The South Asian Film Festival of Montréal (SAFFM) was launched in 2011. Since then it has established a reputation for showcasing quality documentary and feature films from India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, as well as films about the […]
Cheeky Mathematics He and she fuse their cells with the sticky glue of their warm juices Two cells become one which then divides and multiplies until one plus one adds up to ten perfect little toes Baby trades […]
Is there a contradiction between performance as entertainment, performance that is essentially an esthétique of form, beauty and years of extraordinary cultivation of skills, and performance that is by itself an act of change, designed to disturb? For a moment, […]
Writer, performer and griot Koulsy Lamko directed the Centre Universitaire des Arts in Rwanda from 1999 to 2002, in the aftermath of the genocide of the Tutsis. After handing the project over to students, he continued to support and visit […]
Teesri Duniya Theatre was established in 1981 by Rana Bose and me as co-founders. Others involved were the cast and crew of the company’s launch production, Badal Sircar’s Julus. At the time, there was no other South Asian theatre company […]
Stanley Février’s art gets under your skin. It calls you and keeps calling. It engages more of you than you know. Heart and mind and spirit remember. Flesh remembers. You feel the expanse, the height, the depth. The […]
1. Circumstance and sorrow had aged me by the time I found my way into the fire-blighted wood scorched by flames rising up from an earth ravaged by explorations for oil, its water table plundered relentlessly by impulses […]
The 29th edition of the Montréal First Peoples Festival (Présence autochtone) unfolded from August 6 to August 14. On this occasion, it celebrated diversity and creativity through a combination of visual arts, film, music, song, poetry and gastronomy. It […]
Montréal actor Howard Rosenstein in conversation with Serai’s Rana Bose Serai: Good afternoon, Howard! The theme of this issue is Performance as Change. I will begin, though, with a slight diversion. I’ve come across your opinion on […]
What We Remember: Poetry that Reframes History Lisa Bird-Wilson combines two forms of remembering in The Red Files. Her poems mix archival sources with oral history to reconstruct the stories we tell about the residential school system and its […]
I am nobody else’s version of who I am You cannot set your mind based on my looks alone There is no language that defines me Do not box me in Because I am my own I choose not to be enslaved […]
Run J Run, Sokol’s latest novel, was published in May this year by Renaissance Press, a publishing company whose roster features writing that doesn’t fit into a standard genre, niche or demographic and which hopes to uplift marginalized […]
Sometimes it takes just a moment to realize that one is in the presence of greatness. Meeting Habib Tanvir was one such moment. In 1992, I went to India to visit my parents. My husband Rahul Varma, who runs Teesri […]
Québec has just passed Bill 21, which bans many Québecers from holding positions of authority in the public service ostensibly to extend the appearance of ‘neutrality’ of the state. There has been a loud cry of praise for protecting […]
We are still here Aimé, us the niggers of the north An otherness-nothingness imprisoned in our minds by our colour I have heard of white writers who claim to be bush niggers they live outside the high prison […]
Being Chinese in Canada: The Struggle for Identity, Redress and Belonging by William Ging Wee Dere Douglas & McIntyre, 2019 (400 pages) A life of struggle for redress from Canada’s systemic racism From 1885 to 1947, some […]
My Undiscovered Country by Cyril Dabydeen, Mosaic Press (2018), 129 pages Cyril Dabydeen is a Canadian writer born in 1945 in Canje, Guyana, where he worked as a teacher. He came to Canada in 1970 to study at Lakehead […]
Ma voix se dévoile Je me souviens lorsque j’étudiais le chant classique au Collège Ste-Croix. Thérèse, ma professeure, me répétait sans cesse de relâcher ma mâchoire pendant que je chantais. Elle était si rigide et si tendue qu’elle rendait […]
In Which, Being Book One of the Chronicles of Deasil Widdy by Louise Carson, Broken Rules Press (Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Québec), 2018, 152 pages “Their long horns drooped and they seemed half asleep, unable to feel his presence. Perhaps I am […]
The history of music is all about borrowing and building on the work of predecessors, whether it be Griots keeping old stories alive and telling the stories of their time, or Johann Sebastian Bach traveling to hear Buxtehude’s […]
Me Artsy, compiled and edited by Drew Hayden Taylor Douglas & McIntyre, 2015 (256 pages) The best way to enter into the spirit of this luminous collection of essays is to quote what Drew Hayden Taylor, its compiler and […]
My grandmother died in 1969 at the age (I think) of 89. My brother and I weren’t expected to go to the funeral and neither of us now can remember exactly when it was. My grandmother had become […]
Vibration before sound, that’s how it starts. You could be at school, at home, anytime, anywhere. You hear mumbling and feel your lips twitch as you mouth words. Keep on your noise-cancelling earphones, never go anywhere without them. Listen […]
Seven Mountains For my maternal grandmother That moment when you see spring on your windowsill you have lost your sister, ceramic pot yellow daffodils, nodding buds. Wilted petals. Ruffled trumpet. Shriveled and fading that moment when news […]
Veteran war correspondent, Robert Fisk, speaking to a packed house at St. James United Church in Montréal in 2015, reflected on ISIS and the colonial history that has fomented justifiable resentment across much of the Middle East and […]
The Lingering Past Identity is not a simple phenomenon. The farther back in time we go in studying the question, the more limited the number of groups there are to study and the more simply those groups are organized […]
Depuis le tournant du siècle, nous assistons à une montée alarmante de l’extrême-droite et d’un racisme décomplexé, pas seulement au Québec mais ailleurs aussi, notamment en Allemagne, en France, en Italie et aux États-Unis. Il est vrai que les […]
Démarche artistique Le travail intérieur qu’exige la création ne cesse de me fasciner. Il me garde vivante. Mon travail se module autour de deux pôles : la céramique-sculpture et le monotype. J’ai commencé à faire du monotype en 2009, […]
Beliefs and affiliations There are many people who relate the concept of “class” to level of income. This is understandable given that a majority of people see “class” as an extension of an archaic English approach towards social “classification” […]
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