Migration(s)

Mermaid Road, a handmade book; Louise Carson, Broken Rules Press, 2013 Mermaid Road is not a conventional imagining of a mermaid’s life. It is set along the shores of North America’s east coast and an unnamed land not unlike Greece.  Inspired by […]

The Howl! Arts festival is running April 24 – 29 at various Montreal venues **** Montreal is blessed by Howl! art et révolution, une célébration Review by Rana Bose The second night of the Howl Arts festival, 25th April 2014, […]

The Monarch butterfly can travel up to 2,500 miles across “borderless” lands to seek warmth and nourishment for its larvae. The wildebeest journeys through the Serengeti forming part of the largest mammalian migration in the world. And the Arctic […]

  Mon engagement est de donner le meilleur de moi-même, à travers les formes d’expression que j’ai choisies soit : la  sculpture et la peinture. Le dépassement de soi anime ma volonté artistique, il constitue l’essence de ma vie, ma vérité. […]

I –  Long Ago In the beginning there was Migration…not Eden, not Providence, not the Prime Mover. If we dig deep and look far, we see that migrations have made us what we are. And the first of […]

One of the biggest challenges of migrating to another country is leaving your family behind. In most cases the reason is economics. If you are from a developing country, it becomes inevitable for at least one person in the family […]

Degrowth Interview with Joan Martinez-Alier Interviewer : Richard Swift Joan Martinez-Alier is one of the founders of ecological economics and the author of numerous important and pioneering works in this field. Some of his most important works include Ecological Economics […]

Fatima woke up and rushed to turn the alarm clock off. She did not want the rest of the household to wake up before it was strictly necessary. She had taken her shower the night before just before slipping […]

We seem to be global witnesses to what I can only characterize as neo-tribalism. To a large extent, this is the result of social structures that emerged during the Industrial Revolution.  Universalist claims were articulated in the name of religion: […]

(part of The Paradise Project) The first voyagers to the Americas really believed they had found Eden; Columbus called it “the terrestrial paradise” and went in search of the four rivers described in the Bible.  However, in the end, it […]

Jaswant Guzder is an internationally-renowned transcultural psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, an associate professor at McGill and the head of child psychiatry at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital.  She is also a visual artist. Born in British Columbia, Dr. Guzder is of third-generation […]

Artist’s statement: During the 1950s in Lahore and Karachi I rarely saw women who were Burkaized or Hijabized. Most women during that era did not cover their head. In the UK in the 1960s I never saw any Hijabs or Turbans. We […]

Oh you, who remember Jerusalem too well, Wash sacred rock with your tears. Whether exile has chosen you or not, Do not sing of her to one who has seen A stone is no more than it is. […]

Pavitra in Paris Stories for Life by Vinita Kinra Greengardens Media, Toronto, Canada, 2013 Vinita Kinra, who has recently published her first book, Pavitra in Paris: a collection of eleven short stories (www.vinitakinra.com), was born in Canada in 1975. […]

Chimanigasse Through the kitchen window: walnut trees in bloom. Forsythia. Alpine foothills, granite cliffs by the old railroad tracks, Chimanigasse, the Magyar refugee camp Ungarnlager Korneuburg — 220 beds, 270 mattresses, 25 tables, 28 chairs. […]

This is a short story in Italian by Pietro Ferrua [the synopsis in English by Mirella Bontempo follows the original]. Ferrua’s most recent publication is “John Cage, Anarchico ‘Schedato’ in Brasile”(Ocra Press, 2013), an account of how the Brazilian […]

The Lowland. A Novel. Jhumpa Lahiri. Random House India, 2013. A priori The Lowland appears to be yet another novel about the immigrant experience, the alienation imposed by geography, the gut-wrenching loneliness of the expat, the numbing pain of losing […]

Cazzarola! Anarchy, Romani, Love, Italy: A Novel, Norman Nawrocki, PM Press, 318 pages Disclosure: I always loved gypsy culture. From Tony Gatlif’s films to his soundtracks and sometimes even the works by non-Romani Balkan filmmakers who examine or exploit […]

El Amor Amargo de Chavela or Dreaming Chavela, if you wish, is a 2013 documentary about Mexican ranchera music singer Chavela Vargas who died in 2012 at the age of 81. This documentary is what  at first sight appears […]