Canadian literature is as rich as its native children such as Joseph Boyden, who, Through Black Spruce, has allowed city folk to breathe in the heady scent of aboriginal life in the north, Hugh MacLennan, who bridged the gap between Two Solitudes and Gabrielle Roy, who made us understand that Bonheur d’occasion really translates as unhappiness for  the Montreal  St. Henri District working class during the difficult forties.  And there are many more. So many that it could be said that Canada has one of the highest ratios of writers to reading public. And that is saying a lot in a highly literate population.  Could the Canadian Council for the Arts and its hitherto encouraging policies have something to do with it? Perhaps.  Are you listening, Mr. Harper?

Canadian cultural horizons, however, have been vastly broadened and made more cosmopolitan by the contributions of Canadian writers born elsewhere, bringing in  their experiences, culture and unique perspectives. Once again, there are so many that to mention just a few would be doing a disservice to the unmentioned many. As they say in Spanish, to get an idea of a row of buttons, one sample suffices.

Montreal Serai has chosen The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje, as a sample of excellence in Canadian literature.

“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.” Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table.

Where does the title come from? The cat’s table is the one farthest away from the Captain’s table in a passenger ship. That’s where you get the scraps of society if not of food.  Distinguished passengers seated at more privileged tables take turns, upon invitation, to sit at the Captain’s table but that will not be the fate of Michael, our 11-year old hero who sits at the cat’s table, with an assortment of misfits and eccentrics. And this is because he is a pesky child travelling alone with a nominal guardian in the higher decks.

And herein lies the story. The plot is simple. A Ceylonese (the country’s name had not yet been decolonized) boy travels from Colombo to London to meet his mother whom he hasn’t seen in several years. The setting is the early fifties. (The publisher lets us know that Ondaatje, who shares the same first name as his hero and who made a similar journey at a similar age, has not meant to be autobiographical in spite of the autobiographical techniques resorted to in the novel. Crafty Ondaatje, he will leave us forever wondering!) He is apprehensive but not enough to not enjoy some escapades with his young  comrades-in-arms. On the threshold of sexual maturity, he manages to get into scrapes for which he is cut down to size by the ship’s authorities. He has two sharp eyes and two keen ears which allow him to take in the comings and goings of the adults around him.

This fascinating narrative raises many questions.  Was there a murder on board? Was there accidental manslaughter? Who is the mysterious prisoner taking in fresh air at night whose manacles and anklets scraping against the ship make him sound like a ghost? Is the furtive couple hiding in one of the life-boats an unlikely  pair of lovers or Whitehall spooks at work? And what about the messenger pigeons and weimaraner pedigreed dogs? Who paid for Asuntha’s passage? Has the tailor lost his vocal chords? Will there be more burials at sea?

Ondaatje weaves in and out of these sub-plots and time frames with the consummate  ease of a well-lauded writer. He manages to keep his readers hooked from beginning to end and somewhere in between he throws a curved ball  hitting them hard  in the chest,  as deep and hard as the waves that make the cat’s table dip and swell.  It is for this skill and insight and many more reasons that Ondaatje  has been awarded the Booker Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award (five times!) and the Prix Medicis, inter alia, we should add, for good measure.

Read this book if no other.   Canadian literature at its best, eh?

[Media reports dated  October 2011 state that Michael Ondaatje asked to be withdrawn from consideration for the Governor General’s Award for The Cat’s Table to give other writers a chance. Alas, it did not win the recent Giller Prize. ]

When I return from a trip and open the door of my fifth-floor apartment and look out the window and  catch a glimpse of  the wooded ridge that Montrealers grandly call Mount Royal,  I first feel a sense of relief, and then an urgent desire to relieve myself, for  my whole being knows  that I am finally and unequivocally  home. For home is, after all, that one place  where you body relaxes and your mind is at rest.  And I certainly feel Canada is my homeland,  except when I ask myself what brought me to this frozen landscape so distant  from my sun-drenched  birthplace, or why my loved ones are so far away or what will happen when my body falters or where will I be when the time comes to end the journey.  At such moments, home feels very far away.

Today I say that Canada is my home forever, but how long does forever last? After all, once upon a time, I felt safe in Mexico City, the city where I was born, the “most transparent region in the world” as Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes once described it, a city with astounding architecture surrounded by snow-capped volcanoes and lit at night by the stars. I used to think it was the most beautiful place on earth and could not imagine not living there. But now when I visit my birthplace, I no longer think of it as home, my homeland, burdened as I am with harrowing tales of political and street violence as well as the assault of millions of bodies hurrying about in millions of hydrocarbon-fuelled cars or riding in crowded smelly subway cars or just trying to cross from one side of the street to the other without getting hit. Besides, my ageing body can no longer take high altitudes without going into overdrive and pollution has clogged up the atmosphere.

At the age of seven I discovered that Mexico wasn’t the centre of the universe when the newly independent government of India invited my father to work there for a couple of years. My Indian father had been exiled from  his own homeland for forty-seven years for having had the temerity of trying to free it from foreign rule. But now  India was free and the family could “return”. So we made the long trip to India until we reached Nagpur, right in the centre of the country.  So Nagpur became my new home. And if home is where the heart is, my heart was certainly very much in this country where life offered very few amenities and very many adventures.  Home for me was the place where I could follow  the bright eyes of a tiger who had come to our fountain to take a drink of water, while we slept outdoors in summer. It was the backyard where I was chased by a black-faced monkey larger than myself when another child hurled a stone at it. It was the lotus pond in Telenkheri garden on whose banks I would lie  trying to break the silvery beads of water that bounced off the lotus pads. It was the jungle where I tried to count the parrots that camouflaged themselves in the green foliage. It was the back steps of the house where I learnt how to spit and shine shoes from  the driver’s son who also taught me Hindi, my third language after Spanish and English. Home was an independent India full of promise and adventure.

But as they say, all good things come to an end and our idyll in Nagpur lapsed with the end of my father’s contract. So we reluctantly returned to Mexico City where our real life awaited us. But Mexico City had changed, or rather, I had. I no longer found it as comforting or as unique as I had once thought it to be. Yes, indeed, it was still beautiful but our life paled in comparison to the excitement that  India had provided.  But India taught me many lessons, and one of them was the importance of learning. So the nine year old who returned to Mexico had stopped being a shy wide-eyed dreamy child to become a self-confident student. School filled the hollow left in my guts when India was yanked away from me. School was a place where I always felt at home.

But as they say again, the only constant is change itself. My  mother, who was born in Brussels and had the courage to marry  a “black” revolutionary thirty years her senior, suddenly realized that her daughters were growing up and they deserved a better future. For her, a better future meant marrying an Indian man, an idea inspired no doubt more by her fierce love for my father than by any maternal logic.  So  my parents sold our cozy little house, and packed up the family library and all of us took a slow boat to India to live there forever. I was fourteen and I suddenly realized  that I no longer wanted to leave Mexico.  I was very confused. So  I cried me a river and the river overflowed into the Caribbean and then the Atlantic through  the Mediterranean  past the Suez Canal across the Arabian Sea all the way to Bombay. As soon as the ship docked, I burst into tears again at the sight of my father who had preceded us one year earlier.  The family was together again.  We had swam against the current, reversing  migration trends, for who would be crazy enough to leave a relatively well-off third world country where we had a roof over our head and my father had a job for a poorer country still suffering from the wounds of partition and facing the challenge  of  looking after its huge idiosyncratic and diverse population.

When we got to Nagpur, I kept on crying until my tears were drowned by the monsoon and then dried out by the summer drought and them simply forgotten as we settled down to our new life. Life was no longer the exciting affair it had been when my father was a government guest. Unemployment for an elderly patriot, a challenging  life for an outspoken unconventional European woman and the strictures of a patriarchal society for the two young women my sister and I had become were tough, but the support our family got from the community carried us through.  Once again, we were home.  So  I  hit my books again and went about my daily business, turning a deaf ear to what people said about us. What they said was that the girls shouldn’t be running around so freely in their  bicycles, that my mother should keep her opinions to herself, that a girl shouldn’t work in the garden with a hoe and spade like a common worker, that running for office in the student body was just not done,  and so on and so forth. I had finally found a niche in college, but had no idea what the future would bring after graduation.

Then the phone rang. It was my mother who had gone to New Delhi to meet my sister’s future mother-in-law. Pack up and come, she said, there is a job waiting for you in the Venezuelan Embassy. When? I mumbled. Now! Tomorrow, said my mother. So the following day I took a train and reached New Delhi on my twentieth birthday. What does a secretary do, I asked my mother. Well, she said, she uses her head. If your boss has a headache, for example, you get her an aspirin. If you have a headache, you keep quiet and keep on typing. I see, I said. And I did. Three years and three more Latin American embassies later, I was offered a scholarship in Mexico City.

So once again I returned to my homeland at the age of 23. This  time Mexico City did feel like home. The air was beginning to lose its transparency and traffic was clogging formerly quiet streets , but it was certainly home. A Master’s in oriental studies in Mexico seemed to be made to measure for me. But destiny decided otherwise.  I quickly fell in love with an American student, married him, got pregnant, dropped out of school and started my career as a simultaneous interpreter. I even acquired my husband’s Mexican extended family. I had finally arrived.

However, events moved rather fast in the sixties and seventies.  The ’68 movement which first hit the cobblestones of Paris spread like wildfire in the universities of Mexico City and then invaded the streets.  Political violence escalated  culminating in the Tlatelolco massacre in the Plaza of the Three Cultures where we lived. We had to abandon our modest  condo and rent  an apartment near the university campus at the other end of the city. Violence seemed to follow us. More than once I had to run for cover with my two little girls while bullets whizzed past us. Mexico was no longer safe. Mexico stopped being home. So we sold off our belongings and decided to spend my husband’s sabbatical abroad to test the waters.

One day  we drove off  in our Beetle at the crack of dawn. As the sun started to rise, I remember telling my husband that even though we were temporarily without a home and perhaps a job, I felt that our car was our home, because the whole family was together and that was all that mattered.  So we kept heading north until we reached New Haven in Connecticut where my husband planned to sit down and write a book.  The nine months we spent there are a blank in my mind. We had no friends and felt completely isolated.

And then  the phone rang again. It was a job offer for me at a UN agency in Montreal. So we drove to Montreal and I have been here ever since. One day my husband simply decided to leave and I stayed on.  Montreal, I thought, was a good place to raise two girls.

So here I am in Montreal, the city that has provided me with the greatest stability, but my heart is not all in one piece. It is scattered in Mexico, where I have warm memories, in Chicago, where one of my daughters lives, in Wichita, where the other daughter and my granddaughter live, in Delhi, where my sister lives, in Nagpur, where I bid farewell to my father and in about forty-five countries which I have visited and where someone or something has touched me.

My friends have always asked me whether I feel Mexican or Indian or Canadian. I classify that question in the same category of unanswerable questions as the one some silly grownups would ask me as a child: Whom do you love more, your mother or your father?  I also remember the comment made by a fiercely Spanish friend of mine. She once informed me that my problem was that I did not know who I was.  My reply? I did not know I had a problem, I said, and actually your problem is that you are the one who does not know who I am.  It is difficult for me to understand the mentality of people brought up in a jingoistic society. For them, life is either/or, black/white, us/them. For me, identity is a very important part of how we define ourselves,  but at the same time it is also a political and social construct used to manipulate citizens.  Wars would not exist if people didn’t define themselves as “them” and “us”. How can we think of appropriating a piece of land, or destroying buildings or taking human lives if in our minds we did not consider them “the others”, the enemy. And this is a problem which I perceive to be highly  gendered. It is no coincidence that it has been women in Ireland from both sides of the protestant/catholic divide who seriously sought to achieve peace. Their argument was that they did not bear children to convert them into the killers of other women’s children and vice-versa.  Women have also spearheaded peace movements such as the “women in black” group to promote a peaceful solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conundrum. It was women in Plaza de Mayo in Argentina whose relentless efforts brought some answers to the riddle of the disappeared children. What has this got to do with the question of homelands?  The excuse for most wars is to try to save the homeland from some horrible fate and most wars are declared and waged by men.

So returning to the personal, I feel very Mexican when I go back to Mexico and a flood of  childhood memories takes over my brain. But I stop feeling Mexican when I hear the first few words of the national anthem which say: “Mexicanos al grito de guerra….! Mexicans answering the call of war…. Or when my right to call myself Mexican is questioned by passport authorities who inform me that my family name Khankhoje is not Mexican or when I wear Indian clothes and my Mexican friends make a snide comment.   On the other hand, Indians accept me as Indian, even though I was not born in that country,  do not  carry an Indian passport and  do not speak Hindi, the official language,  correctly. This is perhaps due to the fact that the motto of Indian identity is: Unity in  Diversity.  And even though my parents did not give us a religious education,  I strongly identify with the philosophy of several religious traditions that flourished in India. Now, nobody would consider me Belgian at all, because I am sure Belgians see me as “coloured” (although Indians see me as white and Mexicans as just right), but I  certainly feel very  Belgian when I see somebody with my mother’s oddly coloured eyes: green with brick-red specks and feel a deep affinity,  or when I toast to her memory with a stein of beer in one hand and a chocolate in the other. And I realize that I have become Canadian because I enjoy the fact that it is a country where they just  let you be. True, the multicultural mosaic sometimes cracks along its fault lines, but it is still very much multicoloured.

And what about the United States? I must confess that crossing the border into the United States fills me with some trepidation, especially after 9/11. Before that, I had a Mexican passport and they would always give me a bit of trouble, perhaps because having a Muslim sounding name on a Mexican passport was a bit unusual. Now that I have a Canadian passport, I feel a tad safer, but not much more. The press is full of horror stories of how honest citizens have been harassed or worse, for no logical reason at all. I do not agree with the policies of the United States government at present or even historically, but I am very careful not to hold the American people responsible for all of their governments policies. It is a known fact that in most countries of the world, governments do not necessarily speak for the citizens they claim to govern democratically.  And this is a very important point. We tend to think that our homeland is that place were our interests will be protected, but this is not necessarily so. Homelands are an illusory concept because the elites that rule countries seldom take decisions that favour their  weakest citizens.   There is a suprahomeland for the rich and powerful, built on a network of jumbo-jets, world-class hotels, corporate board-rooms and the best playgrounds  that countries have to offer, where all its citizens are given VIP treatment. There is an infrahomeland for  the marginalized, the homeless, the disenfranchised whose shaky foundations are built on the sludge of Brazilian favelas, the landslide-prone mountain sides of Mexico’s vecindarios, the townships of South Africa, the landfills of urban sprawl, the sidewalks of Mumbai. And then there are the autochthonous people, the natives, the aboriginals,  the first nations, the adivasis, call them what you will, but the land they hold under their stewardship is shrinking at an exponential rate.

A lot has been said about globalization, both good and bad. Actually what is bad about the globalizing trends of today is that corporations have become powers unto themselves over and above national laws meant to protect their citizens. And even if there are international laws that are supposed to protect all citizens of the world, including those who hold no citizenship papers,  their enforcement is a tricky question.  But globalization of people is a good thing. It is a fallacy to believe that this is the first time in human history that there have been mass migrations. People crossed the frozen bridge of the Bering  Strait on foot  just as they walked on red-hot sand to somehow cross the  Red Sea, they drifted from the Pacific to South America on a raft (or was it the other way around?), they sailed from China to Mexico and around the Cape of Good Hope and they will keep doing so, because this vast planet of ours is their and our homeland. Today things haven’t changed that much. The locus of what we call  homeland has been extended, that is all. Double and multiple nationalities are quite common. Hyphenated citizenship is a fact of life. And oftentimes, homeland is a concept which is not geographical at all, but simply a very fluid concept.  This is especially  true for transhumant communities. In a sense, even though people who live outside the countries in which they were born are still a minority, the trend is rapidly growing.

Which brings me back to  the original subject of this essay: the word homeland. I have come to abhor that word because it has been hijacked by  politicians to manipulate people, just as the Swastika, a symbol of wholeness in the Hindu tradition  was hijacked to instil terror in the hearts of people.  Homeland Security are two words which inspire dread in many citizens, both inside and outside the United States. It is almost as bad a word as Vaterland. The world homeland was used in many African colonies to reduce the habitat of the original inhabitants so that the colonizers could appropriate the lion’s share of the land. The word homeland is often synonymous with reservation, where the natives are hemmed in just as animals that were born free have been penned in  towards a slow extinction. The notion of a homeland for a specific religious or linguistic  group has caused untold suffering in many parts of the  world by excluding one group at the expense of another one. Current newspapers are full of examples.

I clearly remember a doll I had as a little girl. When  I had accidentally decapitated it, I discovered that  a tiny  Mexican flag  had been used to hold some of the doll’s innards together. The idea that a flag should be used in such a disrespectful  manner shocked me, because at school I had been indoctrinated to believe that nothing was more sacred than a national flag. I no longer feel that way. Symbols should never replace the sentiments they are supposed to foster. Nationalism was certainly a very useful unifying factor in the anticolonial struggles that followed World War II. It was also an  improvement over the old feudal notions of the ruling class that considered the  peasants living on “their” land  as their personal chattel and cannon fodder. Nationalism is a good thing when it includes, it is a very bad thing when it excludes.  Today, more than ever, we have to realize that the only homeland we have, in a strict territorial sense, is the planet Earth. We all have a legitimate right to live off the land and a  concomitant  duty to  protect it.

The “commons” is a  lovely English word. The land that belongs to the collectivity is our true homeland for all of us to share.  Passports,  identity cards,  green cards, laissez-passers and soon electronic chips  are simply documents  invented by people to keep track of their affairs, nothing more and nothing less. They do not legitimize or invalidate the human being who is at the centre of it all. Moreover, our true ancestral homeland is most probably Africa, because it is there that palaeontologists found Lucy’s bones, perhaps the  oldest remains in the world.  Lucy is the foremother of all of us, as proven by DNA and mitochondrial studies.  I love that notion, because I’m sure it makes white supremacists lose a lot of sleep.

Perhaps the best sense of homeland, our homeland, is that space which we have pledged to cherish and protect, where our kith and kin and friends  live, that is our kindred humanity, including the animals and plants with whom we share space. Our homeland is a social and natural contract in which all the parties are committed to working for each other in the interests of the commonwealth.

I therefore agree with  Virginia Woolf  who said:  “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the world”. But Virginia also talked about the importance of having a room of one’s own. So for me, home is not only where the heart is, but it is also that room, both physical and metaphorical,  where we can truly be ourselves. It is that space where our voice is heard and our aspirations heeded. It is where we feel a sense of communion and community. It is that space where we can engage in joint endeavours  and share both the good and the bad. It is that corner where we can break bread together at the end of our toils and raise a glass of wine in celebration.

My homeland is where I can relieve myself at will or cry me a river without fear of drowning or having the Homeland Security chaps knocking on the door telling me to shut up.

because English  here is charmant

and French  c’est cool

because locals  know

that a ridge

is really a mountain

because tortillas &  chapattis

&  pitas & bagels

have no quarrel

with pâté chinois

because anything that flies

or rides or rolls

or sails or skates

converges on  this island

even the Grand Prix

because the women dress with flair

and the men with panache

because cyclists push

SUV’s off the road

because the weather

can still surprise us

like a new lover

because it has

a head and a heart

somme toute 

because life in Montreal

is a year-long  f-e-s-t-i-v-a-l…

 

 

I have a recurrent dream in which I am flying over a large body of turquoise water. The air is balmy, the water is deep, transparent, welcoming.  Just as I am about to plunge, I wake up.

I have been flying every since I was a little girl, back when propeller planes where the norm  and the word security evoked a mother’s embrace, a glass of warm milk and the certainty that all was well with the world.

All is not well with the world today, yet I continue to fly because as we all know, or should know, flying is the safest mode of transportation per passenger mile. Yes, that is how statisticians calculate our chances of making it or not making it at the end of the run.  But we do make it and we do repeat our performance year after year, holiday after holiday, conference after conference or as the whim strikes us.

But flying is not what it used to be. In many ways it is much better, smoother, safer. In other ways, the thrill has become mundane, the aggravations that precede a flight a trifle annoying, not to say distasteful, the rewards taken for granted. But that is not the airplane’s fault, but our own. We have become jaded with flying, with  what was Da Vinci’s greatest dream  and the stuff of which myth and  legend  are made. Garuda , half-man and half eagle, carried the wisdom of the Vedas on his wings to inspire generations  of Hindus in their search for the truth. Icarus suffered a meltdown when he flew away from Crete and carelessly got too close to the sun. Quetzalcoatl, half-serpent, half-bird, flew away from his Aztec home only to sail back centuries later in the guise of a bearded Spaniard.

My own experiences with flying are more modest, but no less visceral for that. When I was a little girl, my parents had a little cabin in the mountains to which we retreated over the long winter break from school in Mexico City. To get there, we had to take the milk plane, or more accurately, the chicken plane, for I remember the hens cackling in their cages at the back of  the small plane. People gave little thought to what we now call security concerns, but Mexico in the late forties was in the throes of a foot-and-mouth epidemic that threatened to decimate the livestock of the country and its economy as well. In order to prevent the spread of disease, passengers had to wipe their feet on a sawdust  trough soaked in disinfectant before boarding the plane. I tripped and fell flat on my face. A kindly airhostess, for that is what female flight attendants  were called in those days, picked me up, carried me to the plane, took me to the lavatory and wiped my face and dress clean. I don’t remember my body having hurt, but I still remember the injury to my pride.

Flying became an exciting adventure when our whole family  went to India in 1949. My Indian-born father had been invited on a long-term agricultural  mission and we were to fly after him. First we rode a bus from Mexico City to New York, which took several days and several nights. It is all a blur in my mind.  Then we flew from New York to Europe, via Gander, Scotland and Belgium. In Gander we stopped to refuel. It was winter and the trek from the plane to the small terminal was rather longish. I had never seen snow in my life, so I scooped some in my bare hands and was surprised by the way it stuck to my palms making them bleed. After living in Canada for thirty-two years I now know better and wear nothing but mittens in different thermal grades.

At some point in our week-long trip we flew over Istanbul, but for some reason, did not land there. I still remember the sight of a brightly-lit crescent moon coasting dark waters. It  looked like a diamond necklace,  a fitting sight for passengers riding in a Super Constellation. Many years later in Canada during the eighties  I would  get to see an old Super Constellation converted into a pesticide-spraying plane for agricultural use. That was a far cry from a plane that had  proper beds in first class and lavatories with several stalls and washbasins surrounded by ample counters. But it looks like the beds at least are making a comeback.

In 1965 I had to fly from New Delhi to Mexico City via Italy. This was my first experience with jet planes and with the fear of remaining stranded in the middle of nowhere without the proper documentation  or sufficient money in your pocket.  After an overnight stay in Rome I headed back to the airport in the airline bus (yes, in those days the airlines would provide transportation from their downtown office to the airport free of charge) where I discovered I had been bumped off due to overbooking. The term didn’t exist then, but the concept was beginning to creep into airline culture. My desperate tears, my obvious lack of money and the fact that the next connecting flight was one week away softened the heart of the airline employee who upgraded me to first class where I was treated to champagne.

In the sixty-odd years  that I have been flying as a passenger, I have had many adventures, all of which ended very well. During a flight to India over the Middle East the pilot said: “Oops, we have to move over, the military say we are encroaching on their airspace”. I was not paying attention to the announcement because  I was busy snapping a photograph of a plane flying over our right wing as if wishing to give it a friendly nudge. We had just been intercepted!

During my first flight to the Soviet Union in the late seventies the plane took off from Mirabel Airport in Montreal as if it were a fighter jet, straight up. I was later told that any Aeroflot aircraft, while civilian, could be quickly stripped of its seats to become a fighter jet in no time, and that commercial  pilots  were actually  military pilots in mufti. I do not know whether this was true or not, but I found the flight thrilling.

During a recent flight from Montreal to Chicago, our small feeder airline  plane suddenly dipped its left wing, dived towards lake Michigan and then quickly  recovered its altitude and  righted its course again. I heard a few muffled cries from the passengers, one of which might have been my own. But it was nothing. Or rather, it was something, something to be thankful for:  our deft pilot had just managed to stop us from getting sucked into the wake of a large jet. Such close calls are the effects of decreased vertical and horizontal separation between planes, which in plain language translates into crowded skies. But not to worry, highly sophisticated equipment and an ever-vigilant satellite navigation system make sure that planes do not collide. Not often, anyway.

On another flight from Chicago to Montreal, bad weather forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights throughout the United States and Canada but I managed to get the last plane out of O’Hare. Climbing out of that heavy snowfall felt like trying to surface  through whipped cream but when we cleared the weather system, we were rewarded with the sight of an unbroken circular rainbow made up of several rings. Apparently all rainbows are complete circles but we are seldom high enough in the skies to see the complete picture. Yes, Dorothy, it is indeed possible to fly over the rainbow…  .

Such sublime experiences, however, don’t have to be the result of bad weather. I once took a short sightseeing flight along the Himalayan range out of Katmandu airport. As soon as we were seated, the pilot warned us not to get up when we neared the range to have a better look since the passengers seated on the wrong side would get a good view on the return leg. When the snow-capped mountains appeared in all their glory most passengers disregarded the captain’s instructions and almost tilted the small plane to one side. Perhaps because I had  behaved myself and remained seated I was rewarded with an invitation to the cockpit to get a better look. Perhaps. I can now understand why so many people have risked their lives and some of them lost it, just to get a glimpse of Mount Everest radiantly facing the sun.

Talking about cockpits, have you ever eaten an ice-cream cone while sitting on the jump seat watching the plane moving along the centerline of the tarmac? I have, courtesy of  the airline that had bumped me off, and very rightly so, for having arrived late. But they let me ride in the cockpit so I wouldn’t miss my business appointment  the following morning. Unfortunately, by the time we left Malaga and reached Madrid, I had no more ice-cream left.

Flying in a chopper is, pardon the pun, a choppy experience, especially if the craft is hovering over Niagara Falls. There you feel as if the cataracts are sucking your  innards  out of your body. Stomach-churning is the only description that comes to mind. But hey, who wouldn’t pay this price to see  the Falls away from their tacky surroundings! On another helicopter ride I was surprised to see the snow that still lingered on the crest of Whistler Mountains even in summer.

Gliding is what I imagine heaven feels like. The sight of a Quebec pasture with tiny cows  while you are sitting in the cockpit of a glider is an almost mystical experience. After you get over the initial shock of  disengaging from the motorized plane  that tows you up, and the sensation of  having your umbilical cord abruptly cut off,  you are ready to enjoy absolute silence and stillness. And the landing is as easy and as gentle as that of a timid  paper plane landing on the teacher’s desk.

Flying in a balloon is similar to gliding, but with a touch of elegant retro glamour. I did not get to fly over the Loire Valley in France, but did experience the luminosity of the Arizona desert at sunrise. Our pilot miscalculated and made us land on a golf-course which annoyed the golfers but a good-will toast from our stash of  mimosas  mollified their irritation.

Flying as a passenger is one thing. Piloting your own plane is another.  After going to ground school for weeks trying to understand the physics of flying,  the mechanics of the cockpit and the vagaries of the weather, I took one glorious thirty-minute flying lesson out of St. Hubert Airport on the South Shore of the  St. Lawrence River. I taxied on the runway until the instructor ordered “take-off!”. I understood it was now or never, so I did just that. I took a deep breath and took off. Just like that.  Once in the air, the plane started bucking like a skittish horse. I tried to hand over the controls to the instructor who ignored my pleas and told me it was quite normal on account of the breeze. He then instructed me to turn around a low hill and to return to the airport where he would land the plane for me. While we were up there he asked me to admire the scenery which I was too terrified to do. The following morning, when I woke up stiff and aching,  I understood that the instructor had been merely  trying to get me to relax.  I have not taken any more flying lessons because you have to drive  to get to the airport and I am afraid of driving.

I have been talking about the joys of flying but have not mentioned airports. Airports are a necessary evil. They  have become cities onto themselves with their own shops, places of worship, clinics, hotels, streets, plazas, food-courts and even jails. Yes, there are mini jails in some airports where the customs and immigration authorities have the power to detain unruly passengers or stop undesirable people from stepping onto foreign soil. They are then handed over to the proper authorities. But that is a well-guarded secret. Forget I said anything.

Once while waiting for our plane to depart  from Amsterdam on our way to New Delhi, I asked a novice  flight attendant why our flight was delayed. He explained that a couple of passengers were missing. I asked him whether he had tried the Casino (yes, there is a Casino  and even a museum at Schiphol Airport). He answered he hadn’t had a chance. What I had meant to say was that the passengers were most probably delayed there! When the flight attendant saw me fiddling with my eyeglasses because a screw had fallen off its hinges, he volunteered the Captain’s services to fix it.  “Does he have the necessary tools?” I asked. “His cockpit is fully equipped” he told me proudly.

So while  modern airline crew members might not wipe the muddy face of a weeping child you can be sure they will certainly  fix her eyeglasses sixty years down the road. That is a comforting thought.

Yet I would rather dream of flying over a large body of   turquoise water than actually have to endure the vicissitudes of post 9/11 travel. Really.

“Hello, did you just say that there is a special on flights to the Caribbean? Get me two tickets please!”

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.

Of late, however, this hitherto productive sea has been churning, spewing out not fresh fish but stale discontent.  Several moons ago a satyr who lives in the boot kissed the hand of a madman who lives in a bunker presumably for  having initiated him into the mysteries of the bunga bunga. Or was it to exchange gold for oil? And many more moons before that another descendant of the Pharaohs fell off  his seat as his heart was  pierced by a shard of metal leaving his seat vacant which was promptly warmed  by his best man. This new Pharaoh only gave up his seat when it became too hot. Such stories are the stuff of which epics are made.

Why should people, people started asking,  starve to death  in a land that has  produced a  diet that health gurus claim ensures longevity? So the inhabitants of this land of plenty surrounding this deep blue sea  have learned a new word: R-E-V-O-L-T. First somebody whispered this word to someone else who  twitted it to a third person who pressed the send button and copied it to a fourth person until it hit  Facebook. Images went viral, imaginations were inflamed.  People took to the streets. Because, you see,  newspapers can run out of newsprint and TV screens can go blank  and journalists can meet untimely death, and the internet can suddenly freeze, but the voice of the people cannot be silenced.

Actions have consequences. Some bad rulers have been run off the land, others have been kicked into the sea and some have taken flight. Blood has trickled and then flowed, tainting the once azure waters the color of rust.  Who will replace them is a question that sages are still pondering.

But if actions have consequences, how come it is only the people under the boot who are restless? Not so! Take a closer look at the mappemonde. Inside the boot you will see the women with their brooms chasing away the satyr who once kissed the hand of the madman who taught him the bunga bunga.

I now know for sure that Santa Claus does exist, provided you believe in him, and that my parents were indeed very much mine, thanks to the laws of consanguinity and bonding. You see, my sister had only been trying to test the dual tenets of transparency and freedom of information.

Or had she?

This issue of Montreal Serai analyses how a group of people, long settled in a particular region, has been controlled by another group of  people coming from elsewhere and how it is fighting back to heal ancient historical torts and restore the health of the land. An important point to remember is that most indigenous populations consider themselves stewards of the land and all the living creatures that reside on it, hence the universal appeal of their struggle. Tomás Ramírez, a Chichimeca from Mexico, describes the struggles of women in San Cristóbal de las Casas, which has had an autonomous government on and off for years. Carmen Cordero, a Spanish woman, tries to get into the skin of  the corn people, especially the Mayan women in Guatemala. Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, a native of Alaska, deplores the killing of whales in her homeland. Shanti Johnson, a multicultural Mexican with Mayan roots, meditates on the deeper meaning of  indigenous. Other authors offer us their poems  in solidarity with indigenous people, and much more.

Most importantly, however,  the First Nations of Canada let us know, in no uncertain terms,  that they expect the Government of Canada to respect its commitment to the United Nations  Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People to which it finally adhered.

In order to understand why we should care to read the memoir of a friendship between two writers who were born in two different continents, we must first realize that Kamala Das left a gaping hole  in the world of Indian literature when she exited this earth to hopefully attain the paradise that her  conversion to Islam promised her.

Kamala Das was a poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer and would-be politician who wrote fiction in her native Malayalam and poetry  in English, the medium of her education at the hands of her great uncle, a renowned man of letters. Her father  had been a journalist and her mother a well known poet.  In 1984 Das was short listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature along with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer. When she died in 2009 at the age of 75, throngs of  Hindus, Muslims and feminists,  who had  alternately  admired her and vilified her, attended her state funeral in her home province of Kerala,  South India.

Merrily Weisbord is an award-winning Canadian journalist, filmmaker and broadcaster whose decade-long friendship with Das, several visits back and forth between the lagoons of Kerala and the Laurentian lakes as well as copious transcripts provide the material  for this one-of-a-kind book.

What inspired Weisbord to undertake this circuitous literary journey? First it was Das’ work, which she found stunning,  then her intriguing personality  and finally the friendship born out of what prima facie appeared to be a contrived experiment in mutual revelation for literary purposes. Take a look: to begin with, Merrily receives a faxed-in love letter written by her companion back in Canada and reads it aloud to her friend. Then Das urges  one of her lovers to profess his love to her in Merrily’s  presence. Mutual revelations about their sexual experiences, motherhood  and the writing process are encouraged and recorded. The writers follow each other around in their quotidian lives. Doesn’t the Heisenberg effect warn us that observation alone changes the behavior of the observed?  But then this staged setup starts gathering  momentum and  art and life merge blurring the boundaries between both. Not that it matters because in the end the reader is caught up in this compelling  narrative and cannot put the book down.

Kamala Das forged her English on the solid anvil of the classics but was considered uneducated because she failed in mathematics so she  was married off at 15 to a man more than double her age. He was a homosexual, but by her own account, subjected her to sexual practices which she found distasteful until she gave him an ultimatum. “I want the freedom of my private parts”. With “permission” to be celibate she was able to write at night while the children slept in order to support the family during difficult financial times. Her highly eroticized poetry, her fictional denunciation of social ills like child abuse and her newspaper columns on anything and everything earned her a large readership, the opprobrium of a very traditional society, the admiration of feminists and the lustful fantasies of hypocritical males.

As Kamala and Merrily bonded like sisters in “the same tribe of writers” many of the poet’s contradictions confounded her friend.  Kamala claimed to have suffered greatly at the hands of her husband yet in later years lauded him as her best friend and supporter. This might just have been true when she emerged as a well-known and highly respected writer which prompted her husband to act as her manager and protector until his death. She also claimed to dislike sex yet she was a  devotee of  Krishna,  revered by Hindus as the embodiment of divine love in a human body.

Kamala Das’ boldest action was her conversion from her matrilineal Nair Hindu caste to Islam at the behest of a young Muslim lover with whom she fell madly in love at 65. Whether this young Muslim  prompted Das to convert with the offer of marriage out of love for her or love for the one million dollars that the Saudi Arabians supposedly paid him (according to “a family friend”) is not clear. What is absolutely clear is that her apostasy earned her the disaffection of  her family, death threats from Hindu extremists as well as from Islamists who forbade her to  abjure Islam and return to Hinduism. It also disappointed feminists who view Islam as a patriarchal institution. Towards the end Kamala would admit to Merrily that religion was nothing but a garb to be shed when the time came. When her time came, she was buried near the mosque where  she had  converted to Islam. If there is an epitaph on her tombstone, it could well read as follows:

“First I will strip myself of the clothes and ornaments. Then I will peel off this light brown skin and shatter my bones. I hope at last you will be able to see my homeless, orphan, intensely beautiful soul, deep within the bone, deep down under, beneath even the marrow…will you be able to love me, will you be able to love me someday when I am stripped naked of this body… Ente Katha (Malayalam version of My Story)

Merrily Weisbord’s memoir of her friendship with the Love Queen of Malabar has not solved the riddle of Kamala’s  many contradictions but it has achieved what she  unambiguously wanted out of life: to be loved, not just as a writer but as a warm, courageous woman who dared to be herself.

N.B. This book provides a complete bibliography of her work in English and Malayalam and is liberally sprinkled with memorable quotes.

Ilustrado. By Miguel Syjuco, Hamish Hamilton Canada, an imprint of Penguin Group, 308 pp.,  Toronto 2010.

Miguel Syjuco (pronounced See-hoo-koh), with Ilustrado, has achieved what Salman Rushdie achieved with  Midnight’s Children: a brilliant irruption into the literary scene. He also triggered a tsunami of interest in the history of a country known to many in Canada more for its ubiquitous care-givers than for its multilayered history. Syjuco received the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and  the Palanca Award, Philippines’ highest literary honour,  for the unpublished manuscript of Ilustrado. Rushdie, as is well known, received the Booker Prize and the Booker of Booker’s for Midnight’s Children. Both wrote about the post-colonial experience and both are voluptuous and highly literate writers  worthy of a Maharaja’s gem collection or should we say, of  Imelda’s shoe collection. But enough of comparisons, except to say that we augur young Miguel Syjuco a career as interesting as Rushdie’s, minus the fatwa, of course, although he must have stepped on a multitude of Pinoy toes with this exposé of corruption in the Philippines.

During the Spanish occupation of the Philippines ilustrado, which means enlightened person in Spanish, was the moniker given to the Filipinos who went to Europe for their education and returned to their country with a desire to better it. Miguel Syjuco, the main character in this book (yes, he is the author’s namesake who also shares some of the author’s biographical details leading the reader to speculate that he is some sort of alter-ego) is a young would-be writer who returns to the Philippines to research famous writer Crispin Salvador’s background for an upcoming biography of his mentor who has recently been reported dead. In this sense, the story line of Ilustrado is similar to the plot of many books written about exiles or descendents of people from the mother country who return in search of their roots. What he discovers there, or rather what he does not discover, provides the author with the narrative underpinnings to delve into the history of the Philippines in the last few decades, roughly coinciding with the author’s/alter ego’s age and circumstances. The author meant the book to be both fiction and non-fiction and left the reader the task of sorting out which is which.

In an interview Syjuco, our Montreal-based author, not his literary alter-ego, explained that the narrative structure of Ilustrado is based on Philippine textiles which at first glance appear to be common patch-work, but are in fact intricate designs with a clear thread of continuity. For this, the author resorted to letters, emails, blogs, memoirs, newspaper articles, poetry and other apparently disparate pieces of writing and wove them together. This  strategy  presented him with the well-known  “challenges of literary bricolage” but it somehow worked. In fact, the different styles and typeface help the reader identify point-in-time, location, mood and narrative voice. A warning, however, this is not for the lazy reader, although it is difficult to be lazy with such engaging writing. In fact, Syjuco’s style can shift from the sublime to the absurd, passing through jocosity and self-deprecation. Apparently Syjuco took hold of many manuscripts from his creative writing student days, including his thesis material, and cut and pasted them together, for which he betrayed  his Luddite inclinations and put his computer to good use. He also took this opportunity to streamline his work.  As a reader I was enthralled, moved, informed and entertained and above all, made to think about the larger questions of life. In fact the lyrical beauty of some passages made me want more of those and less of the others, but as the author explained in an interview,   such monolithic material might have become boring.

I will wind down this review here, not because there isn’t much more to be said, but because there is a lot more to be said about Ilustrado, and Syjuco, the author  and his  literary alter-ego have said it better than anyone else can.

Ilustrado is a thriller, a coming-of-age story, the political analysis of a country and a cautionary tale for those who face the dilemma of either betraying class and clan or society at large. Most importantly, it is a damn good read. Read it and find out why. In fact, read it and you might become an ilustrado.

 PS. Whatever you do, resist the temptation to read the ending first.