Cartoon © by Susan Dubrofsky
Mr. Cooper of New Orleans, displaced following hurricane Katrina, describes his former locale as, “…your little world. You know where to go and what to watch out for.” And how, now that it’s gone, there is the need to “make new friends, build up new trusts, learn to blend in.” He has to do this in the aftermath of media and government designating all those like him, queuing to evacuate, as refugees. It may have seemed to you from that moment on that, as refugees, realistically, they could expect a lot less of what is local and a high degree of uncertainty. After all, what does the word refugee mean?
Cartoon © by Susan Dubrofsky
Mr. Cooper’s position also presents a point at which local meets ideological. It hints at a desire for both. A universal desire evoked for instance in the place of the Vatican and Mecca in people’s hearts, Coronation Street’s viewing figures, the theme of this issue of Serai. Our relationship to ideology and what is local seems to address a desire for something bigger than ourselves.
The narrator of the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon, is a young man with autism. Unable to filter external stimuli, he has no ideology with which to organize the chaos of the outside world: no humanism for comfort, no ninja street savvy for safety, nor political patterning to make sense of it all. Local is an unknown and fearful place. Yet in a courageous effort to find the local train station, to reach his mother, he resorts to his powers of logic and in so doing moves in ever increasing circles away from his father’s home, closing in eventually upon his destination. Readers have found his experience of feeling, fumbling, fearing and negotiating a way through the spiral of life’s strange realities and fictions both funny and poignant.
Even the idea of local can often present a dead weight of disenchantment, of waiting, in line, for the rain to abate, for dreams to come true. It can be about slowing down. Stopping even. Meeting face to face the unplanned, the uncalled for, the dreaded neighbor. It can also find itself in present day Cambodia, whose history has torn up “the contract between strangers”, the contract that allows for any sense of local in the first place. It follows that the degree to which we can know and care for our local place is also the degree to which we know the state of our local institutions and the way they treat the people that are in them.
Paul Virilio, “critic of the art of technology” has observed the disappearance of what is local through, what he terms, the increasing, “militarization of urban space”. Despite its lovely flower boxes and green spaces, Montreal’s local places are being managed predominantly through priorities and technologies of speed, surveillance and security. This tendency of urban local degeneration becomes more apparent when things go very wrong, as in Louisiana, where the state response has been bureaucratized and militarized at every level, herding then scattering local lives of who-knows-who to who-knows-where. You might wonder how things could have gone differently or learnt somewhere of how, in instances where people by-passed bureaucracy and took direct action, they did.
A Neo-liberal controlled media deluges us with notions supporting corporate claims on local places. It traffics ideas about not enough to go around, of the deserving and non-deserving, the enemy within and the need for extensive wiretapping. It transmits these ideas as it banishes and bullies other locals elsewhere to hell. When governments do this to others how confident can we be that they give a fig for we local Lilliputians?
Locally, in Canada, you have to wonder…how the government would like us to feel… walking down the street, knowing of residents, who looked a little like us, being snatched up and sent back to the places they’d once fled. Delocalizing without fair trial or access to the intelligence leading to detention, the government is now defending its right to deport residents to possible torture. It does so in defiance of the UN Convention Against Torture. Here in Canada it now only takes two cabinet ministers to give the say then sign the security certificate that seals your fate. In Canada, if you’re Muslim, how confident can you feel then applying for citizenship? How safe? How local?
It doesn’t take an ideology to know that when rights go freedom goes with them. And when rights are put on the chopping block, without a mandate, it does begin to seem that we have something to fear. How free can you feel then singing the national anthem at hockey games? As for the idea that a reduction of civil liberties can increase public security? History has proven the rhetorical nature of that ideological rant.
Here in Montreal everyone is from everywhere. This place with all its local places is awash with ideas from everywhere. Most of us like that fact. Recently, Montreal activists spawned The Charter of Rights and Responsibilities, the spirit and intent of which is to mobilize locals into real democratic people power at the local government level. Among the many groups pressuring the Canadian government and numerous local initiatives there is also a new municipal party organizing around the environment, and a new provincial party organizing around le bien commun, the common good. From the suffering of Iraq, Katrina, Pakistan, Haiti and our own countrymen perhaps more of us now have a clearer idea of what the common good can mean.
Here, in this issue of Serai, Persian for resting place, you can experience the unsettling, the disturbing, jostling with reasons to be, if not cheerful then…awake…and local.
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/irpa/
