It is generally accepted that the term caste as applied in India was introduced by the Portuguese when they established their first colonies there. The word is derived from the Latin castus which means pure or unmixed. According to some […]
Accordion I passed a man playing accordion on a park bench filling the thick afternoon sunshine with strands that made me homesick for that time I never had in Paris and movies with saturated colours and quirky love stories and he smiled […]
It’s Tuesday night in the back room of le Cagibi, a café in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal that can remind one of images of Weimar-Republic-era Berlin with the place’s muted lighting, clashing bright reds and pale splotchy […]
In the early 20th century, an enlightened Indian sage named Ramana Maharshi lived at the base of a mountain thought to be the incarnation of Lord Shiva himself. Ramana’s radiance attracted many disciples, including westerners like Somerset Maugham. When his […]
The city, with its street grids, the space given over to cars, to stores or housing or public spaces seems, at times, to just be there, part of our everyday lives where we work live and play. But, upon […]
I love the smell of napalm in the morning. –spoken by actor Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, 1979 On May 16, 2003, in the al Baya neighborhood of western Baghdad, a 155 mm. shell was […]
I. Inequality and Breakdown In the spring of 2013 we are still living in an economic crisis of global proportions, marked by inequality and massive injuries of class. That the Dow-Jones index has broken through the 14,000 mark, or […]
ROMA In the last heat, little puffs of fog lift off the marsh like white birds, and although she is kept in the yard by the old frying pan faced maid, Janet knows where in the reed beds the South […]
12 March 2013 In 1876, a number of Saskatchewan Cree and Chipewyan chiefs, faced with starvation due to a decrease in buffalo and with the dire effects of White colonization, signed Treaty Six without consulting Cree chief Big Bear, who […]
This song has been kicking around in my notebook for a while now. I figured what better time to record a version of it than from the balcony of the Lakou Mizik house in Port au Prince, Haiti during Barack […]
Anne Cimon’s new novella, A Room on the Mountain, (Gemma Books, Greenfield Park, Québec), is a story of grief, following the loss of a beloved spouse. It is told by Caroline Sauvé, a fifty-year-old journalist, waiting for heart surgery in […]
Jennie was seven when she first met Tai, her father’s sister. Sadashiv, her father, had been longing to return to India after long years of training and then marriage in London but had hesitated to broach the subject with his […]
Montreal Serai’s cultural critic ***** Le Siecle de Cartier-Bresson. France, 2012. Pierre Assouline. Whoever has seen photographs of Gandhi’s funeral, Nehru’s meeting with Lord Mountbatten and his wife Edwina, the liberation of Paris or other landmarks of the 20th Century […]
Louis Dudek was one of my professors at McGill University, later he became a friend. As I’ve written elsewhere, what brought me to McGill as a graduate student in 1974 was the desire to study with Dudek. It was one […]
In november, flocks of birds fly in spectacular changing formations over the botanical garden of the downtown roman sky. Les étourneaux sur Rome Comme un nuage élastique Dirigé par une main invisible Malléable et fluide Se dessine dans l’azur Comme […]
Yes, this is a Literature issue and it was always destined to be one. I was going to talk extensively about Literature as we have all known it to be, in the mainstream and alternative sense. The thematic title was […]
Two excerpts from a forthcoming debut collection of short stories, Bombay Wali and other stories, by Veena Gokhale, Guernica Editions, 2013. The book will be launched in April of 2013. Printed with the kind permission of Guernica Editions. Preorder on […]
The Tao Book Club gang was safely ensconced in the corner of the restaurant mezzanine by the time I got there. I peeled off my coat, shook the droplets of water on the dark carpet and sank into a chair. […]
In the mid-1960s Alonzo Martin and his brother Victor inherited a stony farm in the Luberon from a bachelor uncle, a house and barns in various stages of decay, the miniscule arable surface consisting of a few scraggly apricot trees. […]
Artist Statement: Mille et un papiers, les chemins de l’exil s’inspire des échanges avec plusieurs réfugiés forcés à quitter leur pays. Leurs récits habitent et hantent mon imaginaire et sont ma source d’inspiration. Dans ma peinture, j’utilise l’aquarelle, l’acrylique et très […]
…do the bouquinistes along the Seine offer a lesson for us? Sometime in 2004, I was talking with Judy Mappin at her Double Hook Book Shop on Greene Avenue in Westmount, and she expressed how very pleased she was because […]
Partial submission I thought of mailing you a paper-clip then thought again for surely you must have some in a similar small green tray or palm-sized round jar (on its lid a scene of camels, desert, sun) or in a […]
Who made us and our world? The questionhas baffled humans for centuries, and resulted in stories known as the “myths of creation.” Based on oral tradition, many of these myths have been told and retold in different versions. They have […]
Editor’s Note: The following paper was presented at a Conference in Honour of Northrop Frye on the Centenary of His Birth, at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, October 4-6, 2012. Paul Hawkins has previously contributed to Montreal Serai. […]
I Canada – Deformed at home, diminished abroad Activist, journalist, and researcher Yves Engler has just produced an important handbook of our national recessional – The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy (RED Publishing, Fernwood Publishing, 2012). In this small […]
TO BIG BILL BROONZY OF MISSISSIPPI it’s moving and it’s quiet in mISsissipI, MISSisSIP pi, miSSSSiSSSSi pI! and she cries out in protest of the color of her skin: if you’s white you’s alright if you’s brown you can stick […]
An Interview With Meenakshi Shedde There was a rare treat at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in the week of November 14th to November 21st 2012: a retrospective entitled Indian Expressionism. It explored the cinematic links between India and […]
[From the website of Véhicule Press] Véhicule Press began in 1973 on the premises of Véhicule Art Inc., one of Canada’s first artist-run galleries. The large space occupied by both the gallery and the press at 61 Ste-Catherine St. West […]
Take a pinch of Conrad, a soupçon of Chekhov, shake vigorously and you get Rushdie. Not quite, but their forenames were the beards behind which Salman Rushdie hid during the nine-year fatwa against him. 1989 was a low point in […]
The first repetitive notes of piano announce a call to remember; a drawn out saxophone note responds. We are off for the 44 minute improv voyage that makes up Duets for Abdelrazik. If it seems like an unlikely name for […]
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