Montreal Serai

Self-portrait

English version below.

An extract from the documentary George Sand: The Story of Her Life produced by CNDP 2004, Montreal (Quebec)
 

Quelques heures avant de commencer à écrire cet article, j’étais à Radio-Canada, dans la  salle Jean-Desprez qui porte le nom de plume de la Québécoise Laurette Larocque (1906-1965), militante féministe et auteure de deux célèbres feuilletons radiophoniques Jeunesse dorée et Yvan l’intrépide qui ont duré 24 et 9 ans. Le rapprochement avec George Sand s’est imposé à mon esprit. Un siècle sépare Laurette Larocque d’Aurore Dupin Dudevant (1804-1876) qui, elle aussi, a signé ses écrits d’un prénom masculin joint à un nouveau patronyme en plus d’avoir publié des romans sous forme de feuilletons, dans les journaux. Nous pouvons supposer que, pour ces deux auteurs populaires, changer de nom s’est  avéré une tactique efficace pour déjouer le silence historiquement imposé aux femmes.

Au cours de sa vie, George Sand a bénéficié d’une reconnaissance considérable à titre de romancière, mais elle a aussi marqué son époque par ses prises de position et ses écrits enracinés dans  son engagement sociopolitique. Sa notoriété dépassait d’ailleurs les seules frontières de la France. Dostoïevski a salué l’influence de la dimension sociale de ses romans sur la littérature russe. Le poète américain Walt Whitman, quant à lui,  affirme avoir adopté comme livre de chevet Consuelo (1846) découvert dans la bibliothèque de sa mère. Ce ne sont là que deux exemples.

Au-delà du mythe George Sand et de l’aura de scandale qui  flotte autour de cette imposante figure de la littérature française du XIX^e siècle, Aurore Dupin était une femme remarquable dans sa vie personnelle, son engagement littéraire et son indéniable volonté de mettre sa plume au service de ses idéaux sociopolitiques.

D’AURORE DUPIN À GEORGE SAND

Née d’un mariage d’amour entre un père aristocrate et une mère issue d’un milieu très modeste, George Sand chevauche deux classes sociales. Elle écrit, dans son autobiographie, Histoire de ma vie,  que « le sang des rois se trouva mêlé dans [ses] veines au sang des pauvres et des petits ». Ce métissage social de la petite Aurore Dupin constitue l’humus à partir duquel se développe la femme qui deviendra George Sand.

À l’âge de quatre ans, alors qu’elle arrive d’Espagne avec sa famille, Aurore rencontre pour la première fois sa grand-mère paternelle. Au cours de l’année qui suit leur installation au château de Nohant dans le Berry, son père, Maurice, meurt dans un accident de cheval. Sa mère quitte ensuite Nohant et cède ses  droits sur sa fille à la mère de Maurice.  L’enfant, qui regrette vivement le  départ de sa mère, remplace son père dans le cœur de cette grand-mère qui a pour ancêtre Auguste II, roi de Pologne.

Aurore de Saxe, est une femme du XVIII^e siècle, une héritière de la philosophie des Lumières. Elle fait de la future George Sand une fille de la Révolution qui grandit dans un climat de liberté et d’ouverture d’esprit. Après avoir été retirée du couvent des Anglaises à Paris par sa grand-mère qui s’inquiétait de ses élans de mysticisme, sa formation intellectuelle est confiée à Deschartres, un excentrique qui avait été le précepteur de son père. Elle se plaît alors à faire de la musique, dessiner, lire et écrire des lettres à ses amies du couvent. Jeune fille énergique, elle apprécie les travaux manuels, les excursions dans la campagne berrichonne, les baignades dans l’Indre et les promenades à cheval ; elle monte à califourchon, ce que les femmes de son époque ne font pas. Elle connaît des jeunes gens de La Châtre, qui étudient à Paris et qui défendent des idées républicaines. Dans la campagne berrichonne du début du dix-neuvième siècle, cette liberté et cette indépendance prêtent le flanc à certaines médisances.

George Sand - 17 ans

Aurore perd sa grand-mère à l’âge de dix-sept ans et épouse, un an plus tard, Casimir Dudevant. Il est son aîné de neuf ans. Descendant d’une famille aristocratique, il ne veut pas porter le titre de baron et séduit aussi la jeune fille par la simplicité et l’honnêteté de sa demande en mariage. Aurore donnera naissance à deux enfants Maurice et Solange. Au fil des ans, l’écart entre Casimir et sa jeune femme s’accroît, ils ne partagent pas les mêmes idées et n’ont pas les mêmes préoccupations. Aurore partira pour Paris avec son amant Jules Sandeau. Elle y deviendra George Sand

NAISSANCE DE GEORGE SAND

Aurore Dupin arrive à Paris avec la ferme intention d’y gagner sa vie en dessinant ou écrivant pour la presse parisienne. Elle publie dans Le Figaro un premier article qui fait beaucoup de remous. De concert avec Jules Sandeau, elle s’attaque à la rédaction d’un roman, Rose et Blanche, qui sera publié sous le nom fictif de J. Sand. En 1832, paraît, sous la signature de G. Sand, Indiana, son véritable premier roman. Cette publication constitue un événement sur la scène parisienne où ce nouvel auteur est absolument inconnu. L’œuvre, comparée à du Balzac, critique ouvertement le Code civil napoléonien qui réduit les femmes mariées à une situation de dépendance où elles n’ont aucun droit civil ni aucun pouvoir.

Son deuxième roman, Lélia, paraît en 1833 sous le nom George Sand. Cet ouvrage crée un scandale dans le milieu littéraire parisien. Il s’agit d’un roman philosophique traversé par ce « mal du siècle » caractéristique de l’époque romantique qui, pour ce qui est de la littérature française, atteint son apogée dans les années 1830. Le roman met en scène un personnage désabusé, incapable d’aimer, incapable de vivre. Lélia choque ses contemporains par son contenu,  et on a aussi beaucoup critiqué sa forme. George Sand ne s’embarrasse pas des conventions littéraires, elle ose écrire comme le commande son propos. Elle mélange les passages lyriques aux descriptions réalistes, elle est capable d’audace dans l’emploi de différents procédés littéraires et elle n’est pas frileuse devant l’angoissant vide de la création.

George Sand deviendra une écrivaine populaire préoccupée de la situation des femmes et des injustices sociales. Elle mettra en scène des personnages aux prises avec des conditions, des circonstances et des événements variés en ayant habilement recours à de multiples procédés littéraires qui lui permettent d’exposer et d’interroger les réalités sociales et humaines qui la préoccupent.

L’entrée en littérature de la jeune auteure a été spectaculaire. Ce départ fulgurant ne s’est pas démenti. Elle a publié environ quatre vingt dix œuvres de fiction, une très volumineuse autobiographie évoquée plus haut, de nombreux autres textes, comme des récits de voyages, et par ailleurs  une correspondance qui a été publiée en vingt-cinq volumes. George Sand a  aussi mis sa plume au service d’un engagement sociopolitique indéfectible.

ENGAGEMENT SOCIAL ET POLITIQUE

La France du XIX^e siècle a traversé de nombreuses périodes d’agitation. Fille de la Révolution française de 1789 et d’un père républicain au sein de l’armée napoléonienne, George Sand constate que les intérêts du peuple ne sont  pas toujours servis par la jeune démocratie en marche. Avant 1930, année où elle s’affirme républicaine, elle se soucie assez peu de questions politiques, mais éprise de justice sociale, elle finit par se déclarer socialiste en 1840. Sa pensée se radicalise graduellement et sa véritable entrée en politique se fait en 1843 alors que La Revue des Deux Mondes de Charles Buloz refuse de publier ses romans si elle ne modifie pas le point de vue « communiste » qu’elle y défend. Elle crée alors avec le socialiste Pierre Leroux et Louis Viardot La Revue indépendante dont elle a elle-même trouvé le titre.

C’est aussi en 1843 qu’elle prend la défense de Fanchette, une arriérée mentale de 15 ans dont les religieuses de l’hospice de La Châtre ont voulu se débarrasser en faisant en sorte qu’elle s’égare dans la forêt. George Sand dénonce les religieuses et l’inefficacité hypocrite des fonctionnaires qui les protègent. Les imprimeurs locaux refusent de reproduire la brochure qu’elle a écrite. Sand et ceux qui partagent ses points de vue en déduisent qu’il faut créer un journal d’opposition. L’Éclaireur de l’Indre paraît pour la première fois en 1844.

George Sand entend faire en sorte que son travail d’écriture soit de plus en plus au service de ses idées égalitaires. Elle prend non seulement elle-même la défense des plus humbles dans ses écrits, mais elle favorise et encourage aussi l’expression des écrivains et poètes ouvriers dont la voix est trop souvent étouffée par le mépris. Elle multiplie par ailleurs les différents types de textes où elle s’engage à titre de citoyenne : reportages, témoignages, lettres, et aussi quelques textes plus théoriques sous forme d’essais. Elle n’est cependant pas une théoricienne, elle ne veut que défendre sa vision du monde dans une période de l’histoire qui est particulièrement mouvementée.

Dans les mois qui suivent la révolution de février 1848 qui a renversé la Monarchie de Juillet et donné naissance à la Deuxième République, Sand crée un hebdomadaire qu’elle intitule La Cause du peuple. Elle affirme vouloir y suivre l’événement parce qu’il met en rapport direct avec l’émotion du moment. Sollicitée par le Gouvernement provisoire, elle accepte ensuite de participer de façon anonyme aux Bulletins de la République qui en sont l’organe officiel. Après avoir mis fin à cette collaboration, elle écrit, entre le 2 mai et le 11 juin, treize articles pour La Vraie République de Théophile Thoré qui est très critique à l’endroit du Gouvernement provisoire. Sand sera accusée d’avoir été de ceux qui ont fomenté la révolte de juin 1848.

En mars, on avait annoncé pour avril des élections au suffrage universel masculin. George Sand pensait que c’était prématuré parce qu’elle considérait que les paysans n’étaient pas prêts. Elle avait par ailleurs aussi refusé de se présenter comme députée à l’Assemblée nationale comme le souhaitait un groupe de femmes dont elle n’approuvait pas la revendication du droit de vote pour les femmes. Elle considérait qu’une telle réclamation ne touchait que les plus favorisées de la société et qu’il fallait se préoccuper de l’ensemble des femmes dans ce contexte social où les femmes mariées n’avaient aucun pouvoir et où la majorité d’entre elles voterait nécessairement comme leur mari.

Pendant la guerre franco-prussienne de 1870-1871, George Sand écrit son Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre qui sera ensuite publié. Selon son habitude, elle veut surtout y témoigner de ce qu’elle voit et entend dans le Berry où elle s’est retirée et où elle constate l’écart très grand entre les régions et Paris. Elle est plus républicaine que patriote. Elle s’oppose à la guerre contre l’Allemagne, un pays qu’elle aime. George Sand a voyagé en Europe et elle se sent Européenne. Elle a d’ailleurs vu juste, cette guerre s’est soldée par un échec, la France a dû capituler le 29 janvier 1871. Cette capitulation crée parmi les classes populaires parisiennes  un climat de méfiance à l’endroit de leur gouvernement ; Paris qui a mené un combat courageux contre l’ennemi, est affamé, bombardé. C’est dans ce climat que naîtra la Commune de Paris de 1871.

Les classes populaires créent leur propre gouvernement entre le 18 mars et le 28 mai. Cette insurrection se termine dans la violence au cours de la semaine sanglante de mai 1871. On a reproché à George Sand et à d’autres écrivains et intellectuels de l’époque de ne pas avoir appuyé les communards. Elle était alors dans le Berry et bien qu’elle ait toujours affirmé s’opposer à toute forme de violence, elle aurait dit en privé qu’elle comprenait ce mouvement de révolte du peuple travailleur parisien.

George Sand n’a certainement pas changé le monde à elle seule. La conjonction de son histoire personnelle, de son métier de femme de lettres et de la conjoncture sociopolitique de l’époque où elle a vécu lui a cependant permis d’apporter une contribution aux idées et aux valeurs de son temps. C’était là un destin remarquable parce que les femmes ne pouvaient pas alors facilement s’émanciper et elles y étaient au mieux des faire-valoir de leur mari. George Sand est morte alors qu’elle avait un dernier roman en chantier. Elle a travaillé jusqu’à la fin de ses jours et son esprit de liberté, d’indépendance et d’authenticité ne s’est jamais démenti. Elle est morte toujours convaincue de ses idéaux de justice sociale.

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GEORGE SAND:  A REMARKABLE WOMAN

Translated by Maria Worton

Some hours prior to commencing this article I was at Radio Canada, in the Jean Desprez room,  Jean Desprez being the penname of the writer Laurette Larocque (1906-1965), militant feminist and author of two celebrated radio series,  Jeunesse doree and Yvan L’intrepide.  The connection with George Sand came to mind.  Precisely one century separates Laurette Larocque from Aurore Dupin Dudevant (1804-1876) who also under a masculine first name and an assumed surname had her novels serialized in the newspapers of her time.  For these two popular authors, changing their names proved an effective tactic for foiling the silence historically imposed upon women.

Gerge Sand at 30 years old

In the course of her life, George Sand enjoyed considerable recognition as a novelist, but she also influenced her era with her writings rooted in her sociopolitical engagement.  Her notoriety spread beyond the frontiers of France.  Dostoevsky recognized how the social dimension of her novels influenced Russian literature. The American poet, Walt Whitman, for his part, claims to have adopted, as his pillow book, Sand’s Consuelo (1842), discovered in his mother’s bookcase.

Beyond the George Sand myth and the aura of scandal that hangs around this imposing figure of 19^th century French literature, Aurore Dupin was a remarkable woman.

FROM D’AURORE DUPIN TO GEORGE SAND

The child of a love marriage between an aristocrat father and a mother of modest background, George Sand straddled the two classes.  She wrote, in her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, “The blood of kings is mixed in my veins with the blood of the poor and the small”.  This duality constituted the soil in which George Sand grew.

At the age of four when she travelled from Spain to the region of Berry, Aurore, meets her paternal grandmother for the first time.  In the course of the year that follows her arrival at the château de Nohant, her father dies in a riding accident.  The mother puts her daughter under the legal guardianship of the grandmother.  The child, who misses her mother terribly, replaces her father Maurice in the heart of her grandmother, Aurore de Saxe Dupin, the great grandchild of Auguste ll, King of Poland.

Aurore de Saxe is a woman of the Enlightenment.  She, in turn, makes of Aurore a child of the Revolution, of liberty and equality.  In fact, the grandmother withdraws Aurore from the convent and its mystical allure, in favor of a rather eccentric family tutor.  Aurore is instructed in the arts and letters, rides astride her horse, experiencing a large degree of free reign at a time when young women are usually confined.   She befriends youth who have studied in Paris and defended republican ideas.  In the Berry countryside, at the beginning of the 19^th century Aurore soon becomes the subject of rumors and gossip.

At the age of 17 she loses her grandmother and a year later she marries Casimir Dudevant.  He is nine years older than her and she is attracted to the simplicity and honesty of his marriage proposal. Together they have two children, Maurice and Solange, but over the years Aurore and Casimir will grow apart.  They share neither the same ideas nor the same concerns.  She will leave for Paris with her young lover, Jules Sandeau.  She will become George Sand.

THE BIRTH OF GEORGE SAND

Aurore Dupin arrives in Paris with the clear intention of earning her living drawing or writing for the Parisian press.  She publishes a first article in Le Figaro and throws herself into a novel that, according to her autobiography, is revised by her young lover and so signed by the two of them, using the pen name J. Sand.  After Rose et Blanche is published, she completes her first novel independently, Indiana, signed, G. Sand. Since he’s had nothing to do with its creation, her lover refuses her the initial J.  Indiana, its author unknown, is subsequently the talk of the Parisian scene. The work, compared to Balzac, openly criticizes the Napoleonic Civil Code that deprives women of any civil rights or power.

Her second novel, Lélia, appears in 1833, bearing the name George Sand.   The work creates a scandal in the Parisian literary scene.  It’s a philosophical novel, capturing the malaise of the time.  True to Romantic French literature that reaches its pinnacle in the 1830’s, the novel turns on a central character who is disillusioned, incapable of loving, incapable of living.  Lélia shocks its contemporaries with its content and receives much criticism for its style.  George Sand does not bow to literary convention however:  she mixes lyrical passages with realistic descriptions; she’s audacious in her application of various literary styles; she abandons herself to her creativity.

George Sand will become a popular writer concerned with the situation of women and social injustice.  She will create characters faced with the conditions, circumstances and events that characterize her day, and allow her to expose and challenge the social and human issues that concern her.

The arrival of the young author on the literary scene is spectacular.  This auspicious beginning is a sign of things to come.  She will publish nigh on ninety works of fiction, and in addition to the extensive autobiography noted earlier, numerous other writings, such as travel journals, as well as a lifetime of correspondence gathered together into twenty-five volumes.  George Sand will also relentlessly put her pen into the service of her sociopolitical engagement.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT

France of the 19^th century is a time of turmoil and upheaval.  Both a daughter of the revolution of 1789 and of a republican father, soldier of Napoleon’s army, George Sand becomes aware that the interests of the people are not always well served by the new democracy.  Before 1830, the year she declares her Republican affiliation, political questions are of little concern, nevertheless social justice issues are.   By 1840 she defines herself as a socialist.  Her political thought continues to radicalize and in 1843 La Revue des Deux Mondes refuses to publish her novels until she modifies the “communist” point of view that she defends.  In response and in league with socialist Pierre Leroux, and Louis Viardot she creates La Revue indépendante.

1843 is also the year that she comes to the defense of Fanchette, a 15 year old girl in the care of the nuns of an asylum in La Châtre.  Wanting to rid themselves of their intellectually challenged charge, the nuns arrange for Fanchette to be taken into the woods and abandoned.  George Sand denounces both the hypocrisy and the negligence of the nuns, and the civil servants who protect them.  Local printers refuse to print the pamphlet that she produces.  Sand and her supporters conclude that a dedicated newspaper is required for raising such issues.  The first issue of L’Eclaireur de L’Indre appears in 1844.

George Sand intends her writing to serve egalitarian ideas by coming to the defense of the underprivileged and also encouraging expression by writers and poets of the working class, a voice too often stifled and scorned.  As a citizen, she employs reportage, interviews, letters, and analysis.  She is not however a theoretician, she only wants to defend her vision of the world in a period of history that is particularly tumultuous and unfair.   

In the months that follow the February revolution of 1848 that overthrows the monarchy of July and installs the Second Republic, Sand creates a weekly newspaper entitled, La Cause du people. She wants to capture events as they are happening and to bring people into the emotion of the moment.  Solicited by the Provisional Government, she agrees to participate on an anonymous basis, in the Bulletins de la République, their official organ. At the end of this collaboration she writes, from May 2^nd to June 11^th, thirteen articles for La Vraie République , another political newspaper, created by Théophile Thoré, a republican  very critical of the Provisional Government.  Sand, among others, will be accused of fomenting the uprising of June 1848.

In March, elections had been announced, for a male universal suffrage for the month of April.  George Sand believed this was premature and that the peasants were too divided.  She had, in addition, refused to present herself as a deputy to the National Assembly, as the women’s lobby had hoped, in disagreement with its demand for female suffrage.  She had decided such a demand would only benefit the more privileged in society and that it was otherwise necessary to consider all of women in a social context in which married women had no power and whereby the majority of them would necessarily vote the way of their husbands.

George Sand at 60 years old

In her later years and during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, George Sand writes a Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre that will later be published.  In her usual manner, she wants above all to witness what she sees and hears in the region of Berry, where she’s retired and where she can observe the divide between the provincial regions and Paris.  She is more republican than patriot and she opposes the war against Germany, a country that she loves.  George Sand has travelled Europe and she feels European.  She correctly predicts that the war will end in failure.  France surrenders January 29^th 1871, amid food shortages in Paris, military failures and the Prussian bombardment of the capital. It’s this climate that gives rise to the Paris Commune of 1871.

During the Paris Commune working class people govern themselves from March 18^th to May 28^th, until the military move in and violently take back the city following La Semaine Sanglante.   George Sand and other writers and intellectuals are blamed for not supporting les communards. In Berry at the time, it is rumored that Sand privately expresses her sympathy for the movement, although publicly she remains opposed to any form of violence.

The woman that has become George Sand has certainly not changed the world single handedly.  The conjunction of her personal history, her work as a woman of letters and the socio-political conjuncture of the era in which she lives has allowed her to contribute to the ideas and values of the time. Nevertheless, her destiny proves remarkable, given the great difficulty of self-emancipation experienced by the women of her day who by and large exist to valorize their husbands.  George Sand dies with a work in progress, still in love with ideas of social justice.  All her life her passion for liberty, independence, and authenticity never fails her.

After years of denouncing Mother Country’s contempt for its emigrants stuck in the 1950s, I am airing the dirty laundry. What makes the immigrants stuck? I do not see peasantry as pejorative, just for some pernicious superstitions passed down through their descendents, who should know better. These examples aren’t representative of all immigrant experience.

We are becoming the men we wanted to marry. 

Gloria Steinem (Ms. magazine 1982)

The worker is a slave of capitalist society; the female worker is the slave of that slave.

James Connolly (1915)

A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind.

Mary Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of a Woman, 1792)

Remember, it’s as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

William Thackeray

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

Edward Burke

With much dismay, regressive forms of feminism re-emerge today. You don’t need a Gender Studies degree to keep a pulse on these matters. It is easy to see what created these fembots. Yesterday’s celebrity role models created a generation of starlets famous for contributing nothing. The sexual revolution brought to us by the media, shows women exposing their bodies for gains however the power structures remain. Southern Europe’s traditional countries of emigration hold contempt for Diasporas as islands of backwardness. Not that these countries are anymore progressive in regards to gender rights. In Italy, snagging that showgirl role opens the door to cinema and naturally, politics. Though these ex-showgirls, or pageant-contestants-cum-politicians, who transitioned from Berlusconi’s Mediaset network into his governments, may dress the part and repeat the lines, but they never get the important ministries. For an inkling of it, see Lorella Zanardo’s documentary, Women’s Bodies.  http://www.ilcorpodelledonne.net/?page_id=91

Another trend closer to home: Daughters of immigrants in Canada have this self-imposed pressure (and pressures from above) to get married. This single girl’s dilemma seems cross-national as the plethora of chick lit, chick films and TV shows like Sex In the City that condition us, it must end in marriage for everyone. The Bachelor also showcases the full-blown desperation of women suffering from considerable delusions.

The desperation is so heavy in such immigrant families, that they constantly remind their daughters of their failure to get married and procreating instead of praising their educational achievements. The onus on education is purportedly very important in immigrant families, yet, traditional forces obfuscate. Such fathers would say at the wedding reception, “We thought she’d never get married.” While immigrants are embittered they can never go home again, since it too has changed, their children can never leave home again, thus recreate a parallel “home.” The tyranny of keeping up appearances inherited!

The vulgarity of New Money, always known for being ostentatious for others, the bigger and tackier, makes for a new generation of self-entitled hyphenated ethno-Canadian Princesses. Creating the ripe conditions for Bridezilla behaviours, where a stunted adolescent craving for independence becomes a dream misplaced onto the fabled wedding day.

These girls, who in the past may have not had a chance for higher education because their parents invested in their sons, have had the benefit of some education; something their parents may have scarcely had back home. Children of peasant societies were brought up in the New World that taught them, more or less; they have choices for their future and are allowed to have it all (ambition and family). Through education, these women who came of age in the1960s already trudged the stereotypical route pre-destined for the female as secretaries, bank tellers, nurses and teachers and cleared the way for later generation of professionals, chartered accountants, lawyers and pharmacists. The economic leap from two generations is big: one from Old World pre-industrial to industrial working class (immigrant parents who saved to become comfortably middle class), to the recent super career women who have climbed up the rank.

Yet, there is an appearance of emancipation. In societies, which value traditions and appearances, these new professionals have to broach the past burdens with a new reality and newfound wealth. Their parents repeatedly may have said NO; now money changes everything. They can make things happen in their new position as women of means and say yes to themselves and would be partners as long as it affords them normalcy. Normalcy as long it conforms in the eyes of their brethren and monoculture friends who maintain and reinforce such beliefs.

In peasant societies, women obtained a modicum of power when she left her father’s house for her husband’s. She was supposed to get married very young, bear children and her obligations and duties in her newfound status as matron included keeping the register of money, the children’s welfare and their moral education. She went from working the fields of her father to those of her husband. Procreation meant making more hands to till the soil. If she was the daughter of a somewhat wealthier peasant family who owned their own land, her dowry made her attractive.

In Italy, daughters of Americani, whose fathers who emigrated to the Americas and returned were particularly attractive, and thanks to him, his son-in-laws could emigrate ensuring a win-win situation for the newlyweds; where the man could get a job while the girl got out of the village and their passage to the New World was their honeymoon. Fathers made sure the suitor had some dough of his own. The merchant class married the merchant class and nobility married nobility. This was feudal society in a nutshell. Depending on the family, one had freewill to marry whom they wanted within the class strata. Except for the rare case of the landed aristocracy when fortunes went terribly wrong, where the Nouveau Riches traded huge dowries for respectability as in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s book and Visconti’s film, The Leopard (1963). Post-industrialized society brought freedom from the lands and some traditions went by the wayside.

These structures were dragged to the New World to women who were taught one way, formally by society at large and another at home. The dreaded cliché of culture clash only exists if the children really want to rebel. Fear held peasants submissive, superstition a by-product, that’s why they rarely revolted save for some incidents in history. Children of peasants rarely revolted for the same reason, save for some of course.

When a bride shouts at her wedding party, “Girls, I finally can go out now!” because her parents kept her on a short leash; marriage means illusory independence. While most of us were at university, one girl was getting married at 20 “because there’s nothing to do.” A long mane girl in her early twenties can’t cut her hair, “What if I get married this year?” Oh, it’s derisible all right if it weren’t so terribly sad.

Greek superstitions like not telling anyone about a pregnancy until after 5 months, or the baby’s sex, or not buying a gift for the baby because it might jinx the pregnancy. Likewise, after the birth, mother and the newborn are not allowed to leave the household or welcome any well-wishers for 40 days (a common recurrence in Christianity, even repeated for funeral memorials in the Greek Orthodox faith). Forty days indoors without accepting visitors because they bring in “viruses” (modern speak for the evil eye because well-wishers may be jealous and cast negative thoughts onto the innocent newborn). These beliefs are sadder still when it comes from women born in Canada and university-educated in scientific fields. Changing of the rules oblige in the New World, exceptions like hospital visits (apparently, hospital rooms are virus-free sanctuaries) and the mother can leave the house for pediatrician visits for weigh-ins. Even for neo-subscribers of superstition, there is a logic that deems it necessary to adapt and accept the necessary medical visits.

Of course, they’ve picked up foreign traditions like North American eating habits, showers and bachelorette parties while not adopting others like moving out before one marries. Preserving some old school traditions like exploit-a-grandmother free daycare when the couple can afford it, or is it New World opportunistic, individualistic thriftiness while forgoing Old World generosity they’ve come to expect from their parents?

Not all archaic Greek superstitions like the trick marriage have been replicated in Canada, thankfully; posing next to a desired woman dancing unbeknownst to her and using the photograph against her will or the taking of a woman to a Greek island and the boatman strands her overnight to compromise her honour. These schemes resulted in marriages, albeit unhappy ones. And this was Europe in the 1970s at the same time Switzerland finally let women vote.

These exceptions in the New World reminds us of when mythology morphed into organized religions in the Byzantine and Roman World or where Post-Colonial Contact and slavery paralleled those of organized religions creating syncretic religions. Within one family’s immigration trajectory, tradition and mores morphed and adapted to the country of adoption. The newer generation pick and choose what will remain as tradition and what isn’t convenient anymore. They no longer have a talent for the kitchen, which was once praised as an ideal trait for a woman to have, but continue on the road of feminine self-sacrifice. Another inane belief is that the second daughter cannot marry if the eldest daughter is not married. In the past, first generation adult children of immigrants gave away their paychecks to parents. In such contexts, children felt the burden of maintaining a household, duplicating the structure back home where the son emigrated elsewhere and had to support the family; the novelty was the guilt-ridden resentment from not living your life. It was payback time after years of parents paying for their education. The majority of ethnic parents usually coddle their adult children.

Many in the West cast their disapproval or out rightly disparage cultures where arranged marriages (now gone hi-tech with internet matchmakers) and honour killings occur. Case in point: When Montreal Afghani parents, with the help of their son, orchestrated the Kingston drowning deaths of their daughters and wife number one who was barren and relegated to nanny/aunt status. All because they feared their 19-year-old daughter wanted to marry a poor Pakistani! The murders only created the opposite: the remaining living daughters who were taken by children’s services will grow up in Quebecois foster families.

And you hear about setting aflame saris, disobeying the family decreed marrying aged Uncle they chose for her. The Punjabi girl from B.C., married whom she wanted to, in spite of all the machinations, was murdered by family members with a phone call to India. The fear of the daughter becoming too Western, the West, where they chose to immigrate for its standard of living, yet traditional parents can’t control the floodgates of assimilation.

We forget Western Culture also fraught with the same contradictions and experiences. For honour killings, one needs to look at the films of Pietro Germi, who as a Northern Genoan seems to have a fetish for Sicilian nobility and mores, which weren’t even practiced by peasants in continental Italy. 

In Divorce Italian Style (1961), he skewers Italy which only introduced divorce in 1974, where nobleman Fernando Cefalù (Marcello Mastroainni), nicknamed Fefe by his overbearing mustachioed wife, takes a liking to his young cousin Angela. Since divorce was non-existent, he was inspired by a news event where a cuckold wife used the honour-killing clause in ancient Sicilian canons as a defence for her husband’s murder. To get a light sentence, he had to set up the conditions to entrap his faithful wife even if it renders him cuckold in front of glares and gawks of a machoistic village. More witnesses, the better where time-honoured la bella figura  (keeping up appearances) is paramount to laws and even supersedes them. Respectable women of all classes weren’t allowed to enter bars or dance so we witness men dancing with men at the Communist Hall. When a Northern Communist leader comes to give a travailed speech about the emancipation of women and mentions that recent case of honour killing at the comizio, the men in the front row shout in Sicilian, “Buttana!”(Puttana / Slut)

Germi’s other Sicilian comedy is more tragicomic. In Seduced and Abandoned (1964), a very acerbic script by commedia all’italiana ace AGE, Agnese (Stefania Sandrelli) is raped by her sister’s fiancé Peppino. She is further victimized: her name alludes to Agnes Dei, a sacrificial lamb. After doing some rudimentary penitence (sleeping with rocks in her bed) and hiding the rape from her sister Matilde, she writes it down, tears it up only for her mother finding the bit she “succumbed to lust.” She undergoes the “virginity test” which the father prescribes to the rest of his daughters for good measure, and banishes her in a room where the only way to communicate is via furnace pipes.

The father’s motivation isn’t the welfare of his daughter. Marriage can cancel Peppino’s crime with a matrimonio riparatore (shotgun marriage) only codified in Sicilian legal canon but that would explicitly mean the girl has been dishonoured. And he cannot resort to honour killing defence since time has lapsed from when he just heard about it. His nightmares are grotesque renderings of “WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK” if the daughter’s rape and crime, if denounced, are exposed. Given a beating and ultimatum, Peppino refuses to give up his law studies and is convinced by his mother that he cannot marry a dishonoured woman even if he was the one who raped her.
Agnese tries to prevent the honour killing plot by escaping to the police but remains evasive when the police chief asks whether there’s a plan or not, to finally say no. The police chief tells the dimwitted carabiniere from the North who believes her at face value: “In Sicily, yes is no and no is yes. We’re not in Treviso anymore.”

When Agnese is forced into marriage to cancel Peppino’s crime with a matrimonio riparatore, the sensible official asks if she freely wants to marry him. She screams hysterically “YES! YES!” and bursts into tears. In the great montage where Peppino reveals his doctored version, she takes on male behaviours, smokes and seduces, he remains a hapless victim aggressively attacked by a promiscuous woman.

The father, who puts the Padre in Patriarchy, transforms and manipulates his all-consuming fear into devising mise en scenes, so Peppino can be accepted socially since people would talk if it were revealed to be a matrimonio riparatore. But that causes another hypothetical dilemma: will villagers ask, “Wasn’t Matilde engaged to Peppino?” He has to find another suitor for Matilde, a destitute and suicidal Baron, and buys him false dental implants. He orchestrates a serenade from Peppino for Agnese, fakes a refusal complete with gunshots into the sky so everyone can hear. The father’s bravado after some villagers enquire about the reconfigured Matilde – Peppino – Agnese love triangle: “We’re not in the Middle Ages anymore!” This, after a well-thought out recreation of the rape via a public kidnapping to hide Agnese’s pregnancy during the Saint Liboria procession in the town’s square in which everyone could witness.

The police chief has a nose what to expect since he drives out of town that day in order to not witness the faux kidnapping spectacle, exclaiming “What a town!” as he covers his hand over the island on the map of Italy, “much better” wishing an atomic bomb would hit his island.

The attempt to trial Peppino ultimately unveils the truth creating the ire of townspersons towards the family. Even the Baron, throws away the dental implants saying he cannot be bought into marrying Matilde who comes from a dishonourable family. Matilde becomes a nun and Peppino and Agnese are promised to one another at the father’s deathbed, a wish that must be carried fully.

Not that these beliefs still exist today in Sicily. Some practices that have died in the mythical Village of provenance, some benign and silly ones like the serenades were transposed by emigrants.

Sicily is the land of creative writers, who’ve mediated on its complicated moral codes and contradictions. Like Vitaliano Brancati’s novel (and a Mauro Bolognini film; script by Pasolini) Bell’Antonio (1960) is about a sought-after handsome nobleman, Antonio who comes from a family of ladies men and turns out to be impotent in a macho society where aristocrats have lost currency and now need to marry New Moneyed women. In Bell’Antonio, it is an arranged marriage out of class preservation that evolves into love. This time, the family honour is dependent on the male and since Antonio cannot consummate his marriage to saintly beautiful Barbara (Claudia Cardinale), it is annulled. Antonio (Mastroainni) gets it on with prostitutes and honour is finally restored when his servant becomes pregnant to the delight of his mother who doesn’t care whether or not the child is his or not. Even if he has to marry beneath him, class is no longer important.

Male gold diggers preying on rich women are nothing new even in the pubescent world of comics: unemployed Archie chooses Veronica over Betty at first. Consumerism made everything possible, buying happiness or love is a new subterfuge for a mercantile exchange for marriage where the individuals are willing or unwittingly impervious participants. The latter usually love-blind with a disregard for verbal abuse because she exudes neediness. Peasant dowries (or the bride’s side paying for the entire wedding in its modern face, common in Anglo weddings) were replaced with professional women buying their own wedding rings, homes and nice toys their non-professional husbands ask for: cars, the latest electronic device. The problem arises when the unequal entities are confronted with the crux of all inequalities: WHO DECIDES? Merely making more money than the man not only ensures bread-making status, it can emasculate the traditional husband who is left in the peculiar old-new position of making the decisions with his wifey’s money as the Kept Man.

Amongst the most memorable names  that I heard as a child, growing up in a South Asian Muslim household, was that of (sir) Salman Rushdie. There was always an air of frustration, anger and utter hatred that seemed to accompany its mere mention by my kin. I was unaware, as a child, precisely what all the fuss was about. What I ended up gathering from the various snippets of conversations and outbursts was that he was a writer who had written some sort of a novel in which the Prophet Muhammad, alongside Islam in general, was portrayed in a most vile sense. The grouping of words of those around me – including the words of those on television who would discuss him – was enough to create an authoritative perspective on the issue that I slowly, with a naive mind, took on as my own.

Regardless of what process  of ‘enlightenment’ I went through as my years increased, that opinion of Mr. Rushdie as a vile figure persisted. It wasn’t a conscious acknowledgement – but the mere mention of the name or his novel The Satanic Verses would immediately spur reddened emotions.  I was never vocal in my dislike for Mr. Rushdie – he honestly has never served for even a topic of casual conversation. He was just a floating name, a floating figure, becoming increasingly irrelevant as he seemingly rode on the coattails of the remnants of a rather fatal fatwa issued, initially, by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for primarily political reasons in 1989, ten years after the Iranian Revolution.

I had skimmed (with much guilt) through The Satanic Verses in my first year at university, out of pure curiosity. Trivialization of familiar words and unholy parallels caught my already made-up mind and I quickly stuffed it back into the array of used books which lay before me.  A year later, a friend mentioned how in a class she had taken about Indian history a book by him had been assigned and she urged me to read it. Skimming through Midnight’s Children did not illicit any sort of interest within my, once again, made-up mind and it remains on my shelf, gathering dust along with unfortunate purchases of the likes of Camille Paglia and Noam Chomsky.

And when it was recently announced, on March 31st, that the undergraduate Student Union of my university would be hosting ‘an evening with Sir Salman Rushdie,’ my ears immediately perked up. What an odd and random choice for a speaker – what has brought him back to relevancy?, I thought to myself. At first, there was speculation that it was an April fool’s prank given the date of the announcement. But very soon it became apparent that it was not and over 800 students RSVP’d as attending on Facebook.

My concern was not for his presence on campus – I fully supported his right to come and spread his nonsense   – but I was surprised and curious as to why and how the Student Union had gone about choosing such a figure for their speaker of the year, essentially, especially given the rather large Muslim student constituency which falls under them and helped pay for Mr. Rushdie’s presence.

It just came across as poor taste, really.

But I was determined to go and see the man whose name had been a sort of fixture – of the peek-a-boo persuasion – throughout my life. Many Muslim students on campus debated attending the lecture and many non-Muslim students generally questioned the choice. As far as I was concerned, while my opinions about of him were strong, I ultimately knew very little. Attending the lecture, I figured, would hopefully serve as a means through which I could humble myself.

Please prove me wrong, Salman. Please don’t live up to the controversial fuss of writing The Satanic Verses.  Put all that controversy aside and talk about literature. Don’t be the irrelevant writer, of past fame past, who continues to cultivate his persona in a controversial manner for over twenty years. Please.

Rushdie walked out onto the stage, in a room filled with around 700 students, primarily of the Cultural/Literature Studies persuasion (thick rimmed glasses, tight jeans, White-man’s burden mindset disguised in a poor facade of moral relativism,  UTTERLY primitive), and the response was thunderous. A friend and I – two young women donning bright veils –  only found seats at the very front, in the direct view of both Rushdie and the vast and salivating audience. While we hoped otherwise, we felt curious and awaited being glanced at. Glances fall in our direction.

He began with a joke. He was articulate, eloquent, and witty. He knew what to say and precisely how to frame it. His syntax was, simply put, rather appealing. He was charismatic.

He immediately dived into his lecture, discussing the interplay between literature and the private and public lives of individuals. Literature, he explained, was the means through which news would reach the common man long before the days of the print media. Through literature, people would learn of the plight of poverty in their countries, wars in other states and issues relating to their own governments. It had real power – a power which has seemingly diminished with the increasingly trivialized nature of the news which treats sensationalist entertainment as serious issues of concern.

But Rushdie wanted to make a case for the ever increasing relevancy of literature – he claimed that it is precisely literature, as a medium of storytelling, which serves to truly examine the lives we lead and the world in which we live. Which claims are certainly far from ‘ordinary.’ He pointed to David Egger’s Zeitoun and What is the What as examples of this sort of contemporary story-telling which blends the spheres of journalism and literature. Such literature commands a humanization of history – it goes up against the ‘official history’ and allows us, the writers and readers, to really engage with who we are, our narratives and our place in this world – essentially, our whole existence.

Storytelling, according to Rushdie, is an integral part of our existence as human beings. We are the only creatures, he claims, who tell stories. Therefore there is something about the story, about the narrative, which creates an innate attraction within us to it. And it is most important during times of political upheaval as it sustains the humanity of everything. After all, at the center of literature is the human being.

The public and private spheres, Rushdie continued, have clashed together in a way unseen before. There is no longer a space between them; they are no longer individual spaces – they are one. He cites the example of Jane Austen, who lived during the time of the Napoleonic Wars, yet when you read any of her novels you would never come close to a hint of the presence of war. Politics and worldly events were not a part – an integral part, especially – of one’s life and existence. It has only been recent that we’ve adopted such a characterization of ourselves.

He quotes Herclitus, who once said: a man’s character is his fate. You are your destiny. Charlie Brown was and is Charlie Brown because he could never quite kick that football.  Lucy was Lucy because she would never fail to remove that football from Charlie Brown’s fast approaching kick. To change that destiny would be to change their characters. Were Lucy to not remove the football and were Charlie Brown to kick it, both characters would have lost a very real part of what made them.

Yet we also know that this issue of our character being determined by our fate is not necessarily always the case, such as with acts of violence. Regardless of whether a person was  a good father, a good son, a bad husband or a lousy cook – when those three thousand individuals were killed on 9/11, as per the example used by Rushdie, the wealth of their character was not based on where their destiny led them. And even then, we are well aware of the importance of the character in our ability to make a decision; in our capability or inability to pick up arms, use unkind words and commit acts of horror. The difference between two people living in the same war, poverty and plague stricken area, of which one picks up arms and the other resists, is simply their character. It is our character which is the fine line between life and death, between good and evil; between everything.

Literature upholds the importance of a multifaceted character, a sort of character which needs to be promoted. We live as multiple selves, thus our identity must be one which is open and broad rather than one which is narrow. A narrow identity, Rushdie claims, leads to conflict; it is hard to find a common group and the self becomes essentialized. The broad identity, however, allows for increased and growing common ground; we relate to others easily thus the impetus for conflict is hindered.

Literature creates and promotes a broad identity; it is the ‘civilized’ response to the persisting problems plaguing our world.

Rushdie then finally tackled the textual elephant in the room: The Satanic Verses controversy.

His entire discussion thus far seemed to culminate in what he discusses primarily about the controversy and its implications. According to Rushdie, and I’m somewhat inclined to agree, when the book came out people were being defined by what made them angry. Your commitment to your identity – in this case Islamic – was based on the sort of anger you showed towards Rushdie and his Satanic associates.

This led Rushdie to ask us who exactly has the power to tell stories? Who has the power to tell the grand narrative? The answer, Rushdie says, is us. We should be the ones in charge of the narrative.

In an open society the narrative is constantly being challenged, constantly in flux, and thus consistently changing; it is never ‘changed.’ Rather it remains in that state of change with no real end. To limit people in how they create and engage with a narrative is to go against the earlier discussed basic nature of man to which storytelling and creating is innate.

The novel persists, despite the internet, radio, and other various forms of media, because it upholds and values the voice of the individual. There is no ownership of this voice – no corporate interest, no lobby group. It is just a voice that speaks to whomever is there, waiting to listen.

Thus came the end to a rather well-structured, humorous and charming lecture. I sat there, sifting through my pages of notes I had been rigorously writing throughout the hour and a half. I sat there, applauding and smiling – some questionable underlying assumptions aside, his lecture was a pleasure to listen to. As someone with an interest in using literature as a form and tool of history, I was immediately consumed by his words which certainly weren’t new but did a rather attractive job of putting together various existing ideas. I turned to my friend, grinned and said “That was really, really great.” She smiled in return and agreed.

Then, the question/answer session began.

The first question asked was a reference to Rushdie’s cameo in Bridget Jones’ Diary. When the laughs subsided, however, the second inquisitive mind decided to provoke a fun response; after all, what good is Rushdie without some controversial perspectives? He was asked of his opinion on the recent legislation in Quebec which has sought to ban the adornment of the niqab from public spaces.

My stomach turned, leading me to reach for the non-existent Pepto Bismol lying somewhere in my recently purchased H&M handbag. Why was this being brought up? What was the relevance of this to his lecture? Since when was Rushdie an authority on minority rights and issues relating to Quebec history and identity complexes?

It was Rushdie’s response, however, which would elicit illicit a complete reddened response from my face.

Simply put, and general sexism aside, Rushdie said he ‘did not like his women behind a cloth.’ How he agreed with the legislation in essence, even though he had not read it, as he felt that was of dire importance that he be able to see the face of a woman who may be serving him in a government office. He didn’t need to see something in a ‘bag.’

I suppose bedding the likes of Padma Lakshmi makes one rather interested in the full exploration of the female body, regardless of her own choice. Again, an overly-enthusiastic advocate of Roman Polanski’s drugged and one-way consensual adventures with a twelve-year-old. Makes sense.

He went onto claim that the women in his family were strong, independent and critical minded individuals who would be ‘very, very, very cross’ were anyone to suggest the veil – no longer just the niqab – to them. He said he felt, quite honestly, the veil was a form of oppression. That while many women here may have the choice to wear the veil, many women around the world did not and were forced to comply with the religious dress code.

As two of three veiled women in the audience – and at the very  front, ten feet from Rushdie with whom constant eye contact was made throughout the lecture – my friend and I immediately found ourselves quietened internally. We were shocked. We felt targeted and we felt isolated as we could almost feel 700 pairs of eyes slowly glance in our direction, wondering about the sort of facial reaction his response would force.

I sat there, numbed. I was not just upset at the rather alienating and completely insulting comment made by Rushdie – implying women, such as myself, who are veiled aren’t the most critical of thinkers or intelligent enough to ‘resist’ such an oppression of the expression of our faith – but I was upset because I knew that very few in the audience would engage with that particular topic any further and even fewer in an at least enlightened or tolerant manner. A crowd, from which questions to this distinguished author consisted of asking his opinion on Twenty/Twenty Cricket World Cup, bloggers as credible experts (about which he knew very little but continued to dispense his opinion to the masses), Slumdog Millionaire’s success, and general advice to aspiring writers, was not one from which I would expect a great deal of ‘critical thinking’ itself. Pretentious perhaps on my part, yes, but I’m the one creating this narrative aren’t I?

What upset me the most, however, was how completely useless Rushdie’s words became once he made that comment. He immediately had forgotten the importance of ‘tolerance’ and finding ‘common-ground.’ Rather than perhaps looking at different ways to live the narrative shared across borders by all of us (amongst our own national, regional, individual narratives) he chose to make it abundantly clear that it was ultimately only his own narrative that mattered. That he was unwilling to listen to or acknowledge the narrative of others, because ‘bags’ just aren’t his thing. Mr. Rushdie spoke of how in an open society, the narrative must be constantly challenged and reworked – the (small) presence of the niqab and the (large) presence of the hijab in Quebec, in particular, are doing precisely that, sir (in the least royal sense of that word). So, what of that?

I attended the lecture with a made-up mind about Salman Rushdie, hoping that he’d be able to somehow prove me wrong despite all that I had read about and by him. That by becoming humanized – the most important thing, he mentioned – my dislike for him would weaken and he would merely become another writer whose work I could respect even with reservations in regards to his beliefs and actions. And during the lecture itself, he grew on me. He was quick, charming and eloquent – it is hard to hate someone who possesses such qualities.

But I left feeling completely to the contrary. The way I was made to feel – alienated – and the way he completely deviated from an hour and a half of his own words, especially, left me completely disappointed with Salman Rushdie. Not as a writer, but as a person. Believe, internalize and exhibit what you say and promote, sir (again, in the least royal sense of that word).

Then again, whatever. Muslims don’t care about Rushdie anymore.

It’s all about Ayaan Hirsi Ali now.

Literature has always been important, is still important and will continue to be important for as long as human beings have a speech centre in their brain. And were an errant blood vessel to flood this important area of the command centre of the human body,  we might survive as living organisms but  our life would be immensely impoverished for there isn’t a sadder sight than that of a human being who can no longer communicate -or commune- with fellow human beings. Because literature is all about communion,  memory, beauty, need, desire, feelings, conviviality and expression,  most importantly expression.  As a species we call ourselves homo sapiens, the human who knows, but we might as well call ourselves  homo affabilis , the human who communicates. In other words, we are chatterboxes who, for the sake of expediency and a larger audience,  invented writing which then morphed into literature.

The Bible, one of the most-often published and translated books in recent millennia and more, got it right when it pronounced: In the beginning was the word. Those who  are a  product of the Judeo-Christian tradition might take all its pronouncements as a literal or metaphorical explanation of life on earth and beyond, or  not. That is their privilege. However, simple lovers of literature recognize that its endurance is due to its ability to capture our imagination and to understand the trials and tribulations of a  wandering people who lived long ago and far away. And if we don’t quite agree with what it has to say, we can always turn to another magnificent piece of literature called the Koran which also calls for empathy and love for our fellow human beings. And yet again, if we can’t read from right to left, and like our letters to hang down from the line instead of being perched on top of it, we can always light an oil lamp in front of an image of Lord Ganesh hoping that he grants us the gift of imagination. After all, Ganesh, besides presiding over weddings and other auspicious (or potentially difficult!) endeavors, is the most prolific author of them all. It is said that he wrote the whole of the Mahabharata, the great epic of the Bharat dynasty that ruled India in a distant past. Some refine this tidbit of information by explaining that  Vyasa, a great Sanskrit poet, was the true author of the Mahabharata and that Lord Ganesh merely took  down his dictation. Closest to the truth is the version that states that this epic poem, the longest in the world with its 90,000 verses, was really an accretion of accounts written across generations. Its structure is that of a story within a story, one of the most complex -and satisfying- literary genres. Be it as it may, every time I turn my computer on, a  jovial bronze Ganesh holding the tip of his broken tusk in his right hand  and scribbling away on a book in his left hand stares at me from the screen  daring  me to do likewise. 

Bedtime Reading Susan Dubrofsky

There are other examples of great literature from other continents. The Odyssey and the Iliad tell the story of gods who mingled with humans and warriors who went on long voyages leaving their wives behind busy at a loom. The  Popol Vuh explains to  the Mayan people from the Yucatan Peninsula  how the world was created.  The Kalevala, an epic poem of the Finnish people, actually inspired them to become independent from the Russian empire and establish modern Finland. The Altjeringa or Australian Aboriginal Dreamings,  map out the path Aboriginals must take  in their long journeys across the continent  and the griots or story-tellers  from Africa keep the culture alive. Literature is the vessel that contains the immense story of humanity across  time and space.

 Modern society has the internet, that network of electronic highways, by-ways and lanes that move the word around with electronic alacrity. The down side is that it is giving rise to another form of literature that is concentrating memory in virtual spaces away from physical supports like stone, parchment  and paper and most importantly, debilitating the  synaptic  resiliency of the human mind. But it has brought about other advantages. The internet revolution has actually made it possible for lovers of literature to immediately disseminate the work of and rally around the cause of writers who are threatened by their governments because the latter feel threatened by them. This proves that the pen -read literature- continues to be mightier than the sword. Writer Vaclav Havel, who as last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic led his country through a difficult transition without shedding blood, validated this saying. Literature was also a life-saver for Shehrazade who survived thanks to her ability to tell a thousand and one enthralling tales.

It is difficult for a writer to get started but once on a roll, it is difficult to know when to stop. One can go on and on about the importance of reading and writing since writers have examined their profession more intensely than any other professional group. So  I will  arbitrarily stop here with a quote from Canadian author Yann Martel. When interviewed about his obstinacy in sending Canadian Prime Minister Harper a novel every two weeks for two years in the hope of eliciting a reaction, he explained that he would have liked to know what Harper read, because he would hate to have a leader whose bedside book is  Mein Kampf. Know your enemy by the friends he keeps and the books he reads!  He also suggested that the importance of literature resides in its ability to open doors and make us more empathetic. “You read a story about a boy soldier in Afghanistan and it opens your heart, even if you’ve never been to Afghanistan”.

Ergo, literature is still important because the hard times we live in require that we open our  hearts, and open them wide.

Often inflated and possibly misleading, the titles I chose for my college Lit essays were always picked last and were usually the invention of unpardonable puns and last-minute panic. In my first and second year, those amateurish instincts did not end there; my essays though full of conviction and argument, failed to translate what it was I meant to say. Words were words were words were words. What I didn’t know then-though it seems stock to say, ‘…but what I do know now,’ considering I’m only six months out of college-is how to read. Writing came after. In Howard Bloom’s book, whose title inspired my last sentence, How to Read in Why, Bloom quotes Sir Francis Bacon in the prologue, and begins to answer the Why: “Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.” Bacon’s counsel, to weigh and to consider, behaves in life as a slowing down; to absorb, appreciate, question, expand, feel, and ultimately grow. Though reading was done quietly and alone, and only sometimes in the company of others, literature became my way of reconciling with everything around me and widening my scope. As Bloom urges, although we read for varied yet familiar reasons, to “read deeply,” is the truest motivation.

And so with the right guidance, a couple of teachers endowed with that mentoring eye-half warmth, half craze-and the sort of vitality that a student who first appears brittle and unimpressionable, me, but who is utterly vulnerable and seeking, latches onto, I soon abandoned the impulse to empty the library’s shelves of secondary readings, and embrace the book alone. I began to read a novel’s first sentence as if it were its overture, and soon discovered that unwitting instinct to treat the first page as if were a foundation, securing and revealing, both, the novel’s path. Of course there was no formula for reading, no checklist to follow, instead, after having deserted the option of reading others’ thoughts and studies, I began to understand pattern, to notice as themes and ideas recurred and connected, as if in certain parts the letters themselves were thicker and bolder on the page. I started appreciating what was being inferred, learning the subtleties of a writer who often describes things as they appear or seem as oppose to the writer who claims to capture everything as it is.

 It was once this phenomenon started happening, that I really became a reader. To think that this only ensued in college is unfortunate, though I’m not sure any time before would have made much sense. These were the years allotted for me to inquire, to be more drastic and to create. I was filling myself with influences and memorizing favourite passages, and romanticizing characters only to recreate them in my own writing; I was, in my own art, “deforming the model,” as Barthes states. Suddenly, despite earlier resistance, I was turning to my parents for their take on things and finding solace in shared journeys. But more crucially, these were the years I chose to read as much as I could; the 19^th century novel, French lyrical poetry, Greek Tragedy, Proust, Contemporary American short fiction. Invariably, my certainties shifted frequently. With each writer, came an era or war, came revolutions-French, sexual, student. But more significant was when I began to understand that certainties were needless, preventable even.

Prior to graduation last May, I made a list of books I hoped to read, ones I had no time for in the year. It was the only thing I’d planned to do; I had yet to find a job, or an apartment, or even consider something more classic , like a road trip with friends or a summer class, something light and indulgent, like printmaking or cooking. Instead, I was excited to begin devouring my reading list, each book, one by one, in no particular order. Somehow, having choice was order enough. I should have predicted what happened instead. My first months this summer were spent re-reading. Some books were still fresh in my mind and I caught myself anticipating favourite parts. Others, short fiction or essays, I hadn’t returned to in a couple of years, yet those too were suddenly alive again; that haunting perfection of a great short story, its timing matching my ride into the city. I found myself assigning my fellow passengers Dickensian names to pair with their Dickensian quirks: the way they sat squished in their seats, sweaty, even grotesque.

Each book was animated in a new way, as if cohering somehow with my daily thoughts and interactions. That nervous, existential post-college fear was quieted one afternoon as I re-read a Raymond Carver essay on writing. I read it three times, as if asking it to accompany me until I’d calmed down a bit. I learned the pleasure of returning to a book, of reading sentimentally and wistfully, with all of me. To be once again in the throes of a narrative, a romance, a familiar pursuit, reminded me that reading was something I had learned to do and that it needed practice and attention, and that despite the years each book had on me, I too was bringing something to the page. “Find now what comes near to you,” Bloom reminds-weigh and consider, weigh and consider.

The novel encourages – a form of storytelling that promotes our sense of being individual, but never forgetting the bond of our “common humanity” and of the “universal experiences” that we believe the best novels elucidate and comment on. – From Noah Richler’s blog

Like most candidates for a Masters Degree in Communication and Theatre, I searched for a text that summarized some obscure, but relevant information. I found Kenneth Burke’s Philosophy of Literary Form. It gave me way of thinking about literature and a reason to start writing.

Burke began by analyzing proverbs “Proverbs are designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling.”  They describe recurring social relationships and events and provide advice for surviving almost anything. Proverbs are essentially “equipment for living”. Literature is” proverbs writ large.”

The books that we read, the poetry and the plays and films that we view, are there to provide in a post technocratic society, what existed in the one-liner proverbs of a pre-literate world. Marry in haste regret at leisure becomes Pride and Prejudice. Red sun at night sailor’s delight, red sun in the morning sailor’s warning becomes Moby Dick; the higher up the monkey climbs the easier to see its ass becomes the Great Gatsby.

There is also my mother’s philosophy of literature which sounds like a proverb. She used to say that books are like food. Some books are great appetizers, others the meat and potatoes and there are lots of desserts. She said that we have a little of everything in our cupboards. To this day I read research books in the morning, meat and potatoes during the day and dessert books are piled untidily by my bed. 

My mother used the books that she had read as a girl to keep my brother distracted from the horrible hunger of a war time sojourn in Siberia and Kirgizstan. She told him the plots of Dickens and Victor Hugo. When he finally learned to read, my brother went through the entire library of the refugee camp in Germany so quickly that Eleanor Roosevelt gave him a prize.

I have written screenplays and theatre plays and short stories and there is a big difference between them.  In film and theatre, the subtext or motivation and thoughts and deepest feelings of the persona, are left to the actor. One writes the dialogue on the surface and prays for intelligent interpreters. I realized when writing stories that subtext was my responsibility.  The only way the reader would know what some event felt like was when I described those feelings. It seems so obvious but it really is the most difficult thing to learn. The performing texts need narrative drive, atmosphere, believable personae and dialogue. A good novel provides feelings, thoughts and subtle changes in attitude so that the journey of the characters remains engaging. Great literature provides ways of thinking about the unthinkable. It addresses the most difficult situations that human beings might experience. Literature makes us laugh out loud, helps to ease our pain, provides clues about human nature and teaches how to surmount desperate times.

A novel can take you anywhere in any timeframe on any personal or social journey. We enter the reality of the anthropological “other”. A good book transcends the limitations of our own circumscribed time and space. It can change or enhance the difficult challenges we face.

A friend of mine from Turkey had just enough English to discover Margaret Laurence. He spent weeks alone in the cab of an eighteen wheeler and he fell in love with Canada as he crossed it while struggling painstakingly through “The Diviners” by Margaret Laurence.

Everyone wants to survive and to live better. In agrarian societies, the proverb served as a textbook rich with life enhancing advice. Today we need proverbs with greater subtlety and complexity to provide us with strategies for living. Notwithstanding the information bombardment of internets and multichannel television, we continue to seek the beauty and intricacy of a Huckleberry Finn, Wuthering Heights, Fifth Business, Cat’s Eye, Tom Jones, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

There are theories about the loss of the habit of reading. The internet and Google fast information bites, face book and twitter cause our brains to multi-task and condition them in ways that make it difficult to concentrate on large bodies of print. Yet, when we are most at risk or stressed, there is one remedy that can serve us better than any chemical panacea – a good reading light, a long and ample sofa and an engaging book. Literature matters and it survives when parents can keep their children distracted from pain and hunger with the tales of David Copperfield and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It survives so that we can know each other. It allows us to internalize the global collective wisdom that lives in great books.

If homelessness of an individual or family is a tragedy, homelessness of millions of people must multiply that tragedy millionfold, mustn’t it?

Here’s a recipe for disaster.  Take a city of eight million people, destroy forty per cent of its housing stock – nearly  one and a quarter million homes – in less than eighteen months and make more than forty percent of its population technically homeless. 

That, in World War II, was what happened to London, England just one of hundreds of cities around the world faced with similar calamities.  In London, it was largely the consequence of the Blitz, concerted German aerial bombing of Britain’s capital between 1939 and 1941.  In Dresden, Germany, the British wrought similar destruction.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, were devastated by the USA exploding the world’s first nuclear weapons.  Yet within just a few years, in these and countless other shattered cities, destroyed infrastructure had been restored and homelessness was virtually unknown.. 

Worldwide in 1945, almost irrespective of political system, there was a high degree of social consensus.  Housing the homeless was seen as a community challenge, a responsibility taken up with alacrity.  Multiple approaches were applied.  Overcoming the personal and social tragedy of mass homelessness transformed cityscapes and social expectations.  One consequence of meeting that challenge successfully was the remarkable fact that by the early 1950s absolute homelessness, people living rough on London’s streets, was almost unknown. 

We know it could be done then.  So why not now?  Why does solving the problem of homelessness now feel like an unattainable dream?  Do the people who tell us to be ‘realistic’ know something we don’t?  Well, many lessons have been learned and, to mix metaphors, a lot of bucks have flowed under a lot of burning bridges and the bucks don’t stop flowing.

 To answer that ‘why’ question, jump forward fifty years to 1992.  Two stories in one issue of the Wall Street journal provided a fascinating snapshot of 90s “reality”.  One explained how India, a country with a population then approaching one billion, was denied a development loan of $200 million, less than twenty cents per head.  The banks, the newspaper explained, could not be sure India would repay that loan.  The other reported that, for reasons not unrelated to preventing the possible collapse of several major Canadian and US banks, three property-developer brothers from Toronto were about to be bailed out with a twenty-billion dollar rescue package, almost seven billion dollars per head.  Less than two years later the Reichman brothers’ construction company declared bankruptcy owing seventeen billion dollars.  Interestingly, they ended up neither homeless nor even penniless.

It was no news for that day’s Wall Street Journal that by 1992 for well over a decade, thousands of people had been living and some were dying on London’s streets, the very streets from which homelessness appeared to have been eradicated in the 1950s.

Logically, morally, housing must be a human right, mustn’t it?

Not without justification, Canada is proud of its Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Canadians who know are doubly proud because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN’s model which has been used so successfully to invoke human rights and inspire progressive legislation around the world since 1948, was drafted by Canadian, human rights lawyer John Peters Humphrey. 

Check out the Canadian Charter or the Universal Declaration online.  Do a word search.  The words ‘house’, ‘housing’ or ‘home’ appear nowhere. 

Yet a 1998 travelling exhibition to mark the Universal Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary showed that in his preparatory notes and first drafts, Humphrey had included the right to housing.  Eleanor Roosevelt  who championed the Declaration and chaired the UN committee which ultimately approved it was also sympathetic.  So how was that crucial right omitted?

Jump forward two years from the WSJ article to 1994, then a further fifteen years to 2009.  Look at what was and is happening in the United States.  Publicly reported hysteria reached levels associated with the McCarthy era and the height of the cold war.  The focus of the frenzy?  The idea that Americans might have a human right taken for granted in the majority of what are often labelled “advanced democracies”, the right to healthcare irrespective of their wealth or poverty.

In the late 1940s the witch-hunt target was different – housing then, healthcare now – but the motive was the same.  The Soviet Union, the embodiment for the USA of the evils of Communism, had a constitution guaranteeing its citizenry the right to a home.  How it was to be achieved or even what that guarantee meant were never spelled out.  But the knowledge that Communists assured that right was enough for its opponents to mount an attack on the very concept. 

As today’s rentayanks appear on television, run weblogs, write articles or take to the streets to vent rage at the imposition of “socialism” on their market-oriented lives, much work takes place behind the scenes to ensure that the usual beneficiaries, the corporations, will continue to benefit.

In the USA of the late 1940s housing was hardly a high profit investment.  From the 1915 recession, until shortly after Word War II, US house prices remained virtually unchanged.  Action was needed to turn housing into a sure fire winner.

 For nearly three decades post-war British governments of all colours competed to outplan and outbuild each other in housing provision.  Although publicly funded housing for the poor could be traced back a millennium, a local authority model that had emerged in the early 20^th Century prevailed.  It came as no surprise to anybody that in a 1959 General Election campaign a British Conservative Prime Minister promised that his government would build three hundred thousand publicly subsidised new homes – social, , not private, market housing.  The 1945 Labour government had started a massive programme of house-building, developing on schemes underway since the 1930s.  Those were intended not just to rebuild the shattered housing stock of the World War I era and provide “homes fit for heroes”, they were a Keynesian strategy to kick-start the economy which had been left in shreds.  Much of the work was carried out by local council or government labour forces.  Many materials and components were produced in publicly funded and operated factories.  The schemes provided remarkably high quality housing at a cost with which the market could simply not compete and make profits.  Housing was treated not as a commodity but a basic right, even though no constitution guaranteed that right.  It created political consensus and social cohesion. 

Socially mixed housing estates, even entire towns were planned and built, providing not only houses but also social, educational, recreational, health, commercial and transport infrastructure. Minimum space and amenity standards were introduced.  Planning was the key.  The model was soon widely emulated around the world.

Globally over the next decades the expertise acquired in rebuilding after wars and natural disasters led to massive programmes of publicly planned and administered, semi-public, co-operative, community and voluntary-organisation-managed social housing schemes.  Hundreds of millions of people were housed, infrastructure provided.  It looked as though the scourge of homelessness could go the same way as smallpox.  House and community building boosted construction and other industry, created employment, improved social conditions.  With governments of all types supporting housebuilding, the United Nations promoting its construction and providing training, skills and experience, the World Bank providing support funding and the International Monetary Fund offering expertise, the future looked as if it could be rosy.  The UN declared 1986-7 International Year of Shelter for the Homeless and the UN Centre for Human Settlements encouraged governments to work towards a target of decent housing for all by the year 2000.  But by the time the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless arrived, there had been a sea change.

Where did it all go wrong?

Opposition to making housing a universal human right in 1948 was more, much more, than just an ideological stance.  It was part of a strategy to create scarcity, allow market prices to soar and make money for banks and corporations.  For a while it appeared to work.  The stated ideological underpinning was that old familiar song, only the market can provide housing in the most efficient way and social provision can never compete with the market.  In truth markets would only ever provide mass housing if there are guaranteed profits to be made.  To make their profits the opponents of social housing would do anything to manipulate the market.

In Britain the first changes arrived in 1951 with the first post-war Conservative government.  Instead of local authorities and government being allowed to fund housing and infrastructure construction directly from revenue and taxation, new laws forced them to borrow the money needed to build housing from specially constituted financial institutions and pay it back with interest over a number of years, twenty five or forty.  It would end up costing far more.  Now the banks were interested.  House and city building could mean big money for them.  Gradually commercial banks got their hands on the loans.  Initially low interest rates rose over time.  The new model was established. 

In the United States, promising mass social housing projects started to face opposition, singled out for concerted Republican attack.  As economies started to boom in the 1950s there was a lot of money to be made out of financing housing construction although regulations introduced to prevent a repeat of the 1929 crash limited potential profits for speculators.

It took the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the USA, both believers in the Chicago School of Economics, followers of the philosopher Friedrich Hayek and advocates of free enterprise to take the new model global.  Both expressed visceral hatred for the concept, even the word, “planning”, then carefully planned and orchestrated their actions.  Both professed unwavering belief in “free markets”, then worked ceaselessly to manipulate markets, ensuring they were anything but free.  The idea of housing being provided on the basis of need was replaced by the insistence that housing was to be available only to those who could afford it.  To support this changed concept, transformation of social attitudes to housing became essential.  Henceforth housing would be promoted as “an investment”.

Margaret Thatcher struck the first death blows for publicly owned and managed social housing in Britain, introducing the attractive sounding “right to buy” while acting to block public building of housing by withdrawing its funding.  She introduced a range of short-term alternative models, support to housing associations and co-operatives, gave them some of the money taken from the public sector, then over time, progressively withdrew that funding.  To accompany these changes, new tax provisions incentivised an entirely new market, to be known as “buy-to let”.  Individuals could make their fortunes there.  Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown, believers in the magic of the market, would challenge the Thatcher model.  For good measure, arguing that a healthy private housing market would eliminate homelessness, Margaret Thatcher sold off most of Britain’s homeless shelters, solid older buildings in good locations, to developers to turn into luxury apartments or boutique hotels.  They were not replaced.

In the US Ronald Reagan appointed Vice-President George Bush as his czar for deregulation of the main housing finance sector, the Savings and Loans banks.  This led in 1988 to the then biggest financial sector failure since the 1929 crash and the Great Depression.  In 1989, then President George Bush was forced to rush through a 165-billion-dollar rescue package for the S&Ls.  In 1990 Stanford University estimated that the true cost to the American public over the life of that rescue scheme would reach 1.4 trillion dollars.

Despite this minor setback, the US continued to push internationally for a series of co-ordinated actions in just one direction.  One major step in globalising the strategy of a shift from public to private provision was something apparently unconnected.  The United States started to withhold its contribution to various parts of the UN system and demand internal reforms.  These were followed by demands for changes in the policies the UN could promote.  Programmes were cut, staff sacked, future projects shelved.  For the UN Centre for Human Settlements, co-ordinating International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, projects based on  self-help, community initiative or public provision were out.  When, a few months later, the World Bank rode to the rescue with new funding, it imposed on the UN agency policy changes already familiar to many poor countries, recipients of World Bank loans.  Publicly owned housing – alongside other public assets – was to be sold off “to reduce the public debt” and “realise public asset values”.  Across Africa, model housing estates based on British council housing were put onto the market.  Most had been housing not for the population at large but for civil servants.  Suddenly they could no longer survive on their already low and frequently unpaid salaries.  They were forced to look for second or third jobs just to meet housing costs.  Opportunities for corruption increased exponentially.

The UN no longer supported public provision, self-build, community or co-operative housing,.  Governments were to switch from provision programmes to “enabling strategies”.  “Enabling” meant advising individuals and governments at all levels on how to contract loans, read ‘get into debt’. 

To be fair, the World Bank recognised its ‘enabling’ policies were not within everybody’s reach.  It had the decency to acknowledge that one of its buzzwords of the 1980s and 1990s, “affordability”, did not apply to the lowest-earning tenth population percentile, that part of the population on ten percent or less of average national income.  It played down the fact that in many countries, massive inequality meant that the lowest tenth percentile could constitute as much as ninety per cent of the population.  For them, the World Bank and the UN offered – nothing!  Homelessness rose exponentially.

UK homelessness may not have figured prominently in  the Wall Street Journal but over the years The Economist published a series of graphs showing that from 1979, as construction of publicly funded housing in Britain fell, official homelessness rose at almost exactly the same rate. 

Meanwhile one further element of the co-ordinated plan was working its way through the system.  Manipulation of housing shortages, management of an international media message that housing was not just a place to live but a long-term, iron-clad investment that for many people could become their retirement pension.

People who looked beyond what became known as the Anglo-Saxon model of economics grasped that these policies had led to a frenzied bidding upwards of house prices.  By the 1980s, in the world’s second largest economy, a country which ought to have been able to provide adequate housing for all, it was only affordable on five-generation, 125-year mortgages.  In the late 1980s Japan’s housing market collapsed taking down major banks in the process and leaving the country in a crisis from which it has yet to emerge nearly twenty years later.  Homelessness there hit new peaks.  Even now, people are living in tent cities in places like Tokyo.  Will Japan’s new government dare consider real change?

Manipulation of the “free market” depended on generating a climate of fear.  If people didn’t get onto the “housing ladder” they risked becoming homeless.  Rediscovered Victorian values divided the poor into “deserving” and “undeserving’.  The homeless, irrespective of how they had become so, were treated as feckless.  In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain people who had not earned their first million pounds by the age of thirty were viewed as failures.  It took time but over the next decade and a half the Anglo-Saxon model engineered housing price rises of several hundred percent.

In the USA extensive understanding of the dangers of overheated housing markets, based on the 1980s experience of the Savings and Loans collapse was not just ignored, it was systematically suppressed.  People who knew and wanted to regulate finance to prevent a repeat of the US and Japanese disasters  were fired and made unemployable.  Regulators were swept aside.  What were known as Recognised Accounting Practices or RAP were replace by something that favoured the fantasy that “no regulation is good regulation”. In came Creative Recognised Accounting Practices or CRAP.  The CRAP regime ushered in the era of the sub-prime loan. 

To compete and stay in business in a globalised world, banks and financial institutions were forced to participate in the CRAP race to the bottom.  Easy access to credit and the promise that rising prices ‘ensured’ that however high interest rates rose, the rising value of property would make “investing” in property worthwhile.  When that myth crumbled last year, not just banks but entire countries became technically bankrupt.

Have the collapse of housing financing institutions around the world over the past two years and the massive increase in homelessness sounded a warning to the world at large?  Far from it!  As major banks start laying claim to massive profits again, it looks as if they will be returning to “business as usual” meaning more homelessness.  British and US media are heralding new increases in housing prices as being a good thing. 

The next collapse will come much sooner and have an even more devastating effect on housing and homelessness than the last. 

Individuals faced with homelessness rarely have the resources to provide decent housing.  Local communities can pool and co-ordinate their limited assets but post-war experience showed only governments can mobilise all the resources needed to build their way out of mass homelessness. 

By promoting monetarism through the World Bank, IMF and UN, the US government forced one choice on all governments, mortgage and debt-based private housing, often benefiting US financiers.  That created homelessness and failed the poor.  Governments recently co-ordinated and marshalled far more than the cost of housing everyone in the world to protect failed bankers’ bonuses.  Without another world war, will we ever see them mobilise as effectively to house the needy and homeless?

The Victorian pauper, with tuppence in his pocket, might gloat: “You pays your money and takes your choice”.  Today’s homeless can only bemoan, “We pays our money, they takes our choices.”

Twenty five years ago a man strolled by me on Viger Street in Montreal. I figured he was a drifter. He looked straight ahead through his round John-Lennon glasses.  He had a slight stoop to his walk. For a split second, he had looked at me and I had looked at him, as well. His long hair had been cut in awkward clumps and it seemed like they had just fallen off. He had a straight line walk. He did not look to the side. He did not want his eyes to meet anyone else’s. His shoulders drooped. Very little of his cheeks were visible.  His black and white beard hung down to his chest. His jeans were dark and tattered around the edges and at the knees.  He wore a dark jacket, whose pockets were weighed down by stuff that he had put in, in plastic bags. I noticed all this in the few yards that we passed each other by. Something about his eyes and his face, however, made him remarkably familiar. I turned around and looked at him and he kept walking away towards the east and I kept turning around to see if he would stop and turn around and he did not and he kept getting smaller and smaller in the distance.   I could sense that he was getting swallowed by the huge structure that was the Jacques Cartier Bridge in the distance. His face kept haunting me. Unlike the folks, known as panhandlers,  around Viger who perform silly antics to draw attention, do a little jig, or make strange faces and put their hat out, this man kept walking, never looking sideways.

I saw him again about a week later at another spot, near Chinatown. This time he did not see me. I was determined to see his face in an unobtrusive manner. He sat down after about five minutes of my following him, at a bench in a park built by the city on top of the Ville Marie tunnel. I stood in a bus stand and watched him. Doves, seagulls or pigeons were flocking around him. He took bread crumbs out of his bag and threw them around. He watched the birds for a while and then he sat up straight, pulled his hair back and stared out. I recognized him then. I could not quite figure out, whether I should go and talk to him. After all, this was a guy who hung around a group of students who went to McGill in the mid seventies. He was doing his MBA in Finance and he was a lively, cheerful guy, who always had some nasty humour to share with the whole gang. I did speak to him a few times and I knew he had a huge crush on one of the women who was also in this rather talkative and disco-loving group that I had run into.  He was possibly from Bombay, the old name for Mumbai.  I asked a mutual acquaintance about him and she said that he had either had some psychological problem or he had an affair that had severely traumatized him. He left his academic life, walked out of his apartment and had simply started walking the streets. His parents had tried to find him and they never did. I saw him a few times later and then never saw him again. He disappeared and was never heard of and seen again by anybody. What is remarkable about this young and bright man, as I was told later by others who knew him, was that he came to do graduate studies in McGill, submitted his thesis but never came back to see his professors or pick up his degree. He came from a fairly well established family and refused to recognize anyone from his past. While he was seen taking meals at the Old Brewery Mission, he did not panhandle and did not ask for money. He did not also talk to anybody.  He left no trace. No address.

A few years ago while on a trip to Kolkata, where I was born and lived for twenty years, I headed up to the main street from the side street where I had lived, and I realized that the long time rag pickers there had become pavement dwellers. They had not only taken over a large section of the main pavement along the main thoroughfare, but they had built shacks, tea stalls, erected a small temple-like obelisk, where people gave donations and a small TV set was also tucked away in one corner, under a tent-like structure. This was their home. They were no longer homeless. They were pretty vociferous, confident and did not care about the fact that the bus stand was no longer usable, because they had used it to build some structures and had created a variety of sleeping arrangements in and around the bus stop. As much as one could be disgusted by the squalor and cockiness of these people, you would realize after some reflection that after more than sixty years of India’s independence from the British Empire, 38% of India’s population live in extreme poverty. They mostly come from the rural areas, running away from drought and starvation, looking for work, either as rag pickers, cleaners or resort to begging. And when they come to the city, they learn to hustle, because as they are mostly minorities or people belonging to the lower rungs of the caste system, they cannot even be considered for all of the jobs that they are prepared to take. There is however a perception amongst those who walk by them, holding their noses, that they are born smugglers, thieves, crooks, prostitutes and petty criminals. The police constables are frequently seen taking bribes from them, so that they can store their rag baskets in huge mountains in various stretches of the pavement, never mind the illegal structures on the pavements themselves, for which the local councillors are reportedly taking the “licensing ” fees. Years ago, on that same pavement, I met a nearly blind man, who sat down on the pavement with his arms outstretched. The pavement was then clean, no squatters, no pavement dwellers. I had gotten to know the blind man. He was always well-dressed, clean shaven and he wore a pair of dark glasses. Sometimes I had helped him cross the main avenue. From time to time people walking by would drop a few coins into his palm. He would give them a salaam and smile. He had a Bachelor’s degree, but could not get a job, so he had learned welding. While working at the docks, he got blinded in an accident and had no option, other than to beg. He told me his story and I listened. There was nothing I could do, other than introduce him to my friends. He remained well shaven and well dressed always, sitting on the pavement. Two years ago, I found out that a taxicab had run over him. I asked around where he had lived and found out that he had no home. He slept on the ramp to a garage, along an edge. He washed himself clean every morning, put on the same pair of clothes and sat down all day in the sun, until he had enough money for a meal.

All the hype, all the rockets in space, all the software sexiness and all the corporate posturing cannot fig leaf the nakedness of India’s poor. All the tall claims of growth, the technical arrogance, the rising number of Indian billionaires, the nuclear powered attack submarines and still some 297 million people, in a study done recently by a committee commissioned by the government, live in absolute poverty! 

A news story now. London, July 24: More than 20 people aged between 5 and 74 slept rough on paving stones and gravel outside a park at Hampstead in the UK capital and raised 8,000 pounds for a Kolkata based charity.

People slept at Rosslyn Park Unitarian Chapel to “experience” what homeless in Kolkata feel like. ‘Kolkata Rescue’ provides healthcare, education and vocational training to homeless in the Indian city.

American-Dutch businessman Glen Kendall, who worked for a year as the administrator of the charity, decided to raise funds for the organisation by planning the “Big Sleep in Hampstead” to mark the 30th anniversary of the organisation.

Kendall said they wanted to build a ‘bustee’ for the Big Sleep, but realised that they could not source authentic materials to make such a ‘bustee’ in London.

He said the volunteers, in the age of 5 to 74, braved cold wind, discomfort and noise on the pavement along with worrying about police asking them to move from the pavement. End of Story.

Canada? Well, here is the end section of a rather informative piece in Wikipedia.

“Canada is one of the few countries in the world without a national housing strategy (United Nations, 2009). Many of the federal governments’ expenditures are cost-sharing, one-time only funding initiatives that lack long-term leadership on homelessness. The United Nations has also noted the lack of information on these expenditures, including the number of houses produced. Housing has been declared a fundamental human right. Canada helped to draft the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights that includes a right to access housing in Article 25. Canada also ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1976, which recognizes an adequate standard of living, including housing, in Article 11. Currently, there is a court challenge stipulating that the crisis of homelessness violates the right to security of the person and to equality for disadvantaged groups under sections 7 and 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” 

The debate about homelessness, as also about poverty, can go on forever. There are those who feel that it is only individual actions and “misfortune” that cause homelessnes and therefore it is only individual remedial actions and charity that can resolve a part of these situations. It can never be resolved totally. There are others who believe that the concept of a society includes a provision to care for and take responsibility for the disenfranchised and impoverished. That social safety net is fundamental to the concept of a caring society. This is as opposed to a society where only the highly aggressive and competitive can survive. Without government policy firmly in place for low cost social housing and redistribution of wealth, without a fundamental belief that having a home is a constitutional right, in this fast changing economy, homelessness is inevitable.

Art is Democracy !

Acknowledgements:

1)The Design of Dissent, Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic, Rockport Publishers Inc. www.rockpub.com

2)Paper, Paper Publishing Company, New York, www.papermag.com

3)Jean-Michel Basquiat, by Richard Marshall, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

          I am strolling past a a well-known Tea and Chocolate store in Broome Street, Soho, New York.  And I catch a glimpse of a magazine called Paper.  On the cover is Gael García Bernal.  The Mexican new wave actor, who played Che in the Motorcycle Diaries. I thought it was a great flic. Very inspiring. Of course on this cover feature, he is modelling clothes  or occassionally talking a bit about Tarkovsky, Buñuel and Antonioni. All the films he mentions are my favourites as well, especially Zabriskie Point and Los Olvidados.  It spurs my interest in the magazine.  He is branded as a great thinker. “ More like García Lorca than George Clooney—(he)  has the mind and soul of a poet.” But, of course!  One would expect so, from a person who has acted in a few thoughtful plays and movies and in one or two esoteric /quirky ones, as well. Thinking artists provoke notions of the democratic process in the roles they play. Benicio del Toro does the same. Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando have done the same, at times. And directors like Gilo Pontecorvo, Mrinal Sen, Costa Gavras, Ken Loach and Montreal documentarist Mary Ellen Davis and Indian documentarist Anand Patwardhan (the latter two interviewed in Montreal Serai, previously) maintain this thoughtful process of interrogating democracy through their Art.  

I am compelled to sit down at the café, notwithstanding the legendary reputation of the chocolates and teas served here,  and breeze through this rather well produced magazine and then I notice there is a very interesting feature on rebranding America.  It’s put together by Kim Hastreiter. Kim has invited several well-known American designers to take a fresh look at a post-Bush America. What has changed? What can be changed?  What are the new ways of looking into the future? And the designers have done a superlative job.  The mandate is to turn the United  States into a new U.S.A. The tone is set by a graphic which has the stars taking the place of the stripes on the flag.  A caption says “ A new US.” This one is done by Ivan Chermayeff.  “Rebranding means changing the values of the United states,” he says. Banal? Simplistic? Or, hopeful? I would say it is Art  for Democracy!  A valiant and hopeful expression, a  way forward and only artists and designers can practice this democracy. They are not constrained.  They are not fearful of litigation, despite it being the US of A. They are not shackled by lobbies. Like the new President of the US seems to be more and more, every day. But that was not a surprise, anyway. He is a utopian and as well an excellent  brand manager to boot, who believes that the philosophy that has governed the US for a century can still be made to work, somehow. He is handcuffed to the Pharmaceutical lobby, the Israel lobby and even to the Military lobby. He has waffled on Health Insurance, on Palestine and now even on the torture photos and Gitmo. An Artist is not shackled, tongue-tied and hamstrung.  An artist is fundamental to Democracy.  I turn the page and another great design catches my eye. It is an outstretched hand of the world gripping a hand-sketched outline of the US map. The caption says “Nice to meet you again.” It is made by Weiden + Kennedy 12, a creative school based in Portland, Oregon.

The next one that catches my attention is  a “SORRY” carved out of the US flag on a plain white background, with a diminutive  US bald eagle emblem  saying Humble, Strong, US in a very small caption instead E Pluribus Unum.  It is done by Andy Spade. He says the following- “Our thinking behind the assignment’s solution is that by offerring a simple apology, we acknowledge our mistakes with the hopes of restarting our relationship with the rest of the world.” Indeed!

I flip the page, as my interest is definitely aroused.  There is now a rather well done rendition of a US one dollar bill. In a text note  attached to it, it says that Benjamin Franklin questioned the choice of the Bald Eagle as the national symbol of the US, claiming it was “ a bird of bad moral character.” It was, he suggested, too lazy to fish for itself, survived by robbing smaller, more vulnerable birds.  So instead of the bald Eagle, the artist has changed the bird to a dove.  Look carefully!

 What a potent message in 2009, indeed for the US, to live up to! It is done by Kevin Roberts, the CEO  of Saatchi and Saatchi, the same people who have clients like Toyota, Lexus and JC Penney! The Bush era really pissed off so many layers of people and classes that even the handful at the top feel the need for some sort of “change.” And Mr. Obama, sure knew how to capitalize on that.   And then there is another one by Roberts, that says in bold letters on a white background “No more US  and THEM.” The US is made out of a US flag.

New York is where Jean-Michel Basquiat, exploded on to the scene and then disappeared so painfully at the age of twenty seven only.  Basquiat, it is said, painted with the militant emotions of Malcolm X and the subtlety of Miles Davis. Montreal Serai covered his works, a few years ago. I am back in Montreal and I am leafing through a book on his works, brought out by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The picture that I notice, is not by Basquiat. It is a conceptual photograph by Renee Cox. It is entitled, The Wall: They Say a Mad Man Wrote This, 1992. 

 A sublime rhyme  says it all “They never taught Marcus Garvey in our school, Christopher Columbus is their golden rule.”

Finally, I dust off a book I got as a present, three years ago. The Design of Dissent. It is an excellent catalogue of wall art, posters, guerilla stencils from all over the world, both before and after the Cold War, and also into the eight hellish years of George Bush. Extraordinarily well annotated and curated, it is a work of art by itself. It propels you into a sense of imminent reactiveness to the world around you.  Here, I find the essence of democratic dissent and art! For a start, using the format of the Arm and Hammer logo for selling Baking Soda, the artist Dejan Krsic from Croatia proclaims, Art is not a Mirror, it is a Hammer! 

Finally, in the wake of Roe V Wade the same publication has this graphic poster by Trudy Cole-Zielanski entitled Preserve the Right of Choice.  As per Wikipedia, Roe v. Wade , 410 U.S. 113 (1973), is a United States Supreme Court case that resulted in a landmark decision regarding abortion. According to the Roe decision, most laws against abortion in the United States violated a constitutional right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision overturned all state and federal laws outlawing or restricting abortion that were inconsistent with its holdings. The note from the artist says “This poster was designed to promote the understanding that a woman’s body is her own, and she has the ultimate right to say what she does with it.” 

Finally, in these times of rabid Islamophobia and incoherent terrordom politics,  Anatoly Omelchenko has the over-used and cliched  Che stencil of Korda on a Muslim green background, but alongwith the star on his beret is also a crescent moon. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” says the artist.

Democray without Art? Like humankind without O_2.