Ars Poetica

At Bain St-Michel, 5300 St-Dominique, Montreal, from January 17-February 12, 2012.

Infinite Theatre Production

An Anglo Montreal Theatre company when it chooses to explore the local Anglo Arts Angst (AAA!) scene in a spectacular manner, and for a month long run, is possibly exposing itself to a live post-mortem, which is not a particularly pleasurable encounter for the theatre company concerned.  A vitriolic dissection demolishes young actors and the experienced alike, especially when enormous efforts have gone into the production.  On the other hand, a careful and benign story line reportage followed by a few casual praises does not up the art, either.  The etymology of Ars suggests a historic commitment to high art.

A courageous act, no doubt, on the part of the company to encourage a local story by a local writer. But the Anglo community being what it is—growing in presence, vociferous, envious, cautious, (but rarely experimental), sees things in a variety of ways which is often colored by personal exigencies, animosity, competitivity, defensiveness and not always in the fantastic and expansive realm that theatre as an art form offers to those who are simply interested in being in the audience.  In other cities in North America (and there is no need to specify Brooklyn or Manhattan as the examples) the theatre critic maybe entirely anonymous; just as a food critic in Montreal restaurants is often not recognizable (since the days of the late Rochester and Chandwani). The point is that we know each other and must continue to know each other as we are a small community. Therefore needless to say, the pressure on the critic and the well-wisher, here, is extremely significant. But, the critical view of the audience cannot be numbed!

Having said that, one must state the obvious. This was a great production, very well technically cued up, excellently blocked, considering the complex geometry of the set, but essentially culled out of a dead-beat script; chock full of clichéd, banal and stereotypical character incarcerations. From beginning to end, stereotyping dominated. From the sleazebag lawyer Hugh portrayed adeptly by Howard Rosenstein, to the elfish student intern (the daughter Naomi) conniving to move to NYU, (the supposed Valhalla of creative writing)– miscast but valiantly acted by Elana Dunkelman. Then came the archetypal and hugely avoidable Canada Council Program Officer whose Quebec-isms are an archaic instigation and throwback to the racist Anglos who departed down the 401 highway to Ontario and elsewhere in the seventies. All this leaves the play wanting in intelligence.  Wanting in contemporariness, wanting in a dateline that defines its periodicity.  In a post-Bush, Harper world– Montreal’s contemporariness goes beyond a few casual mentions of Concordia, McGill and Cote Vertu. The act of defining it as a “serious farce” (Guy Sprung to Pat Donnelly in the Gazette), does not get the script off the hook.  It remains muggy, earthbound, and non-ethereal—- the etymology of the title would suggest otherwise—while the sets are telescoping skywards in a spectacular manner.

George, the Publisher (Noël Burton ), who has inculcated in his staff the allegorical ability to enter and exit complex financial and social circumstances through the fire escape,  is outstanding as an actor who takes his character beyond its spine; words and grunts tumble out of his mouth in near spontaneity as he lives the character on stage.  Now here perhaps is the redeeming creation of the writer Holden, who must have an insight on the lives of well-known Montreal poets. There must have been a deeper understanding  here of the connections between popping a bottle of bubbly early in the AM, flying off to Cancun with grant money and liaising dangerously in one’s office.

Guy Sprung, Artistic Director of Infinite Theatre and Director of the play, is extremely resourceful, cycling his way around corporate Montreal tirelessly, networking, making the right connections, raising substantial sums of money to keep alive a significant Montreal institution( and injecting lascivious characters often in his productions along the way). This play however was surprisingly contained.  No subtext, no suggestions, no post-orgasmic exhalations. Everything peters out at the end and a cinderellaesque compromise is achieved.   Sprung’s ability however to deploy the right resources towards an excellent utilization of the old, cold bath house repeatedly for theatre, is commendable. When one enters, one is reminded of the new Acropolis Museum at Parthenon, large cubic shapes and windows to another world, slanted at expansive angles with gobos and projectors streaming the words of well-known Montreal Poets. The sets were done very imaginatively by Veronica Classen.

All in all a production worth going to, but marred by the writing.

An issue on Canadian Literature has been on the cards for a long time. Here it is, and…… here is to bemused looks, neutral shrugs, crinkled foreheads, and other intense Canadian-isms.

Oh! Don’t get me wrong! We love grovelling in the multi-culti-interculti-stewpot-goulash-curry-prairie-east-coast-big-city-rez-dopey-sex-crazed-iconoclastic-we-are-different-ist mishmash that is CanLit,  which is now taught, researched, admired, funded, trashed, heavily quoted and equally heavily ignored all over the world, so to speak. But Canadians are writing away with ferocious sagacity (another deeply held Canadian bipolarity), unknown in recent times. Every time you turn a corner, there is a new author popping up from behind a lamppost. Ambush! There is a Canadian writer from Montreal, who is now unfolding an entire novel Tweet by Tweet! We are unstoppable!

In the past, Montreal Serai has published Shyam Selvadurai, Rawi Hage, Jaspreet Singh and several others before they scored (Canadians like to) and hit some major targets! But this time we have the full metal jacket, or more like both barrels locked and loaded, to use a not so peaceful analogy…

We have contributions from Linda Leith, the founding Director of the renowned Montreal Blue Met Literary festival; Cyril Dabydeen, much published novelist and frequent essayist from Ottawa; Canadian novelist and Montreal’s Rover Arts Magazine founder, Marianne Ackerman; Julian Samuel, Montreal writer, painter and filmmaker on a new exhibition in New York by ex-Montrealer and Guggenheim scholarship holder (and also a past contributor to Montreal Serai) Abouali Farmanfarmaian.  And to boot, there is an interview with Montreal filmmaker and writer Merrily Weisbord, whose book Love Queen of Malabar is doing very well in readers’ and writers’ forums and on bookstands; and a rising new Toronto poet who has chosen to write Ghazals in English, Sheniz Janmohamed. If that were not enough, we have our perennial reviewer Maya Khankhoje on Ondaatje’s new Book The Cat’s Table, Rosalind Hampton with a powerful interview of the artist Theodore Harris and several more essays, book and film reviews (by Ann Cimon and Prasun Lala) and Ilona Martonfi on the legendary Montreal Literary Space, The Yellow Door. And then there are short stories by Montreal composer Antoine Bustros and as well as others. In short, this is a power-packed, bullet-proof edition for the year ending 2011. Enjoy or be Canadian!

Theodore A. Harris, On the Throne of Fire, 2008, mixed media collage

I first came into contact with Theodore Harris when I was given the opportunity to moderate “Art as a Weapon: Critical Thinking and the Media,” the keynote event of Culture Shock 2011 co-organized by QPIRG McGill and the SSMU (Student Society of McGill University). Culture Shock is an annual series of events on McGill University campus focused on the stories and experiences of immigrants, refugees, communities of colour and indigenous people. This year’s keynote speakers were artists Sundus Abdul Hadi [i] and Theodore A. Harris.

I was born in the U.S. in 1966 to a biracial couple active in the civil rights movement. Our family moved from Boston to Montreal in the early 1970s; however I have always felt a strong cultural connection to Black America and some of my earliest, deepest impressions are of the 1960s in the American northeast, even though I was too young to really remember this time and place. I have found much inspiration in African American art history and especially in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and ‘70s.  My career has transitioned over the past 15 years or so, from social services to community work to a broader cultural work involving community art and education, situated within African diaspora histories of emancipatory education programs initiated from within the community, for the community[ii].

I immediately connected with Theodore’s art and saw it in the tradition of BAM, an impression that was reinforced as I discovered his collaborative work with renowned Black poet-playwright Amiri Baraka[iii].  Following the Culture Shock event in October, Theodore generously agreed to stay in contact with me and to discuss his work and ideas.  The following conversation represents some of the issues we have been engaging with by email and telephone in the past six weeks.

Rosalind: In addition to my appreciation of your artwork Theodore, my motivation for initiating this dialogue is my research, which explores the potential social, cultural and economic benefits of inter-generational art education that is critically and culturally grounded in the lives of Black community members.  My key interests right now are (a) understanding how the notion that visual ‘art isn’t for Black people’ is perpetuated both within the community and in art discourses; and (b) working with other community members to advance student-centered, critical multicultural approaches to art education that work to broaden conceptions of ‘art’ and ‘artist,’ and seek to examine and dismantle the powerful traditions of racism and ethnocentrism ingrained in the histories of Western art and art education.

Last summer I discovered a study by art education scholar William Charland in which he addressed what he described as the “Black avoidance of art as an area of study or career aspiration”[iv].  Charland examined the attitudes and behaviours toward visual art and the career identity of ‘artist’ of fifty-eight African American adolescents from four different high schools.  The teenagers were asked to describe stereotypes what they believed White people attributed to Blacks, and then later in the study were asked to relate widespread stereotypes that people have of artists.  Charland found, for example, a “startling overlap between informants’ understandings of society’s demeaning stereotypes of artists and African Americans” (i.e., both as poor, marginalized, moody, unable to function in ‘normal society’, etc), suggesting that “an African American adolescent who assumes the mantle of artist willingly takes on social stigma aligned with racial stereotypes as well”[v].  The teens also talked about family and community objections to an art career, something I hear often as well, suggesting that stereotype-informed beliefs about artists exist across generations.

So Theodore, given the exclusivity and elitism of formal institutions of art and what Charland describes can you talk about how you became an artist?

Theodore: First I want to thank you for moderating the keynote panel with the great artist Sundus Abdul Hadi and myself as part of the Culture Shock events at McGill University.

This is a great question and one that gets to the heart of some deep concerns for me. I was born in 1966 in Manhattan, New York City, but I grew up in Philadelphia. My mother was a single parent with a drug addiction raising my sister and me, while my father was still in New York dealing with his own addiction (which he did manage to control enough to obtain a degree in social work from NYU).  I say all that to say with all of this dysfunction my parents respected the arts; my mother could draw and play the piano very well, so music was for the most part was dominant art form in our lives, not visual art.  Jazz was always playing and I am very grateful for that because it has had a great influence on my life and work.  You see, my mother also worked at Aqua Lounge Jazz Club on 52nd street in West Philly, where greats like Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, and Art Blakey and The Messengers played and she also hung out with them.  My mom was into music in a deep way and I think music was the thing that made her the most happy.

As early as I can remember I was always drawing, whether I was in school or at home, and my mother always encouraged me to make art, but I don’t remember any one saying you should go to art school, or college period, and this is something I just started thinking about within the last few years—why wasn’t the idea ever put out there? The only person that was, somewhat, of a father figure in my life was my grandfather, who tried to discourage me from the arts.  He knew nothing about the visual arts and for some reason thought art was not reliable, in other words, ‘how can you make money from it?’  At this point I was into graffiti, so one thing he did because I guess he could see I was not giving it up, he got me a job working with a sign painter and sign builder named Mr. John Wilson and I loved it. Working with Mr. Wilson was the first time I ever held a paint brush.

Art is not promoted as a career choice in inner city public schools, which is why, among other things, I left school in the 11th grade and hung out in libraries and bookstores in the art history sections trying to figure out what life and art were about. My life is all about art, it is how I see life, I guess that is because it is the only thing I have that I think I do well. And although we lived below the poverty line, I always felt like with art I was intelligent and could make some kind of future for myself if I could stick with it. And as an artist you know what I mean, you eat and sleep art.

I am sure that reading about art and artists also improved my reading skills, because you are not just reading on the surface, you have to know what those words and metaphors mean and in turn you learn about the world through art and artists and come to understand that the block you live on is not the whole world. In my opinion this is why art is not taught in public schools in the inner city, because it teaches you how to think and understand images and that is what the business class does not want you to do; become a critical thinker and an intellectual. They don’t’ want another Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Romare Bearden, Augusta Savage. Because these visual artists and writers force you to see your self in the world, although you may disagree with what you see in the mirror they are holding up to you, you have to deal with it.

Yes, the art world is elitist and backward in its politics, because it is mostly managed by what Hans Haacke has called “Museums, Managers of Consciousness:” the 1 % class born into money who think that art is all about aesthetic pleasure, which is why war profiters see innocent people on death row or killed in war, as collateral damage.  And that drove Walter Annenberg and the blue bloods of the art world crazy: in their world art is used to disenfranchise people in the under class through promoting European art as the standard of what is human and intelligent and the rest of us as primitive and subhuman. My visual art became blatantly political after I heard and read the poetry of Sonia Sanchez; I think it was because her use of metaphors made me see what I could create with visual art, and the poetry was also a history lesson, that made me see myself in a new way.  After this I went right out and read more of her poetry and the writing of other poets and got into reading the literature and literary history of Black America and this opened up a new world to me.  I fell in love with literature and it inspired and added meaning to my artwork; before that I described my work as “just pretty colors,” I was painting mostly flowers, still life and art historical subject matter and was preoccupied with mostly formalist concerns.

The Charland study mirrors my experience, but some how I ignored the un-constructive things people would say to discourage my art and becoming an artist and kept going, because art was the only thing I had to hold onto and it kept me in museums, bookstores, libraries, and out of jail.

Theodore A. Harris, Postcard from Conquest, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: Can you talk some more about your early influences and mentors?  Did someone or something in particular teach you that a Black man could be an artist?

Theodore: Off the top of my head, it was that the more books I was exposed to with African American artists’ work in them and the more African American artists I met; that was how I knew I could pursue art.  Artists such as Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and always staring at those Blue Note [jazz] album covers reflected something back at me that was so powerful it even made me change the way I dressed; I started wearing suit jackets, dress shoes.  This in effect causes you to walk different and you take your self more seriously, you see yourself, community and world view differently and this shapes your art.  The more you know about the world the more you can teach yourself and your children to think globally.  That is why I refuse to be called a minority just because most of America claims the social construct of whiteness.  I am a citizen of the world and most of the world is made up of people of color, which makes them, the whites, the minority.

Theodore A. Harris, Assemblage for Decolonizing the Mind, for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I find this so important Theodore; it really underscores the significance of ethno-cultural influences, and how, even in the absence of direct mentorship, access to cultural history and art that we can relate to our own lived experiences can make all the difference in our lives.

I can see your concern with the global picture particularly in your anti-war pieces, and in the ways they raise questions about America’s place on the world stage.  Can you speak about the emotion and particularly the notion of violence for example, in the Collage and Conflict series?  I’m curious about whether you would describe art as a non-violent response to violence, and how you understand the use of art as a weapon.

Theodore: Yes, it is a non-violent response to violence in our homes and interpersonal relationships, but most of all it is a critique of America’s domestic and foreign policy, its self destructive militarism in the name of democracy. The Collage and Conflict series began as a compositional challenge to myself because I wanted to see what would happen. Working with the three panels all at once opened me up to experimenting with the surface, and I decided to attack it—to go to war on the surface by writing curses, setting it on fire, hitting it with a hammer, ripping it apart and putting it back together—and have figures in the piece attacking each other to raise the issue of ‘friendly fire.’  Bloody flesh wounds on the panels are meant to give the viewer a visceral feeling, as if they, their flesh, are being struck by a whip or a drone missile. And the blood that is spilled is a mirror in which I see the middle passage; our flesh in knots, fire-hosed with the slobber of biting dogs and pepper spray, under the orders of Sheriff “Bull” Connor, whose mouth is a little white tank moving backwards, camouflaged with Kara Walkers’ silhouettes.

I see art as an offensive and defensive weapon to defend your self and community, as it was in the great work Emory Douglas made for the Black Panthers’ news paper—I would say Emory is a Charles White turned up a few notches. Because of the influence of documentary film on my work, I would say the Collage and Conflict series are cinematic confrontational collages; cinematic because I see the juxtaposing and layering of images as creating a sense of movement as captured in film stills, and confrontational because of the weight of issues the work is dealing with. My work is about looking beneath the “Surface Politics” of aesthetics and formalism, to visualize a Black Aesthetic that is about “life over death” like Addison Gayle said.

Theodore A. Harris, Purple Hearts Bleed, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: I find collage to be somewhat of a ‘violent’ method in and of itself, in terms of the cutting, severing, disassociating and dislocating it involves.  I notice that you refer to it as ‘surgery’ and I find your work is similar to Wangechi Mutu’s, who has also described her collages as ‘delicate surgeries.’  Both of you also use wounds in your work in similar ways.  You describe war as a ‘map of wounds’ and have said that in your work the wounds might be from shrapnel, gunfire, friendly fire… I also think of those wounds in your and Mutu’s work as wounds of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism. And the violence in yours and perversion in Mutu’s work, for me, have so much to do with the violent distortions and perversion of these systems, the ways they act on human bodies—flesh and blood—and on human-ness overall.  I’m also very intrigued by your identification of the Challenger explosion as a starting point.

Theodore: As an artist the goal of my work is to get the ideas in your head, so I would say Wangechi Mutu, John Heartfield, Romare Bearden, and I are attempting a kind brain surgery on the mind of the viewer, to do what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o termed “de-colonizing the mind.”  And yes those wounds are the result of damage done to our minds and bodies under capitalism, colonialism, Jim Crow, and the prison industrial complex—a plantation with stock options in sizzling electric chairs…I wonder if an innocent prisoner on his way to the electric chair, who has exhausted all his appeals to a crooked court, I wonder if he feels ‘Post-Black?’

In the two person exhibition “War is a Map of Wounds,” Howardena Pindell and I had at New Jersey City University, I had this quote by Amiri Baraka on the wall of the gallery above my work, for the most part to be directed at the art students: “It is a new world we want not an endowed chair in the concentration camp…art must be our magic weapon to create and re-create the world and our selves as part of it…This is my motto and the standard on which I make my work as magic weapons, created in the ‘Black Labs of the Heart.”

But another way to view that blood is to see it as the artist sacrifice in sweat and tears, Augusta Savages’ tears when she could not get back her sculpture “The Harp” she was commissioned to make for the 1939 New York Worlds’ Fair, that had been inspired by the song ”Lift Every Voice and Sing” and was destroyed after the Fair.

I was frozen when I witnessed the Challenger explosion, the images were so powerful that I started to collage them with images of crying babies, this is how I got into collage. Then I went on from there to collaging the U.$. Capitol building by turning it upside down, first done in my collage Vetoed Dreams of 1995.  Some people have asked me will I turn it right side up because President Obama is in office.  Why, because he is African American?[vi] I say no way; its too early for that, like I said before the scales of justice are not blind and even, and that is why now a world wide struggle is exploding.

Theodore A. Harris, Iced Leaders, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I think that may be a critical note that we might end on for now: that while our conversation for this paper has been largely driven by our common concerns and interests in relation to Black learners and communities, and Black artists and their art work, we both understand that the issues are not just “Black and White”—critical thinking, like your collages, is always more nuanced, layered and complex than that.

Theodore: From the outset it has been so great talking with you and we need you in the university and community to debunk how we see and what we think about ourselves in relation to the arts.

Derek Walcott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit: Rana Bose

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From A Montreal Life, 1980-1997

Leo Caraballo had been diagnosed with cancer. After encounters with doctors, oncologists, medical institutions and medical insurance agents, her cancer went into remission.

Caraballo, who invited her doctors, surgeons, and bronze sculpture foundry workers to the opening, is a socially perceptive photographer. “Visitations,” her past work, faintly echoing Diane Arbus, documents aspects of death and the funerary rituals connected with this universal passage.

“Visitations” http://www.caraballofarman.net/still/visitations/

Abouali Farmanfarmaian, has just completed his doctorate on cryonics; his dissertation, Secular Immortal, might have informed this project. He is also a film producer ( “Vegas: Based on a true story”: [2009]); and a calculating photographer.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1283971/

caraballo-farman have made several projects together. This current collaboration, Extractions, is the height of their artistic production. Their stunningly beautiful bronze sculptures are unique in contemporary art world-wide. She is from Buenos Aires and he’s from Tehran, the center of the Axis of Evil.

Extractions evolved from diagnosis-conception to completion in about 18 months: caraballo-farman, like many critical artists in New York, have avoided the shallow ambition prevalent within the arts. The current work can be fully understood if one follows their production sequence: Leo Caraballo’s genetic code instructs her body to produce treatable cancer; after exhausting discussions with surgeons they convert the MRI images into 3D models, then they introduce medical scientific knowledge and imagery to bronze sculpture-making experts in a foundry. Imagine explaining to foundry workers who normally make Statues of Liberty to now make sculptures of tumors. I was told that the foundry workers got deep satisfaction from making their bronzes.

The MRI images are what fascinated them. They could now see her actual tumors. Historically, patients haven’t had an image of what is transpiring inside their bodies. The question emerged: Could they convert Caraballo’s cancer into art?

The artists got a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a residency at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.

caraballo-farman describe their process for the Eyebeam section of their exhibition:

“Ruins (Carcinomas), highlights breast cancer’s links to carcinogens in our everyday environment. Depicting fallen urban landscapes over-run with tumors, the pieces are based on breast cancer tumor forms, imaged and “digitally removed” through a special process devised by caraballo-farman, that combines Magnetic Resonance Imaging and rapid prototyping. The grey ‘support material’ used by 3D printers to build up a form is generally meant to be removed. But [we] used Eyebeam’s 3D printer in such a way as to maximize the architectural form of the printer’s support structures and then hacked at the structures to partially reveal the white tumor embedded.”

They were stopped in their tracks when they considered the entire image of the plastic surrounding a model of the cancer tumour inside. In not removing the 3D printer support structures, the artists faced something they did not predict: clear and direct models of high-rise buildings resembling the World Trade Towers during 9/11. With screw-drivers and other instruments, the buildings were artistically pock-marked.

The Eyebeam Window Gallery exhibits a white field filled with these high-rise towers (20 x 27 cm) with hidden models of tumors inside which we can’t see due to the faceless, horrifying, opaque grey plastic. Depending on one’s point of view, this unpredictable metaphor is accurate, or inanely simple. I walk away from the window feeling unsettled: I am a Canadian-Pakistani looking at models of buildings being 9/11-ed.

Their project comes to fruition at Ramis Barquet Gallery, 532 West 24th Street (very near Eyebeam Window Gallery).

The intelligence of “caraballo-farman / Object Breast Cancer” is to have installed their total exhibition in three contiguous galleries. One sees the metaphor of  9/11 devastation at Eyebeam; then one has to walk outside for about 300 meters to see the larger tumor sculptures at Ramis Barquet Gallery. What was inside the grey models are now larger bronze sculptures, approximately,  40 cm x 50 cm x 25 cm. The gallery swarms with 8 such pieces.

And,  just 30 meters west of Ramis the artists have set up a one-stand jewelry shop at Sebastian+Barquet Gallery, 544 West 24th Street. The tumor necklaces and worry beads are about 6 cm x 6 cm x 1.5 cm. To magnify the irony of  selling tumors to America, the artists formed a company, Object Breast Cancer, and chose a loquacious blond to do the sales pitch. I chatted with her while looking at the sharply lit jewelry. I liked her fresh, blue sky attitude. An intellectual from Haifa, standing nearby suggested that these jewels were the 21st century’s equivalent of The Evil Eye. A percentage of sales goes to cancer research.

At Ramis Gallery, I face the bronzes with fear and confusion. Am I actually going to see beauty in all this? If so, why? What could be the point of using one’s cancer to make art?

The edgeless bronze sculptures, set in front of white walls sit under the bathetic gallery lights. The tribe of metal totems hover over their stands; most have a solid, super-heavy mass core with voluminous wings of thick-and-occasionally-thin chapati-like appendages jutting out into space; there are solar flares ejaculating into the sky; there are things that flutter out of caves like waves of smooth endoplasmic recticumlum which, as one walks around, become multiple heads of Rabelaisian Canada Geese. There are holes in the cores from which there mightn’t be an escape; we see a diagram of CERN traced in a flying arm of deep brown metal; and, here is David’s finger extending out to the cool North Atlantic; in adjoining sculptures I see faces in the shapes of maps of Afghanistan and Tajikistan staring into celestial history. And, more holes, and more caves.

Cancer flows around and around these rewarding sculptures. But what’s the reward? Is the reward to know that some thing beautiful comes from something nasty? This isn’t very deep, is it? A chicken is a beautiful bird. So is roast chicken. Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, (1940), said this about things that are beautiful:

“The assets of culture are not only a document of culture without being at the same time a document of barbarity. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another”.

There is a reason why these artists have calibrated walking time breaks from one exhibition space to the other. Roughly 100 – 300 meters separate the exhibition spaces. This physical spacing gives the beholder time to understand roast chicken and its discontents, or to connect barbarity with civilization. One walks out into the smiling crowds visiting hundreds of other openings in the area. We’re all having a smoke outside. It’s Thursday night in Chelsea, a light drizzle infects the October evening. I’ve walked from models of 9/11-ed buildings to the Bronze Age.

The last time I had such a shock of beauty was when I saw American film-maker Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Eye, (1971: 32 minutes); a documentary shot in a Pittsburg morgue. As with Brakhage’s work, one can’t escape the root source of beauty – dead bodies which become mysterious things hovering in introspective, resplendent space. With precision, his camera trembles over the cool bodies, some with three-degree burns; some car crash victims; some bodies pock-marked with gun shots. The master’s documentary states: please, try not to run from the death that I’m showing you. If you walk out of the cinema, you might lose an appreciation of elegance; lose a sense of elegance and you’ll gain a sense of empty ambition.

caraballo-farman, have guided the audience in a similar way but without being as confrontational as Brakhage: Brakhage used a projection booth, an audience sitting in a darkened room, and a white screen on which to view the slow, methodical cutting open of dead bodies flickering by at 24 frames per second. The only way the beholder could wipe the trance would be to leave the darkened room.

caraballo-farman have, with unusual expertise, made their challenging project relevant to gallery curators, as well as oncologists, surgeons and doctors. The beholder can break the trance proposed by these two artists also: just walk out of the galleries, eat a street-cart meal made by The Halal Brothers and the viewing experience will go into remission. We’re ephemeral entities: these bronzes have a decay rate, but a slower rate than the authority of the flesh that produced them.

Julian Samuel is a friend of caraballo-farman.

www.julianjsamuel.com

caraballo-farman sites:

http://objectbreastcancer.tumblr.com/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Object-Breast-Cancer-by-caraballo-farman/258608990849813

http://eyebeam.org/events/window-gallery-ruins-carcinomas

Regarding the Horror

http://www.caraballofarman.net/moving/horror/index.html

Visitations

http://www.caraballofarman.net/still/visitations/

caraballofarman.net

Gallery locations:

caraballo-farman / Object Breast Cancer:

Ramis Banquet Gallery

532 West 24th Street, New York, NY

Extractions

Opening Night Performance and Reception

Thursday, October 13th, 6-8 pm

Eyebeam Window Gallery

540 West 21st Street, New York, NY

Ruins (Carcinomas)

Thursday, October 13th, 6-8pm

Sebastian+Barquet

544 West 24th Street, New York, NY

OBC Jewelry Launch

October 13th, 6-8pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(The Holy Qur’an, 17:1)

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bulla Ki Jaana Main Kaun

I know not who I am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One usher insists on giving us, not just Ivor,  more rice…because Ivor’s so tall? How tall is he really? The other guests  watch us. Ah, Ivor finds the fare tantalizing, his English taste buds are now stirred, he tells me.  Alloo, pumpkin cooked with masala.

Ivor drools,  licking the dhal on his fingers mixed with rice.  He’s bound to tell his students it’s authentic fare.

But do I hear one feisty student, Miriam, asking: “Why are there no genuine Caribs left on the island?”

“Caribs?”

“Yes, Caribs.”

Ivor shrugs. And I must know more about everyday Britain, I figure. Another student: “Are there only Africans and Tamils on this coast with French history intact?”

Miriam is berating Ivor. Nothing’s ever real in the Caribbean, she says. Oh? Take my word for it, I was born there. The other students come on her side.

–You’re missing the point, Professor Ivor. You really are.

Ah, it’s again about race: black and white, in England or the USA.

What about South Africa with apartheid still at work despite a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Miriam waves with a tremor of her hands. Her language of life, she  calls it. Echoes are now everywhere. And does Ivor really want to go to South Africa to meet ANC  members, if Nelson Mandela himself? Not meet  Zulu Chief Buthelezi or  Cyril Ramaposa?

Ivor’s mouth is yellow-stained; he’s slurping, more like it.

“Eat up,” I say. And the sun’s heat begins to make us uncomfortable. I want the ocean to come closer.  “Yes,” Ivor says,  his “plate” still  primed. Rice falls like confetti, as the male ushers come to him again. Ah, curried goat–the same animal I’d earlier seen tied to a shrub and had seemed irritable on this the hottest day of the year. Who’s the real vegetarian now among the Hindus?

“Eat all,” a food-ladler urges with glee.

Ivor slurps once more.

“Eat all or they will  be offended,” I murmur. “It’s the custom to eat everything on your plate.”  It’s the way of the French in the Caribbean, no?

Ivor laughs at my deduction; he calls me Ravi, as everyone hails me.  Not call me Shiva?

“I am not from India,” I say.

One guffaws.

–What d’you think, Miriam, with your armful of books  weighing you down?

Ivor’s now just  the object of everyone’s  curiosity. One distinctly thin woman with truly dark features laughs loudest.

–Hey, Ivor, she isn’t the real thing, says Miriam.

Ivor scrapes at the edge of the banana leaf, his makeshift plate.

“I’m really enjoying it,” he says.

–You’re not.

“I’ve been looking forward to it, to Carib-creole food.” A gargoyle’s face; everything keeps overwhelming Ivor, if only because of his ingrained English ways.

Miriam laughs. Multi-coloured South Africa is also laughing?

Canada now…the same?  I hum to myself.

Believe me.

Ivor boasts that he will become the most “knowledgeable man”  in England, with knowledge of the authentic Caribbean. Oh? Now, though,  it’s really the  urge to eat more with such appetizing local fare around.  But the banana leaf-plate is bitter, it’s not  salad.  Christ!

Ivor burps.

The others watching him applaud.

Will he start eating the edges of the leaf, his way of complying with local custom?

“It’s the heat that makes you swelter so much,” I say.

Ivor scoffs, “Maybe not.”

Then, “You’re just exotic to them, Ivor.”

The word “exotic” has its own special appeal or resonance; and maybe he will again bite into the banana leaf, as the locals keep encouraging him…to eat all!  Hand-gestures, drama being acted out, I imagine. Ivor is playing along, isn’t he?

Ritual, more like it.

–Stop making a fool of yourself, man,  Miriam’s voice is in my ears. Ivor’s lips twitch. “Maybe we’re fated to be here,” he says, his   eyes lighting up against the umbrella-slanted sun.  He  points to my own empty leaf-plate; then he tells me that I am also a foreigner here.

Anonymity intact?

The surge-slap of water at Pointe des Chateaux, like a distant sea, I hear.  Buccaneering days, ah, long-gone in the Caribbean.

Now the crowd drools, one almost pulling Ivor’s hand.  Pulling him up. As the women make faces.  They really do!

I simply incorrigible Miriam’s voice again: Ivor, run for it. It’s your only chance.

“Eh?”        

–Run, man!

Cymbals clashing. Kali-goddess and Maria-ma–the twain meeting.

A Hindu and Catholic mix in Guadeloupe, see.  Where else are people  really changing everywhere around the world?  Ivor’s own Germanic tribe, in the mix, I imagine. The Madrasi-headed women in the market are yet laughing. Imagine someone coming at him with a crude spear. Heads being unceremoniously lopped off!

–Run while you can, Ivor. This is no National Geographic special, you better believe it.

Palm trees thrash and hurl,  like another hurricane coming. There’s no denying what occurred here not so long ago.  Trade winds literally kept  brandishing swords.

Nothing to deny?

Ivor looks at the thin but attractive swarthy women with their  particular allure.  Miriam makes a face, a genuine Caribbean face, eh?

Oh, to live in England…longer. But I unconsciously long for Canada’s cold. Do I really?

Gosh, we are multicultural everywhere.

***

A mixed-race TV crew, all American, with media link-ups across America and Europe, who will buy their “feed”–who tell us there’s always interest in people of the Caribbean, don’t we know?

A tallish woman with sallow skin forces the tripod in place. She looks through the lenses, eager for magnification.  The interviewer, a handsome  male mulatto, smooth or just glib in his manner, first addresses Ivor. Not me?

–What d’you think is the importance of this festival you’re attending here? You’re a professor of cultural anthropology in Britain, aren’t you?

–I am.

–What brought you here?

Go on, tell the truth, Ivor.

–My students want me to be here. What I mean to say is that this is a good opportunity for the people in the region, all the races, as I will tell everyone back in Sussex.

– About the real Caribbean? But how real?

–Well, er…. Asia.

– Go on, please.

–The European powers have had a long history in this region, which can’t be denied or ignored. But…

–Continue in this vein, Professor.

–I mean, there’s an interest in ideology, too. Your American audience will understand that.

–Ideology?

–Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about terrorism only we should be interested in.

– Muslim fundamentalism, or drug-pushing, eh?  Tell us, Professor.

–I believe all the races are one…before the time of slavery and  indentured labour. Indeed sugar is the Caribbean’s only legacy, nothing else. Here now it’s a wonderful mixing of people, I mean…blending. It’s  why I am here, so I can tell my students.

–What about the Natives, have they disappeared?

–Natives?” Ivor’s eyes rove around. Where are the swarthy-complexioned females now?

–D’you feel any responsibility, Professor Ivor Jones, as an Englishman, I mean?

–Not at all. But, er…the Natives, they’re still around; they will be eager to talk about their ancestry, if you ask them.

–Arawaks, d’you mean?

Ivor contemplates; as Miriam and the other students seem to be  urging him to it. My own inner ear at work.  Do I next see a  man astride a horse with whip in hand in a slave plantation…somewhere?

Do I really?

–It’s always a  question of race, isn’t it, if it’s what you’re asking, no? Ivor is taking his time, bemused as he is.

Slowly the camera shifts away from Ivor, and turns to me. The tallish TV woman before her tripod smiles.

–You are from Canada, are you not?

I nod.

She wants me to articulate, to keep on talking.

–You’re considered, er …a black Canadian, are you? And is the Caribbean a place you feel you must return to?

–The last time I came here was eight years ago.

–Seen many changes as you look around:  the music, the food, Indian lambada?

Really lambada?

A crowd comes around; they  expect me to tell it as it is.

What?  The TV  tape will soon be played around the world; but not in Canada? Space and time, for students only, who will want to hear everything…about actually being here, no?

Ivor looks at me.

What about South Africa that you want to visit next, mate?

The TV tripod starts unfolding. Oh, the matronly Madrasi women in the market are in the background, but coming closer.

A close-up shot with more magnification, only. What’s now more exotic in a tropical island-place with drums beating everywhere …pounding.  Echoic sounds I hear. A special journeying now.

And who will eat what next? Another goat tethered not far away, in the sun, waiting to be “sacrificed”  by Hindus here in Guadeloupe. Oh, again the ushers will ladle out food on banana leaves spread out under the zinc-roofed tent. Ivor will keep a careful eye on everyone one, you see; he will want me to fo the same because we are indeed two of a kind.

The heavy aroma will begin to be oppressive in the heat: sounds and smells, which the TV camera will never capture, I know.

My heart starts beating faster.

(It’s not fair that you should do this, for what’s to be edited out, you know.)

–So Professor Ivor, tell us what d’you really feel being here in the  Caribbean? Waves come crashing down on all sides now.  And, you see,

I will conjure up winter, with ice-crystals  coruscating in the sun.

But beaches I want to be on, as I will go once more to Pointe Chateaux, then wander around Guadeloupe, including to Marie Galante.  All the while Ivor will contemplate visiting South Africa as Miriam keeps being at his heels. Will he want to shake Nelson Mandela’s hand  because of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearing?

–Do not go there, Ivor. Nothing’s authentic anymore.

Why not?

Indeed the  races will mingle,  I say to myself. And I will  keep thinking about  ancestry, if only about the Tamils in Pondicherry, and then about the first Indian man or woman who came here.

Who? Now natives all.

Bones, relics.

*

Voices keep calling out, like twittering sounds I will keep hearing everywhere; as Ivor will also relive his genuine experience of the Caribbean,  with creole food in him…as he also thinks of Asia and Africa being less  exotic, won’t he?

His students like now laugh louder, some indeed dark-hued in Sussex and others coming from across England.  Coming from Canada too? Tabla sounds again beating, and a crowd is marching…being ready to embrace Ivor and me, I know. A close-up snapshot…the Caribbean, indeed.  Then it’s also South Africa we’re talking, aren’t we?

Will you really go there too, Ravi?

Because of where I might have come from, you see. Come from other parts of India too, like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, or some place else…now being originally from Guyana.

Ah, I know I will head back north again, where I watch Ivor’s face on the TV screen from time to time and dwell on more authentic meeting ground, everywhere. But never mine.

Soledad ( 4' x 6') by Ludmila Armata, Oil, from series entitled "misfits" exposed in June 2011 at the Gallery d'Este, Montreal.

Il était une fois un petit monstre très laid et très méchant, qui portait en lui des pensées si tristes et si funestes qu’il n’avait aucune envie de grandir pour devenir un grand monstre avec des pensées encore plus tristes et plus funestes que celles qui le tourmentaient déjà.

Très vite, il avait envisagé le suicide, mais ne trouvait ni le courage, ni n’avait développé l’ingénuité de mettre fin à ses jours. Le seul espoir de murir suffisamment pour former des idées sûres et achevées, lui permettant de concevoir un moyen efficace de s’enlever la vie, l’emplissait de joie et l’engageait à persévérer dans l’attente de cette maturité.

Les jours passaient bercés par cet objectif, au point qu’il en oubliait l’aboutissement fatal. Chaque soir devant le miroir, le spectacle de sa laideur et le reflet de ses intentions involontairement perfides déclenchaient d’insupportables maux de ventre. Mais les nœuds dans ses entrailles semblaient se défaire aussitôt que le traversait la pensée que bientôt, il cumulerait la force et le moyen de supprimer l’horreur dont il était le supplicié. Cet espoir de réconfort, était son seul refuge de grandeur et de beauté.

Ainsi, l’avenir était devenu son échappatoire et le baume unique contre son état détestable. La vie se déroulait devant lui comme un tapis, où chaque jour lui offrait un nouvel espace où poser le prochain pas, qui le rapprochait d’un lendemain enivrant et d’une perspective avenante.