Montreal Serai

THE ISSUE:  This summer  Montreal Serai focuses on the environment through a variety of viewpoints. Jacqueline Fortson, who has moved to Canada from Mexico, gives us a contemporary photo-essay “Montreal – Nature and the City: What makes Montreal a liveable place?” The Quebec city socialist writer, Malcolm Reid, looks at the relation between the environment and social movements, describing the global biosphere as “the new proletariat.” Reid says nature is the oppressed voice which activists must learn to hear. The Montreal environmental leader, David Fletcher, in his striking  essay, “It’s about ecology, stupid!” draws a comprehensive, stark portrait of the current bio-diversity crisis. It is, he warns, a “global winking out of life,” a “waking nightmare” – unless we rouse ourselves. The transport critic of the Quebec’s Green Coalition, Avrom Shtern, writes about car-mad transport, and the urgent need for mass transit of a different kind, while Maria Worton looks through her center-city window and sees a world that is “Living in Traffic.” Rana Bose comments on the BP spill and Subir Das tells us about California politics. And there is much more writing, prose and poetry, in this issue, with more “pushes” to come later this summer.

Amid the varied views presented here though, there is a common theme: we need new vision to break what the poet William Blake called the “mind-forged manacles” of what was once his London and now our world. 

THE EDITORIAL: While Patrick Barnard has acted as general editor for this issue, the editorial board has decided to use four short comments from some of its members as an introduction.

Susan Dubrofsky

I grew up with Strontium-90, the threat of nuclear devastation, fall-out shelters and Coppertone. I was not allowed to suck the tasty marrow from chicken bones and for a few summers even milk was considered suspect. Fifty odd years later, we live with global warming, ozone depletion and traffic pollution, bees disappearing, increasing numbers of cancers, species extinction, deforestation, resource exhaustion, ad infinitum. When googling news about the latest oil spill, not only do I read about it being a massive disaster but how lawyers are making money on it, how politicians are waffling and scuffling and worse, that leaks and spills are more common than we realize. The Gulf of Mexico environmental catastrophe is the elephant in the living room as I recycle my plastics even though I know that only about seven percent is actually reused, as I buy organic food that still uses insecticides, as I bike in city traffic with high UV levels and carbon dioxide emissions, as I use deodorant without aluminum and as I eat genetically modified foods. My dilemma is that, bombarded by media information of videos depicting oil spills, of photos of ocean garbage patches and of daily predictions that climate change will cause massive disappearance of plant and animal species, I cannot comprehend how my recycling will help. But nuclear armageddon did not happen and the new generation is informed and active. And when I ask my friends, what do you think about our planet, one says, do you know that the water around Montreal is cleaner than it used to be twenty years ago, and another, what about the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement to protect our forests, and another, all those companies going carbon neutral, like the airlines, movie studios, the World Bank and you can too. And perhaps I can, in conjunction with the small and the big, contribute.

Maria Worton

Oil slick-sick, more of us than ever before must be asking, “How can we do this differently?”   We know we’re getting down to the wire.  Johann Hari, reporting in The Independent, asks how anyone will deal with accelerating climate change when, “The most powerful country on earth can’t stop a single leaking pipe.”   And what else can we do when the earth’s remaining oil is beneath the ocean floor, in the Arctic or in risky conflict zones.   Must we really go nuclear?  Sure, it’s non-fossil, more climate, plant, animal friendly.  Trouble is it’s killed a lot of people, and threatens everyone else.  

I was ready for good news when I recently happened upon this wonderful report, http://www.offshorevaluation.org/downloads/offshore_vaulation_full.pdf, an evaluation of how Britain can get 150% of its energy needs through off shore energy production using tidal and wind technologies and an international electricity grid system, creating 145,000 jobs in the bargain.  All of which would come at a fraction of the cost of committing to nuclear energy.  Every country on earth needs such a report that scientifically evaluates new energy technologies and their geographical application.

How does one get there?!  It seems that only public assembly, debate, demand, democracy by any other name, will deliver a movement with the critical mass to incline kleptocratic government to agree energy policy for the planet that does not sacrifice nature or its people. 

Patrick Barnard

I believe that human beings do indeed now face a dire threat to our own existence as a species because of our very own activity, and I think that we have probably reached the extinction threshold. Without radical change we will not survive. State socialism, as we have known it, has been a threat to the capitalist oligarchies that rule the world. However, “existing socialism” has failed dismally on the environment, in part because it is actually a form of state capitalism run by managerial redistributors who have the same misguided ideas about nature as their capitalist counterparts.

Out of necessity, human beings, I believe, will rise to the challenge of preserving life for ourselves and our fellow creatures. But the danger of eco-fascism, both of the statist and corporate form, is very great. Hence, the fight for nature and democracy must go hand in hand.

Maya Khankhoje

Children are taught that birds do not foul their own nest. The irony is that those very same adults who admonish their children to respect the environment are the first ones to foul it when the lure of  filthy lucre rears its ugly head. As a species we seem to have forgotten that money is indeed dirty, literally and figuratively, and that it won’t replace  what we have been so diligently destroying. The Cree Indians have a prophecy: “Only after the last tree has been cut down/ Only after the last fish has been caught/ Only after the last river has been poisoned/ Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.” This issue of Montreal Serai is a nudge towards this simple truth.

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.

            It was exactly  a hundred years ago that Clara Zetkin, leader of the Women’s Office for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, tabled the idea of an International Women’s Day. The occasion was the Second International Conference of Working Women and the venue was Copenhagen.

            A lot has changed since then yet much remains the same. Women’s suffrage is almost universal, women are a significant part of the paid labour force and female astronauts, prime ministers and Nobel laureates are no longer unusual. Women have always excelled in the arts and letters, not surprisingly considering that the Greek muses were female, although they have sometimes been forced to hide behind male pseudonyms. Not anymore. Yet today 70% of women in the world live below the poverty line, about 90 million girls are still denied access to primary education and 2/3 of illiterate adults are women. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to a fall in hard-won maternity, health and education benefits for women in former Soviet Block countries.

            Modern day religious extremism has heightened legal and social restrictions on women and even in countries like Sri Lanka with a strong matrilineal tradition there has been a push towards genital mutilation by Islamic groups – a practice which is neither Islamic nor Sri Lankan. The United Nations Population Fund was denied $34 million in US Congressional allotments as part of a gag-rule against institutions that provide abortion.  In countries where women have earned the right to work outside the home, they continue to shoulder the main burden for child-care and house work.  

            So it is clear that there is still plenty of room for  change in society and that women will have to continue doing most of the changing as they have done in the past. When women empower themselves or are empowered by society, healthy change thrives. This simple fact was recognized by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh who started granting micro credit to women in villages with astounding results. Likewise, when food distribution was placed in the hands of women in Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating January earthquake, food got to the needy instead of the pockets of speculators and hoarders.

            In conflict situations like Ireland and Israel/Palestine it has been women from both side of the divide who have spearheaded peace movements. In Argentina the Plaza de Mayo mothers were able to uncover the veil of deceit surrounding the desaparecidos in their country. The list of examples of women as agents of change is endless.

            This issue, devoted to women changing the world, is but a mere sampling of the historical achievements of women. Yet it has turned out to be the biggest fattest issue in www.montrealserai’s  history, which proves that the women’s movement is neither  anorexic nor dying, as some feared.   We welcome further contributions from our readers, women and men, not only to this issue’s theme (which we will continue to publish for the next three months) but most importantly, to a world issue that affects the future of our species.

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Since there has been a very enthusiastic response to this theme,
another 5 articles on the same theme will be uploaded on April 30 and May 30, 2010.

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”.

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

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

Bedtime Reading Susan Dubrofsky

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

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

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

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

            Samira sat on the floor of her adobe hut studying her hands as carefully as if she were plucking  a daisy  or reading the constellations on a bright night or counting the drops of water that dripped into the kitchen sink like a metronome. Her hands had five appendages each, five, just like her feet, which also had five. Like  starfish. Like Christ’s wounds.

            She stroked her hands slowly like Tony used to do. Tony would stroke her waistline, she would stroke his back, their lips would  touch, their tongues  would intertwine until they no longer knew where her taste-buds ended and his began.  But that had been  a long time ago and the first  baby was now a young lady with boobs and all poking under her blouse like small mounds of brown sugar  and fine corn silk grew  under her arms.   And after the first girl they had a second one.  

            Samira’s eyes ran over her hands. Her left index finger traced the lines of her right palm. Her right thumb touched  the finger-pads of her left hand.  As she did this, she felt that slight frisson that hardened her nipples and made her mouth water,  moistening her lips into a pink gloss, just as her other lips used to  turn deep crimson under her bushy tropical tangle. Samira remembered how Tony’s tongue would explore until it sunk into those depths that tasted like zapote  fruit   and smelled like wet soil. But that pleasant memory also brought back dark memories of how Tony’s tongue could also make her hurt. Tony’s inflammatory tongue, which could stir red-hot coals in her body and rouse rabbles at the university had become so caustic of late  that Samira no longer remembered why they had married at all.    

            Samira traced the lines on her right palm. They spelled a perfect capital M,  deep and clear, without any breaks, or sidelines or alleyways or anything that was not as clear-cut and bright as the wonderful  future that was theirs for the taking.  

            They say that the lines in the left hand  show a person’s destiny and those on the right one  show the struggle between destiny and will. The lines in Samira’s left palm remained unchanged  throughout her life, while the ones in her right hand had started changing at some point. Samira no longer remembered when this had started to happen.

            How could hands change so drastically?  First the head line of her right hand broke off, when she had to have her appendix out in a hurry. Then another line went haywire, when her tiny  baby boy was born, a candle flickering  in the wind to be snuffed out two hours later. Then Tony started acting strange and fine lines started appearing on her right hand like branches in a creeper.

            Whenever Samira would reach this point in her ruminations the crazed lines in her hand took over her brain like a creeper that strangles anything that crosses its path. What mattered most, Samira repeated to herself, was that her destiny and her will had parted ways and the rest of her body had also started breaking apart. Her tongue no longer said what her brain really thought,  her brain got disconnected from her heart, her heart and her reason were at odds leaving  her soul bereft.  At the end of the day  all she could do was stare at that bottomless pit  that nothing and nobody could fill.

            Samira’s reverie was interrupted by a  volley of hail that  hit the French windows of the main house. When they had bought the plot to build their dream house, they had decided not to touch the adobe hut built by the previous owner at the back of the garden. It would be  their love nest. As it  turned out, not only had Tony started an affair, but he had the gall to tell the children that Samira needed to be sent to a rest home, “until she felt better”.

            The hail stopped pounding and the rain dissolved into a light drizzle. Lucerito had her nose glued to the French window. The tears running down her face mirrored the curtain of water on the other side of the glass. She was looking at the adobe hut where her mother lived trying to remember the last time that she had buried her face in her mother’s warm bosom.   

            -Why does mummy spend so much time all by herself in the little hut?

            Tony  was about to say something but then changed his mind.

            Samira looked across the garden at her daughters and her husband wishing she could be on the other side of the French windows.  She couldn’t afford to mull over the past.  Whenever she thought of Tony with the other woman,  a   dark viper would slither up her vagina all the way through her gut boring its way to her heart, pushing the air out of her lungs and if she was lucky, coming out through her mouth, nose and eyes in a torrent of wails and tears.

            So instead of trying to deal with a world in which there was no room for her, Samira  decided to create a world of her own. It was a place were time stood still and the present was suspended in the middle  while the past and the future whirled round and round like a giant Ferris wheel, producing a strobe effect in which lights moved back and forth,  where the future and the past were one blur and the present was where you wanted it to be.  

            The drizzle stopped  and the sun melted the dampness that still clung to the window panes into thin tendrils of steam.

            – Look at mummy, she is wading in the fountain!  Can we go play outside?

            Tony opened the French windows and stared at his wife.  Samira was standing in the middle of the fountain  holding water in her hands as if offering it to the sun. Her hands looked like  starfish, with five fingers, like the five senses, like Christ’s wounds,  like the Gutierrez family, who had been five, and then became four and now were three plus one and soon  would be one minus one minus one, because children grow up and grownups grow apart and go their  separate ways. At the end of the day, everything that adds up has to be subtracted, although who is to say that everything that has been subtracted can’t  add up again? The trick is to do it yourself before life does it for you.     Samira’s lips moved and her soft voice floated over the fountain and stopped at the French windows of the main house.  She looked at her children. Then at her husband. Their eyes met.   The Ferris wheel came to an abrupt stop. The past and the future became an indistinct blur. The sky burst into light. In a flash, Samira ran to the main house with her arms outstretched   until  they were covered in a tangle of fingers and palms and crazed lines.

            Samira no longer knew where her hands ended and those of her family began.  

[This story is a translated  extract from Las Manos de Samira awarded a first prize by A Quien Corresponda, a Mexican literary review whose demise was due to budget cuts.]

Neon Light by Susan Dubrofsky

The glare from the neon lights bores through my eyelids making them flutter. I fight  back and force them shut. They flutter again and one sleep-crusted edge disengages from its counterpart with a subliminal pop. Re-entering my dream is futile so I give up. The sharpness of daytime had somehow cut through  countless walls and malls and halls into this windowless hellhole severing my ties with that alternate reality where I am always the main dude. I shift my aching hipbone from the hard and wet surface that holds it in place and turn to face the wall. The surround stench takes hold of me like an octopus, forcing my eyes  open. The bikini-clad girl on the billboard is about to plunge into a translucent turquoise sea. The sea stinks of pee. My pee. I want to crap as well but it is too early for that. I no longer need a double latte to activate my entrails. I have jettisoned all that ballast from my old life. A cup of American-owned Canadian-branded Tim Horton’s  generally does the trick.  But I have no need of that today. Is it Saturday today? Or is it Sunday? Who cares! But I do. On weekdays the toilets  open earlier and close later, on weekends the place has the air of an abandoned jail. Or a Tarkovsky movie, complete with rusting pipes, water leaks and the odd humanoid walking about as a counterpoint to inorganic decay. My gut cramps. It must be the half-eaten Subway I rescued from the recycle bin. Slathered with mayo. I never liked the stuff anyway. Mother used to say that mustard is better on account of its sting – if it burns your nostrils it will also zap the critter in your gut. Especially if it is dee-jon, made in France. The girl on the billboard is shaking her body like the chicks in the bars on St. Laurent. That always hits a chord. The first train of the day has arrived in the station. I don’t know why they bother with early trains  considering that the usual passengers are the newspaper boy from Sri Lanka, the cleaning lady from the Azores and the pure-laine metro staff. They are generally grumpy and have nothing much to say and nobody to say it to. But somebody has to be first. I prefer the last lot of passengers. They are more convivial and sometimes obnoxious which provides entertainment if you’re in the mood. Besides obnoxious is good. It makes mall security forget about the likes of us. People with nowhere to go. No, I won’t say they’re heartless. They turn a blind eye to our presence, especially in winter, even though it’s against the rules. Unless the other guys, the ones who look like war-game clones, are around. These guys mean business. They walk around with their chests puffed out as much as their bullet-proof vests let them, looking for people to harass. And sometimes real cops come around and try to take us to shelters just to please politicians and habitual letters-to-the-newspaper writers but we know and they know what it’s like over there, no smoking, no drinking, no nothing except be a good boy and follow their senseless rules. The bikini-clad girl is now walking through a clump of rotting sea weed. Stinking sea weed I should say. The pee in my pants has cooled down making me shiver but somehow my groin starts feeling warm again. Holy shit! It’s not on account of Miss Bikini on the wall! I’m glad my pants are former Outfitters, just the right khaki colour. But the Salvation Army people forgot to give me the Boss perfume that goes with the outfit although I do have the unshaven look. Hope nobody notices. If I can’t persuade the bible-toting lady to give me some fresh pants from her church stash, I will just have to take matters into my own hands for the common good. Or maybe I won’t have to filch and split. For all I know,  they might have a street sale today. Quaint name, street sale, when this place is a massive underground penitentiary, but then they can’t call it penitentiary sale, can they? Ha! If worse comes to worse, I can always rinse my pants in the men’s room when nobody is looking. They’re already wet, anyway. I turn again and make myself  comfortable. My eyelids weigh a ton. The bikini-clad girl bends over me. I think she is going to kiss me. The last time she paid attention to me was when she actually went down on me sending me to paradise until that stupid Westmount cow interrupted my dream and started yelling at me. She had the nerve to tell me to remove my hands from my pockets and to zip up my fly properly. She also told me that I’m shameless and that decent people don’t go around behaving as if they were at home alone. But I am at home. This is my home, the only one I can remember. Very conveniently located. Near public transportation and a panoramic view of the sea. Ah, Miss Bikini is not going to kiss me after all, but she is holding my wrist daintily as if she were afraid of breaking it. She mumbles something to the guy with her. He hands her a syringe. She unrolls my sleeve, swabs me with something cool  and plunges the needle into my forearm. I start drifting off but I can still feel the guy’s  strong hands under my armpits. She grabs my legs. They plop me onto something soft and cart me away. The train rumbles by. Cay-shun, cay-shun, cay-shun, it says. Intoxi-cayshun. A loudspeaker fills up the space above. I can’t make out the words but I know what they mean. The public transit system wants the janitorial staff to come to my corner of paradise and clean up the mess I left behind.

Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art.  Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. By Ruud Priem and others. Vancouver Art Gallery and D & M Publishers Inc, 2009. 

             Art is often likened to a gadfly hovering over society’s dung heap. Conversely, it is also universally recognized as society’s most sublime expression. The latter is particularly true for the Golden Age of Dutch art, a five-decade period during the 17^th Century that produced painters such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hal. It was the confluence of political events and the advent of mercantilism, banking and maritime exploration that led to the creation of unprecedented wealth in cities like Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leiden and Utrecht. Not to mention, of course, the infamous slave trade that flourished later on.   This wealth, in turn, was invested in art, not in land, a scarce resource in tiny water-logged Holland. Moreover, unlike other European countries, power in the Netherlands was vested in the hands of merchants and craftsmen and not in the landed aristocracy, a not surprising phenomenon in a country that had become a republic.

             The Netherlands had been part of the Spanish Empire until William I of Orange revolted against  Philip II of Spain. This revolt led to the formation of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. In this republic, cities and provinces had a greater say in local as well as international policies. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602 and the first commodity exchange opened in Amsterdam in 1611. Well-crafted household goods and art, mainly in the form of paintings, were objects of great value and were considered investments, not goods to be consumed. Artists were well paid although some of them, like Rembrandt, became victims of financial mismanagement.

             In this new democratic (for the historical period in question) society, the artists organized themselves into professional guilds to protect the quality of their products and their own professional worth. These guilds also served as educational as well as social security institutions. Artists did not depend on the patronage of the nobility or the church. It was City Hall or other artists or members of the bourgeoisie who commissioned their work. Many artists painted their self-portraits in which they documented their own success as part of the composition of the painting.

             The Rijksmuseum has lent many of these masterpieces to the Vancouver Art Gallery to be exhibited from May 9, 2009 to September 13, 2009. This book is a beautifully annotated and printed introduction to this collection as well as an overview of how democracy in 17^th Century Holland gave rise to such masterpieces.