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Xenophobia, or Neo Tribalism

We seem to be global witnesses to what I can only characterize as neo-tribalism. To a large extent, this is the result of social structures that emerged during the Industrial Revolution.  Universalist claims were articulated in the name of religion: […]

Directions to Paradise (#2 NY-CA)

(part of The Paradise Project) The first voyagers to the Americas really believed they had found Eden; Columbus called it “the terrestrial paradise” and went in search of the four rivers described in the Bible.  However, in the end, it […]

Jaswant Guzder: The Artist of the Floating World

Jaswant Guzder is an internationally-renowned transcultural psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, an associate professor at McGill and the head of child psychiatry at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital.  She is also a visual artist. Born in British Columbia, Dr. Guzder is of third-generation […]

Montreal’s coming of age: Paintings by Julian Samuel

Artist’s statement: During the 1950s in Lahore and Karachi I rarely saw women who were Burkaized or Hijabized. Most women during that era did not cover their head. In the UK in the 1960s I never saw any Hijabs or Turbans. We […]

Exiles

Oh you, who remember Jerusalem too well, Wash sacred rock with your tears. Whether exile has chosen you or not, Do not sing of her to one who has seen A stone is no more than it is. […]

Pavitra in Paris: Stories for Life by Vinita Kinra

Pavitra in Paris Stories for Life by Vinita Kinra Greengardens Media, Toronto, Canada, 2013 Vinita Kinra, who has recently published her first book, Pavitra in Paris: a collection of eleven short stories (www.vinitakinra.com), was born in Canada in 1975. […]

Baarìa & Chimanigasse

Chimanigasse Through the kitchen window: walnut trees in bloom. Forsythia. Alpine foothills, granite cliffs by the old railroad tracks, Chimanigasse, the Magyar refugee camp Ungarnlager Korneuburg — 220 beds, 270 mattresses, 25 tables, 28 chairs. […]

Namesake and Volver

Slowly the skin gets depoliticized mottled and flaky. The throat parches over Beleaguered, crotchety and shaky . The shoulders cringe Blue veins, snake rivers Crawl, where muscles Once showed off Slowly, the voices, of mothers and fathers get closer To […]

Le caramelle dei banchieri

This is a short story in Italian by Pietro Ferrua [the synopsis in English by Mirella Bontempo follows the original]. Ferrua’s most recent publication is “John Cage, Anarchico ‘Schedato’ in Brasile”(Ocra Press, 2013), an account of how the Brazilian […]

Lahiri’s Elegance: Stand Alone Characters in Lowland

The Lowland. A Novel. Jhumpa Lahiri. Random House India, 2013. A priori The Lowland appears to be yet another novel about the immigrant experience, the alienation imposed by geography, the gut-wrenching loneliness of the expat, the numbing pain of losing […]

Romani, Love and Italy: On Reading Nawrocki’s Cazzarola

Cazzarola! Anarchy, Romani, Love, Italy: A Novel, Norman Nawrocki, PM Press, 318 pages Disclosure: I always loved gypsy culture. From Tony Gatlif’s films to his soundtracks and sometimes even the works by non-Romani Balkan filmmakers who examine or exploit […]

Dispatches from FIFA

El Amor Amargo de Chavela or Dreaming Chavela, if you wish, is a 2013 documentary about Mexican ranchera music singer Chavela Vargas who died in 2012 at the age of 81. This documentary is what  at first sight appears […]

Unusual Gardening

If I believed in fate as an intelligent force, I would see my relationship with Jay as predestined. From the very beginning Ma Kirton, his grandmother, wanted us to be friends. Not sure if to this extent, but she’s dead […]

An Unexpected Visitor

“Sometimes we revolutionaries are alone; even  our children see us as strangers.”– Che Guevara The “guest speaker” was coming; and the Party bosses were at it again. Hush-hush everything seemed, or sounded. But I also wanted it […]

The Ladder Is Gone – Part 2

[Editorial note: Part one was published in December 2013.] III. Shakespeare, Nothingness, and the Audience An actress who worked professionally in the 1920s said to me of Shakespeare: “To appreciate him, I think, you have to realize that Shakespeare was […]

My Multi-Ethnic Friends & Other Stories

My Multi-Ethnic Friends & Other Stories, Cyril Dabydeen, Guernica Editions, Fall 2013,206 pages I waded into these short stories with no inkling of what shoreline I was leaving, what stones were underfoot, what spirits were alive in the water. […]

A Good Day

The knock comes as Ellie scratches at the remnants of a dream. A chilly wind on her cheeks. Moving against gravity high up into the blue, her head tilted towards a melee of trills and chirps. Ellie squeezes the sounds […]

Keeping the Shards of Sleep

Cricket’s on the TV. It’s on but you’re not watching. You’re lying on the couch in front of the TV, but your back is to the TV and your face is burrowing its way into the back of the […]

Sonnet: A Corset?

I have become interested in the sonnet form recently after years of writing and publishing books of free verse. My preference is free verse but why not try my hand at writing a sonnet? It would be a […]

Bread and Wine …. after 40 years

An essay on reading Bread and Wine By Ignazio Silone Signet Classics, 2005 – Fiction – 279 pages Forty years ago, I read  Bread and Wine while living in Calcutta. Despite my indifference  towards the folks who wrote […]

Short and Sweet and Contemporary

I used to take my short stories to girls’ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her? Ray Bradbury Women want love […]

I Worst of All

No, it was not you I was thinking of when you caught me. I didn’t answer you last night, because to give such an answer is no answer. It merely opens the floodgates to more questions. None of […]

Persistence of Trauma

Does she usually read this way? Always in the same room? Is the tiny black object on the trunk (on the steel cabinet) really a bird? Why exactly am I moved by this image? There are 48 black-and-white photographs in […]

How The Armadillo Lost Its Armour

As Trixie and I filed out of the interpretation booth for the coffee-break, a smiling woman intercepted us. Trixie and I exchanged a look, returned the woman’s smile and said hi. She explained that she was training as a […]

The Princess in the Desert

After two months cruising the southwest Mexican coast, picking up poco espanole and John, I was ready to go home. We caught the ferry at Puerto Vallarta and landed before noon on the tip of the Mexican Bahas. We planned […]

Two Poems

In the Drear Light of Zoo I see my shadow Elongated Etiolated, uprooted And high Plugged into the miracle Of electricity I buzz harmonies Of post-bop Kabala The Caliban of a soul I have Crouches in hiding […]

The Walmartization of the U.S.A. – Parts I & II

Part I This country’s fathers’ paramount desire was this – pursuit, unlimited, of wealth. But Jefferson, whose land and slaves were surely wealth enough, wrote “happiness” instead and not because he’d had his fill, but since he thought […]

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

G. Willow Wilson is a boundary and border crosser of the rarest variety–a sophisticated political thinker who is also a cracking storyteller. In Alif the Unseen, she gives us a novel whose thriller elements are in perfect equipoise with a […]

Ars Poetica and other poems

ARS POETICA Although I have dreamt of floating virginal and weightless, my blue gown ballooning on an updraft, orange fire rippling off my fingers, I am crouching naked, my pale breasts stretched slightly, brown nipples spilling into […]