There’s a story I tell the people in my Decolonizing Journalism course. I explain that just as we are all treaty people and we all benefit from or are taken advantage of by treaties, we have also either benefitted from or been exploited by colonialism. The point is that the institutions and effects of colonialism are all around us if we would only look.
Sometimes the people in my course have experienced colonialism as refugees and immigrants, without ever giving it much thought. I’d like them to think about that, which is why I tell the story. It begins like this…
Have you heard the one about the two young fish?
One fine day, two young fish are enjoying each other’s company. They’re just bopping along having a great time, swimming around an aquarium. It’s a huge aquarium—so big they’ve never been to every part of it. They’re enjoying their adventure until they spot another much larger fish approaching them head-on.
The two young fish tense up. They’ve never seen this other fish before. They don’t know the intentions of this other fish. They stop talking and become real serious as the older and bigger fish gets closer. Just as they’re about to pass by each other, the older fish says rather matter-of-factly, “Enjoy the water.”
The two young fish keep swimming in silence and slight confusion. Eventually, one turns to the other and asks, “What’s water?”
“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”
John Lennon
A few years ago, a friend heard that I had liver cancer. He looked uncomfortable as we passed each other in the grocery store parking lot. It seemed as though he didn’t want to say anything to me. Unable to avoid me, he asked, “How’re ya doing? How are you feeling?”
I’m not sure he cared how I felt. Was it fear of the word “cancer”? I think so. I also believe what he really wanted to know was whether I was dying. Was I afraid of hitting my expiry date? If I thought he was serious and really wanted an answer, I might have told him.
At the time, a friend of mine had just passed away. We both got throat cancer about the same time. We went to different hospitals and survived similar treatments. We both came out the other end alive and cured. Or so we thought.
The last time we spoke, he’d just received new choppers—full uppers and lowers. He wanted all of his teeth pulled because the radiation treatment would eventually make his teeth fall out or crumble. He was laughing when he said this because—finally—he could eat real food again. No more soup, everything mashed with sauces. I heard his throat cancer came back with a vengeance about a week later.
This was during COVID. It meant isolation. He entered hospital alone. Doctors operated to save his life. They removed the cancer along with his vocal cords. They inserted an artificial voice box so he could talk (sort of), a permanent feeding tube into his stomach, and a colostomy bag—the works. He lasted about a year. I could only imagine … but I didn’t want to.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the things you did.”
Mark Twain
Of course, you know or you’ve already guessed what the story of the two fish is about. Maybe you’ve heard or read somewhere that the water represents society with all its beliefs and assumptions. The aquarium represents an ocean of cultures and traditions, lifestyles and habits. But also all the prejudices, biases and stereotypes that shape who we are and how we understand the world around us.
That’s the aquarium we all swim in and consider “normal” until someone points out that our cultures, languages, beliefs and values are not the same for everyone else. Differences that make us unique also create tensions with others who think we should or must be all the same. Once we begin to question this assumption about society, we begin to understand that the world is not some benign place. It can also be full of injustice, colonialism, sexism, racism, colourism, ageism, violence and so on.
All of this surrounds us, nurtures us, feeds us and defines who we are. For good or ill, it’s all we’ve ever known. It’s what we’ve been taught by family and friends, the education system and the mass media, from kindergarten on, by books and films, newspapers, radio and television. And for the last generation, by social media and the Internet.
“Our greatest ability as humans is not to change the world but to change ourselves.”
Mohandas Gandhi
I don’t know the prognosis for my own cancer. It’s been four months since the last rounds of chemo and radiology. There have been no X-rays or CT scans since. No real follow-up. My lab coats (what I call doctors) said they’d schedule these things after my last treatment. That never happened. The lab coats don’t seem concerned. Or maybe they’re just tired of my constant “Who cares?” attitude. Who knows?
I do that, you know, make jokes about my situation. I joke about looking forward to the “indignities” that await me after a two-hour drive into the city through parking-lot traffic, and then sitting in a crowded waiting room until summoned by a lab coat for a five-minute consult. “You look fine,” I hear him say, barely looking up from the chart in his hands. “Go home.”
I then face another two-hour drive yada yada and so on and so forth.
I am thankful that they saved my life. Really, I am. But after seven years of this stuff, I’m getting tired. It’s wearing me down. I joke that the cure can sometimes be almost as bad as the disease. Joking—laughing at the absurdity of it all—somehow helps.
I call a colonoscopy an “Australian” (down under) but also “a trip down the alimentary canal.” A prostate exam is an “alien abduction with a probe.” I call antibiotics “bug juice.” The nurses at the blood clinic, AKA vampires, shake their heads when I tell them to “just take a pint and put it in the fridge for the next time.” I ask the ultrasound nurse if it’s “a boy or a girl.” I replace the word death with “best-before date.”
“Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.”
Clive James
I began writing this series of stories asking why we—peoples living on the margins of the mainstream—don’t really know very much about each other. Is it that we can’t be bothered to find out? Or have we internalized prejudices about each other, deliberately distancing ourselves, fearing the unknown? Thinking about such questions reminds me of something a teacher once said: “Most people don’t wake up every morning thinking about Indigenous peoples.”
He meant that, like one of those young fish, I assumed everyone saw, felt and understood the same things in the same way that I did. He wanted me to understand that other people had other realities based on their different experiences—experiences shaped by the dominant society’s attitudes and beliefs. Most everyone was more concerned with their own problems affecting their own lives.
Why would they—and why should they?—be as concerned about Indigenous peoples as I am? Why should I be any different in this assumption? He wanted me to know that we could all use more understanding and empathy in relation to one other, if only to cut through all the crap that separates us.
“Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself.”
Maya Angelou
This was actually the topic of my very first story for Montréal Serai (“It’s My Party”). Did I want to be some surly old man destined to die alone with a cat eating my face? Or did I want to appreciate the little things in life, like listening to trees, riding my bicycle, nursing a hot cup of coffee on the back deck watching the rest of the world wake up?
More to the point, what could I do to take control not only of my life but of my exit? I needed to regain control, something taken from me by those all-powerful, all-knowing lab coats. One actually told me, “Your only choice is whether you want to live or die.” Meaning, if I wanted to live, I needed to give him the power to decide what they could do to my body.
I began writing again, needing to find meaning in the changes going on all around me.
I can’t let fear of the treatment, the lack of explanation and information, and the constant uncertainty grind me down. I see too many eyes empty of hope in those waiting rooms. Joking is my way of telling fear to “Fcuk off! Take a hike! Get lost!” Something my parents in their lives and declining years showed by example.
That first time with cancer, I was afraid that I was going to die. At first, I got angry. I handed out blame like candy at Hallowe’en. I shook my fists at all the gods.
The next time, I had another kind of cancer. What really bothered me was the constant uncertainty. All of the “C’mon, jeezus, what the fcuk next?!” I worked myself through all that to arrive at a need to re-evaluate my life, myself, my relationships with family, friends and lovers and others.
What did I genuinely need or wish to put into the “save” pile? What could I give away or push into a “recycle” pile? What and who was sucking the life out of me and needed to go? You know, the things I’d outgrown or hadn’t used for a long time, or that merely took up space. That included people who cared more about themselves than our friendship and just sucked up energy and hope.
There was another kind of evaluation needed that had to do with myself. What kind of man were they going to remember? Who was I beyond my résumé? We all wear masks that define who we wish to be—in public, in private, with family, with lovers. Who was I under all of that?
However, the more I thought about it, the more I discovered that I no longer cared what anybody thought about me. What mattered was the answer to this: “What kind of man do I want to be?” I think that question has haunted me most of my life.
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
After Grandma passed, Grampa moved into our crowded little house. Besides my ma and dad, our house was filled with eight kids. He was in a wheelchair, couldn’t care for himself anymore, but still didn’t want to live with us. He liked his freedom and solitude. But he needed us. The more I got to know him, the more I realized that we needed him too.
Grampa always had stories. Stories about working at logging camps in the Gatineau. More stories about cutting huge blocks of ice from the frozen lake in winter, storing them in big barns filled with sawdust. People would buy smaller blocks of ice for use at home in pre-electricity “iceboxes” to keep food from spoiling. He had more stories about rowing across the river in all kinds of weather to do yard work at the homes of rich people over in Hudson.
The stories he refused to tell were about his time in an Indian residential school far away in Sault Sainte-Marie. Still, small nightmares would come out like broken pieces of mirror from time to time. He was always laughing and joking, but there were also constant hints of pain in his eyes. Learning this added to my guilt when I’d slip past his bedroom without greeting him on my way to the kitchen.
Some days, if I had time, I’d read a few stories from the newspaper to Grampa. Other days, he’d prefer to tell stories about himself, share things he’d learned from a long, hard life. “Get an education,” he used to say.
“Never stop learning,” he would tell me. “The only time you stop learning is when you’re dead.”
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
Zora Neale Hurston
The seer is looking in my direction but not really at me; maybe somewhere over my shoulder. It’s as though he’s looking for something far away. I find myself doing the same, not quite looking at his face. Every now and then, though, I glance at his eyes. He’s silent. I breathe in and out to calm myself.
“You’re a writer,” he says at last.
We’ve never met. He shouldn’t know anything about me. His words come slow, sentences punctuated by long pauses.
“You need to tell a story,” he continues in a soft voice. “It’s a difficult story but you need to write it.”
I find myself stealing a peek at his face, to see if he’s looking at me. He isn’t.
“You’re in pain, though, because you can’t face yourself. This is why you can’t write. The words are piling up inside. You have a journey, a trip,” he adds.
He keeps scanning that place over my shoulder.
“But you haven’t decided whether or not you’re going. Not yet.”
I’ve been thinking of going back to South Africa. But I haven’t told anyone, not even my family. This whole thing spooks me.
My life is a mess. I’ve lost direction. Every day, I go through the routines, but I’m not really doing anything. I have a story, but I can’t figure out how to get it going. It’s been a long time. Is that what he means?
“You’re afraid of something,” the seer says. “You know what it is. I don’t need to tell you.”
He pauses before continuing. “Your fear is making you ill. You want to run away. But that’s not the journey you need to take. Your journey needs to take you somewhere, not escape from what you’re afraid of. You need to confront your fears.”
How does he know all of this? I look up just then. I’d lowered my head, staring at a spot on the floor while he spoke. I’m stunned by his words. My head rises and our eyes meet—but just for an instant.
“You can’t free the words until you stop being afraid.”
“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.”
Gail Sheehy
I’m in Johannesburg. I call Brent, a tv producer and a friend. He’s South African Irish; sharp of tongue and a no-bullshit attitude. He’s just back from training young filmmakers in Zimbabwe. I’m on my way home after Namibia. I’m lucky he’s home. He invites me to dinner.
This is my first home-cooked meal in weeks but I only pick at my plate. After his wife heads off to put their son to bed, Brent wastes no time in asking why I’m back in his country.
“You look like a whipped dog, man. I could tell the moment you walked in.”
I tell him I’m looking for something. But I don’t even know what.
“You think you’re going to find answers here?” he asks.
“Who knows?” I shrug.
We talk. I hem and haw. Brent persists. Then he says he’s going to ask four questions. I must answer them quickly and honestly.
“Don’t think about the answer, man, just give answers off the top of your head.” He then asks if I’m willing to try. Sure, why not? I’ve come all this way looking for answers. As the Cat Stevens song goes, I’m “On the Road to Findout.”
“What are you most proud of?” he asks. I hesitate. “Come on! Off the top of your head.”
I tell him my students or trainees. He asks why? I say I like watching my students grow. They energize me.
Next question: “What are you least proud of?”
A slight hesitation before I confess that it’s my broken relationships with women and our shared lives left behind. These questions make me uncomfortable. “What’s the point?” I want to know. Brent says I need to wait until he’s finished. Only two questions left.
The next one is easy. Of anyone in the world, who would I like to be, or to be more like? Without hesitation, I reply: “Harry Belafonte. I heard him speak at a conference on my first day back.”
Belafonte said he was born into poverty, raised by a mother who wanted her son to be educated and do good in the world. He doesn’t use the phrase “do well,” but “do good.”
Belafonte quit high school to earn money at odd jobs and study acting. He began hanging out at the Village Vanguard, a jazz joint in New York City where he got to know Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and other jazz giants.
One day, they invite him to fill in as a singer between sets at the Vanguard, after he’d been frozen out of yet another acting job. Belafonte talked about one set that included the song “Pennies from Heaven.”
“As an out-of-work actor, I figured this song was appropriate since there I was with my hat out, hoping that pennies would fall into it so I could pay the rent.”
Belafonte met and became friends with Paul Robeson, one of America’s greatest singers and tragedies and Belafonte’s mentor. U.S. authorities hounded Robeson into an early grave for his communist beliefs and his unwillingness to endure racism in silence.
“He spoke 12 languages including Zulu, Khosa, Spanish, Italian, French and more,” Belafonte told our audience. “Robeson wrote in all of those languages too.”
The audience is full of Black faces but Belafonte’s words resonate in my Mohawk heart too. Robeson was the first African American to graduate from Rutgers with honours in law. Robeson held three doctoral degrees. He could have been anything he wanted, Belafonte explains, but he chucked it all: the chance to be rich, powerful, a real establishment player. Instead, Robeson tells Belafonte: “I want to be an artist because I can do more to change the world through art than if I was a lawyer.”
Robeson sets Belafonte and others on a different course in their lives. They push against the media, the government, the establishment, society’s attitudes, racism, bigotry and more in the long struggle for civil rights.
Belafonte’s question is: “How can I change the world when I know it will strike back, push me down, try to silence me and what I have to say?” Robeson’s response: “Get them to sing your song, and they will want to know who you are.”
Belafonte says this is when he stops trying to be like or sound like one of many competent but similar jazz singers. He decides to become something else, something different—a folk singer with his own unique style—a voice that will someday bring down barriers all around the world.
South African artists exiled by apartheid, like Hugh Masekela, gravitate to Belafonte. He tells a struggling Miriam Makeba, echoing Robeson’s advice to him, that “The world already has a Sarah Vaughan. We don’t need another Sarah Vaughan. We already have an Ella Fitzgerald too. Find your own song to sing, so people will want to get to know you and your people and your country.”
“There is nothing like standing on a stage in Tokyo,” Belafonte almost shouts to applause from the audience, “and listening to 60,000 Japanese voices singing ‘The Banana Boat Song.’” He raises a finger to emphasize the point: “That is what Robeson meant. That is what I tell young musicians who come to me. You want to change the world? Then get them to sing your own song. But—first—you must find out what your song is. To do that, you must find out who you are, and be proud of that.”
“Okay,” Brent says, “here’s the last question. What’s your favourite movie?” I snap back with A Few Good Men.
Never seen it, he replies. It’s about a navy lawyer, I explain. Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise? Nope, Brent says, he’d remember the film.
I describe the plot and why I like it. The lawyer defends a couple of Marines on a murder charge. Their lives are at stake. There’s a moment when this lawyer is forced to make a choice: take a huge risk on himself, to put his growing career and everything he’s earned on the line to bring out the truth and save two young marines. Or he can play safe, abandon those two young men and lose whatever respect he had by doing so.
Now it’s Brent’s turn to explain the point of this exercise. He says the answers give him an idea, a hint, of a person’s emotional state, of their personality. It helps him identify problems that may be holding back his trainees.
“Here’s the deal,” Brent says, leaning forward. “You’ve reached a point where you must make a decision about what you want to do and who you want to be for the rest of your life. But you’re hanging back, man. You’re afraid of taking that next big step. You can sit back and do nothing, live off your past success. Or take a chance. Win big. Or lose small, over and over, for the rest of your life. Be brave or be a coward. It’s as simple as that.”
Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.
Robert Kennedy
I’ve traveled halfway around the world to hear almost the same things from people who should know nothing about me. Yet, each of them has been directing me, encouraging me whether they knew it or not. I sit in a cold sweat facing decisions that will change my life and lead to uncertainty and doubt no matter what.
A few months later, I sit at my makeshift desk in my sister’s house at Kanehsatà:ke near Oka in southern Québec. It’s mine while she works in Ottawa. I’ve inherited her big smelly dog along with the house. Bear, the dog, watches as I turn on my computer.
I stare at the screen for a long time. A story about two young fish comes to mind. I begin to type letters. They come slowly. I’m not sure where I’m going. The letters become words—the first words I’ve really cared about in a long time.
For more on Harry Belafonte & Johnny Clegg:
Harry Belafonte (1927-2023): Sing Your Song (2011); PBSNewsHour
Johnny Clegg (1953-2019): NPR
