IN THE WRITERS’ WORDS Conversations with Eight Canadian Poets, Laurence Hutchman, Guernica Press, Toronto-Buffalo-Lancaster (UK), 2011

The1950s in Canada were energized by a group of young poets who were on a mission to create a national literature. Their hard work and dedication, and not the least, their brilliant poetry, continue to have impact today. In the Writers’s Words records the literary experience and vision of Ralph Gustfason, George Johnston, P.K. Page, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Al Purdy, Anne Szumigalski, and James Reaney.

Poet and teacher, Laurence Hutchman, made it his mission in the 1990s to interview these senior writers in their homes. The intimate setting no doubt facilitated the “conversation.” Hutchman’s introductory description of their dwellings helps to further bring the poet’s character to life. This is what we find in this accessible book: a group of poets who wanted to share what mattered in their time, the creation of a poetry that was fresh and imaginative and could be called Canadian.

There is a cozy warmth in In the Writers’s Words, but also the snap and crackle of fire from these opinionated and well-connected authors. Al Purdy was humorous as he recalled his friendship with Milton Acorn, another major Canadian poet; Louis Dudek was cantankerous when discussing Marxism and how it had infiltrated all the universities and could lead to the “death of the author”; Anne Szumigalski expounded on the ills of feminism.

Though politics change, the time lapse doesn’t matter as much when Hutchman guided the poets back to their interest in language and craft. George Johnston, who taught Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse for thirty years at Carleton University, and became  internationally known for his translation of  The Faroese Islanders Sagas, stated: “I am interested in the syntax, that is, how words relate to one another. Translating forces you to get down to the exact relation of words.” And Anne Szumigalski, who emigrated from England to the prairies of Saskatchewan, and was a founding editor of Grain magazine. said that for her, punctuation was “the most difficult part of writing poetry.” Dudek, for his part, stated in a “for dummies” tone: “Unless you find the right word, you haven’t got a poem, everyone knows that.”

Louis Dudek, who returned from his studies at Columbia University in New York City to teach at McGill in 1951, was a leader in the creation of our national poetry. “It was not just for myself that I was going to do the work, but for this city and this country…I had studied modern poetry there (in New York City) …I was full of the sense of what the modern is, and the transformation that modernism must bring to poetry and to life. So I came back and a friendship was renewed with Irving Layton, and we began to publish together.” Dudek asserted that it was the launch of presses such as the McGill Poetry Series that established Canadian literature.

Fred Cogswell, born and based in New Brunswick, authored more than thirty poetry collections. He possessed extraordinary literary energy and published over 300 writers when he established Fiddlehead Poetry Books. Hutchman, who is himself the author of eight books of poetry, and teaches at the Université de Moncton, Edmunston Campus, New Brunswick, skillfully questioned Cogswell on the influence of rural life and his Acadian roots on his writings.

All the poets interviewed have something powerful to say about their relationship to poetry and Canadian literature. Al Purdy, who won the Governor General’s Award for his volume Cariboo Horses, and published over forty books of his poetry, along with essays and an autobiography, defended his style: “I have always been accused of being elegiac, and I guess I am. But it seems to me that elegiac quality is an area in which you can write very well because we mourn the past continually, I think.”

In the Writers’ Words should be accompanied by the reading of some, or all, of these writers’ poetry. On a personal note, as a young bright-eyed poet in the late seventies, I had the privilege to attend readings given by a few of these major poets including the gracious P.K. Page, who was the last of this group to pass away, in January, 2010.

When I reread  ”After Rain” in an anthology, I fell in love again with her words::

“The snails have made a garden of green lace:

broderie anglaise from the cabbages,

chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils -

I see already that I lift the blind

upon a woman’s wardrobe of the mind.”

The Art and Science of Healing Since Antiquity. By Daya Ram Varma, MD, PhD. www.Xlibris.com, 2011.
***

Why should a book on the history of medicine be reviewed in a magazine mainly dealing with the arts, culture and politics?  Because this book has it all: an insight into the art of healing, an understanding of how culture can advance or hinder medical science and a mordant analysis of how politics can affect, for better or for worse, the health of a nation’s citizens.

First of all, a word about the author. Indian-born Daya Varma is a Professor Emeritus of McGill University in Montreal, world renowned medical school. He is best known for his research in pharmacology and for his scientific and humanitarian work involving longitudinal studies of the survivors  of the Union Carbide tragedy in Bhopal, India, which killed thousands of people. He is also known for his political activism which, as far as he is concerned, should never be divorced from his work as a scientist. His book reflects these concerns.

The initial chapters explain how medicine, being both an art as well as a science, branched into different schools,  a phenomenon not seen in other scientific disciplines. Dr. Varma also traces the influence of sociopolitical determinants on medical advances.  He emphatically differentiates what he calls  “witchcraft” from what he calls materialist medicine, but fails to make a feminist analysis of how  witches in medieval Europe were persecuted, not because they might be poor healers,  but  because of the threat they posed to a patriarchal and ecclesiastical political order.  Women who could not only heal, within the limits of the knowledge of their times, but also provide contraception and abortions, were a threat to male authority.

The author also lumps major alternative healing systems such as  Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and acupuncture, homeopathy and Unani-Tibb or Islamic medicine under the generic term of witchcraft, which is an extreme  simplification of a very complex reality.  After all, there are many modern scientific studies validating the benefits of acupuncture in pain management and anesthesia, the blood-pressure lowering effects of meditation and the possible benefits of  the blood-thinners present in the saliva of leeches for the treatment of strokes. Varma is rather dismissive of all alternative therapies and seems to allow no room for the mind-body connection in healing, which is rather strange considering that he recognizes that medicine is both an art as well as a science. On the other hand, he does a wonderful job of explaining the therapeutic mechanisms of pharmacological substances in a manner which a lay person can easily grasp. And his warning against being seduced by therapies that are not evidence-based is a point well taken.  He also warns his readers that natural substances can be as toxic and harmful as their synthetic counterparts. Varma very rightly concludes that people resort to charlatans and unproven remedies  because mainstream medicine might not be easily available to them or because the limits of science have failed them.

One of the postulates of this richly-documented book is that modern medicine did not start with the Greeks, but actually had its birth before that, in ancient civilizations like the ones that thrived in the Gangetic Plain, the Yang-Tse River Basin and the Nile Valley. For Varma, the true birthplace of modern medicine is Egypt, not Greece. The author, however, explains that there are gaps in the evolution of modern medicine, most probably due to the material conditions prevailing then. For science to be able to develop, a capitalist mode of production is necessary, and that requires going beyond feudalism. This explains why, according to Varma, Europe produced so much in terms of scientific discovery when it outgrew its feudal economy  and why the United States, with its importation of European brains and the absence of a feudal past, has become a leader in medical research and technology. However, Daya  Varma is quick to point out that in spite of being such a rich country, the United States has failed to look after the health of all of its citizens unlike Cuba, which has one of the best public health systems in the world.

Another important message contained in The Art and Science of Healing Since Antiquity is that countries can, and should, mobilize their resources in looking after the health of their citizens the way they mobilize resources during natural disasters or catastrophes.

This richly-documented book is a treasure-trove of information on the history of epidemics, diseases, discoveries, medicaments,  theories and myths. It is also a brilliant collection of memorable quotes, paired in opposites, opening each chapter. Einstein, Marx,  Engels and Shelley are equally pressed into service to illustrate the novel ideas of  a book which is a delight to read and difficult to put down. The author’s humour and originality trump the minor errata and typos apparent in the preliminary version available to this reviewer. These will, however,  be eliminated from the final edition.

Canada and Israel – Building Apartheid by Yves Engler, a co-publication of Fernwood Publishing and RED Publishing, ISBN: 9781552663554,  Publication Date: Feb 2010, Pages: 168

Right off the bat, let’s take an excerpt from a blurb on the book issued by – Gabor Maté, Physician and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction. 

 ”Yves Engler’s meticulously researched volume refutes, for anyone who still believes it, the myth that Canada is or ever has been an honest broker in the Middle East. Reading Engler’s work leaves one with the inescapable and sad conclusion that the essence of Canadian policy has always been support for the establishment and continued dominance of an expansionist Zionist state in the territories that now comprise Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. As a former Zionist youth leader, I thank Engler for setting the record straight and can only lament our country’s historical and ongoing contribution to the tragedy enveloping the long-suffering peoples of the Promised Land, Arab and Jewish.”

In the debate on the Middle East, the authenticity of the voice has become a critical element. Even Chomsky’s record on certain issues tends to get pretty sullied and Chomsky has also blurbed on Engler’s previous book which was reviewed in Serai.  There is a rather interesting interview of Gabor Mate.  This doctor, whose grandparents perished in Auschwitz , is a well-known authority on ADD and has published a few books and is well known in the Vancouver area for working with HIV positive drug users. I state this, because  there are voices amongst independent Jews that are becoming increasingly audible and distant from the monolithic  presentations from the community.

Now, back to the book itself.  Any data that is irrefutable, any historical record that cannot be undone, speaks volumes for the authenticity of the researcher and his publication. Engler is  such a person. He does not leave too many stones unturned. That there has been a historical basis for Canadian support for Israel, especially amongst the Christian Zionists, is not very well known. In fact Engler has unearthed that Henry Wentworth Monk, a Canadian , long preceded Theodore Herzl, the Austrian founding father of Zionism, in proposing to the British Empire to establish a “Dominion of Israel” similar to the dominion of Canada.  In fact, Monk sent off a similar proposal letter to A J Balfour, who twenty years later fathered the Balfour Declaration. Engler, in one of his forwarding statements attests to the atmosphere in which Jewish Zionism grew.  “British imperialism, Christian Zionism   and nationalist ideology were all part of this country’s ideology.”

Canada, as a nation, has historically played a key role in determining support for Israel and its policies. It is not necessarily a new –found politique, as some of us tend to believe. There has been no “reversal”. There has only been continuity. A continuity that far exceeds the role the US has played.    In fact Canada has been a mastermind in undermining the role of the UN in all matters related to Israel and has never been an honest broker on the Middle East.  Right up to 1967 Canada did everything in its capacity to speak from both sides of her mouth, it seems, de-emphasizing or sabotaging the role of the UN and at best supporting individual Palestinian rights and not collective rights.  While Pierre Trudeau may have criticized the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, there has been a continuous complicity in the country’s cabinet to secure support for Israel by any means. Engler very deftly establishes that successive governments in Canada, from Chretien and Martin to Harper have essentially maintained this intrinsic argumentation to align with the Jewish state, as opposed to giving any leeway to a non-Judeo-Christian Arab state. In fact Trudeau and Chretien “garnered more support from the Jewish community than either Harper or Mulroney.” It is no wonder that during one of the recent election campaigns, the Conservatives launched a rather lurid campaign to suggest that the Liberals were backers of the Hizbullah and Hamas. And the desperation seemed to have worked.

The major contribution of Engler’s meticulous documentation is that it lays bare Canada’s historic commitment to Israel, as opposed to fairness to Arabs and Palestinians, because of a confluence of religious and colonial affiliations.   This is an eminently eloquent document that needs to be read for its well-researched position on this continuity. Engler concludes one of his chapters with a very succinct upgrade to the current context. “How long Israel will continue in this geostrategic role for the US empire is unknown, but so long as it does, there will be a powerful force pushing Canada to be one-sidedly pro-Israel.”

I am a Japanese Writer. By Dany Laferrière. Translation by David Homel. Douglas & McIntyre, 2010.

I am a Japanese Writer is a novel about a writer who is neither Japanese nor speaks Japanese, but is actually Black and hails from a sun-drenched  country full of turmoil. Dany Laferrière, its author, in fact comes from Haiti and is best known for How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, a novel that was turned into a movie and translated into English. It has been said of this novel that it is funny, honest, critical, witty, deep and daring. I have not read it but I can certainly say that these same qualities are very much present in …Japanese Writer but we have to add the word surreal to the mix. Because …Japanese Writer is certainly surreal.

For starters, the main character doesn’t have a name, and if he does, it has escaped my notice. His voice is heard in a first-person narrative about a writer who has been paid a considerable retainer to write a novel with that catchy title. The novel never gets written but the title is so catchy that it garners the attention of the Japanese Vice-Consul  who in turn contacts his government back home where the non-novel and its elusive author become an overnight  sensation. In the meantime, the protagonist, who has already spent his retainer in paying long-standing debts, makes the acquaintance of some Japanese girls whom he meets in Café Sarajevo, an artistic watering hole close to Carré St. Louis. Our hero also spends a lot of time trying to avoid his landlord who knocks on the door once a week to collect the rent. He also has to deal with tragedy, comedy and the absurdity of life. We don’t quite know what to make of this putative author or the people who court him with food, praise and other unearned gifts but we certainly understand that in many ways this character is the alter-ego of a Dany Laferrière who might have faced a similar life before he became a famous author.

Be it as it may, I am a Japanese Writer, in spite of its fractured story line, or perhaps because of it, is food for serious, very serious thought. By making us laugh and by drawing us into this world of writers and artists and precarious livelihoods, he has made us ponder about the deeper meaning of art and identity and the self. Most importantly, Laferrière has taken us on a journey with Basho, the Edo-period Japanese  Haiku poet who journeyed on foot in winter in search of  a full moon over a frozen landscape.

PS I forgot to comment on the quality of Homel’s translation because it reads like an original version!

From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond. Images of India in International Films of the Twentieth Century, by Vijaya Mulay. Seagull Books, 2010, London, New York and Calcutta.

[Vijaya Mulay, a.k.a. Akka, or Elder Sister, was  born in 1921 in  Mumbai, India. She  is a documentary filmmaker, film historian, writer, educationist and researcher. In 2002 she was awarded the  V. Shantaram Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Indian Government. She is already working on her next book on education.]

            
           From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond, RYGB for short, is Vijaya Mulay’s magnum opus on one hundred years, not of solitude but of multitudinous films  made by foreigners smitten with India or by Diaspora  Indians reluctant to forget her. It is also a history of cinema, the story of the author’s love affair with it and an initiatory  journey through the  land whom  the gypsies call bara than, or big place. At 554 pages and with an impressive collection of stills, archival material and documents from private collections, RYGB is worthy of  a Rajah’s library or  a Yogi’s morning meditation. It is also worthy of Satyagraha, or strict adherence to the truth, an ancient principle of Indian culture taken up by Gandhi as his strategy against the British Raj. However, what exactly is truthfulness in film? Cinema is, after all,  the archetypal  purveyor of dreams  and illusions as well  as  the insidious vehicle for propaganda. The author tries to decipher these questions for her readers. She succeeds admirably well.

            RYGB starts off with a foreword by Thomas Waugh, from Concordia University in Montreal, who explains that he particularly loves “Akka’s introspection on her schizophrenic identity as simultaneous film buff and film censor.” The book is broken down  into ten chapters, laid out chronologically so that the reader may enter directly into a specific subject. There are also several appendices containing Louis Malle’s correspondence, a list of German films and synopses of selected films. Chapter 1 is a delightful foray into  Short Films of the Silent Era, with particular attention to so-called Durbar films which,  according to Stephen Bottomore, were  “part of a political and military strategy for keeping India in submission”. They were also the precursors of modern-day historical documentaries. Chapter 2, Rajahs and Yogis, explains  how India was depicted as part of the exotic and mystic east by a “rational” west, with particular attention to why Germans where so interested in the Aryan origins of Indians. Chapter 3, as the title suggests, is about Empire Films of the Colonial Era, because “the need of empires to construct an acceptable public face means that knowledge has to be arranged so as to present a favorable view of those who dominate”. Chapter 4 transitions into Empire Films of the Postcolonial Era. Here the author explains how a changed post-Second World War Scenario necessitated a redefinition of strategies by colonial powers like Britain. Films like Bhowani Junction slyly suggest “that Indians may not prove equal to the task of keeping India independent”. Chapters 5 and 6 honour the  Seekers, as Mulay calls them, or the four directors who did not see India as exotic but rather as the cradle of all Indo-European civilization.  The transformation of Jean Renoir and Louis Malle from France, Roberto Rossellini from Italy and Arne Sucksdorff from Sweden in the arms of an all embracing India is  studied in great detail. This is particularly true of Louis Malle whose life was turned around by India and who  became a life-long friend of the author. Chapter 7, labeled Insiders-Outsiders is a nod to the work of  foreign filmmakers who either lived in India for a long time or made films in collaboration with Indians. The enduring partnership of James Francis Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are important examples of this category. Chapter 8,  New Trends: From Gandhi to the Diaspora, covers the last two decades of the Twentieth Century.  In this new vision, India is not treated at the Other but as a microcosm of the universe. Mahabharata (1988), a metaphor for the history of humanity -directed by Peter Brook- is based on the well-known Indian epic of the same name.  Chapter 9 is a study of Gender Roles and Relations. Here it is interesting to note that European films did not consider a romance between an Indian and a Caucasian taboo, whereas American films considered it miscegenation.

            Chapter 10, the author’s Conclusions, neatly ties up the apparently disparate themes of the previous chapters. It also provides Vijaya with a forum to delve into the nature of truth (“Everything is correct and so is its reverse”, she notes wryly, quoting Rabindranath Tagore), the deleterious effects of the narcissism that all cultures are guilty of  and  the amazement of modern-day filmmakers who “wonder that India continues to exist as a single entity despite its amazing diversity”. Vijaya Mulay concludes with the realization, as expressed in these films,  that  “happiness is dependent not on material wealth but on maintaining a balance in human relations”. Her insistence on the need to return to India’s culture of integration with nature and its long-standing close relationship with animals, is the author’s final message.

            From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond is an obligatory text for libraries and  cinema schools and  a wonderful read for movie buffs and India fans. It is a formidable book written by a formidable lady.

Reading A Woman Among Warlords you may find yourself forgetting on occasion that this is, in fact, a work of non-fiction, so extreme are the terms of its author’s life and homeland.  The youngest MP ever to be elected to Afghanistan’s parliament, Malalai Joya was kicked out in 2007 amid cries of, “Take this prostitute out of here!”  Her crime had been to challenge the legitimacy of a parliament and judiciary, largely composed of warlords, drug barons, fundamentalists, qualified by the participation of intellectuals and justified by the protection of NATO countries such as the US  and Canada.  Here is the one of the women NATO governments claimed they were going to war to help.  There is a certain shock value in the details of just how far from such a mission our governments have strayed, how far from grace they have fallen.

The beauty of the book Malalai Joya has co-authored with Derrick Okeefe is that it rings with reality, as lived and understood by an Afghan woman, wise with words by dint of an education and politicization.  The truth of that reality here brims with good people, bad people, and fearful people, crimes of the most egregious nature are detailed and their perpetrators named.

Sure to be one of a kind as it mixes diverse genres: personal anecdote, history, socio-political analysis and political manifesto.  It is also a personal appeal to the reader, to understand both the historic and present roles played out by foreign governments, occupation forces and corporations in both funding and implementing the tormenting and terrorizing of ordinary Afghan people and the destabilizing of their country. 

To this end, tragedies are spelled out: wedding parties are bombed and civilians killed in the thousands, the infrastructure wasted, food crops turned to heroin crops, children forced into labor, women forced into abusive marriages, women who self-immolate in sheer despair.  This is the country with the lowest longevity where most people still do not live beyond the age of 43, thanks to a grueling poverty, that in itself testifies to the contradiction and futility of aid carrying a gun.  

There are victories too, so few and so hard won that they are indeed precious and moving.  Malalai’s election and this book must surely count as two of these.  The subject of hate campaigns, attacks and death threats, Malalai is kept constantly on the move and her precise whereabouts a secret.  The blue burqa she must wear becomes a life saver, as it blends her into a sea of other burqas.  This paradox also provides a useful metaphor, for though on the one hand she cuts a heroic figure, on the other, as Malalai readily maintains, she is just one among an ever growing number of Afghan women and men, fighting for women’s rights and a democratic Afghanistan.  This is a movement largely growing underground, demonstrating great courage and community in the face of mortal threats by warlord militias, and fundamentalist policing that preaches a woman should be “in her house or in the grave”.    

Not surprisingly, Malalai speaks and writes with the urgency of a woman who counts every day of life as a day won and not to be wasted.  She writes with great pride and affection of an Afghanistan that’s rarely ever been mentioned in the western corporate media that prefers to cast this land in the light of a primitive country full of backward people with neither the inclination nor the culture to manage themselves in a civil fashion; a people who must, therefore, be bombed into the sort of democracy that only criminals are fit to defend. 

Malalai’s book serves as a counterweight to such constructed news and views, citing history and culture of the struggle for Afghan democracy, with the likes of Amanullah Khan and Queen Soraya, the parties and organizations in the Afghanistan of the first half of the 20^th century. All of which sowed the seeds of a constitutional monarchy and a more egalitarian society, that saw women enter parliament and many areas of the labor force.  Such homegrown evolution suffered serious setbacks however under direct Soviet influence in the 70’s that culminated with Soviet occupation in ’79, all amid the cold war machinations of the US and the latter’s funding and arming of extremists that would, in turn, fuel the bloody civil war of ‘92-’96 and ongoing instability.

The democratic urge has surely taken a severe beating and yet Malalai finds reason to be hopeful. She writes, “The support I received in the election campaign proved that the inequality between men and women was not some kind of permanent part of Afghan culture – things could be changed for the better.”  Most of the religious leaders in her province of Farah supported her too.  And she recounts many expressions of Afghans passionate longing for an end to corruption and violence and the beginning of a better world for their children.  One man tells her, quite simply, “I want to put my hat on your head and your scarf on mine.”  

The poignancy of this voice stands in stark contrast to the cynicism she encounters elsewhere. In the interests of realpolitik, Malalai has frequently been asked to forgive and forget the “mistakes” of the past, the contradictions of the present, and to compromise a little.  To the Italian journalist who asks her why she doesn’t try a more diplomatic approach, she replies with the question, “Would you have compromised with fascists like Mussolini in your country?”

Malalai maintains that guns are clearlynot the best way to win a democracy.  She argues as an educator who understands democracy as a matter of process, discussion, education.  Nevertheless, she does distinguish democracy from freedom.  Where Afghan freedom is concerned, she is prepared to do what Afghans have done before, as they did with the British and the Soviets, and that is to defend it to the hilt. 

Presently, Afghans remain “trapped between two enemies”, NATO forces and the Taliban.  Malalai reasons that leaving Afghans with the one enemy invader to conquer would give them a fighting chance for a free Afghanistan and the eventual possibility of diplomatic resolution of her country’s regional differences, in an Afghan way, at an Afghan pace. With this in mind, she urges “democracy loving people”, Canadians among them too of course, to do whatever we can to get NATO forces out of Afghanistan. Evidently, large anti-war demonstrations and opinion polls here in the West do not go unnoticed among the “democracy loving people of Afghanistan”. 

The thing about Malalai Joya is that she really believes that when enough people become aware, “they will rise like a storm that brings the truth.”  Her book ends with an Afghan proverb, “Our enemies can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of spring.”

PERFECT HOSTAGE. Aun San Suu Kyi, Burma and the Generals. By Justin Wintle.  Arrow, 2007.

In Burma there is no prejudice against girl babies. In fact, there is a general belief that daughters are more dutiful and loving than sons and many Burmese parents welcome the birth of  a daughter as an assurance that they will have somebody to take care of them in their old age. Aung San Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma, 1997.

PERFECT HOSTAGE is an imperfect biography of Suu Kyi in the sense that the author devotes almost half of the book to the life and times of  Bogyoke (General) Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father as well as the  father of modern Burma,   and the generals that have controlled the country ever since. Yet the author could not have done otherwise. In order to understand what has made  Suu Kyi the modern-day  symbol of peaceful resistance,  it is necessary to be acquainted with  Burmese history and the events that catapulted her from an ordinary life as the wife of an academic to the extraordinary position of Prime Minister Elect (but never in office) of her besieged country.

            The general public is very much aware of the fact that she has been under house arrest for more than fourteen out of the 20 last years. It also knows that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, as well as a panoply of prizes from other countries, including the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the Jawaharlal Nehru Prize for International Understanding. This same public also knows that her political achievements came at great personal cost: prolonged separation from her children and husband and her husband’s loss  to cancer without having had a chance to visit him at his deathbed. In fact, she has been criticized for not being a wife and mother before being a political creature. What is not so well known is the exact nature of her achievements and that again, is understandable, for they are intangible, although no less worthy of admiration for that.

            Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father,  was assassinated on the eve of Burmese independence when she was barely two years old. He was instrumental in bringing about Burma’s independence from the British and is credited with creating the modern day army which still controls the country. Suu Kyi, like any Burmese citizen, was brought up to revere him and seeing her father’s picture in public spaces and on bank notes must have reinforced her sense of destiny as her father’s political heir. However, as she grew up she realized that the army had strayed from its original role of protector of the people.

            From an early age she knew she was called to serve her country but was not clear as to the exact role she would play. After having obtained a  degree in political science and economics she worked for the United Nations in an administrative capacity and then married Dr. Michael Aris, a British citizen  specializing in Tibetan culture. They lived in Bhutan for several years and  then settled down in England with their two sons. There she obtained a   doctorate in Oriental Studies. When her mother had a massive stroke in  1988 Suu Kyi returned to Burma to nurse her and the rest is history, as the saying goes.

            The last twenty-odd years have been marked by civil unrest in Burma, brutal repression by a succession of generals and a general awakening of the population to democratic alternatives. Throughout all this Suu Kyi has stood her ground, been arrested and tortured and remained  under house arrest on and off. During this period, Suu Kyi has continued rallying the people around her either openly in her house or  in front of the family compound  through clandestine messages. She even  managed to win the first –and only general elections- held in Burma but was never allowed to take up office.

            The international community, through the United Nations and diplomatic negotiations, has continued to support her peaceful movement. It has awarded her accolades in the form of  honorary degrees and prizes which she has funneled back into her humanitarian work. However,  author Justin Winkle’s appreciation of her role is not so simplistic. While admiring her courage, determination and integrity, he believes that armed struggle is sometimes necessary to topple violent regimes and that passive resistance has actually played into the hands of the regime. In fact, his contention is that her intransigence has resulted in the death of many of her supporters and bolstered the dictatorship  that has in her “the perfect hostage” who serves as a bargaining chip with the outside world.

            The Nobel Prize Committee citation prefers to look at the broader picture:

“…In awarding the Nobel peace prize for 1991 to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honour this woman for her unflagging efforts and to show its support for the many people throughout the world who are striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means”.

The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning, edited by George Bowering and Jean Baird, Random House Canada, 2009. 351 pp.

                   
           The Heart Does Break is a Canadian anthology of personal stories on grief and mourning that immediately attracted my attention since I experienced a heart breaking loss myself  a few years ago.

            In his Introduction, “May I Bring You Tea?,” George Bowering, Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, explains that this book came out of a personal need. His wife, Jean Baird, a well-known magazine publisher, lost her thirty-five-year-old daughter, Bronwyn,  in a tragic car accident in June 2005, a loss that continues to affect their daily lives deeply. As Bowering notes, people who become impatient with mourners and say “get over it” (something I have experienced too) don’t understand the grieving process. After doing some research on the literature available and finding little in Canadian publications, the couple decided to collaborate on this project.

            They began by commissioning Canadian writers of various degrees of fame  to share their own experiences with loss. Many declined to contribute due to the difficulty of the subject. The stories now gathered in this book are uneven in literary quality but are powerful, some more eloquent, intimate, perceptive than others. Overall, each writer offers some insight that illuminates the darkness that is mourning a mother, a father, a sister, a longtime friend, and most painful of all, a child (whether adult or unborn.)          

            In The Heart Does Break, similar reactions are shared among the writers, for example, how death changes the perception of time, how there is no more “ordinary” time since the death of the loved one. And time doesn’t ease much of the pain in recollection. The mourner, whatever her or his age, experiences a profound identity crisis.

            The late Paul Quarrington, the prize-winning novelist, musician and film maker, who died in January of this year of lung cancer, wrote “The Bluesman”, a personal story that reads like a meditation on the death of his mother when he was a teen. Her death made him feel “abandonned and monstrous,” and angrily he told his father that he “wouldn’t cry.” Vulnerable, shunned at school, he fell under the spell of Paul, an adolescent who was a petty thief, in and out of prison. This Paul offered him some friendship but also his “first drink”, the alcohol that soothed his grief but turned into an addiction. As Quarrington remarks, he then became a “fifteen-year-old hard-drinking bluesman from Don Mills, Ontario.”

            In a very different story, “Waiting to Grieve,” Montreal poet and playwright, Endre Farkas, writes about mourning in our contemporary society and how the funeral home has become a conglomerate cultural center with café, art exhibits and other activities. He questions the appropriateness of this trend to “celebrate” a death and presents the Jewish burial rituals in contrast. As a  child, he reluctantly accompanied his family to the cemetery every year to mourn relatives such as his aunt Margit, a strong, hard-working woman who owned a “hole-in-the wall” restaurant on Prince Arthur Street where many Hungarian immigrants congregated to eat goulash, stuffed cabbage and other homemade dishes. To ease his sadness at her death, he wrote his own eulogy for her, “a satisfying act.”

            Some of the writers suffer more than one loss in a short span of time which complicates the grieving process even more. Linda McNutt, a novelist and teacher, writes that the day of her father’s funeral, she learned that she was pregnant. This explained why she was ravenous at the funeral buffet. Months later, due “second trimester infant death,” she tragically gave birth to a lifeless baby. Like many of the contributors, McNutt notes how people say the wrong things or “platitudes” that fail to ease the grief. For her, anger is not a stage of grief, but what “keeps me alive. It feeds my hunger.”

            Other similar experiences described in these stories are the physical reactions to the loss such as vertigo, panic attacks, or even breakdowns. Some write of vivid dreams of the deceased or supernatural occurences.

            Austin Clarke, author of ten novels among other writings, and winner of the 2002 Giller Prize and the 2003 Trillium Prize for The Polished Hoe, describes in “There is no Good in a Black Night,” a poetic prose piece, how upon his return home to Toronto after the funeral for his mother in Brooklyn, the doorbell kept ringing. Though there was no one there, he felt certain it was his mother’s “presence.” An affecting picture of Gladys Irene Clarke Luke, Austin Clarke’s mother who died at ninety-two years old, shows her at a table eating, laughing, sponge hair curlers still on her head. Each contributions (save one) offers an accompanying photo of the deceased which adds visual poignancy.

            Rituals for the dead are less traditional than in the past. There are still funerals and wakes but one ritual often described in this anthology is the disposal of the ashes of the dead. In Marni Jackson’s “Just Cremation,” in memory of her father Clyde Bruce Jackson, she describes with some dark humor, how she travelled with his ashes from southern Ontario to Saskatoon where she found the bridge her father, an engineer, helped build in 1930. “I had left behind the vase, thinking that a woman with a vase on a bridge might draw attention. The ashes, in a plastic bag tied with two garbage twists, were as heavy and big as two bricks.”  As she empties the bag into the river with some difficulty, her cousin takes pictures with her disposable camera.

            One of the most beautifully written stories is “On the Material, or, Gail’s Books”, by B.C. poet and teacher at Simon Fraser University, Stephen Collis. He remembers his sister, Gail Victoria Tulloch, who died of cancer in 2002. They shared a love of books and as they grew up, she was the first to make him feel that writing poetry mattered. As in many of the stories in this anthology, intimate details of the last days or even last moments are shared which may make for uncomfortable but powerful reading. In a style that might recall the strokes of an Impressionist painting, Hollis begins his story this way:

            “Just after our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary – an August day, garden sun, her flower print dress -my sister Gail learns she has cancer and I recall that dress her smile and the sun. On December 19, 2002, she dies. Enduring her final lucid moments trying to talk and something in her tongue seems gone and as a kind of resignation the only word that comes out again and again is “okay “okay.”

            During the three-day wake, Hollis recalls how he sat in the room alone by her body and read verses from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass out loud. He includes poems that he wrote to his sister as a way to honor her and continue their relationship beyond death.

            Other outstanding stories are by Erin Mouré, Brian Brett, Catherine Bush, George Elliott Clarke and others. I found The Heart Does Break  to be an engrossing, disturbing  ultimately beneficial book that can enlighten those of us who dare want to learn more about grief and mourning.

Every immigrant to the western world knows, or knows of, a cabdriver who was a brain surgeon or fiscal economist in his homeland. The narrative of the underemployed migrant goes something like this: lured by promise of fluid upward mobility and unfettered capitalism, professionals move west, only to find that their prior work experience doesn’t count. The educational qualifications earned in their homelands via sweat and blood (and sometimes an organ donation) aren’t recognized. Their alien accents and unfamiliar cultural codes further solidify entry barriers into the workforce.

Toronto-based writer and therapist Farzana Doctor takes a long hard look at this depressing phenomenon in her debut novel “Stealing Nasreen“. And yet, I was chuckling as I read, for Doctor’s clear-headed, witty narrative is never overpowered by the weight of the issues tackled. The novel’s other running theme-the (non-)acceptance of GLTB  South Asians by this community-is again a profound topic treated in a knowing, humorous manner.

Shaffiq Paperwala and his wife Salma have moved from Mumbai to Canada in search of the proverbial better life. Shaffiq, an accountant, felt his (Muslim) religion clouded his career prospects in India. Salma, a school teacher, was more sanguine, but was eventually persuaded to emigrate. The only employment Shaffiq finds in Toronto, however, is a janitor’s post in a hospital. Salma meanwhile works at a dry-cleaning outlet, and teaches Gujarati on the side.

In moving countries, Shaffiq has moved down the social ladder; as a janitor and a new immigrant of color, he is invisible to most eyes. Attempts to assert his former class position are met with indifference or suspicion. In one scene,  Shaffiq, while taking out the recycling, finds a budget sheet with an accounting error. When he points out the error, the administrator informs him that the documents are confidential.

“…I’m not sure that cleaning staff should be scrutinizing them.”

“You see I am not really a janitor. Well I am here, but back in Bombay I did this kind of thing in my job-”

“Oh, well, I suppose I should thank you for noticing my mistake. But please, for future reference, you really shouldn’t be-” She frowns, not able to hide her irritation.

“You see I am an accountant,” Shaffiq adds, wanting her to understand.

“That’s what I really am. I guess my eyes were just drawn to what used to be so familiar to me.”

“I see,” she says, with a frozen smile that tells Shaffiq that she doesn’t…

Canada looked far better from far away; now, Shaffiq longs to crowd into “a city bus with a hundred Indian men” again. But just as he’s questioning his move to Canada, he encounters Toronto-born Nasreen Bastawala, a therapist in the same hospital. As a contemporary of Shaffiq’s ethnicity and a successful Canadian professional, Nasreen appears to be the Canadian migrant’s dream gone right. Shaffiq develops a fascination with Nasreen, and starts purloining small objects–a dropped earring, a discarded travel itinerary-from her workplace.

Nasreen is initially too preoccupied with her troubles to notice Shaffiq. She’s just lost her mother to cancer, her father seems increasingly needy, and her girlfriend (now her ex) cheated on her. But when Nasreen enrolls for Gujarati classes with Salma, her intersection with the couple takes on a unforeseen dimension. Salma is attracted to Nasreen, and the discovery that Nasreen is lesbian opens up a world of sexual possibility inconceivable in conservative India.

All kinds of complications-all touching, all believable, mostly hilarious-ensue when Salma impulsively acts upon her feelings.

Doctor’s book is driven by the issues of the day, and such books, by their very nature are perishable. But Stealing Nasreen is first a novel, and only then a social manifesto. The book is energized by its characters, and Doctor has a real gift for crawling into her protagonists’ heads and recording their emotions. I was nodding in recognition as I read, finding echoes of myself and people I know in almost everyone of the characters– Nasreen’s dietary habits, for instance, uncannily matched my own weakness for Jalapeno kettle chips followed by Nutella followed by more chips… The book thus engages the reader in a very personal way even as it indicts some of Canada’s (and immigrant communities’) failings. The story’s denouement, while featuring a too-long exposition by a secondary character, is as farcical and delirious as a Noel Coward play. And like these plays, comedy is the leavening force for exploring serious issues such as marital discord, the repression of homosexuality in “polite” society, and class conflict.

Stealing Nasreen is published by Inanna Publications, a small Canadian non-profit feminist press. (Inanna, by the way, is the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare.) Stealing Nasreen reminded me anew why I love small presses so much. These folks are willing, even eager, to address the issues nice people don’t talk about.

Notations 21 by Theresa Sauer is a collection of musical scores, beautifully written, drawn, painted, etched, computer generated, and so on by composers using non-traditional techniques for musical notation. Not long ago a friend was telling me about how his grandfather used to “read” musical scores at bedtime, engaged in the distraction as one might enjoy reading a short story before slumber. Another friend (with perfect pitch) describes how musical keys that contain a lot of sharps generally sound “brighter” to her. In his chapter on musical synesthesia (Ref 1), Oliver Sacks explains that for the general population the relationship between colour and music is metaphorical, but for the musical synesthete it is quite literal. What does all this have to do with Theresa Sauer’s 2009 collection of works (explorations) of musical notations? I swear there is a connection….give me a few paragraphs to figure it out with you.

Notations 21 encompasses Sauer’s research on musical notation and how the commonality “of notation comes from its purpose for the creation of music, a phenomenon that can allow for spectacular variations of musical scores” (p. 10). She solicited composers for samples of compositions with the option of including a statement or description. Some composers were also commissioned to write essays relating somehow to “notation, contemporary music, graphic scores, or the compositional process” (p. 8). The resulting 300-odd page book comprises an astounding collection of notations for musical compositions, essays on related topics, and inspirational and visual fodder for musicians and non-musicians alike. It is an exploration of the modes and media of contemporary music. The contributing composers hail from over 50 countries and diverge immensely in the style, intent, and essence of their musical notations; however they have one common thread, non of them use what we know as standard Western musical notation – although many do co-opt, distort, and subvert such notation in their own way.

The book is directly inspired by John Cage’s similar collection of the late sixties called Notations (Ref 2). In fact, it is in essence a continuation into the 21^st century of the archiving process that Cage undertook to preserve 20th century notational forms. His book (co-edited with Alison Knowles) was partially conceived to benefit the Foundation of Contemporary Performance Arts and he solicited hundreds of composers, visual artists, and writers to contribute to the book (Ref 3). The selections used in the book and further manuscripts spanning the years 1884-1990 are part of the John Cage Collection in the Northwestern University Music Library (Ref 4).

I was previously unfamiliar with this endeavour of John Cage. I know of him (admittedly quite naively) as the person who influenced Yoko Ono in music and performance art, who in turn influenced John Lennon, who ultimately influenced all of contemporary pop music (and beyond). The recent exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John and Yoko, had numerous examples of Ono and Lennon’s use of differing media apart from sound to express musical ideas. In fact Cage’s Notations book and collection include contributions from the Beatles’ canon.

The first thing I did upon opening Notations 21 was to go to Theresa Sauer’s own piece in the collection called Parthenogenesis.

Excerpt from Parthenogenesis (2009) by Theresa Sauer. For da’uli da’uli and an unspecified number of female voices.

The title refers to the Komodo dragon’s ability to reproduce without the aid of males. The piece is intended for da’uli da’uli (an instrument that is struck) and female vocalists singing in Bugis (a language of Komodo Island). Sauer chooses to give a fairly detailed description of the inspiration for the piece, and some rudimentary instructions on how to interpret the score for improvisation.

Although no piece in the collection is “typical” of the others, Sauer’s piece, like many of the others, has an inherent visual beauty independent of its function as a guide to the performing musicians. Someone seeing (not hearing) the work on its own, with no explanation, would be at pains to decipher its pragmatic role. Sauer’s instructions and description serve as a guideline of her intent (e.g. “the vertical lines should intuitively guide the strikes of the da’uli da’uli”), but no one “reading” her score can predict how the music will sound. Granted that this is partly due to the improvisational nature of the piece, but herein lies a major difference from the notations used in the anthology and a more standardized form of notation. Remember my friend’s grandfather who read scores? He could hear an orchestra playing in his mind’s ear. I am a musician, but I don’t read music (or I don’t read it very well anyways). Apparently learning to sight read music is not so difficult a skill to learn – and even those that don’t have the skill can imagine what it is like. If you are having trouble imagining it – watch this animation of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kotK9FNEYU

But many of the scores in Notations 21 rely on an intuitive rather than literal translation from the notation to the music.

1. Excerpt from Versus (1997) by Kerry John Andrews. For solo voice and piano. Andrews is a visual artist whose scores explore, amongst other things, linear time and stasis. The excerpt above is the vocal part while the piano part is in traditional notation.

2. Excerpt from Museik No. 9 (1979) by Henrik Colding-Jorgensen. For any instrumentation. The word “Museik” is a combination of the Danish words for “museum” and “music”. This series was originally conceived for very young instrumentalists.

3. Excerpt from Das Licht im Dunkel der Wolke (2006) by Peter Hölscher.

4. Excerpt from Paprika King (1996) by Joe Pignato. For any number of improvisers.

5. Excerpt from Picnic (2006) by Cilla McQueen. For violins, oboe, and bass guitar. A poem beginning “Two violins, the first smelling of roses, the second holding a sword” guides the piece.

6. Excerpt from “mapping space in sound” itself from Pavilion Scores 1-5 (2005-2006) by Steve Roden. For children’s glockenspiel. Created as a site-specific work for the Serpentine Gallery’s Summer Pavilion – mirroring the architectural construction of the space. In this case the colours guide the set notes but timing etc. is up to the performers.

This intuitive process of interpretation might be akin to the musical synesthete seeing music, except in reverse, and thus hearing pictures. Perhaps my friend would play more sharps during the brighter parts of some of these notations. It is more likely that each musician, when left to interpret such a visual notation uses personal metaphors to translate the score.

Many other composers decided to subvert more familiar notational forms playing with either the visual aesthetic of such notation or the semantic notions.

1. Excerpt from Lunar Cascade in Serial Time (2009) by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz. For tenor guitar. In the essay accompanying the piece the composer writes “Music notation engenders disagreement and passion because it is so tightly bound to legibility, meaning, and especially physicality”.

2. Excerpt from “DreamFrame” itself from Five Terrestrial Projections for Guitar and Other Instruments (1989) by Joe Catalano. For guitar alone. The graphic content is a reworking of celestial diagrams by Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler.

3. Excerpt from Zones of Coherence (2003) by David Rosenboom. For trumpet virtuoso. In the detailed essay accompanying the piece the composer writes “The title refers to how zones of musical meaning emerge from a form in which the parts are modular….”

4. Excerpt from Val Comonica: animali (2002) by David Young. For solo violin. In the detailed instruction to the violinist the composer writes “While by its very nature this notation has many freedoms, every attempt should be made to realize the graphics’ contours and shapes as carefully as possible”

Other composers have chosen to make the medium a game where musicians can improvise in a playful manner.

1. Excerpt from Ink Bops (2000/2007) by Ellen Burr. To be played alone or in a group, Ink Bops are musical improvisation cards presented on a poker-deck size of 56 customized cards.

2. Excerpt from Hexagonie (2007) by Gaël Navard. A musical game for 2, 3, 4, or 6 players. The composer writes “the score itself is…mobile because it evolves in real-time with the game.”

Still others have chosen a more technical interpretation when creating a score.

1. Excerpt from “Graphic Score Number 9″ itself from 21 Graphic Scores (2001) by Mike Langford. For tape and computer. The methodology of creating the scores originally begun in a technical drawing class this excerpt is based on a tape of birds singing and a Fibonacci spiral.

2. Excerpt from Grid (2002) by Vagn E. Olsson. For variable instrumentation. The composer states “Every section/square in the compositions can be rearranged and played in any order whatsoever.”

Obviously with the enormous range of composers and works included in this book it is impossible to give more than a meagre taste of the wide range of notations included within. Interestingly, many of the composers cite John Cage as an influence in their work and a piece of his own is included in the collection. Sauer is also respectful of Cage’s original method, for example revealing the composers in alphabetical order rather than by any particular theme. The presentation of the scores is also true to the spirit of Alison Knowles montage-type presentation in the original Cage collection, but it is definitely more stylized in 2009. The book is well indexed including composer biographies listed at the end.  

Although the collection was apparently put together in a matter of months I feel it would take me much, much longer to fully reflect upon and absorb the works within….I have yet to attempt performing any of the pieces. But to leisurely wander through these scores is a pleasure – picking up on themes and ideas by chance with a random flip of the page. Incorporating chance into art was a constant theme in John Cage’s work, and it is probably appropriate to end with a quotation from the preface of his original anthology. Although he is talking about the way in which pieces of text accompanying the notations were truncated by chance – I think it also applies to the mind-frame when exploring these scores:

A precedent for the absence of information which characterizes this book is the contemporary aquarium (no longer a dark hallway with each species in its own illuminated tank separated from the others and named in Latin): a large glass house with all the fish in it swimming as in an ocean (Ref 2).

More information (and more complete images!):

http://www.notations21.net/

p.s. For a similar exploration of notation and composition that is local – check out Hearing/Visions/Sonores – an exhibit of contemporary Quebec music composers who incorporate notation and improvisation into their work.

http://www.improvcommunity.ca/hvs/home_eng.html

References

1. Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Revised and expanded. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2008.

2. Cage, John and Knowles, Alison, Notations. New York: Something Else Press, 1969.

3. John Cage (1912-1992) Collection. Series II. Notations Project p. 1. <http://www.library.northwestern.edu/music/archival-collections/Cage-Series2-Notations.pdf>. Accessed August 2009.

4. John Cage Collection Northwestern University Music Library <http://www.library.northwestern.edu/music/archival-collections/cage.html>.