Dr. Shree Mulay , Professor Emerita of the Department of Medicine of McGill University in Montreal, is currently Associate Dean and Professor of Community Health and Humanities Division,  Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s.  Dr. Mulay served for eleven years as  Director of the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women.  She has also held office in different capacities in the Executive Board of SAWCC, the South Asian Women’s Community Centre of Montreal, of which she was one of the founding members. Dr. Mulay also participated in the decision making process of  NAC, National Action Committee for the Status of  Women in Canada. Shree Mulay has received numerous awards and honours for her academic and community work, including the establishment of the endowed “Shree Mulay Graduate Student Award in Women’s Studies” in recognition for her contribution to women’s studies at McGill University, the Humanitarian of the Year Award,  Indo-Canadian Chamber of Commerce and  the Woman of Distinction Award for the Advancement of Women, YWCA, Montreal. Dr. Mulay, who was born in India, has not forgotten her roots – she travels to South Asia  several times a year for  research and community work. And yes, she is also a gourmet cook, a creative gardener and a friend women can count on.

Montreal Serai:  Good morning, Shree. We  first met a long time ago! What happened then?

Shree Mulay: In 1980. That was the start of the South Asian Women’s Community Centre. If you remember, we met over the summer and we were thinking of setting up a South Asian Women’s Organization. Nine women from different countries  met to talk about the issues that South Asian Women faced.

MS: Yes, I remember our first meeting very clearly because you said that you would have very little time for the future centre yet you’ve certainly worked  very hard and were one of the main persons there. What satisfied you the most about your work with SAWCC?

SM: I want to make it clear from the outset that I was not one of the main persons  in SAWCC because it was really a collective effort. To go back to your question:  that which gives me the greatest satisfaction about SAWCC’s work is, first of all, that it was possible to shape and work with other women in what the organization should look like, what issues should be taken up in the organization and the careful placing of that in the context of Canada and what was happening in South Asia itself.

MS:  As an endocrinologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal you must have an understanding of the  dynamics between pharmaceutical companies and their research in Third World countries. How do you think that these new technologies and pharmaceutical products have affected the life of women in South Asia?

SM: Doing research in endocrinology gave me a better opportunity to actually see what kind of research is being done on women and thanks to my understanding of contraceptives  I began to teach about reproductive endocrinology. While doing  some background reading for my undergraduate students  I realized that  it was women from developing countries who were being experimented on with early versions of  oral contraceptives which were quite harmful. These studies were considered unethical and now informed consent is a cornerstone of any research on human subjects.

MS: What is your take on the morning-after pill?

SM: The morning-after pill provides what would be considered emergency contraception. The problem is  that it is easily available here but in developing countries it is not…

MS: Really?

SM: …easily available. It’s good if you’ve had  unprotected sex and  you think you could be pregnant because you can do something about it within 72 hours. But it is a hormonal combination which when misused can have terrible effects on women so it’s a tradeoff. However, the real question is one of access  because the moral conundrum is that many women’s organizations here have suggested that the morning after pill  not be controlled by pharmacists but be freely available like condoms.  Some concern about its misuse might be justified  but at least with proper material accompanying those pills it should be possible to  regulate it much better.

MS: I thought that in some parts of the United States it was already available without a prescription.

SM: I believe that is true. In Canada it is available but you have to have a pharmacist give you information about it. You cannot go and just  pick it up .

MS: What’s your take on in vitro fertilization? And the question of so-called surrogate mothers and the whole debate from an ethical, moral and medical point of view?

SM: You know, it is amazing how women get blamed, dammed if you do and damned if you don’t. Earlier  women were blamed for having too many children  too early and now women who have become part of the work force and have to delay pregnancy  are being blamed for not becoming pregnant earlier. I find that a bit ironical. However, women’s capacity to become pregnant does decline  with age, while so many women seek motherhood at a later age. In earlier years I used to be much more critical about IVF and assisted human reproduction; I am less so now but do think that the industry exploits women. Moreover, there is a  real difference in treating female infertility and subjecting women to IVF treatment to overcome male infertility. This is done by inserting a sperm directly into an egg through intra cytoplasmic sperm insertion (ICSI) to produce embryos. Recent publications suggest that boys born through ICSI have very low fertility.  It perpetuates male infertility which would have been nature’s way of limiting infertility. The real issue is that women have to bear the burden of fertility treatment which is not innocuous. You have to take a drug which stimulates your ovaries which produce the eggs and that can be a big roller coaster because you are producing 8/9 eggs instead of one that you would have in a normal cycle, But let me speak to another issue  which has become much more controversial in this last little while, namely surrogacy where people rent a womb -  perhaps this is the correct nomenclature because it is a monetary transaction and it is done in a third world country such as India …now there is evidence that it is done in some of the Eastern European countries as well where you have women who will accept an embryo and bear the child through that particular process. There are actually no laws at the moment which protect the woman who is the surrogate and the parties in any way. Some very interesting cases have come up – the case of a Japanese man  in India who had hired somebody to bear a child and the couple divorced and the woman did not want the child,  the man could not claim the child because he was not married to the woman who bore the baby and it was a legal mess. There are numerous other cases like that. Surrogacy where the parents know the woman and she does it for altruistic reasons to be able to help the couple; these have also been quite problematic. You also have cases where you have five parents involved in producing one child.

MS: Five parents? How so?

SM: You have the husband and wife who commission the baby to be produced, then the egg donor because the woman is unable to produce eggs and then there is the sperm donor who donates the sperm. It could be the husband or a third person and then the surrogate mother into whose womb the egg is implanted. I am not saying that this happens all the time but theoretically you could have five people involved in the production of this one child, but most of the time it is three people.

MS: Do you think many of these problems could be avoided if women had their children earlier on when they are healthier and provided that the State supported them with child care and so on?

SM:  Women’s groups have felt that appropriate support should be provided to families. But at what stage should  women take time off to have children? And yes, without appropriate State support this is difficult. If  you remember, it was a novel idea that women would get time off to nurse their babies because if you were a working woman and you wanted to breast feed your child  you had no time off. During the Allende government in Chile women got time off to nurse their infants.  Of course now we do have good maternity benefits in Canada but this did not happen without a struggle.  So it is a question of what the State is willing to do and who decides what the State does. There is a direct link between what support is provided and notions about the family. Right-wing ideas have become quite important. Essentially the tax breaks that were provided and the subsidies for each child that the Harper government instituted was that instead of providing day care  women were given a $100 a month to be able to stay at home and be moms. I think that this particular subsidy basically meant that women were not able to benefit from outside employment. It also reinforces the notion that women should really be at home taking care of their kids instead of going out looking for a job and if you look at some of the right wing literature,  they say they also take away the manliness out of manhood because women are competing for the same jobs  and then  men are not able to be  good providers. This ignores the reality that many women have to work to support the family and it also puts a burden on the man to be the sole bread winner.

MS: You  were not only a member of the SAWCC Executive on several occasions but you were also director of the MCRTW, McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women for eleven years.  I understand you were the first scientist to be heading an institution that was part of the humanities section of the university. Is it because you felt that as a scientist you needed to be involved in social issues as well? What were your most important challenges and achievements during your tenure as director?

SM: Yes, at McGill I was the first full-time director who came from the sciences although there was Abby Lippman who was an acting director for a year before that. My  involvement with SAWCC  and with NAC -  National Action Committee for the Status of  Women gave me a greater appreciation of what the social sciences and humanities had to contribute. And I certainly thoroughly enjoyed my term because there were new challenges.  I became director at a time when McGill was cutting back on funding so making the place go was a challenge. At that time women’s studies involved courses from different  departments and had actually no courses other than one seminar course. So getting all that in place – that is having a Women’s Studies Department, with its own status offering its own courses along with courses from other departments stabilized the program. Having a graduate option in women’s studies was also a plus.   But I particularly feel very thrilled about the fact that we were able to open the doors for community participation because women’s studies without their being integrated into the community are meaningless. Academic women’s studies and the debates around feminism, first wave, second wave is one thing,  but opening the doors to the community was an important part of the activities of the centre.  We also benefited tremendously from this vibrant relationship because the Friend’s Committee managed to raise about $250,000 not from contributions of big donors but the small, tiny contributions by women who identified themselves with the MCRTW.

MS: After  you left this post you accepted a more challenging one  at  Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. You did this at an age when most people, if not dreaming of retirement, are  at least dreaming of working in the slow lane. Why?

SM: Because it was a new challenge, something different. In  my work  every ten years or so  I’ve had a career change in spite of a certain continuity. When I came to work in the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1972 I was supervising clinical labs till I left in 2008. But the main change was the eleven years I served as the director of the MCRTW. Then my work with the community,  with NAC and with SAWCC,  was an important part of what I did. What the Memorial University job allowed me to do was to  consolidate my involvement with the community and to incorporate the understanding that I had gained through the work that I had done to be able to bring together  academic issues with community work. Looking back,  I think I cannot sit back and move into the slow lane given the fact that my 89-year old mother just published a major book in 2010 after having worked on it for close to ten years. I also had a grandmother who raised three daughters single handed at a time when she had no education and no money and had to struggle her way  through when education was the most important thing that women needed to have.

MS: And of course that must have been even more difficult in India in those days.

SM: Absolutely. She was an uneducated widow without any means yet she raised these three daughters and inspired them to go on to their own academic careers. Unfortunately one of my aunts died at a young age. But the other two went on to have illustrious careers. There are three women in my life who have had a great influence: my grandmother, my mother Vijaya Mulay in an indirect way and Madeleine Parent. They have inspired me by their work in the public and private sphere. My grandmother’s work has been very much in the private sphere – she was not a public figure, she was not out there organizing people but leading the life that she led it was very clear that she believed that women should be able to do anything that anybody else does.

MS: Your grandmother’s name should be recorded.

SM: Her name is Saraswati Bai Ranade and I’m happy to say  that a school has been opened in her name in Sonale, Maharashtra (India) to which the whole family contributed.  

MS: Her name was well chosen – Saraswati is the Hindu  goddess of learning!

SM: That is true.

MS: Please tell our readers from outside Canada who Madeleine Parent is.

SM: Madeleine has been absolutely instrumental in, first of all, beginning the dialogue about how women of color and immigrant women are part of the Canadian women’s movement and has reached out to them. She has also worked with aboriginal women. Madeleine got me involved with NAC, a direction I would have never taken alone. Growth comes in so many different ways. I only spent four years with the executive of  National Action Committee yet during those four years I met such incredible women from across Canada. It was the first time that I was out of Montreal into a much larger Canadian context. I owe that to Madeleine. Aside from her well-know contributions there is the lesser known fact that through sheer persistence she made francophone organizations more effective at a time they were not,  because they did not see how the  whole question of Quebec nationalism could fit into the Canadian context.  Madeleine opened the path for women and SAWCC, to join hands.  

MS: Well, women have struggled all their lives to get rid of patriarchy but  lately there seems to be a  polarization of attitudes  throughout the world and a resurgence of patriarchy  both in the East as well as in the West. What’s do you say to this?

SM: Patriarchy is lurking all the time. We have to be very vigilant. It can be quite innocuous like subsidies for women to raise children. But in extreme patriarchy people use cultural practices and culture as a way of reasserting patriarchy on women. There is a constant struggle between women asserting their rights and those who wish to push them back.  One can argue that Islamic fundamentalism is a reaction to the demonization of Islam. Once can also say that not only Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise, but so is Christian and Hindu fundamentalism. We women cannot afford to say that we have won the battle.  We have to be vigilant and respond to those threats and make sure future generations understand those struggles.

MS: What’s your advice to our granddaughters’ generation? 

SM: I hope the world will be different for them, but we have to tell them to understand the world and see what is happening around them, to be critical, not to accept individual benefits as if they benefit the whole world.  We have to ingrain in them the value of social justice. That is one of the most important things that we can pass on to our children and grandchildren.

MS What you are saying Shree, is that equality for women equals social justice.

SM: Absolutely!

MS: Thank you very much.

Think old people can be troublesome?

You don’t know the half of it!

Why didn’t my mother warn me?

 

It didn’t feel like it at the time but was it a stroke of luck for me that my friend Rose Hacker died  two years ago, just shy of her 102^nd birthday?  If she hadn’t, I’d probably be in prison now – or at least awaiting trial, for conspiracy under Britain’s increasingly draconian “anti-terrorism” (read “anti-freedom”) laws.

Of course I’m not happy she’s dead.  We were friends for fifty years.

So, how could Rose, who would have been 104 this month, and her friend Hetty Bower, six months her senior, 105 this October, have put me in the security services’ firing line?

Rose, Hetty and Rose’s friend Alice Herz-Sommer are just three among the ever-growing number of centenarians who challenge most of our pre- or mis-conceptions about ageing, what it is to be old and much else.

At 107 this year, Alice is the eldest.  An internationally renowned pianist for more than eighty years, she survived the Nazi holocaust in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, losing almost all her family except her young son who survived only to die suddenly aged 65.  Just a few weeks ago the BBC screened Everything Is A Present, an hour-long interview with Alice speaking and playing piano.  She still lives alone and practices for three hours daily.  She holds no grudge against the Germans, unlike many Jews, and made it clear that even Wagner’s well-known anti-semitism and role in the Nazis’ masterplans did not prevent her admiring his music.

When I saw Roberto Benigni’s film ‘Life is Beautiful’ I thought the story of a father not only keeping his young son alive but shielding him from the horror of concentration camp life by a mixture of play and humour far-fetched.  Yet that was the reality Alice created for her son.  His brief description in the introduction to her biography A Garden of Eden in Hell explains just how effective she was.  And her love of life and sense of humour continue unabated.

How many major anti-war or pro-peace demonstrations take place each year in London?  Probably around a dozen.  At how many can you expect to find Hetty Bower marching – usually leading?  Around a dozen.  Rose and Hetty went on every march against the 2003 Iraq invasion.  On 5 March a story about Joe Glenton, a young soldier facing Court Martial for desertion after refusing to return to Afghanistan, was screened hourly on BBC News.  Who appeared alongside him in the archive footage?  None other than Hetty Bower.

How does Hetty keep in practice?  She walks daily, protests other major issues, takes annual walking holidays, staying in Youth Hostels.  She has been on two demos against Israel’s actions in the occupied territories this year.  In February, the worst in London for many years – and she hates cold and snow – she was out leafleting in the streets against closure of her local hospital’s Accident and Emergency unit before taking part in a two-mile protest march to draw attention to the problem.  Questioned on national television before the start about why she was marching she declared, “It’s my patriotic duty.  I would die trying to save the Health Service.  I believe it was the first of its kind in the world and used to be immensely proud of it.”  She then told a local newspaper reporter, “I prefer to march at the front.  People walk too slowly further back along the line.”  Clearly the ramblings of a feeble-minded, weak, old woman!  After the march she confided,  “I know I’m getting old.  I had to stop twice for a little rest and a cup of tea.”  But that didn’t prevent her completing the march, all uphill, in around an hour, before many other people.

Over lunch she said she doubted she would do her annual Oxfam fundraising hike  this year.  Last September she walked three miles and raised nearly two thousand pounds.  But then her daughters and I both reminded her she had said the same thing last winter when it was cold and grey.  Just let one ray of sunlight come out and so will her get-up-and-go.  Hetty’s the best argument I know for switching to solar energy now.

 

And how did she recover from her exertions on the hospital protest?  By going next evening to a chamber-music Sunday Concert in memory of Rose who died two years earlier after attending them for seventy years.  Despite poor hearing, the expression of rapture on Hetty’s face showed she adored every moment.  Many of the more than 200 people attending were clutching copies of the Camden New Journal in which Hetty had written a tribute piece to Rose about the importance of music in education and much else.

That recovery process may hold at least part of the clue to their longevity.

Just a few weeks after her 100^th birthday Rose asked if I could drive her over to see her friend Alice for her 103^rd birthday.  She could have walked the two miles but she wanted to arrive fresh in order to …

Let’s go back to a little story told at her funeral by one Rose’s hundreds of close friends; everyone that met her immediately considered her a close friend. Rabbi Lionel Blue, a mere stripling at only 80, is probably Britain’s best known, out, gay, religious leader.  He speaks regularly on radio and television, writes extensively and does a national public speaking tour – An Evening With Lionel Blue.  He told the mourning crowd how he had met Rose at a Passover Seder dinner at the home of mutual friends.  She was then only 90.  The two of them kept everyone in stitches before Rose rose, announcing it was time to teach the children how to belly dance.  And she did.

For Alice’s 103^rd birthday Rose and Wendy, a young friend in her 80s decided to entertain Alice by belly dancing for her.  I still have pictures.  In her sixties Rose had joint and back problems.  She overcame them and roared back to good health by learning and continuing to follow the Alexander technique.  In her eighties she took up belly dancing and in her nineties added Tai Chi to her repertoire.  At 97 she was given an award as Britain’s oldest working artist – she was a skilled sculptor.  And like both Hetty and Alice, she loved walking especially in sculpture rich Kenwood on Hampstead Heath and in smaller local parks.  A week before her 101^st birthday, Rose and two friends in their nineties starred on stage at one of London’s main dance venues, The Place, in Remembrances, a piece specially choreographed for them.  It recounted the story of the twentieth century through dance.  They stole the show.

Four or five times a year Rose and Hetty used to, Hetty still does, attend concerts of Musicians Against Nuclear Arms (MANA).  Almost every week Rose also went to the opera, another concert and lectures or meetings.

Even with failing hearing and eyesight, both still loved theatre and cinema.  A couple of months ago I took Hetty to a Sunday morning London Socialist Film Co-op screening of Memories of Underdevelopment, a 1968 Cuban film.  Hetty speaks no Spanish, could only pick out occasional subtitles and get a vague impression of the images on the screen, she claimed.  At the end she whispered,  “I must be getting old, I couldn’t tell whether that was a feature film, a documentary or a film about the making of a film.”  A discussion led by a professor of Latin American studies began,  “When this film came out in 1986, it was probably the first film to combine documentary footage into a feature film and it was interesting for being highly self-referential, a film about film-making.”  Clearly Hetty’s understanding has waned with age.

Last month we went to see one film about protest in Iraq and another, Waiting for Mordechai about the international team that assembled to greet Mordechai Vanunu on his release from Israeli prison.  This month it will be two retrospectives on the Spanish Civil War.  Then two films on Palestine and maybe a bit of Michael Moore for relaxation.

In various ways all of them have spent their lives working for peace.

Both Rose and Hetty have described the process by which, during World War I they became pacifists.  Both were swept up in the wave of patriotism in which young men were sent off to Europe to die.  Both were taken by school teachers to wave goodbye to “our brave boys”.  Both saw the limbless, shell-shocked, traumatised, emotionally wrecked, young men who returned from the battlefields their lives in shreds.  And quite independently, well before that war was over, both came to the conclusion that war was wrong and far from solving any problems, created disaster. True patriotism meant working for peace and both committed themselves there and then to fighting against war and for peace.  Hetty’s father had taught her before WWI to recognise anti-German propaganda for what it was.  Like my parents (with me), in 1958 both Rose and Hetty marched in the first of what became annual marches by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an Easter-weekend-long protest against the Nuclear Weapons production and storage base at Aldermaston.

All three came from comfortable, middle-class Jewish families and enjoyed good health.  Rose and Hetty had strongly egalitarian fathers and much more conservative mothers. Rose described her father as a ‘feminist’, Hetty described hers as a ‘political radical’. Rose was and Hetty still is an active supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestine.  Last summer Alice persuaded a Muslim friend to offer a fascinating introductory course on Islam at the local University Of The Third Age which she only recently stopped attending.

Rose and Hetty both became committed socialists early in their lives.  Rose, working as a designer in her father’s fashion house overlooking Oxford Circus in London witnessed the 1920s hunger marches.  She was shocked when she realised the miners she could see from her window were so much smaller than Londoners because of malnutrition.  Hetty was influenced by her older, suffragette sister and her political friends.  Hetty worked in progressive cinema, refugee relief and education.  Both strove ceaselessly for the improvement of society through politics, policy, art, music, culture and example.

While Alice’s life was bound up in music, Hetty and Rose were involved in education, politics, human rights; minority, immigrant, children’s, women’s prisoners’ and refugee rights, among others.  Rose worked in social welfare, marriage and relationship counselling and sex therapy.  She researched for a 1949 UK study of sexual behaviour that went much further than the Kinsey Reports.  In 1956 she wrote The Opposite Sex Britain’s first book on sex directed to children and young people.  The initial run sold around a quarter of a million copies.  In between she found time to raise a family, sculpt, paint, write poetry and speak publicly, particularly on mental health and the rights of the disabled, mentally ill, homeless, elderly and generally dispossessed.

At an age when many people were retiring Rose became a Councillor on the Greater London Council, considered so left-wing by Margaret Thatcher that she abolished it.  Interestingly, many of its most radical policies, hated by Thatcher, championed by Rose, have since become mainstream.  Rose had particular responsibilities for music and theatre in education and the community and the canal network for the Greater London region.

In 2006 I asked the organisers of an annual Hiroshima Day commemoration which my mother had launched in 1967 and Rose always attended, to invite Rose, then 100 years old, to speak. She not only mesmerised the crowd, she caught the attention of  the editor of a local newspaper.  He was so impressed that he decided he needed her to write a hard-hitting political column every two weeks.  Her column became a big hit.  Under the banner “The World’s Oldest Columnist”, she was able to write things nobody else could get away with.  She soon had a new cult following.  Daily papers picked up on her story, she was frequently interviewed by international media.  She was asked to speak to ever more organisations, appear on more platforms, take part in more demonstrations.  Often Hetty and some other near centenarian friends went along.

One request Rose received was from a TV production company proposing a four part series about sex.  Each episode was to deal with a different age group and Rose was asked to become the presenter for the oldest segment.  She had already done something similar in a documentary called Little Kinsey.

I probably should have known better than to take Rose and Hetty to see Mark Thomas, a brilliant satirical, political activist much of whose work has been devoted to sabotaging Britain’s massive arms manufacturing and trading industry (universally regarded as phenomenally successful if you discount the bribes it has traditionally and illegally paid out).  With Rose then in the record books as the world’s oldest working columnist and Mark a Guinness record holder for the highest number of demonstrations in twenty four hours, some kind of symbiosis was inevitable.  In a packed theatre in which the induction loop system didn’t seem to be getting sound to their hearing aids, Rose and Hetty sat entranced as he went through his routine.

In the panic following 9/11 the British Parliament rushed through legislation to protect all that it holds most valuable, namely the British Parliament.  It passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 banning any demonstrations around London’s Parliament Square without prior police approval.  The real aim was to remove the embarrassing Brian Haw, a lone protestor who had camped on Parliament Square to protest the 2001 Afghanistan invasion and stayed.  In its haste Parliament left a vacuum and a loophole.  The loophole was that the law could not have retroactive impact and was therefore useless at removing a protestor who had already been there for four years.  The vacuum was that it forgot to give police any grounds to refuse permission or any resources to handle applications to demonstrate.

Mark Thomas happily devised a series of schemes to fill that vacuum.  For people who wanted to protest in front of Parliament but were tired, too busy, couldn’t find a baby-sitter, had a previous appointment or needed to wash their hair, he could offer a complete service including permit application, poster or banner preparation and even a person to wave them.  Realising that twelve hundred individuals staging one-person demonstrations could not be seen as a mass demonstration (taking longer to process), he came up with the concept of ‘mass lone demonstration’.  Within days the Westminster police were tied up in knots, forced to process thousands of applications for demonstrations in the area around Parliament with no option of refusing them. 

Despite the packages Mark offered, Rose and Hetty had ideas of their own.  Both were incensed at the loss of freedom of speech, which they viewed as the thin end of a very dangerous wedge.  Both wanted to protest against the government’s trampling on long-established rights of protest and while Hetty was not keen to go to prison, Rose was quite willing to do so.  She had worked in prisons for over fifty years and they held no fear for her.  The plan was simple.  Hetty would apply for a permit to protest.  Rose would not.  Robust Hetty, “I’ve still got very good legs,” would push a wheelchair in which frailer Rose “My legs aren’t what they used to be” would sit.  Hetty would carry a placard saying:

HETTY BOWER
LEGAL 102-YEAR-OLD PROTESTER
AGAINST LIMITATION OF THE RIGHT TO PROTEST

Rose a banner declaring:

ROSE HACKER
ILLEGAL 102-YEAR-OLD PROTESTER
AGAINST LIMITATION OF THE RIGHT TO PROTEST

The police were required to arrest Rose or risk condoning lawbreaking.  We would obviously have ensured good media presence and adequate TV coverage, then sat back and waited to see which police officer would be the first to dare arrest a fragile-looking, 102-year-old in a wheelchair on national television. Planning was difficult because of all the giggling.

My role in all this?  I introduced them to Mark Thomas.  I was present when they were discussing their evil ploy.  I was expected to help co-ordinate, transport and provide refreshments.  All material support of conspiracy to commit serious crime.

Sadly – and not just for the plan – Rose died just before her 102^nd birthday.  Hetty could not make that particular protest alone.  The plan died with Rose.  For months Hetty was depressed by Rose’s death, they shared so many interests and at Hetty’s age, so many of her friends and relatives had already gone.  A film then nearing completion about life in the wonderful Mary Feilding Guild residential home where Rose and Hetty lived, ‘The Time of Their Lives’ starring Rose, Hetty and a fascinating younger woman, Alison Selford, had to end without Rose and Hetty’s demonstration.  Nonetheless it has gone on to win international acclaim in film festivals around the world (including Canada), as well as being widely shown on television.  And Hetty has revived, continues to do things that matter to her and has agreed to address this August’s Hiroshima Day commemoration.

Is there a secret to being a vibrant, radical, centenarian role-model?  Being born over a hundred years ago is a good start.  Making and keeping your life interesting helps. Positive and accepting attitudes seem to play a role.  All three are humanists, convinced atheists.  Do they fear death?  No.  They welcome it.

So why didn’t my mother warn me against such centenarian trouble-makers?  Was it because, when she was dying over thirty years ago, barely a half-centenarian, despite an unbelievably busy schedule, Rose made time to help me nurse her, the only person to do so?

No.  I think it’s because she aspired to being one of them and wanted me to as well.

Link to a recently released BBC film called “Alice Sommer Herz – Everything is a present”:

http://www.allegrofilms.com/film/Alice_Sommer_Herz_EVERYTHING_IS_A_PRESENT_Alice_Sommer_Herz_music_documentary.php

Here is a ten-minute interview with Alice Sommer Herz on the BBC radio (Radio 4) Front Row  =>

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

 

 

In October 1975 Roy Lowther was charged with the murder of his wife, Pat, a gifted and renowned Canadian poet, when her two young daughters, Chris and Beth, were seven and nine. In this film, the two women revisit the circumstances surrounding the violent death of their mother and try to make sense of their father’s brutal act and its aftermath.

 

         

BATTLE OF WILLS tells a story of obsession and intrigue in the art world worthy of Shakespeare himself. It travels from the high-tech labs of North America, to the art galleries of Bond Street and the windswept castles if the English midlands to unravel the mystery behind a painting that shook the art world.

 

 

Interview:

 Q. How did you choose the subject for your film Water Marks?

A. I was in British Columbia, about ten years ago now, and I found a book called Furry Creek written by Keith Harrison, which was a fictionalized biography of a poet, Pat Lowther. It included her poetry, the story of her murder and references to her daughters. I was immediately attracted to the story for a very personal reason. My brother Alex had been a west coast lawyer and his very first law case was to represent Roy Lowther, Pat Lowther’s husband. Alex was a young lawyer starting out and she was a much beloved Vancouver poet.  The whole arts community was outraged at the murder. I remember my brother telling me about this case and how high-profile it was for a young lawyer. I knew the back story from my brother’s point of view but I hadn’t yet investigated the larger story, the story of Pat and her husband and her children. And of her poetry. I had studied English literature at Mcgill was going to be a English professor until I got side tracked into film. So a lot of things came together in the subject matter.  I wanted to do a film on the west coast, because it is a second home for me.  My brother had lived there, my parents. I grew up in Montreal but everyone else in my family had migrated west. Pat Lowther was a great poet of the West Coast landscape, much of her imagery conveys that rain forest feeling of the West Coast. I read her poems when I began that film.  There were a number of levels that interested me, there was the tragedy of two young girls, the West coast, poetry.  There was a lot of creative room for me to explore. Plus it was a strong feminist story, a story of the two daughters of Pat Lowther trying to reclaim their childhood which was robbed from them and to  reclaim their family history.

 

Q. How long was it after Pat Lowther was killed that you did the film?

A. She was killed in the mid-seventies and I did the film around 2001. It is a story that has continued to resonate in poetry circles in Canada. There is the Pat Lowther prize that is given to an emerging female poet every year.  She had been active in the League of Canadian Poets and a much beloved figure in those circles. I would not have considered doing the film without that. She was an important figure in the mythology of the West Coast literary circles. The seventies had been a particularly fertile period for writers. With the aftermath of the sixties, the West Coast was laid-back, bohemian and people drifted to that area. Visual artists as well.

 

Q. Where did Pat Lowther live?

A. She lived in the city of Vancouver. She and her husband owned a tiny rudimentary cabin on Mayne Island, which is in the film. After  Roy Lowther murdered her, he took their two children over to this cabin and hung out there until he was arrested. And that was another way in which the story overlapped with my own life. My brother had a rustic cabin just off Mayne Island. So it was a place I knew well.  There were all these resonances for me and it seemed that I was supposed to do it.  So I did.

 

Q. Was the murder more important than the other aspects, the children, the poetry and the family context.

A. I would not like to think it was more important. One cannot sum up the life of an artist by a catastrophe that happens to her in one instant.  That would be diminishing her, but I cannot deny that as a film maker I am always trying to find the drama and murder, of course, heightens the stakes. Particularly in documentary, you are trying to find some element that is going to give the drama of fiction.  So, yes, the murder ended up being an important dramatic element. I tried very hard not to fall into that “Allo Police” kind of mentality, which is all about blood and gore, so there are no scenes of the body or anything like that, instead I let Pat Lowther’s voice come through, by using her poetry, her voice is present on the screen, in a collage of images. I was giving a sense of who she was. The end of the film, doesn’t end up with her murder, it ends up with her daughters who put together her collective work, a beautiful book – a heartfelt attempt to reclaim a painful history and to move on from it.

 

Q. What I mainly remember from the film, which I saw quite a few years ago, is the lushness of the scenery and the colouring.

A. The entire film was tinted blue and I had never done that before. I worked with a genius cinematographer, Marc Gadoury. I wanted to film some scenes underwater – we have scenes of jellyfish floating, and a scene where the camera is underwater and Chris Lowther is swimming above.  Both the daughters are writers too, not as well known as Pat, but Chris has published a collection of poetry.  All these women’s voices come through.  When I told my cinematographer that I wanted the film to have this watery feel to it, images of water, the wetness, the fog of the west coast, he suggested that we tint it blue. I was terrified, I thought it would look hokey.

 

Q. The second main memory, other than the fluidity and lushness, was the daughters, their emotional sense that came across.

A. They are fascinating.  They have a complicated relationship. In the aftermath of that kind of tragedy, where both parents are missing, the mother dead, father in prison (where he died), it is not surprising. The younger resented the older because she was the surrogate boss. But they are of course very close even though the relationship is complicated. They are opposites. The older one, Beth, was urban, edgy, lived in the east side of Vancouver, part of the bohemian milieu. The other had escaped to a wilderness part of the west coast, in Tofino. She and her boyfriend had an apartment in Tofino but even that was too urban for her and they lived on a houseboat most of the time in a bay off Clayoquot Sound which is all rain forest and many uninhabited islands and bays. If you don’t have a lot of money, you can spend ten thousand dollars on a houseboat, take it out, moor it in a bay and you have a mile of waterfront. That’s what Chris Lowther and her boyfriend had done. Living in this paradise, growing organic vegetables on the deck of her houseboat. That was interesting to me, the differences between the sisters.

 

Q. What did you most like about this film?

A. I always like stretching the creative chops. As a documentary film maker, you are essentially a story teller trying to create a narrative using music, imagery, poetry, character.  How to be true to your subject and how to create a story that will engage and this one was rich with those elements.

 

Q. Eight years later, is there anything you would do differently?

A. Yes. I have never done a film where I have felt one hundred percent satisfied. I will never be the type of film maker who says “that was just right”. I learned one thing in that film. The subject was charged because the daughters had so many emotions about what had happened and because my brother had represented their father. I was walking on eggshells during the time I was making the film. Because of this somewhat tense situation, I pre-interviewed them a lot before we ever shot. Their best interviews, their best responses, were before the cameras were on. When I repeated the questions on camera, they didn’t have the same freshness, spontaneity. I could have done better interviews if I hadn’t been nervous and over prepared. That is tricky about documentary. It is so much about creating trust and comfort with the person you are interviewing. If they are trying to respond to the question, they are having to think harder because it is a new question, they can get distracted from the camera. I should have trusted my instincts as a film maker and not over prepared. I don’t do that anymore.

 

Q. Do you like Pat’s poetry?

A. Yes. Some of it’s quite challenging. She writes a combination of poetry that is an homage to the west coast. She writes political poetry, about Chile, and poetry about women’s lives;  she worked for the NDP, and her husband, Roy, was a quasi-communist, they were always left-leaning and that comes through in her poetry.

 

Q. Is there a poem of Pat Lowther’s that would represent her?

A. Yes.

 

 ANEMONES

 

Under the wharf at Saturna

the sea anemones

open their velvet bodies

 

chalk black

            and apricot

                        and lemon-white

 

they grow as huge

and glimmering

                        as flesh chandeliers

 

under the warped

and salt-stained wharf

  letting down

      their translucent mouths

                                                of arms

 

even the black ones

have an aura

like an afterimage of light

 

Under our feet

   the gorgeous animals

        are feeding

                                    in the sky

 

© Pat Lowther

 

Q. Were you changed in the making of the film?

A. I am changed by every film I make. It was not an easy film to make as the daughters were quite prickly. I cannot fault them considering the circumstances.  But I felt that I had to keep them happy. Documentary film making can be intrusive since you are asking personal questions. 

 

Q. What was their reaction to Water Marks?

A. I think they were happy. Initially they didn’t quite know what to make of it because it was so personal to them, but they received a huge amount of feedback. It went to different festivals, to screenings and it brought attention to their mother’s work, their mother’s life and to her book which they had just brought out, which was a labour of love.  We are still in touch, it goes on. Allan Safarik, a Canadian poet who was in the film because he was Pat Lowther’s best friend wrote his memoirs and sent a chapter about Water Marks to me. he said that participating in the film, was a huge catharsis because he had kept so much emotion bottled up about Pat and the children and he had felt guilt, and seeing them again and giving them some of her work was incredibly important.

 

Q. Your latest film Battle of Wills is about Shakespeare. Both films have something to do with writing and literature.

A. In the film I just did, I used Shakespeare’s poetry and “his voice comes through” in the sound track. Like Water Marks, it is about a writer and also about landscape, this time about England. Battle of Wills tells the story of two portraits that are duking it out, both claiming to be the only image of Shakespeare painted from life. It is a deconstruction of two portraits, from the point of view of the outsider, the long shot; the Sanders portrait is owned by Lloyd Sullivan an elderly man in Ottawa whose family has owned this portrait for four hundred years, passing it from generation to generation. It’s an engaging face, an authentic 17th century Elizabethan portrait. Sullivan has spent almost all his lifetime savings vetting this portrait and it is 100 percent Elizabethan painted on oak. But is it Shakespeare? The contending portrait is owned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, a huge, august institution and it is the founding portrait in their collection and they have a huge stake in it being Shakespeare. The film is about the politics of the art world, the dishonesty of the authenticity debates, the hidden agendas in the world of Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is an industry. The film is about the mysteries around him, because we know his works so well and absolutely nothing about his life. He is a big cypher and there are theories upon theories about him. This film plays into those theories. And I have some sexy people in it, like Joseph Fiennes and Simon Callow. It was filmed at Yale University in Ottawa, Toronto, London, Stratford-upon-Avon, the British Midlands and Montreal.

 

Q. What was your push to do this film?

A. It was a series of articles from the Globe and Mail dating back to 2002, about a new portrait of Shakespeare that had been discovered. It was a big story and then a book by Stephanie Nolen came out. I always thought there has to be a good story here. There were three or four film companies that were competing to tell the story and I lucked out. I love Shakespeare. Water Marks is a serious film, Battle of Wills is tongue-in-cheek. It was my chance to make fun of English pomposity and the art dealers from Bond street with their noses stuck right up in the air – a romp with serious questions.

 

Q. Is there anything else you want to add about film making.

A. Making documentaries is the most wonderful thing imaginable, except I only get to do it five percent of my time, the rest of the time I am looking for money to do it. It is not for everybody. Young film makers starting out think they will be going into the film industry and spend all their time making films, it is just not the case.

 

 

 The Last Room

 

I am waiting for you

In the lowest room beneath the building

 

I am smooth as a gourd

without resistance

my shape spreads

            downwards

                        seeking the lowest

centre of gravity

 

I spend hours memorizing

the labyrinth

            beneath our skins

                        by which I came

 

waiting for your long shadow

in the passage

 

I am green as a gourd

but inside I am red

 

All through the folded hours

I am burning

            quietly

 

I am becoming a red hollow

skin

 

            a gourd for drinking

 

Only now do I recognize

shards patterning the dust

between my legs

 

they are my former skins

 

How many times

have I come here

 

How long have I been waiting

 

© Pat Lowther

 

 

KITCHEN MURDER

 

Everything here’s a weapon

i pick up a meat fork,

imagine plunging it in,

a heavy male

thrust

 

in two hands

i heft a stone-

ware plate, heavy

enough?

 

rummage the cupboards:

red pepper, rape-

seed oil, Drano

 

I’ll wire myself

into a circuit:

the automatic perc, the dishwater, the

socket above the sink

 

i’ll smile an electric

eel smile:

whoever touches

me is dead.

 

© Pat Lowther

 

 

 

For further information on Battle of Wills by Anne Henderson: http://www.informactionfilms.com/en/productions/battle_of_wills/index.html

 

For further information on Pat Lowther:

www.poets.ca/linktext/awards/lowther.htm

 

Anne Henderson has been writing and directing documentaries for 25 years, with many international titles to her credit. Her documentaries encompass a wide variety of subjects concerning culture, human rights, history, and the environment. She likes to tell stories about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. She makes her home in the midst of Montreal’s vibrant arts community.

Biography:

Montreal-born Martin Duckworth came to filmmaking from a background in history. Duckworth was on staff at the National Film Board of Canada from 1963 – 1970 and since that time, has made films there as a free lancer. He has done camera work on 84 films and has directed or co-directed close to 30, most, but not all of them at the Film Board. 

He is active in the Canadian peace movement, and his 1994 film, Peacekeeper at War: A Personal View of the Gulf War follows in a line of work concerned with war and its effects.

Some of Duckworth’s later films are Acting Blind (2006) and The Battle of Rabaska (2008), which he co-directed with Magnus Isacsson.

Duckworth is a member of the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC) and l’Association des Réalisateurs et Réalisatrices du Quebec (ARRQ). He is the father of six daughters and a son, grandfather of ten, and lives in the shadow of Montreal’s mountain.

 He is currently working on a film about Palestine.

 To see some of his films, including No More Hiroshima, Return to Dresden and Riel Country: http://www.nfb.ca/explore-by/director/Martin-Duckworth/

 

 

 

 Interview:

Q: How do you understand or see the relationship between art and democracy?

A:  Without art, democracy would be dead. Art is the most important thing in keeping the critical awareness alive.  In art, I am including creative journalism, as well as music, painting, film-making, poetry.  I think it is essential, the most essential thing there is. I don’t think about democracy very much. I do think about art a lot. I devote my life to art in all its forms.  I do read political journals.  I read The Nation, I read Naomi Klein’s every word. I think her quality of journalism is high art because she is a master of the English language.  So I guess democracy is a political word and doesn’t imply art.  Art is a separate realm. And art would need a democratic political framework in order to thrive.  One world depends on the other, in both directions.

 

Q. What about all the incredible art that came out under the church, which wasn’t democratic.

A. I would have to say that was what kept critical intelligence in those times when there was no democratic framework.  You’re talking about the windows in the Gothic cathedrals.

 

Q. All the ceilings, Michelangelo, da Vinci.

A. Those guys, it was quite a freedom of expression, in the Renaissance, when those guys were working.

 

Q. Some, with De Vinci, he was backed by the Medici family.

A. Probably right up to the twentieth century, artists needed some kind of backing. When you say there were far fewer artists before than there are today, it’s because the arts have flourished more when there is a democratic political setting. Bad art and good art.  When art depended on wealthy backers, it was only the geniuses that got the backing, the Rembrandts, the Bachs, the Beethovens, but who knows what other artists might not have flourished if they had the financial backing.  Today we have a much bigger pool.  So maybe geniuses now have a better chance of arising out of poorer circumstances than they used to. I don’t think I would have been happy living in the Renaissance. I don’t think so.  You really had to be a genius to survive as an artist in those times.

 

Q. So you are positing somewhat that in a democracy we get more bad, but also more good stuff.

A. The arts are flourishing, but documentaries are starting to go downhill in Canada because the right wing is starting to take over. Our funding is cut. Documentaries take a lot of money, it takes a lot more money to make a documentary than to write a poem or a song.  We are dependent on state subsidies. I don’t have private backers. They do in the US. There are private backers for filmmakers in the US. I think we are more conservative, less risk-taking in this country.

 

Q. If your documentaries were less political, would you get more money?

A. No. Money is affecting not only political film-makers, but all documentary film-makers because a good documentary makes you think critically, not only on politics but on all other aspects of life.  We are heading towards a fascist era in this country, if we keep going the way we are going now, where there is no place for critical thinking.  I have been active in the Justice for Adil Coalition*.  I just flew with him to Halifax where he had a speaking engagement and I witnessed the terrible harassment he was subjected to by the border guards, who followed him on the airplane, followed him all the way home.  He wasn’t able to get on the plane to come back so he had to rent a car to come back and they followed him on the highway. We have fascism in the bushes now.

It’s getting worse.  It started to go that way under Paul Martin

Q. Has the way you approached documentary changed over the years? 

A. They have become more political.  I started off making films about friends and family and got more political when I met my wife, Audrey, who comes from a very politically active family.  Actually, the Hiroshima film was a suggestion of her father, who was in touch with the peace movement in Japan.  He is an active member of the Anti-Imperialistic League in Boston. He did a history of it, he’s an historian. So I have tried to make films that combined characters with political stories, messages, over the years. 

 

Q. Going back to the October crisis, can you tell us if artists from the Anglophone milieu, like you, feel that Quebec’s democratic rights had been usurped and if so, are you involved in such issues?

A. The October 1970 issue? Gaston Miron, Gerald Godin, Pauline Julien, Michele Lalonde led a fantastic outburst of poetry and music at that time. Certainly there was suppression of Quebec artists prior to Bourassa under Duplessis, but it was the artists that led to the Quiet Revolution, Borduas, Riopelle, Felix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault   In 1972, that was the worst thing that Trudeau did, declaring the War Measures Act, sending the army in.  But he did not succeed in suppressing the arts. The arts exploded as a result.  In the same way, they defeated the Tories in Quebec last year.  They tried to suppress the artists in Quebec and had the opposite effect.

 

Q. In your documentary, Return to Dresden, what were the atmosphere and feelings you encountered when you were shooting the film about the allied carpet bombing of Dresden and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union and East Germany?  What were your feelings and reactions?

A. It was under the Communist regime. East Germany was still alive and well under Hünniger. It was a very difficult film to shoot.  We were under surveillance, weren’t allowed to meet any people in the peace movement in East Germany, they made it impossible, a very repressive atmosphere.  We were allowed to film because the subject of the film was what happened in 1945.  And the people of Dresden were very moved to have among them someone who had come to apologise for his role in the destruction of their city. We were followed everywhere. I didn’t have freedom of movement at all.  But the authorities had to display a certain respect for former allies coming over to apologize for the bombing of Dresden, so they allowed us to work as long as we didn’t get in touch with members of the peace movement. The woman who greets us at the beginning of the film, recites a poem near the end, committed suicide soon after we were there. We suspect it was because life had been made difficult for her as an actress because she was too outspoken.  It was a courageous thing for her to make herself available to us, a western film crew.

 

Q. Are you satisfied with that film?

A. I am crazy about classical music so whenever I can do a film about classical music, I am happy, particularly if there is a political message.

 

Q. What recent work has struck you with its artistry or honesty or beauty?

A. Mark Achbar, The Corporation. It’s a superb work of research, on the same level of intelligent frameworking and researching as Naomi Klein’s work.  Great characters. Very strong story line.  Those are the elements of any good documentary. The same Robert Cornellier’s film about the Alaskan oil spill twenty years ago, Black Wave, The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez. It’s a film that just came out last year and it’s an extraordinary film. The visuals are kind of secondary. The visuals are there to tease you, to get you into the content, whatever the story is.

 

Q. What issues are presently important to you?

A. Palestine. Palestine is the worst thing happening now and we are all going to be dragged into another terrible confrontation if we don’t give the Palestines justice.

 

Q. You heard Robert Fisk speak about the Middle East and his position was rather pessimistic.

A. I was brought up in a socialist, pacifist, Quaker family that gave us confidence in ourselves and in human nature and through building alliances that we can change the world. And I still believe that. I have to believe that. I can’t see any point to living if I don’t believe that. Robert Fisk has other ways of enjoying life besides writing books. He listens to a lot of classical music, he reads great literature, he is very knowledgeable about Shakespeare. He doesn’t let politics get him down, because he sees a lot of hope in other arts. I have Palestinian and Jewish friends who believe it is essential to find justice for Palestinians and I share a belief with them that it has to come. We can’t allow it to go on like that.

 

Q. What film are you presently working on?

A. I have a Palestinian friend who is a business man, whose family owned a hotel in Haifa before they were evicted in 1948. He was three years old at the time. He’d like to get that hotel back and open up Haifa to Palestinians abroad.

 

Q. So the film about Palestine is close to your heart?

A. Yes. I’ve been in Palestine on three or four films and quite aware of the situation there now.

 

Q. Given free rein, what subject would you choose to work on?

A. I would go into my Haifa story.  I’d like to do a thorough research in the role played by Lester Pearson in splitting up Palestine into two pieces in 1947. Pearson has a major role to play in that. Initial research shows that it’s been largely covered up. It would require a person of Naomi Klein’s stature to dig into it and find out more about it.  It’s one of the worst things this country has ever done, under a good man, supposedly.  How did he allow himself to do it. I heard from one of his colleagues that he regretted it. But I would like to get more evidence of that.

 

Q. What else would you like to do?

A. I can’t imagine doing anything else. Although I started late in life, I didn’t get into film making until I was thirty years old, it’s become pretty much an obsession with me, I can’t imagine doing without it. I have a very manageable, high-definition camera, light-weight enough to carry in spite of my age. I love working on my Final Cut Pro editing system. What else would I like to do?  I wish I could play the piano again. I still have a piano and I do play once in a while. If I had time, I would love to play it a lot more.

 

 * In February 2009, the Federal Court finally lifted most of the interim conditions imposed on Adil Charkaoui. Adil was arrested under a so-called security certificate in 2003. Adil Charkaoui is one of five men in Canada who are undergoing the Kafka-esque security certificate process. All are still subject to the agonizingly irrational “security” certificate process, deeply invasive and suffocating bail conditions, and live under threat of deportation and torture. The Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui formed in Montreal in a matter of days after Charkaoui’s abrupt arrest.
 
The Coalition is an alliance of Muslim groups, refugee and immigrant rights organizations, anti-oppression groups and the Charkaoui family.