to do just this, if only as “a “community service” (as the publisher calls it) in confronting our growing diversity and coming to grips with our identity.

Importantly, our educational institutions must take the lead in broadening the curriculum and embrace a wider canon for us to become more relevant in a genuinely post-modernist world, one with a growing, sometimes deadening, globalization all around. In this context, my dismay stems from the fact that new graduate students at our universities appear unaware of writers like Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, or Wole Soyinka, Nobel-prize winners all, thereby missing out on uniquely original ways of apprehending our world. Publishers and literary-magazine editors too must play an active role by broadening their outlooks, more than they currently do; they must seek out talented writers from the multi-ethnic communities. The aim of fostering new reading publics and extending imaginative horizons should form an underlying raison d’etre, if literary magazines (little as they are read) are to foster their international outreach, perhaps by inviting writers of the aforesaid backgrounds to submit works and thereby tap into the networks many immigrants inevitably bring with them.

Publishers in the Literary Press Group–and others–may be doing this already;  but it should be done more strategically, in order to reach places like India, China, Brazil, not just Europe or America, as we make Canadian literature better known. In achieving this, new aesthetic ways  will come about that incorporate relatively new motifs and tropes,  added to the new linguistic styles tied to orality that many of new writers bring to bear in their creative processes. Unique language-use and expressions, different cadences, with varying  rhythms and inflexions outside of the norm of standard English will result in genuine half-blood blues.

I contend that there are no permanent or fixed aesthetic concepts in view of the  post-modernist and post-colonial world we live in. Different echoes and resonances are all around us even as social media impulses  facilitate different feelings and emotive states that go beyond passe self-reflexive angst. Our writing will be infused with genuinely felt or relevant experience in a changing world.  I think we fail to do this at our peril; more is promised with the vast potentiality at our doorstep as art must indeed thrive on difference and paradox (as I’ve said). To echo Salman Rushdie,  our identity is at once plural and partial: “we straddle two cultures, we fall between two stools,” as immigrant writers; and, in reflecting the so-called mirror of life as reality, it is also what’s behind the mirror, or perceived in the “broken mirror”  with all the discontinuities, dislocations, and ambiguities–Rushdie adds–far beyond imaginary homelands. “It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost,” Rushdie argues.

Cultural memory is also at the core of understanding ourselves, as we reconfigure identity in evaluating accepted notions and standards.  With memory tied to identity and becoming  actualized,  it will likely establish stronger and more coherent communities, I believe. As Edward Said opined,  “our lives teach us who we are”; and, a writer like myself, keeps continually looking for new or different angles tied to a narrative voice associated on occasion with a two-toned English because of my Caribbean-immigrant background; and, you see, there’s nothing of the “enigma” because of our “arrival.”   An evolving Canada is my space as I consciously (or unconsciously) broaden the vision encapsulated in “idea of the North”.  And I will use language to simply interpret the past with sometimes “fractured experiences” stemming from the residues of experience with colonialism. As Canada vaunts its  human rights record, the discourse associated with multiculturalism becomes more relevant, I suspect. This “realism,” as I see it, is closely integrated with overall language-use, added to dialectal and sprung-rhythms at work (as T.S. Eliot puts it,   the aim of the poet is to “purify the dialect of the tribe”). And, as always,  for me,  “literature  is the combination of the alphabet with volatile elements of the soul” (Eldridge Cleaver).

It’s been said that a writer must mythologize the ground– the Great White North–on which he walks, though now there’s what’s being called “the tropicalization of Canada”–Toronto is being described as the “Caribbean of the North” (the same can be said of New York City and  South Florida); and, as a writer I seek to expand my own landscape of the imagination by also recognizing my early years in Canada when I lived in the Lake Superior region; and, I will keep striving to bring the heartland closer to me more than viewing flora and fauna as tropes; in  delineating reality, I will keep seeing the “past as a condition of the present,” as Scottish-Canadian novelist Alistair McLeod describes it.

In my Canada, the imagination helps me shape irony, which  motivated me to entitle one of  my books  North  of the Equator (short-story collection), with concrete places in mind; as Carl Jung puts it, “anything psychic is Janus-faced”–it looks forwards and backwards,  simultaneously; and  maybe  I am a better writer for it for being aware of more than one place: with memory constantly alive with metaphor as the Muse directs it. And I will say and see the word, as in “Sir James Douglas: Father of British Columbia”–one of my better-known poems–since Douglas,  born in British Guiana (Scottish background),  came to Canada via the Hudson Bay Company–which suggests a true multicultural spirit in action, and it allows me to dwell on history in numinous or just tangible ways.  Now living in Ottawa, it is this consciousness of a richer world in my day-to-day experience, as well as my taking part of a horizontal realignment: that is, enabling me to see the Americas not with hierarchies deriving from “the  imperial gaze.”

I will also try to escape the solitude of the labyrinth (Borges), maybe in a true post-modernist sense, maybe more than just checking out one’s groovy karmas stemming from what’s perceived as “exotic,” as I yearn for transcendence and keep envisioning Canada as more than “a shy coquette,” but being a “wanderer across cultures” –as George Steiner puts it–nothing less.

Photo credit: Rana Bose

This story took root during a bad winter when I was overcome by a fierce desire to flee again, an urge made all the more troubling by the fact that I was and still am personally happy. Happy in love, beyond anything I could have imagined during those earlier years, when simply being here, walking up St. Laurent Boulevard alone on a Saturday afternoon, was thrilling. After months of furious typing and a few tears, the urge to flee disappeared. But I’ve kept on writing, propelled by a desire to understand the strange pull of place. How it can so easily turn into repulsion, and you blame your whole life on having stayed put – in the wrong place.

*

My daughter was born in January of 1978, five months after I started my first real job as Hull bureau reporter for The Ottawa Journal, at 24. Desperate to escape the grind of single motherhood and working full-time for a daily newspaper, I moved to Toronto in 1980 to do an MA in drama at U of T. Reading plays and talking to smart people about big ideas was bliss. Toronto seemed like the obvious choice to begin again. But I’d spent the previous summer in Montreal, loved it, and decided to go back, see how long I could survive as a free-lance writer.

A man I’d met in Toronto was kind enough to drive the van bearing belongings, my three-year-old and I down the 401 to a vast apartment on Roy Street east, two blocks east of The Main. In those days, whenever an opportunity to form a couple presented itself, I would be overcome by negative thoughts – not so much for the individual, as a feeling that things would not work out, that I was on my way somewhere, and would become a different person and have to break up the household. Instead, I existed on unrequited love, which is available on every street corner. There was rarely a time when tumultuous emotions played no part in the rhythm of my days and nights, though until I left Montreal in 1997, I was on my own.

Raising a child on the avails of free-lance journalism was not has difficult as it would have been in a normal urban economy, or even in Montreal today. The Plateau, a decaying immigrant neighbourhood around St. Laurent Boulevard, was insanely cheap. From an outgoing tenant, I sublet what is called a seven-and-a-half on the ground floor of a triplex, 1200 square feet plus an enclosed back yard, for $250 a month. The landlord who lived upstairs was away on vacation. When he got back he said there’d been a mistake, he intended to open an art gallery, we would have to move. Nothing happened for three months, so I suggested he take back the double living room at the front for a gallery and leave me the rest: two bedrooms, a large living room, kitchen and bath. He put new locks on the doors and dropped the rent to $175. After a couple of years, when the gallery hadn’t materialized, I convinced him to let me rent the double room back, which I was able to sublet, lowering my part of the rent to $150 a month.

Cheap it was, but also run-down and impossible to heat. I pasted wallpaper over cracks in the plaster, set up my card table as a desk in the living room, and started pitching ideas to editors. We got through the first winter without a fridge by keeping butter and milk in the space between the kitchen window and a wobbly storm. In spring, our neighbours, Nancy Marelli and Si Dardick, mysteriously produced an “extra” fridge, my only major acquisition during the five years we lived on Roy Street. Nancy and Si are legendary Montrealers. Si and Guy Lavoie founded Véhicule Press in 1973, part of the Véhicule artists’ co-op, to print art books and poetry. Si and Nancy took over in 1980, and made it into a vital cultural institution, publishing a long list of Montreal poets, novelists and non-fiction writers.

It soon became apparent their three-storey cottage was a social and intellectual hub of post-WASP, post-European immigrant Montreal. Nancy, second generation Italian, and Si, a Jew from Kingston, Ontario, were bona fide flower children who preserved the best of Sixties ideals and after forty years are still thriving, still true to their ideals. What forces brought me to rent the draughty flat next to their house? It if was sheer luck, then it is pointless to count on anything else. They made my early Montreal years as close to easy as possible. Our daughters were best friends. They wore nothing but top-quality kids’ clothes we picked up on seasonal jaunts to church rummage sales. Nancy was a collector with impeccable taste in vintage, long before the word was coined. All of our best meals were consumed at their table; my social life revolved around their gatherings. I can’t recall the face of a single official babysitter from the days we lived beside them.

Most of what I wanted to write about as a journalist concerned the kind of things people like Nancy and Si were doing. Some of my best ideas came from them. I made culture my beat, writing features and theatre reviews for the Globe and Mail and The Gazette, occasionally reworking a piece for publication in the Winnipeg Free Press or The Ottawa Journal, until it folded. I did a series for The Gazette on “the new Anglos”, Montrealers (mainly young) who were working in the francophone milieu, and later summarized the material for the Globe and Mail. In the 1980s, the subject of linguistic crossover was a curiosity amid the blizzard of controversy around Bill 101, head offices leaving town, Alliance Quebec vs St-Jean Baptiste Society, that sort of thing.

Occasionally a similar theme would turn up in the French-language press, always presented with the same faint aura of incredibility, as it to say, yes these weird few are doing this; now back to our regular programming. Despite decades of change, Quebec remains one of the few places where it is necessary to read at least two newspapers, if you are going to read one. Although on a few issues, both linguistic camps are equally blind and deaf.

Political ferment had been my original attraction to Quebec. My first glimpse of Montreal was from a high school bus trip to Expo ’67, enough to convince me this was a place worth getting to know. Like thousands of other teenagers across the country, I volunteered for our local liberal candidate when Pierre Trudeau ran for prime minister, and became convinced that only by learning French could I participate in the most interesting debates to be had about the future of Canada.

Settling in Montreal, I did not at all identify with wounded Anglo pride; I had no sympathy for their lost status and wealth. I found it astonishing, even shameful, that so many people could have lived here for decades and never bothered to learn the language spoken by eighty to ninety per cent of the province’s population. What held them back?  I couldn’t see then how similar their experience had been to my own.

In Ontario, you could pass five years of language classes and come out barely able to decode a restaurant menu, which was why I decided to spend a year in France, where there would be no choice but to learn. By the time I moved to Montreal, I was functionally bilingual, no more. My sympathies lay vaguely with the independence movement, on the theoretical level at least, although by 1980, politics in general had started to bore me. Doing a BA in political science at Carleton University had begun to look like a four-year mistake. My last year at Carleton, I read mainly political philosophy, and decided that the grand ideas shaping public life had basically been forged in the 19^th and early Twentieth Century (with considerable recycling of Classical Greece and Renaissance/Reformation). What it all came down to in our time was leadership and the galvanization of public attention around a few key bureaucratic nuances that might make common life slightly better, or slightly worse. I’d come off the farm believing I knew nothing about Canada, and left university convinced there was not as much to know as I’d imagined. Expect for Quebec.

In the 1980s, Quebec appeared to be headed for political rupture. Every corner of society was galvanized in the effort to demolish ethnic/linguistic structures that had dominated society since the Conquest of New France by Britain in the late 18^th Century. French was replacing English as the public language. Francophones were taking over major institutions and changing the power balance of business and culture. Some Anglos were leaving, but many more stayed and were coping with change in their own fitful ways. They were showing what I thought from my corner of the Plateau was a pretty amazing readiness to recognise that change was not only inevitable but necessary. And good. I felt part of that minority, and was proud to be.

You couldn’t live on the Plateau Mont-Royal in the Eighties and Nineties and not notice change. French was spoken everywhere; everybody I knew put their kids in French daycare, then French immersion schools or, in my case, straight into the francophone system, although as a Canadian-educated Anglo, the option existed to have my child educated in English. The Plateau was a kind of gregarious no-mans-land where you were as likely to hear Greek, Portuguese or Spanish as you were English or French.  The public language definitely was French, the one you had to speak in order to get even a barmaid’s job. English was a keep-your-head down fact of life.

To some extent, that’s still true. You don’t very often encounter people on the street shouting in English, and if you do, they are probably American tourists.

If political ferment provided the surface tension that made life in Quebec seem interesting from a distance, up close it was the artistic climate that affected – maybe even infected – our lives. Forged my life – that much is certain. Those first few years on Roy Street, I tasted a kind of freedom that can only come from low income and low overhead – a life were making and spending money do not significantly

bite into one’s day, dominate consciousness. A variety of freedom to which, for better or worse, I’ve become addicted. Not that I don’t have to work hard, or make sacrifices. I do. But unless there’s a plane to catch, I don’t often wake up to a ringing alarm. Haven’t done so since, well – high school.

In recent years, those undeclared Bohemian days on the Plateau are beginning to seem like a mythic time and place, thanks to a growing number of good novels rooted in the ever-changing community of youngish immigrants from all parts of Canada and abroad who come here (still do), drawn by a human-scale urban landscape and the presence of many other people like themselves, or like people they wanted to become.

No work of fiction has tackled Anglo Montreal’s big story: the demise of an historic ruling class which began after the Second World War, accelerated during the so-called Quiet Revolution and culminated with the departure of some 200,000 English-speaking people and their money during the 1980s and ‘90s, though it’s a subject worthy of a Balzac or Zola. But the generation that moved in to take advantage of the havoc this exodus wrought on Montreal’s economy are telling their stories. Louis Rastelli’s A Fine Ending is one of my favourites. His account of the ice storm of 1998 is magical; the protagonist’s attachment to his cats and having a good time pretty well sums up the mixture of poverty, innocence and revelry dominating Plateau life during those years.

We were living in a bubble, no doubt about it. While the rest of the country struggled with recession, we basked in marginality, relishing monolithic youth, indifferent to success and dedicated to creative living. Occupying some exceptionally grand – if decrepit – real estate, we battled extreme weather while living beside Portuguese, Greek and sometimes even Jewish grandparents, people left behind or determined to stay put when their prosperous offspring fled to the suburbs. Virtually everyone I knew in those years was living for some artistic project or another. Theatre, poetry, music; prose writers weren’t that visible, but of course their typing went on anyway.

While I wasn’t wrestling with a newspaper or magazine deadline, I worked on my first plays and short stories. Summers were spent on my parents’ farm in Prince Edward County, where my daughter could free-range with her many cousins who lived nearby while I typed away in the solitude of an empty chicken coop.

In August of 1984, the entertainment editor at the Winnipeg Free Press, to whom I’d sold a few recycled pieces, tracked me down on the farm with an invitation to be interviewed for a job at the Free Press. Naturally, I took the Managing Editor’s call.  At the end of a friendly conversation, he asked how I would feel if, after a few months in Entertainment, I got “dropped into the ledge”.

I’d never been to Winnipeg, and at first the image struck a mixture of panic and vertigo, until I realised he meant the Provincial Legislature. This I knew to be a huge compliment, as arts reporting was considered a junior or at least a ladies’ ghetto, whereas to be considered for the all-important role of political reporter meant I’d made a good impression. I think I mumbled something about being a dedicated arts reporter, but definitely open to moving around. He asked for a reference. I named Mel Morris, Managing Editor of The Montreal.

The next day Mel called me to say a position as feature writer had just opened up at The Gazette, could I come back right away and take it. He wanted me to write about “trends”, along the lines of the New Anglo series.

I said yes, but could I start in September? Apparently trends were breaking out left and right and he’d been left in the lurch by the trend reporter. Reluctantly, he agreed to wait. So I turned down the Free Press and went back to my chicken coop, excited about the possibility of heading into my fourth Montreal winter with a salary and a heated office.

From A Montreal Life, 1980-1997

There are good reasons to celebrate their accomplishment, in part because they are younger than the writers who first established Canada’s literary credentials nationally and internationally. There is every reason to expect more from these new writers In addition to the prizes themselves, they have won the considerable support that the literary world can provide to its favourites. The future looks rosy for Canadian fiction.

When those older writers could not find publishers at home to publish their work, some of them left Canada to make a name for themselves, others created new publishing houses of their own, and yet others worked in quiet obscurity until an enterprising impresario or publisher recognized their talent. When it came to CanLit, everything remained to be done when Gallant and Richler, Munro and Atwood were emerging as writers. Working with book and magazine publishers, literary journalists, booksellers, librarians, and eventually festival directors, they succeeded in creating a readership for their work.

In many ways things are easier today. Neither Egugyan nor deWitt had to create the publishing house that would publish their work, nor did they have to create publications to review it, associations to defend their interests, events to showcase their work, prizes to cover it in glory, or a public interested in reading it.

In other ways things, things are harder today, mostly because there are so many writers of all stripes and all ages wanting a share of the literary pie. The importance of literary prizes has increased, too. That has a lot to do with the fact that the number of book reviews has decreased, so that winning a prize is the only way some writers can have any impact at all. There are fewer and fewer alternatives, offering less and less space for book reviews. Books that don’t make it on to the shortlists – and benefit from that kind of publicity – simply disappear from bookstore shelves.

Another consideration is that Chapters Indigo has reduced (to a mere 45 days) the length of time a book may remain on their shelves before it is returned. This reduces the likelihood that your book will be available in the store if and when a review ever does appear. This is a shortsighted move even for the bookseller, as it will encourage even more book buyers to go online. For the writer and his publisher, it’s murder. It also further increases the importance of prizes, award-winning books being more likely to remain on the shelves.

All the more reason for envy of the chosen few. Which brings us to the spurned writer.

Writers love literary awards when they win them, and they hate them when they don’t. In general, writers are more likely to wonder what could have possessed a jury to choose that particular title than to cheer when then the winner is announced. This is especially the case of writers who had a book of their own in the running. Awards organizers, who know a bit about sour grapes, just roll their eyes.

Complaints cannot always be discounted, though. Sometimes the grapes are indeed sour, and if sour grapes have made it into the bottle you are served at dinner, you’re right to send it back. Writers muttered about the Giller Prize for years, with so many winners living close to downtown Toronto. The fact that the Giller has finally emerged from its Toronto cocoon is a direct result of complaints from writers who felt excluded from this charmed circle.

Writers mutter about rigged juries and biased jurors, too, sometimes unfairly, but not always unfairly. Being a juror is an underpaid and in many ways a thankless job, with the result that juries are not always ideally diverse. There are jurors who keep their personal animosity for a writer to themselves. They quietly set that writer’s work aside so it never even gets within hailing distance of a shortlist. Other jurors keep their love for a writer to themselves, which doesn’t help either.

There can seem no end, in other words, to the sheer bloody unfairness of it all. When your book doesn’t even make it to the long list of some prestigious award, it can be tempting to think that awards are just a lottery.

And it’s true that luck plays a role a role in literary success. It isn’t always possible to know how big a role that is. The process cannot just be a lottery, though when a book is nominated for three or four major awards with entirely different juries. That is the case with both Egugyan and deWitt. There are honest juries, and there are deserving books. Everyone knows that, except for writers who feel spurned.

I was first introduced to ghazals by my father. Well, not really. I first heard ghazals at my father’s house. He would plunk in tapes of Pankaj Udhas, a famous ghazal singer, and my sister and I would groan, “Dad! Not this again!” Being an avid Bollywood movie watcher, I picked up a few Hindi words here and there. All I could understand of Pankaj Udhas was his constant longing to drink, to drink until he was drunk on love.  At that time, I didn’t understand the poetry behind the words- the craft behind the voice. Ghazals occupied the world of the older generation. When I heard ghazals, I imagined a room of old men sitting on the floor- drinking endless cups of chai (or wine, depending on how secular they were), spitting out wah! wah! at the appropriate junctions. Wah has no equivalent in English. It is utter and sheer appreciation for the poetry of a line, for a vocal riff, for the phrasing of the heart through music. The poet’s name is usually included in the last line of the ghazal itself; a verbal copyright. Some poets used their names given at birth, and others created a pen name (takhallus). My pen name is Israh, inspired by Sura Al Isra from the Qur’an:

Glory to (Allah) Who did take His servant for a Journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque, whose precincts We did bless,- in order that We might show him some of Our Signs: for He is the One Who heareth and seeth (all things).

(The Holy Qur’an, 17:1)

Writing is a journey through night. It is a process of polishing a gem until it sparkles in the light of day. In order for a literary jewel to shine, the poet has to surrender to the darkest recesses of the soul.  St. John of the Cross referred to it as “the dark night of the soul”. To write without the fear of exposing oneself; this is the key to being an authentic writer.

In the first year of my MFA program, I took a poetry workshop with Dionne Brand. Brand exposed us to various forms of poetry, and asked us to experiment with them. In one class, she said “Today, we’re going to try writing ghazals”. Ghazals? I thought. How can one write a ghazal? Ghazals are songs. At the time, I wasn’t aware of the tradition of ghazals in English. A handful of Canadian poets had tried their hand at writing ghazals, or “anti-ghazals” as they called them: Lorna Crozier, John Thompson, Phyllis Webb. However, it was when I read Agha Shahid Ali that I realized it was possible to write Urdu in English.  By writing Urdu in English. To write Urdu in English is to take the essence of Urdu’s poetic beauty and find a space for it in the country of my birth: Canada.  I would inherit a form dating back to the 7^th century, but write in the language taught to my ancestors by colonizers: my mother tongue of English.

English, a colonial tongue, contains words derived from South Asian languages: curry, jungle, opal, saffron, juggernaut, widow, jasmine, bangle, monsoon, lilac, musk and mango to name a few. I decided that if I was going to write ghazals in English, my refrains would consist of words from Hindi, Malayalam, Arabic, Malay, Urdu and Sanskrit. The last word of each line would be an affirmation of my complex ancestral history. If I couldn’t speak the language, I would speak through the form.

But how would those versed in the ghazal tradition respond to my attempt at writing ghazals in English? It was a taxi driver in downtown Toronto that reminded me of my unique identity as a Canadian South Asian writer.

***

To enter someone’s car requires trust. I make it a point to observe their trinkets- sometimes it’s a large rosary hanging from the mirror, or a shiny CD engraved with a Qur’anic ayat. Or perhaps a card of Ganesha taped to the dashboard.

The car might smell like new leather, or cigarette smoke masked by cheap cologne, or strawberry scented air freshener, curry, sweat, betel nut.  The same smell of auto rickshaws in Bombay. Except one can easily fall out of an auto rickshaw (there are no doors), and subsequently get trampled by a herd of cows. Cows own the right of way on most roads in India. But Toronto cabs have doors. There are no large animals but there are bicyclists, who could easily get thrown off balance by a taxi driver swerving to the curb without warning.

To observe silence in a taxi, unless I’m on my cell phone, is rude. Strange. Unbearable. Even a discussion about the weather, or politics, or where I’m going is better than staring out the window with my mouth shut and my eyes shifting focus.

If I don’t ask “Where are you from?” first, they most certainly will.  We’ll chat without seeing each other’s mouths move. We’ll just meet each other’s eyes through the mirror.

After many taxi rides over the last 5 years, I’ve learned that a taxi ride is a lesson in how not to judge a person by their profession.

Late for a magazine interview I was conducting at a cafe, I hailed a cab on Bay Street. The taxi driver had honey coloured eyes. He was a doctor back in Pakistan- Lahore to be exact. I could tell from the sing song in his thick voice. Lahore. I had read about Lahore in Sufism class. Lahore is the city of saints, where the tomb of the famous poet, Baba Bulleh Shah, is located. A few years ago, in Kerala, I remember watching the video of a pop song on MTV India. A Bulleh Shah poem turned into a catchy tune.

Bulla Ki Jaana Main Kaun

I know not who I am

The taxi driver and I spoke of ghazals, and I told him I was writing a collection in English. Like many connoisseurs of Urdu ghazals, he was taken aback. Urdu is the language of poetry. I concurred. To write a ghazal in English would be like watering down a strong cup of coffee. He lamented. The flavour, the taste, the strength is lost.  But I don’t speak Urdu, I told him. How else can I connect to a literary tradition that has belonged to my ancestors, and their ancestors? He was amazed that someone of my age was writing in a form that is mostly reserved for older, white haired men. As we reached the entrance of the cafe, he quoted Mirza Ghalib:

Na Tha Kuch To Khuda Ta, Kuch Na Ta To Khuda Hota

Duboya Mujko Hone Ne, Na Hota Main To Kya Hota?

When nothing was, then God was there; had nothing been, God would have been,

My being has defeated me, had I not been what would have been?

This couplet was of the few Urdu couplets I had memorized by heart. It reminded me of the humility of writing in a form more ancient than my great great grandfathers.  Reading ghazals from the past was quite an experience for me.  I was often shocked by the candour and elegance of the language. The combination of both left me wondering, “How can I write about post-modern ideas with candour and yet maintain the elegance of the language?” In the poetic language of the past, readers were more willing to accept lofty ideas. In our post-modern world, language is becoming simpler and simpler to heighten communication. As a result, writing in an ancient form while maintaining thoughts and ideas from the present is quite a task. The ancestral poet within me and the post-modern poet within me may never reconcile. In reality, we cannot reconcile ancestry with our modernity—they simply have to co-exist. With this observation, I translated the parallel existence onto the page.

The English ghazal is a reflection of the limitations we face in defining ourselves. Similar to the constraints of writing in the ghazal form, we are defined by the labels that are given to us. However, it is through those limitations that we find the strength to push back.  We are forced to become more creative, defiant, innovative and reflective. The ghazal, therefore, is perfectly suited to my own journey as a writer who embodies many identities. The demand for “exotic” writing in Canada must come to an end. The South Asian literary identity is more fraught than arranged marriages, mangoes and spices. The question is, are Canadians readers willing to embrace the uncertainty of the culturally diverse, simultaneous, literary identity?

The soil in my DNA traces its history to many homelands. To dip my pen into the blood of my ancestry and plant seeds on the page in the land of my birth– this is the ultimate goal. Whether the seeds take root depends on my beloved reader.

Why should anyone read Paradise Lost?  Why do we read it?  We read it to find out how to regain Paradise.  I mean this very literally and directly.  I am not a religious man, I do not believe in any God, and so I don’t believe in the religious traditions behind the poem.  I most like William Empson’s comment that the poem is barbaric, that it has the glorious splendour of cruelty, since it is one of the ultimate products of a cruel culture.  Our culture, the culture we teach our students, is a culture of cruelty.  And our work within colleges and universities is an initiation of the young into acts of cruelty.

But we do not perform this initiation in order to make the young cruel.  No—our culture is cruel, but we are forced to teach it, because our culture is a part of the world, and the world—reality—must be reckoned with and seen and experienced.  We initiate them into adult cruelty, the cruelty of the adult world, in order to help their initiation into love.

Why do we read Paradise Lost, or why do we read Paradise Regained, or why do we read anything at all?  We read in order to regain Paradise, in order to learn how to re-fashion the world so that there will be no cruelty, no hunger, no pain, no exploitation of human beings by other human beings, no exploitation by humans of other creatures and no exploitation of the earth itself.  This is where we are going—this is the work that all of us are about whenever we are doing genuine work.  We read to remake the world.  We write to remake the world.  But in literary criticism, the greatest power is always with the reader.   My poems will not do good only, my poems will also do enormous evil, said Walt Whitman, because he knew that this power to do good or ill resides in the reader.  Whitman invokes, celebrates, and unleashes the reader.  The reader is his hero, and we, following him, are in the age where the only heroic figure is the reader.  The only genuine hero in the present world is the reader.  Or genuine heroism—the power to change the world positively, to make a leap of faith, a leap in the dark toward paradise—always begins in a reading, a critical reading of reality if not of a “text” in reality, a reading that alerts the loving reader to the gaps and imperfections in reality, a reading that motivates an act to fill in the gaps, to correct at least one imperfection.

It will take a long time to arrive at Paradise, presumably, but when we get there, we will realize that we have been there all along.  Not that we should be there, but that we have been there all along without knowing it.  It will take a long time to get there and we are there right now.  Paradise is all around us whenever we choose to see it.  We enter Paradise for instants whenever we do genuine work.

We do genuine work when work becomes leisure, re-creation and recreation, loisir.  And we truly enjoy “leisure” whenever our leisure is animated by love, which means our leisure is animated by the force of work, our leisure does work, for the preservation of self and others.  That’s one formula for Paradise, Huck’s formula:  Paradise is where comfort is preserved for self and others.  Paradise is lazy, easy, and comfortable.  It can be a raft on a river.

Paradise can also be the conversation I had with a prostitute on Ontario St. East in Montreal this morning, September 16, 2002.  I was walking to work (one hour walk away) on this beautiful, sunny, slightly cool early fall day, wearing black trousers and white long sleeve shirt.  A prostitute whom I have seen before passed by as I was not far from home (since I live on a street among the prostitutes and drug addicts and the gays—and don’t worry, I do not at all romanticize the condition of a prostitute or a drug addict).  A short light-brown-haired girl, very petite, potentially very pretty or in the past very pretty—why am I such an asshole?—she is very pretty.  She was wearing no shoes, short slip of a skirt, a light coat.  Her feet were dirty and her legs somewhat dirty, but she had lovely slightly brown skin, a Quebecois girl, I am sure, but lovely brown skin that suggested “somewhere else.”  She asked for a little money.  I was rushed, though I shouldn’t have been (but the mystic is not infallible), because I was dying to get to school to work and to talk to people, but I knew I had a one hour’s walk before getting there.  Anyway, I said my usual cruel thing when not giving money, sorry, but good luck all the same.  When I’d gone maybe 10 steps past, I realized that I was being ungenerous.  Go back and give her something.  I reached into my back pocket and took out a selection of coins, just a handful.  It was 3 quarters and maybe a few pennies.  I don’t think mysticism demands that we give everything away all at once, just that we give, but I realized as well (since the mystic is not infallible) that I really don’t know how to give, I still have to learn how to give.

And change in hand I went back, but she was walking fast in the other direction, and was about to cross the street.  It was a little difficult to catch up, but before she crossed from a little distance away I said, excuse me! She stopped and turned toward me.  When she saw that I was giving money she held out her hand simply and let me give her the change.  I said that was ungenerous of me before, and sorry.  She mumbled something like OK, and then as I said goodbye and turned to carry on my way she came back with me.  I said, it’s OK, you can continue on your way, you don’t have to come with me, but she said no, that I’d given her enough to buy whatever it was, I think maybe a croissant or something, from the store nearby.  So we walked together as she was heading to the store, me to work.  She said, are you going to work?  I said yes.  And then she said, whenever you want, some other time maybe, I’ll give you a really good deal on a blow job.  I was really charmed and said, Aw thanks.  Then after a little pause, but I’m gay.  She didn’t have a problem with that, her face clearly said, and we continued walking together.  Gays think they know how to suck, she said, but I suck better.  So I can show you.  We’d reached her store and she started in.  So I said, well, I guess maybe sometime you’ll have to show me, but I don’t really know how.  She went into the store and I carried on.

I made a new friend today, I said as I walked on.  I’ve seen her before and I’ll see her again.  She’s sweet.  I don’t want her to give me a blow job, and I’m not sure whether or not she’s on drugs.  I don’t think so, but I realized that, while I’ve nothing against people on drugs, I realize I’m frightened of the thought of being with someone on drugs.  Many, many thoughts like this were just happily tripping through my brain.  Maybe Michael would like to be sucked by her, and maybe he can tell me what she’s doing, and then I can try and she can teach me.  I love giving blow jobs now, and I’d like to give a better blow job.  Why shouldn’t I learn how to give a better blow job?

Paradise is not just an intellectual exercise.  Paradise is about thoughts and feelings and it’s about things like blow jobs.  It’s about our whole passional life.  Because our thoughts are just a part of our whole passional life.  It’s about teaching and being taught.  It’s about knowing who gives a better blow job (of course, at first, I stupidly thought, I give good blow jobs—and then realized, stop being an ass, she’s a sex worker, there’s no way you do it better than her, she’s a priestess of the blow job), and letting yourself be taught—if a better blow job is what you want to learn.  You choose (everyone chooses) what they want to learn, and what they want to teach.

We can change our minds and decide anew that we do or don’t want to learn something.  We can enter Paradise whenever we’re sensible enough to let someone teach us something.

Traditionally, in Canada or in any other country, a visit to the zoo is meant to be an exercise in reconnecting with nature for city folks  who have lost all touch with animals and plants. And as with any institution, zoos find a representation in literature in all countries, including Canada. My colleague Rob Laidlaw, director of Zoocheck Canada has written a book for children that questions the ethics and objective of conventional zoos. As an organization based in Toronto that monitors zoos in USA and Canada, they are in a good position to comment. Rob’s book, as a non fiction volume, lays bare the myths surrounding zoos, at least traditional zoos that stock as many animals as possible.

A Canadian writer named Yann Martel won the Booker Prize in 2002 for writing a novel based on a zoo sojourn named ‘The Life of Pi’. The book narrates the adventures of young boy named Pi Patel who makes a journey with zoo animals and is shipwrecked with a tiger. The plot is novel, the characters, both human and animal, are enchanting and I realize that Yann Martel’s experience was based on Trivandrum Zoo in India. Reading the literary works of these three Canadian people as well as the popular science works of David Suzuki make me think that the Canadian perspective on zoos is actually a representation of the broader depiction covering animals in captivity.

The modern zoo is principally a product of colonialism and the world’s first modern zoo was started in London in 1826(the zoo in Vienna started earlier but since Britain had a worldwide empire at the time it is stated that Regent’s Park was the first modern zoo in Europe). The idea of seeing exotic animals in a captive setting appealed to the Western public and even today we are still left with remnants of that old curiosity. One tragic instance of human curiosity gone horribly wrong was the exhibition of Ota Benga, a Congolese Pygmy man in Bronx Zoo in New York in 1901. Ota Benga was displayed along with Great Apes, but the display stopped after some religious leaders objected to the exhibition, citing it as unethical. Many articles have been written on this shameful display of human prejudice and a whole book is devoted to his sad saga, entitled ‘Ota Benga, : The Pygmy In The Zoo’ by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1992. He was not alone because accounts of Europeans of the time talk about the exhibition of indigenous  non European tribes from across the world in Europe and North America as objects of curiosity.

Zoo animals represented in literature, such as in the poems of Margaret Atwood  represent a curious dichotomy of mankind’s relationship with nature. Based on observations in Toronto Zoo, Margaret Atwood’s animals represent a large assortment of living animal kinds. As literary critics, Kathryn Van Spanckeren and Jan Garden Castro have stated, her descriptions of zoo animals represent depiction of life on different levels of being and highlight the vulnerability of all mortal things. Her portrayal of zoo animals also highlight the interdependence between man and animals.

Whilst the likes of Atwood and Martel in Canada have examined captive zoo animals in fiction, Laidlaw and Suzuki have done so in non fiction. Truth is stranger than fiction, the saying goes, and like any other literary tradition in the world, Canadian literary tradition on zoo animals extends to both genres. Laidlaw’s book, ‘Wild Animals in Captivity’ concentrates on educating children and youngsters, zoo goers and potential zoo goers. Any Canadian wildlifer would be struck by the ongoing nature of the Toronto Zoo debate over their elephants and the zoo’s unwillingness to let go of their pachyderms is sadly very typical of the bigotry that the zoo community exhibits everywhere.

It is important to note that the Canadian examination of zoos in literature in both fiction and non fictional forms has had an international impact. Both Atwood and Martel are well known in the English speaking world. Laidlaw’s book has been very well received in India and the works of David Suzuki serve as useful reference to any nature lover across the globe.

In a broader context, these Canadian works also find resonance in the works of Farley Mowat, one of Canada’s most widely read natural history authors. All these writers have penned their thoughts on animals and nature as their imagination and observations demanded or suited them.  In doing so, they have led many to think about mankind’s tenuous relationship with the natural world. Canadian hunters make international headlines every year during the annual seal hunt. Would Canadians and the international community be affected more or less by reading these authors whilst witnessing the slaughter? There is no clear cut answer  because one can never say with certitude if there is exclusivity in the writings of Atwood or Martel from a Canadian perspective. But on at least one occasion, the Canadian non fiction literary tradition crossed borders. Canadian natural history literature has helped me to refine my thoughts in India on conservation and directly aided my project on zoos. That would please Atwood, Martel, Laidlaw, Suzuki, Mowat and their Canadian admirers.

[Please note that this piece was originally published in Poetry Quebec. - ed]

3625 Aylmer Street, Montreal

It is Thursday evening at The Yellow Door and you are hearing poets and prose writers reading from their work. They stand just a few feet away from you. It is as though you are in someone’s basement.

As founder, producer and host, I have been running The Yellow Door Poetry and Prose Reading Series since January 1999. I remember that our first reading was standing room only, and it has been great ever since. I enjoy networking and community-building with poets. I also host The Visual Arts Centre Reading Series at the McClure Gallery and co-host Lovers and Others, which will be held this year at Café Sarajevo.

The Yellow Door is home to folk stars, spoken word artists, and poets. Simplicity and hard work keep audiences coming back. Over the years, the coffee house has hosted the likes of Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen and Rufus Wainwright.

A typical Yellow Door season runs from August to May and consists of roughly 12 shows. The series receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts and The League of Canadian Poets. Twenty-five to 35 people attend our shows. A couple of times a year, we have a full house of about 50. Part performance, part acoustic experience, The Yellow Door always delivers the poetry. The authors’ enthusiasm for their work is matched by the appreciative audience.

The series has featured talented Montreal poets and prose writers including Governor General award winner Hugh Hazelton, Michael Mirolla, Catherine Kidd, Paul Serralheiro, Stephen Morrissey, Carolyn Zonailo, Endre Farkas, Carolyn Marie Souaid, and others. We have had musicians, as well as writers from out of town.

Sometimes publishers from Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver contact me to book one of their writers. Spoken word artist, Ian Ferrier, who has performed at numerous shows believes that The Yellow Door has been kind to the literary scene.

Poet Carolyn Zonailo, who has read at The Yellow Door many times over the past ten years observed that it has a “collective sort of soul feeling.”

Ilona Martonfi  Tel: 514-939-4173 ilona.martonfi@sympatico.ca

Dawson Peace Garden

Dawson – The New “Other” as The New “Us”?

Most writers and journalists who have grown up with the contemporary world and have puzzled about it are also people who think about the perennial divisions of “Us” and “Them.” That is particularly  true of those of us who are both immigrants and have had parents who came from mixed cultural backgrounds.

We live in one of the world’s great ages of migration, and if we inhabit a cosmopolitan city, many of our family and friends are people with varied roots. In Montreal that cultural “métissage” has been particularly evident in the last decade.  One way that I think of it is by remembering that I have taught literature at Montreal’s Dawson College,  on different occasions, over the course of 40 years, and interestingly, in one sense I am much closer to my students now than in the past.

Years ago, if I stood in a classroom, I was  the only person with dual nationality. Now I often have classes in which 10% or more of the students are dual-nationals, and in one class recently the majority had two passports.

Of course, it is always dangerous to assume that cosmopolitanism is the norm or will come to rule history. No one in the age of the Emperor Augustus thought that the imperium romanum would devolve as it did, nor could the people who were so attached to Warsaw’s diversity before 1939 have possibly imagined that only 5 years later the city’s Jewish population would be exterminated.

The tensions between internationalism and nationalism, between universalism and ethnic identity, have played an important historical role over a surprisingly long period, and nationalism obviously remains a vital force in our own time.

So today especially, the person of mixed background embodies an interesting paradox. On the one hand, she or he seeks to transcend differences and is often the biological expression of parents who have done just that. On the other hand, the culturally mixed person often psychologically holds on strongly to her sense of inherited identities because their mixture makes her what she is. There is an internal interplay between identity and difference, and people of varied background often must choose aspects of themselves that they will stress as most important. Sometimes they become passionate nationalists as a way of resolving conflict that is both personal and political. That  choice is a particularly crucial one during those political periods when nationalism is a vital tool to fight against oppression and imperialism.

The tragic killing at Dawson five years ago was not political in an way. It was a radically contingent event that resulted from one young man’s deep psychological disorder and the gravity of the act cannot be explained by an over-arching sociology. But it is striking to me, as someone who was in the college on that day, how the people involved bear the hallmarks of this global age. Anastasia DeSousa, the one victim who died, was a Canadian of Portugese descent and had a Polish grandmother. Kimveer Singh Gill, the shooter,  was a young Canadian from a Punjabi background. The three weapons he carried into the college that day were manufactured in Italy, Austria, and China.

Also striking was the fact that immediately after the shooting the student population seemed to instinctively understand that what took place originated in individual psychic conflict, and no one reached for any essentialist or ethnic explanation of what had happened.

Without being blind to the searing conflicts around us in the world, it is fair to say that the students at Dawson College, like a lot of their peers in similar urban centres in Canada, exemplify two very important facts about changes now taking place in Canadian life.  First, they are adding to and changing a new “Us,” a population that will look different, and perhaps think differently in the future. Secondly, these students are much less likely to see Others, to judge “Them” – whoever they may be – in ethnic terms. Perhaps one reason for their relative openness is that they themselves have a direct experience of otherness. They have been “Others”  and know the benefits of not “splitting” the world.

Dawson Peace Garden photo #2

Some of these thoughts lay behind my decision at Dawson one year ago to teach The Other, a well-known set of short lectures by the polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuściński . After all, I thought, these young people will understand this book – they are the “Other” forming a new “Us.”

As it turned out, I was wrong in my assumption that Kapuściński’s book would be almost a natural thing to teach in the 2011 version of Dawson College,  and what happened in the classroom told me a lot. For some time I reflected  and felt that the students had been oddly refractory. The conclusion I drew was that they were the evolving Other in the process of becoming Us,  but did not or would not recognize this fact about themselves. Yet the more I think about this question of altérité,  the more I feel that there was something very important eluding me. In some ways, I was wrong and the students were right to resist the book, if only unconsciously.

So….here is the story of teaching The Other.

II

The Book, The Class, and Common Humanity

The Other is a slim book consisting of talks given in Vienna, Graz, and Krakow between 1990 and 2004. The speaker, and the author, was Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007), a polish journalist who worked outside of Europe for forty years, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Kapuściński was born to a poor family in 1932, and in the 1940s he was a member of the Polish communist party (The Polish United Workers’ Party) , and remained in it until the end of its rule. A vivid, ironic writer, he had the gift of getting to know all kinds of people, and by the end of the 1950s he became Poland’s roving international correspondent. I had read a number of his well-known books which chronicled the horrors of modern power – such as his portrait of the Shah of Iran’s regime – and I had been fascinated by his account of the absurd “soccer war” between El Salvador and Honduras. The Other was a book I read during a summer break in Saskatchewan and I was glad to see that someone with the field experience of a reporter had described a primordial source of political conflict in our age: the shifting, dynamic relation of Self and Other throughout the world.

The Other takes as its premise that both people of European descent and the world as a whole must shed Eurocentrism. As Kapuściński puts it, “ the world’s destiny has developed in such a way that for the past five centuries European culture or civilisation has dominated us, and as a result in saying ‘we,’ we understood – ‘we, all people’, though in reality we meant only us, the Europeans.” Now that is irrevocably changing, he says, through a new, polyphonic conversation between the Self and those outside, on all continents not just Europe,  and since the composition of the Self also dynamically includes the Other, then a “new kind of person or being is created.”

While this hope for open dialogue in the future is almost transcendental, Kapuściński is also very tough on the past legacy of the West: “At the end of the European Middle Ages and at the start of modern times, Europe’s great expedition to conquer the world, enslave the Other and pillage his possessions wrote pages of blood and cruelty into the history of our planet.”

However, Kapuściński counts on anthropology, philosophy, communication, and exchange to overcome the traditional hostility to the Other which has expressed itself either through War or Autarchy. Only a true attitude of dialogue and encounter, he says,  can overcome innate human traits of narcissism and ambivalence.

This argument was the one I sought to convey to the students and I thought it all the more apt since it came from a man who had spent the major portion of his life among people who were not his own.

As I taught the text, however, I pointed out to the students that there are logical flaws in the book. Our Polish guide in reaching the Other was himself riven by contradictions. The first, and most important, is Kapuściński’s Eurocentrism. And the second is his inverted class consciousness, a kind  of upside-down Marxism that blames the faults of the ruling class upon the quality of the people below. I thought the fact that this keen observer was also Eurocentric would be an illustration to the students of how perceptive viewpoints are themselves often skewed.

The opening section of The Other holds up the ancient greek historian Herodotus as a beacon to us today, since Herodotus “wrote about Others without contempt or hatred” and he understood “that to know ourselves we have to know Others, who act as the mirror in which we see ourselves.” But in this very same section of the book, Kapuściński makes a claim which a number of critics have pointed to as a kind of poison that has tainted  his work as a whole. The early passage in The Other is worth looking at in full:

In this march of civilisations [the rise and fall of empires], Europe will be the exception, because it is the only one, right from its Greek beginnings, to show curiosity about the world and a desire not just to conquer and dominate it, but also to have knowledge of it; and in the case of its best minds, nothing but knowledge, understanding and closer relations with a view to forming a human community. [Kapuściński’s emphasis]

This claim of a unique European curiosity is ahistorical and false. It is an ex post facto explanation of history that comes from reading events backwards through a kind of need for Hegelian immanence. All cultures are curious and something like “the unexamined life is not worth living” has been articulated in many places and at many times. The history of ancient Greece or the Rise of the West is a lot more complex – and crazy –than what is suggested by Kapuściński’s picture of a European logos standing alone on a promontory.

Dawson Peace Garden photo #3

Some time ago, in 2001, William Finnegan writing in The Times Literary Supplement pointed out that Kapuściński’s “magnificent sympathy” sometimes “simply deserts him” in his writing, and Finnegan pointed to a book about Africa The Shadow of the Sun: “The low point, analytically speaking, of The Shadow of the Sun, is marked when Africa’s troubles are attributed to a lack of ‘critical spirit’ by an author self-congratulatory in his Europeanism.”

The Other, then, presents us with an author seeking to escape Eurocentrism, as well as a man seeking to convince others to free themselves too, while he is in fact captured in the toils of his very own cultural narcissism. That is not so surprising  perhaps– because if Kapuściński is right about the powerful centrality of our relations with the Other, then he too might probably be so trapped.

I was teaching this book in a course which included Shakespeare’s Othello and Black Boy by the American novelist Richard Wright – and the readings began with Kapuscincski and excerpts from Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Rather a lot for 15 weeks….

The class was beautiful – I use that word to describe their variety, intelligence, good will, and decency, not their scholastic properness.. They were not perfect students, far from it. They included people with connections to all the continents except Australia and Anatarctica. They spoke many languages. They were young and they were parents, they were earnest and alienated, charming and diffident.

One young woman whose family comes from one of the famous Greek islands, and who revisits it nearly every year, rose to the occasion when we discussed the navigation of the ancient Greeks – their “curiosity” – and the material necessity that lay behind their push to the sea.

She had her own version of the emergence of Greek civilisation – and Western Europe’s too : IT WAS AN ACCIDENT! That notion of a contingency – or set of contingencies – fits the historical evidence much better than Kapuściński’s notion of some inner trait that then expresses itself in the development of a culture.

There were also two ladies from Zimbabwe in the class studying nursing, and in the middle of the term I arranged that they would become tutorial students because of their workload. We had read a few chapters of The Shadow of the Sun and I had pointed out to the class as a whole that Kapuściński seemed to suffer from a common reporter’s dilemma: developing a dislike of the very African people he was reporting about.

One of the ladies took me to task: “These students are very young. You are showing them this book that gives a distorted view of Africa and then expecting them to be able to distinguish the reality of African life from the biases that are part of the book. I don’t think you should really be teaching it.” I told her that I regretfully had to agree.

The essay assignment asked the students to explain the main ideas in The Other and the contradictions in the book – both the objective difficulties that Kapuściński describes for cultural dialogue and the internal contradictions in his argument.

A very quiet, brilliant dual-national – both Swedish and Canadian – produced the best essay in which he clearly set out the tension between Kapuściński’s ideal of transcending fearful hatred,  and his portrait in The Other of the barriers behind which cultures hide: race consciousness, nationalism, and religion. The student was very lucid and clear. He saw the dialogue that Kapuściński wished for, but also the same picture in Kapuściński’s  argument of the encrusted structures that prevent dialogue from taking place.

The comments of the Dawson student were not all that different from those of Andrew Rice, writing in The Nation in 2007, who drew a more tragic picture of this polish writer: “Ultimately, Kapuściński sees the world as composed of tribes, and for all his travels among them, he doesn’t believe that they can ever really communicate with one another.”

As I remember, the Dawson  student was saying something different about Kapuściński, and more hopeful really: that the categories that prevent real dialogue really do require some form of universalism to enable the full dialogue that Kapuściński genuinely wanted to take place.

The events of the Arab Spring speak, I think, of this need for universal rights and political liberties, however particularist the various outcomes may be. These protests were not supposed to take place, they did not fit “The Arab Mind,” they were unforeseen. That is their most important feature. They speak of an emergence that cannot be predicted and of a common humanity of the kind that one finds among the young people at Dawson.

I do not think I will teach The Other again, but I will keep all my books by Kapuściński.

And I will think warmly of his humanity, too.

Montreal Sept. 21, 2011

The mass shootings in Utoya, Norway seemed to have shocked the average person, who has never noticed the trends and the blunt comments on television made by politicos in which racism camouflages itself as snide commentary.

Society has become complacent and tolerant of such digressions because we are well past that P.C. threshold. Because being tolerant is bad and not politically expedient. The real and imagined problems created by certain media and then regurgitated by a manufactured vox popoli, result in these issues being always tagged onto questions of “national security” to frighten a fearful, feeble-minded electorate.  In the past two decades, xenophobic politics has been normalized.

In fact, there seems to be a resurgence of Race Panic like the fear of miscegenation in D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of A Nation (1915) where a white girl is pursued by a freed slave and jumps to her death; the Klansmen kill him. In the book, which inspired it, a differently named character is explicitly raped. In the film, it is vague. It is similar to Gay Panic when a heterosexual male kills a gay man out of a panic that threatens his identity in a primordial sense. Race Panic predates that panic. It is fear that eats the soul like the title of a Fassbinder film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) about an intergenerational love story between an elderly German woman and young Moroccan man.

Now Multicultural Panic instigated by the Conservative leaders of Europe has captured the pulse of their peoples, claiming that multiculturalism has been a failure. Echoed in lands of low immigration, where people have seen their homogeneous populace change all of a sudden, but also in lands which long exploited colonies, the ones that were the first to accept immigration from their third world fiefdoms, such places as Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has stated, “For too long, immigration was too high.” Angela Merkel, who grew up in a homogeneous East Germany, has deemed Multiculturalism a failure only after living in a multicultural society herself since 1989.

In times of economic crisis, we see knee jerk reaction number one: blame Others. Deprivation in the minority creates riots, while deprivation in the majority creates navel-gazing racist movements. Protectionism is the gentlest face of it. The job stealers can be educated or not, vying for jobs natives want and those they don’t. Supply and demand dictates. Canada during the Great Depression halted immigration in 1930.

When right-of-centre parties align themselves with far-right parties and govern in tandem in coalitions, they get pulled further to the right, tugging the whole political spectrum along, shifting ideologically, and radicalizing the moderate parties. Anti-immigration parties in governments influence legislation; they shape the discourse, future election results and the popular sentiment in polls.

For a brief second, Italy’s Centre-Left Partito Democratico even wanted to be an ally with the Northern League if it made the Berlusconi government fall but the government won’t fall since Berlusconi and the League cannot survive without one another.

As examples, the Northern League in Italy, Geert Wilders in Netherlands, Denmark’s Danish People’s Party –which had been in a Con-Lib Coalition Government since 2001 until their electoral defeat on September 15, 2011(incorporating the extremist islamophobic defunct Progress Party– with a name change in 1995) — and Austria’s Freedom Party; all gained legitimacy from their perceived fringe marginality once they govern in coalitions.  (Haider founded a breakaway party, moderate on immigration, called the Alliance for the Future of Austria before dying.)

Denmark’s Progress Party, and its spawn Norway’s Progress Party, both were born as anti-tax Libertarian parties; the latter was, and is, the fastest growing amongst young Norwegians, before we ever heard of Breivik, a member from 1997 to 2007.  True Finns became the official opposition in Finland in the last election in April 2011 thanks to talks about bailing out Portugal. Also, women are playing important roles in these parties. As leaders of the Far-Right parties, in Denmark, Norway, Hungary and France, where Marine LePen inherited the Front National leadership from her father, their presence makes the rhetoric palatable to their non-traditional voters.

Meanwhile, Eastern Europe has reverted to the persecution of Roma, who have been stigmatized in Western Europe as well, since there isn’t much of immigration to exploit politically. The Slovak National Party even was in coalition with the Social Democrats, such that it was suspended from the E.U. Socialist grouping. A fledging movement in the Czech Republic might consolidate a Far Right party with the current President. In Hungary, the governing Centre-Right party Fidesz has recently developed a new constitution where Christian roots of the nation was written-in since the leader is devoutly Protestant. In local politics, it co-governs with Far-Right Jobbik which has its own militia inspired by the infamous Arrow Cross fascists from the Second World War and now its founder runs state media nominated by the Fidesz government.

In this atmosphere, the difficulties of integration, the politics of fear, the new level of migration, shit-scared Mainstream politicians steal from the Far Right parties’ repertoire whenever those parties’ rise in popularity.

In France, Sarko started leaning in on Front National territory. And when the repatriation of the Roma took place, the E.U. Commission had harsh words but no repercussion ensued.

In Canada, the Tories aren’t the Tories of yore. But the parties of yore were also tainted. Racism was prevalent during the old wave of immigration: federal legislation limited flows of undesired peoples by introducing specific immigration legislation and head taxes. If one reads the Canadian newspapers of a hundred years ago, one would see the same kind of raw irrational fear present in Europe today, just the immigrants’ faces would be different. Also there were Immigrant Acts, –Chinese Laundries inducing cities to adopt municipal laws limiting them , because they were seen as eyesores by the locals, and the various internments of enemy aliens (from Ukrainian World War I internments to all those of World War II).

Canada has denied entry to various ships with Asian migrants. In 1907, the Monteagle ship with 901 Sikhs triggered anti-Asian riots in Vancouver’s Chinatown against Chinese and Japanese merchants and that coincided with lumber workers being laid off during the 1907 recession. In 1914, the Komagata Maru (a. k. a. “the Singh Ship”) with 376 Punjabis was denied entry due to “continuous passage” laws to prevent Asian immigration. The ship had to return to Colonial India where the British kept them onboard for 6 months; some were arrested and some shot. Canada would also deny the MS St-Louis entry with German Jewish refugees in 1939.

Yes, in economic crisis, the scapegoats are found, the same who have lived there for decades. Sometimes the scapegoats of yesteryear are forgotten, but there’s a new batch to lay blame. When the financial Armageddon comes, scapegoatism always re-appears since mankind forgets the ebb and flow of economic downturns and previous historical hysteria, and once again persecutes society’s weakest members, minorities.

We see the average German on the street on Euronews resenting Greeks for ruining the Eurozone and “punishing” their fiscally responsible citizenry who were always civic-minded by paying their taxes.

“Is nationalism a driving force in European politics?” asks a BBC journalist as I write this piece. The Schengen Agreement about the free movement of goods and people is kaput. Italy was left alone while Libyan/Tunisian refugees were drowning in the Mediterranean; Denmark closing its borders with Germany during the mysterious sprout “e. coli crisis” which opportunely presented itself after Germany erroneously blamed Spanish cucumbers; Vaals, a town in Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party controlled Limburg area in the Netherlands, deciding that even E.U. members without a job can be denied residence, affecting 300 out the 10,000 inhabitants, and specifically targeting Poles and Romanians.

The BBC journalist brings up the fact that E.U. members are failing in their basic obligation: the Greek/Turkey border is the entry for all of E.U.’s illegal migrants, yet the E.U. is not sharing the burden and not interested taking in refugees, backlogging the process of 60,000.

When major crises occur that involve xenophobia, those most responsible often escape blame and responsibility. After World War II, there were not any real repercussions for those names and families who headed companies which were chin deep with the Nazis, like that German industrial family portrayed in Visconti’s The Damned (1969). Or, those who got recycled in postwar Germany as industrialists as seen in The Odessa Files (1974) or many German New Wave films.

Fascist organizations like France’s Cagoule, an underground Fascistic Masonic group in France, counted as its founders people who created the world’s biggest cosmetic empire, the founder of a French car company and heir to a tire company. The son of the founder of the British Union of Fascists ran the Formula 1, the affiliation re-emerged with his titillating Nazi costume photo scandal. No such heads hanging in shame there!

Northern Europe was homogeneous they tell us, but so was Southern Europe. They were also lands where people emigrated FROM – to leave for North America.  Welfare States’ safety nets were possible with a small population to sustain, thanks to the previous century’s mass exodus. Many of these anti-immigrant parties in Europe on the Far-Right still believe in the Welfare State mixing in populism, traditionalist Conservatism, euroskepticism and anti-globalization. The True Finns, which rose to official opposition (although more moderate than Finland’s Freedom Party) and Sweden Democrats (nationalists, anti-multiculturalism, anti-Sami minority) are examples of these oddball creatures resorting to the unemployed base like most populists do.  Stieg Larsson as a journalist signaled the rise of extremist right wing parties in Scandinavia in the last 20 years and was targeted for doing so.

Chinese Laundry Mural in Vancouver’s Chinatown

Myths from the Left

Unions have never been immigration friendly, or for diversity for that matter. The Trades and Labour Congress of Canada at the turn of the last century demanded for the government to raise the Head Tax to 1000$ from 500$, from the 100$ 1903 fee, while the leader of Quebec’s Jacques Cartier Typographical Union contended at the 1906 T.L.C.C. convention that, “the actual tax imposed upon Chinese immigration does not prevent the great overflowing of yellow workers to injure especially the laundry workers of our country.” When Chinese workers’ membership in the dominant unions was rejected, the Chinese Laundry Workers’ Union was formed in Vancouver in 1906 demanding higher wages in order to fight against their own ethno-exploitation. The same Trades and Labour Congress of Canada persuaded Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1912 to ban white females in Chinese Laundries. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 to halt Chinese immigration, which replaced the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act as well as head tax, which were specifically designed with one group in mind. Only the advent of modern washing technologies, and not legislation, destroyed this industry.

Many immigrants in Canada preferred to have British-origin persons as union leaders to dissipate anti-foreign sentiments. When ethnic unions started to advocate for themselves, like Montreal’s Jewish Labour Committee chapter, they advocated for the non-discrimination against other ethnicities in Canada.

Today Canada has found a way to import badly needed agricultural farmhands and workers in the fisheries by issuing seasonal contracts to Mexican workers (who have a special accord) and Central American workers, bypassing immigration altogether, like guestworkers. A 48 month limit in Canada, no protection over wages, passports confiscated and no overtime; like that Guatemalan tomato picker who got deported after he complained about pesticide burns and unpaid overtime overdue. He didn’t know Quebec labour laws protected him. Think about those hands when you are savouring your greenhouse tomato, strawberries, Canadian wine or admiring your Christmas tree.

Quebec, which has its own special immigration process under federalism, wanted Francophone immigrants in the late 1980s which included North Africans for easier linguistic integration. Then, they posed religious issues to a now secularized Quebec which has replaced Catholicism with secularism as the new religion/ideology. We can safely assume white immigration was and will be preferred by most governments (with the exception of European wariness of white Eastern Europeans newly accepted into the E.U.). That is why Canadian policies were finagled throughout the years.

It seems almost “normal” for countries with a Fascist past to have resurgence in Fascist sentiments. They always remind us in every facet of our culture, whether warranted or not. They never let us forget, even though there are laws barring Nazi salutes in Germany, as a dimwitted tourist from Quebec found out in front of the Reichstag. Italy’s law on Fascist apology was created in 1952, but its reinforcement is lax since people freely flaunt it in public, on TV, on the internet. At beachside shops in Rimini, Fascist and Nazi paraphernalia is sold. Some politicians, from ex-neo-fascist parties and now governing with Berlusconi’s party, naturally want to scrap this law.

Yet, no one remembers other nations’ brush with Fascism. Everyone seems surprised in a rise in Scandinavia because the word, resurgence, is never used and its history seldom revisited. The Nazi-occupation of Norway and Denmark was annexed.  Sweden experimented with eugenics (forced sterilization) on undesirable minorities and mentally ill (1934-1975), occurring simultaneously in Finland (1934-1955), Norway (“consent-based” by legal guardians 1934-1977) and Denmark (1929-1967). All cite hygiene health policy as reason and the practice pre-dates the Welfare States even if implemented by the Social Democrats. But was the nations’ political culture or the ignorance of that period to blame since the practice was worldwide?

Entire Lap towns in Finland were burned down by Nazis after surviving their Civil War (1918). The internal fighting between Communist Finns and White Finns post-Civil War played out in the Canadian Hinterland. The reason Canada admitted White Finns, even if they later were Nazi supporters, in the 1940s was to neutralize Canada’s older Left-leaning Finns. One wonders if Anglo-Canadians in Thunder Bay or Sudbury at the time, felt the Finns’ lifestyle being foisted upon them with their radical politics, radical newspapers, Finnish Labour Temple and sauna they brought with them. They were surely seen with suspicion since the 1919 Immigration Act introduced the exclusion of ideological undesirables (Bolshevists). As an idea, how politically committed the Finns in Canada were, they joined the Republicans in Spanish Civil War alongside the C.C.F. recruits and Ukrainian-Canadians. Two Finnish lumber union leaders from Thunder Bay, Rosvall and Voutilainen disappeared in 1929 and their bodies were found in 1930 where the community suspected hired Finnish henchmen.

In North America, past immigrants were either blamed by unions for being too subservient, ignorant of their rights, working for nothing or worse, for being strikebreaking scabs. Few pockets of politicized immigrants were deemed shitdisturbers of their time. There was the famous protest in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Bread and Roses strikes led by Ettore and Giovannitti, Maria and Pietro Botto of Haledon, New Jersey and the anarchist and socialist stone carvers of Barre, Vermont.

Many activists remain anonymous, like the victims of the Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre’s fire, mostly children and women while the Greek mining camp leader, Louis Tikas, was shot. Three immigrant (Ukrainian and Lithuanian) coalminer strikers on parade were shot by the RCMP in the Estevan riots (1931) in Saskatchewan. The bickering factions of Ukrainians in Myrnam, Alberta, as that Heritage Minute Commercial reminds us, brought a system of free health care (by creating a non-sectarian hospital) with the blessing of the authorities. The Wobblies had immigrant members like Joe Hill, who was Swedish and the Finns in Ontario and Northern U.S.

But the majority of immigrants took shit from the majority, “being strangers in a strange land,” since it was felt that one shouldn’t raise your voice even for a legitimate concern such as being unpaid.

I once met two older women from France with a Lombard father (Northern Italy, the birthplace of the Northern League) and Polish mother, “You couldn’t say anything back then in France, no vindication of your rights, they’d remind you of your place,” and in the same breath, “Not like these North Africans.” The irony is lost…

When Mexican illegals get brand new schools in California which invested in infrastructure to resuscitate their economy, Tea Partiers say, “We pay taxes” while the illegal parents do not. The irony is lost on them too, complaining these illegals enlist in the army “to get U.S. citizenship,” while their boys die as patriots. Some blood is more precious than others.

Further information:

A brief review of European Far Right parties: http://fr.myeurop.info/2011/07/25/d-oslo-a-milan-la-montee-de-la-nouvelle-droite-radicale-3053

http://www.praguepost.com/news/10206-organized-far-right-party-could-emerge.html

Jobbik: http://www.economist.com/node/13871359

Vaals: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0729/1224301563283.html

Chinese Laundries in Canada: http://www.tgmag.ca/magic/mt41.html

Estevan Riot: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/52/br_1.html

Myrnam Hospital Heritage Minute: http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10207

When I was in class three, I remember reading a story about Guru Nanak which spoke about his perplexity with the discrepancy between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have nots. The story narrated his bewilderment with the status quo of society and the inability of his father to explain inequality in society. Twenty five years down the line, the perception of differences in society as well as in the diversity of life continues to strike me as hard as it did during those formative years. And I, like many millions like me, see it manifested all over.

The overwhelming differences in the lifestyles of ‘high society and low society’ folks, the differences between those who speak in English in India and those who do not, the gaps between urban India and rural India, the chasm between those in power and R K Laxman’s common man, the discrimination between different races and a very strange unwillingness to accept Darwinian principles that has led to a very damaging relationship between man and animals based on perceived notions of superiority and inferiority.

I start from the last one since I have a special interest in the topic. It is a matter of regret that most of us would rather seek to believe than know when it comes to evolution and even today, in the world’s most prosperous country, there are ongoing debates on whether man is God’s messenger or ascended from Apes. This notion of man being separate from the rest of nature and termed ‘speciesism’ by the philosopher Richard Ryder has led to us thinking ourselves as divine beings who can do whatever they like with other sentient creatures and the rest of nature. “They are animals, we are humans,” the thought goes, ignoring the fact that the word ‘animal’ is derived from the Latin word ‘anima’ which means soul and therefore any creature, including Homo sapiens that has a soul is an animal. And this difference between ‘them and us’ has granted us the licence to do with animals and nature what we please. As Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan eloquently expostulated in their book ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’, “Humans ―who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals—have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and “animals” is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them—without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret (…) They are just too much like us.” But perhaps the lack of understanding between them and us is not quite that inexplicable when you consider how humans have historically treated their own fellow beings.

Take for example, the great debate surrounding corruption in India and the arguments for and against a Lokpal Bill. Fasts, regardless of their desirability have suddenly permeated the social consciousness and the populace appears to be sharply divided between ‘them’, the government versus ‘us’, the citizens. But how about the fact that ‘they’ the government representatives were elected by ‘us’, in the world’s largest democracy, a notion that we never tire of emphasising? And where are the landless peasants and tribals and villagers in the rhetoric of anti corruption that is currently swaying the country? Is it possibly again a frightening manifestation of the Orwellian dictum envisaged in ‘Animal Farm’ so long ago that ‘All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’? It may very well be that we the people have challenged them, the government representatives, but even among us, not everyone has an equal voice and footing to express our thoughts and ideas on a happy and healthy existence.

Talking of identities, one cannot but ignore the fact that the most immediate impression(and sadly more often than not, a conclusion) is drawn from physical appearance. Black and white, yellow and brown, these appearances all contribute to the perceptions of ‘them and us’ in civil society. The anthropologist Desmond Morris described it as a reflection of ‘in groups and out groups’ in a book entitled ‘The Human Zoo’. These physical differences  sometimes are so deeply rooted in our consciousness that we invent terms like ‘African American’, ‘Ethnic minority’, “British Asian etc.’

I recently had the opportunity of watching a very enlightening debate on British politics featuring Nick Griffin, the leader of the British Nationalist Party that draws a sharp line of distinction between ‘them ‘ and ‘us’ on the issue of who is British and who is not. During the course of the debate, a young girl stated that if one went by the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis, then every human being, including a white British individual, represents ethnic minorities. It was a brilliant argument and reminded me of an essay called ‘Gaps In the Mind’ by Richard Dawkins where he says that if you could form a line by conjoining ancestors, it would not be very far back in time when a human form will hold hands with an ape, a position already outlined previously.

But even apart from physical appearance and the species barrier, there are other  forms of barriers. For example, English speaking urban people and vernacular language speaking rural people in India. From my personal experience, I have to admit that as a student I would disavow and disassociate myself with Bengali literature, Bengali culture, Bengali scholars and achievements because I felt that my English medium school education had proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt that Western civilisation was superior to ours, if we had any at all. So therefore, any student of my age, studying in a Bengali medium school, would be the object of contempt or snide remarks, something I really do regret today.  My perceptions changed after reading Tagore’s autobiography where he thanks his brother for having instilled in him a love for his mother tongue. It was a very poignant realisation for me and the breaching of the barrier between ‘them and us’ based on language opened a whole new world for me to explore and many new individuals to discover and befriend. It was  a fabulous discovery to comprehend the fact that individuals who do not talk in swanky English can have the most exalted ideas that we so often associate solely with the West.

A very interesting commentary on the notion of them and us has been laid out in a book called  ‘Reason Before Identity’ by Amartya Sen. Sen humorously writes about an incident whereby one of his professors went to attend a function and asked one of his colleagues about the people in the audience. “Who are these people?” the gentleman questioned and the reply he got was, “Well, logical positivists mainly”. I found that anecdote hilarious but deeply insightful. As Amartya Sen says, we are not just Indian and Canadian, black and white, Westerner and Asian but we are also fathers, mothers, teachers, students, friends, vegetarians and non vegetarians, Western Classical music aficionados and pop song fanciers, cricket fans and football admirers, admirers of poetry and worshippers of prose, in short we have multiple identities that would raise questions on traditional divisions based on ‘Them and us’ because all these affiliations could justifiably be used for coteries and clubmanship as stringently as race and ethnic and economic background.

Carl Sagan, in a lecture called ‘The Age of Exploration’ indicated that the very notion of aliens implied a derogatory aspect for those who were unknown to us. “We are human, they are not, we represent the standard of living, they do not’, was the gist of what he wrote. And we see examples of that philosophy making itself felt in every section of society.  How many times have we heard the assertion that people of a different religion, caste or economic status are ‘sub human’?

So far what I have outlined represents a largely negative perspective of how humans treat each other and the rest of nature based on ingrained perceptions of ‘them and us’, perceptions that are very deeply rooted indeed. But throughout history there have been some extraordinary examples of individuals who have tried to bridge this divide. Take for example, Phil Wollen, an Australian banker who has come out of his cushy corporate success to fight for social justice and the rights of nature. I met Phil recently during a trip to China and was amazed that he could have voluntarily eschewed the kind of lifestyle he would have been entitled to if he had pursued the path of relentless profit minded motives. He is one man who has done so much to alleviate real and perceived differences between them and us and since he hails from India, he merits a special place in my heart.

I have also been extremely heartened in recent times by the work of individuals like Binayak Sen working for impoverished tribals in Chattisgarh and in a very different context, the courage and determination exemplified by the work of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Both of them tirelessly strive to give voice to those who are marginalised. Both Sen and Rusbridger have come to the limelight in recent times for their activities and have courted widespread support for their convictions.

As someone very keenly interested in how the media draws a distinction between them and us, I was particularly impressed by Alan Rusbridger’s Hugh Cudlipp lecture last year called ‘Does Journalism exist?” where he said the following : “There is an irreversible trend in society today which rather wonderfully continues what we as an industry started – here, in newspapers, in the UK. It’s not a “digital trend” – that’s just shorthand. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others. About resisting the people who want to close down free speech.”

Many changes in society are the result of conversations, verbal and written with those we deem as ‘others’. Preconceived notions can be brought under the scanner if we are willing to move out of our comfort zones. The death of my friend and colleague Shehla Masood, who was fighting to expose corruption in tiger conservation efforts and civil society has made me realise that hatred and anger based on ideas of ‘Them and Us’ are still deeply rooted in society.That is why I deem it very important to give voice to alternative ideas so that ultimately as a teacher of mine once commented, we realise that “We are them and they are us.”