The Point

Friday, December 29, 2006

What to watch: 2007

Björk in snow (bjork.com/Erez Sabag)

Three things to watch in 2007:

Björk's new album - I am waiting with great anticipation for her new record. Her last stand-alone album, Medúlla, successfully caught everyone listening by surprise, to say the least. I appreciate that she doesn't sing for the sake of reaching as many people as possible. Some people want to listen to her experimenting with making beats out of cards shuffling and throat singing; others do not. For those of us that do, so much the better, because she's a brilliant (if bizarre) artist through and through. Now she's apparently working on a hip-hop album of all things. How can you say no to this woman? She's insatiable. The best part? She's reportedly producing it with Timbaland. Yes yes yes.

Darfur and Jan Eliasson - The genocide that wouldn't go away. Kofi Annan just appointed Jan Eliasson, former President of the United Nations General assembly and former Swedish foreign minister, as the Secretary-General's Special Envoy in Darfur. It's way past the point of humanitarian collapse. Aid agencies are pulling out after facing '"unprecedented difficulties" because of military activity and direct violence against them.' Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has conditionally accepted a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force in the region, but has intimated the government may allow little more than logistical support from the UN troops, and only a few hundred of them at that (as opposed to at least 22 000 troops in the joint force that many many corners are saying are urgently needed).

It is an understatement to say that there is something of a conflict of interest here. Why on earth al-Bashir's government, who have been accused of complicity in the genocide themselves, should have the final say in whether UN forces are allowed into the region to bring an end to the slaughter... is simply beyond me. It's absurd. Let's see how closely Ban Ki-moon listens to Eliasson in the new year and whether the international community has the balls to finally act.

Huangbaiyu - On this little village rest the hopes of a nation. Sort of. Despite what the Kyoto Accord might imply, there can be no discussion of creating sustainable societies today without China and India, and the former is taking an ambitious step in a tiny community in Liaoning called Huangbaiyu. William McDonough is the co-author of Cradle-to-Cradle, a book about truly circular ways of living in a very nutritious way which you can expect to hear a lot more about here and which you should pick up now. He's also part of the China-US Centre for Sustainable Development, which recenty launched a project in Huangbaiyu to create more sustainable homes for the residents, taking into account the cradle-to-cradle concept of making things that are locally appropriate, use energy intelligently, and give net benefits to the environment they are part of. The problem? It seems no one asked the residents about the project.

Locals are complaining that the new homes have yards that are way too small to support the small home-based agriculture they depend on to supplement their income, and are far too expensive. So far, not a single one of the 42 homes built in the first phase of the project has any takers. Part of the problem is likely that the 'local partner' in the project, Dai Xiaolong, is the village's leader as well as a chief investor. An experienced businessman, he should be commended for pursuing environmental sustainability for his community for more than just altruistic reasons - after all, no company is going to invest in something for the benefit of society as a whole if it's not going to make them a profit. It seems the project has taken a series of bizarre turns, though. Only one house is solar-powered as planned, the building materials being used aren't at all what was originally envisaged, the houses are apparently being built with garages...

It reminds me, actually, of the lack of consideration of the needs of the actual residents that seems to be threatening the veneer of 'sustainability' over Edmonton's Downtown East plan. It will be well worth watching what happens in Huangbaiyu next year, because the number of fingers in this particular pie means what happens in Liaoning will likely help set the tone for other sustainable development projects in the Middle Kingdom.

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posted by Christopher at 2:05 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Friday, December 22, 2006

Out with it


I have a confession to make. It's time for me to officially come out...
Harry, you're not staring longingly enough.

... as a huge Harry Potter nerd. My primary source for news in all things Potter is, of course, Mugglenet, and they have an excellent cheater's guide on how to mess around on the J K Rowling site to get at the best Christmas present ever: the title of Book 7. It's possible, but not likely, that I have been giddier in the past. Full of mirth, and all that.

If you want to be especially festive, I recommend you check out the Thunder Chunky X-Mas Project. It is essentially the best advent calendar in the world, chok full of illustrated delights, and best of all, December 11th features my favourite cartoonist: John A!

Merriest of Christmases and happiest of tidings. It's going to be jolly.
posted by Christopher at 4:56 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

I have confidence

JUNE AND CENTAVO, IF YOU'RE READING THIS, I APOLOGISE. It was just too timely to wait. You know how I love confluence and coincidence? Our embarrassingly perfect book club recently picked Walsh, the 1978 play about Sitting Bull and Superintendent Walsh by Sharon Pollock, as our yuletide reading. It's a precipitous tumble down a cliff side full of genocidal brambles, cruelty and pride in the l870s as Sitting Bull and the Lakota Sioux he led crossed the Canadian border into the North West Territories seeking refuge from the enraged American government. The callous self-interest of the Canadian government then came sharply to my mind this week as Canada's Supreme Court approved compensation for survivors of another atrocity in our recent history: the residential schooling system.

In 1998, then-Minister of Indian Affairs Jane Stewart formally apologised on behalf of the Canadian government for nearly a century of Church and governmental efforts to give children a 'free and equal chance to that of children in urban centres.' The residential school system was brought in in the late 1800s by the Church of England and the federal government in the hopes of solving the 'Indian problem' our new nation faced in their eyes; by teaching them a proper language, a real religion, and welcoming them with open arms into white Canadian society.

What it amounted to was a systematic effort to destroy aboriginal cultures across the country, taking children away from their families and communities at a young age; away, of course, from the corrupting influence of being brought up 'on the wigwam' in their own culture. In what Justice Minister Irwin Cotler has called 'the most disgraceful, harmful and racist act in our history,' residential schools created an environment of shame, hostility and backwardness for Indian children toward their own culture, Cree, Miq'mak, Haida or Ojibway.

Walsh addresses Canada's difficulties rationalising its national mythologies with aboriginal peoples by introducing us to a proud man brought to his knees by North American conceptions of identity and empire. Sitting Bull, as we meet him, is fleeing the United States with five thousand of his people to avoid their certain massacre in retaliation for the events at Little Bighorn in 1876. Taking hope from the recent grant of a reservation to the Santee Sioux in Manitoba, Sitting Bull hopes to find refuge, and food, for his people. The titular James Morrow Walsh was the North West Mounted Police officer charged with taking up Sitting Bull's case. Pollock, a thoughtful and relatively trusting playright (trusting in her audience, that is), plays well with the friendship that grows between the two men as they gain respect for each other in the black numbness of the seemingly intractable situation.

In neither Canada nor the United States do aboriginal cultures sit well within our heroic national mythologies of conquering wild lands to found nations of freedom and prosperity for all. In the absolutism of that vision, of appropriating an entire continent into one (or two) common vision(s) of wealth and justice for every man, we are somewhat uncomfortable when forced to acknowledge the genocidal atrocities against First Nations that took place in order for us to carve out Trudeau's romantic nation of birch-bark canoers and Henry Ford's oh so democratic land of Model Ts and endless highways. American commander General Terry assures Sitting Bull his people will be safe to come back to the United States, and that no harm will come to him. But with the thousands of 'renegades' he leads who have left their US reservations in protest of the destruction of their way of life, he is certain suffering awaits them south of the 49th.

In Canada, though, his people face the imminent prospect of starvation. In a land once teeming with opportunity for the Sioux, the buffalo are now on the verge of extinction. As a herd finally heads north from Montana, the Americans light fires along the border to drive them back and let the Lakota stew on their hunger (no pun intended). Walsh, a truly compassionate man in the play, is forced to refuse to give any aid on behalf of the Canadians. To the Ottawa government, peace with the Americans is more important than handing out food to some hungry Sioux from the wrong side of the border. They will tolerate their presence in the North West Territories, but nothing more.

Walsh is a play about the suffering myths can cause when seeing them through means destroying people whose way of life does not fit into them, (perhaps worse?) destroying their songs, their dances, their stories, so no myths exist but that of the victorious conqueror of the wicked and the beastial. Residential schools, as plays like Wendy Lill's Sisters so squarely tell us, were an instrument of that myth in action. Undermining children's sense of worth and pride in themselves and in their native culture came with sexual, emotional and physical abuse for many students and a legacy of depression, suicidal tendencies, and a loss of identity that some say continues today.

The most promising thing, then, about the approval of this settlement is the $100 million earmarked for a truth and reconciliation process such as South Africa has seen since the end of apartheid. This, and opportunities like the new Residential School Museum in Portage La Prairie for stories to be told of what happened to those who lived through the system, are what give me confidence that we may hear stronger voices speaking about the destructiveness of our more absolutist mythologies, and of new stories that speak of respect, and of healing, and of trust.

On this point, my friends, I think we may be hopeful.

On perhaps a different note altogether (though is anything ever totally unrelated to anything else?), I'm pretty alarmed about Chuck Strahl's decision to fire Adrian Measner, head of Canada's Wheat Board until earlier today. Speaking of politicians using brute force to bully their ideologies into fruition...

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posted by Christopher at 11:32 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Sunrise at eight


I don't know whether you've heard of this magazine called Ode? My friend Dianne directed me toward it a while ago when we went to go see Carol Off speaking at the U of A. We were trying to figure out what we knew about the cocao trade in the Ivory Coast (Ms Off's topic of the evening) and child slavery and the conversation started getting darker and darker. With marine life in the oceans now on the brink of collapse and journalists in China being regularly harassed and imprisoned, I reasoned, what hope is there for the future?

Dianne smartly upbraided me for that little bit of self-indulgence. We have a responsibility, she said, to be optimistic, to be hopeful and dream big dreams for the future. Our grandchildren's world (and the generations after them) after all, will be shaped - are being shaped - by our choices today. Milan Kundera's musings about kitsch, I think, are what have brought my thoughts so dramatically to swirling pools of cynicism and negativity. She told me to read Ode, because it was a magazine with an outlook of recognition of our world's weighty injustices and cruelties, but courage enough to look brightly at people making a positive difference and encourage them. Purely coincidentally, someone had recommended I pick up this month's issue of The Walrus for the same reason. Sure enough, they were pondering too On Optimism*.

So last week I picked up a copy of both at Front Page down on Jasper. I remembered, actually, that I'd heard of Ode before because of an article they'd published by Vandana Shiva articulating clearly what the real roots of poverty are, and what it means. Bizarrely, I flipped through the Muhammad Yunus article and the excited murmurs of algae-based power on my way to a Christmas party only to meet a woman named Tilly talking about exactly the same way of looking at life (over mulled wine, of course) not an hour later. The research doesn't seem exhaustive, and they certainly seem to have some undue optimism here and there, but I think it's kind of wonderfully subversive to turn to imagination and creativity and hope instead of sheer depression about The State of Things.

Certainly a welcome warmth in the belly of Edmonchuck winter.

*Article available to Walrus print subscibers only (and I'm not one either)

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posted by Christopher at 7:55 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Thursday, December 14, 2006

East

Photo credit: Sarah Lemmon

In case you've been wondering about the Downtown East redevelopment project the city's been talking up this year, so was I. If you are interested, I would kindly direct you to this week's issue of Vue Weekly or, for my French Polynesian and Latvian readers, you can check out my article here.

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posted by Christopher at 2:34 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Pop

M.I.A., Sri Lankan-born UK hip hop artist

Lately I've been really into two things that have more in common than I thought. One of them apparently originates in Brazil, but it seems like an idea with a somewhat universal ring to it. The other has confirmed, for most of my friends, that I am indeed as crazy as I look, but hear me out. I have a hypothesis that hip hop and theatre of the oppressed are different leaves of a self-same tree.

Now, if you know me, you can testify that I probably seem like an unlikely fan of hip hop. I'm still sort of shaky on whether I can use that word interchangeably with rap, but I'm not exactly into Fifty Cent or Nelly, and I wouldn't even know where to buy a Fubu jacket. It wasn't until this summer, though, that I found out rap could be about more than bitches and bling and riding around in your new Benz.

I don't remember how I started listening to K'naan but as soon as Soobax fell into my ear, I heard sweet honey (okay, I'm thinking of this Persian snack, baunieh) and even though I couldn't understand any of the words in Somali, I felt like he understood me. Something about the music made me want to stand up and shout, and I couldn't believe someone was rapping about warlords and refugees. I had the immense honour of meeting him and some of the guys in his band this summer, and I was completely humbled by how quiet and dignified he was. He was singing about seeing his best friend shot in Mogadishu, about suffering and about telling children they're worth something, and yet he had the presence of the most reserved philosopher. I still can't believe it.

So I started wondering if there was more to this hip hop thing, if other people were singing about empowerment and about struggle, instead of just how sweet their new ride was. How could I have known M.I.A. and Cadence Weapon were way ahead of me?

And then I heard a line in one of K'Naan's songs that hit me: hearing rap from the US when he was seven, it made him feel eleven -- 'I understood it,' he says, 'as the poor people's weapon.' And like a glass of water settling down, it all became clear to me, why his music hit me so hard. It made me see hip hop as not just some ivory tower reserved for the beautiful, the educated, the classically trained or the gangstas with more ice than Reykjavik, but as something anyone could pick up as long as they told their story and told it well.

Which brings me all the way around to this Theatre of the Oppressed thing.

A couple of years ago in Beijing, I met Darren, the program supervisor from the other Canada World Youth group in the city and told him about my disparate, seemingly irreconcilable interests. I'd been doing theatre since I was a little kid, and I'd tried acting, directing, design, tech, everything I could get my hands on. At a certain point, though, I had to stop, because I realised I had stopped being passionate about theatre itself, and started craving only the applause. I felt hollow about it, but there was some magic to the act of performance I wanted to get back into. Someday. I told him I felt torn because that thirst was so far away from my other passion, which falls today somewhat loosely under the name international development. How could I reconcile a need to understand the world in the context of other cultures and languages, understand poverty, and still do the stand up on stage and sing thing? Can you see where this is going?

He told me to check out the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and his ideas about education as a tool for empowerment, rather than as a vehicle for filling empty vessels from some esoteric font of wisdom. He said Freire's ideas about popular education tied right back into theatre through something called Theatre of the Oppressed, and then he started talking about conflict resolution and helping kids work through crises through theatre and I remember my brain shutting down and thinking This is so depressing. Why on earth does he think I would want to be part of something about oppression?

Fast forward to about two months ago. My friend Gus called me up and asked me if I wanted to do a cool education thing about globalisation with a Canada World Youth group in Camrose. I'd never been to Camrose (which is shameful, since it takes longer to drive to West Ed from my house) and I think you get a sense now for how much I love CWY, so I said yes in a heart beat and came to the brainstorming session at Remedy with pencil and paper and eager eyes. Well, lo and behold, his idea for this globalisation thing turned out to be a form of popular theatre, better known as... theatre of the oppressed.

As our group started talking about it, I realised what the label meant. We decided to do two skits; one about access to HIV/Aids drugs, and the other about cross-cultural marriages. Rather than doing a conventional sort of morality skit with a wag of the finger, though, we came up with some seemingly insoluble situations for the characters, and let the 'audience' work them out. In the Aids scene, I played a CEO of a pharmaceutical company trying to explain why I couldn't sell our anti-retrovirals for less in poorer countries without losing my job. One of the other characters was a little girl who had no friends at school because they were afraid they would catch her 'bugs.' Tough. So what did they do?

The audience got to ask us all questions in character after the scene. Why are you so heartless? would be a good summary of what came my way. Why couldn't you take a tiny hit in profits in order to save people's lives? And as we broke into smaller groups with a handful of audience members to talk about why our characters made the decisions they did, I realised why this type of theatre ties back to popular education. Rather than pretending we knew everything about the issues involved (which we didn't), the audience members got a chance to throw in their experience and knowledge about HIV and its impact, and threw open doors we hadn't realised existed. Some of the participants who came were from South Africa and Mozambique, so when the girl playing an Aids orphanage relief worker talked about how hard it was for her to watch the kids suffer needlessly because the ARVs were too expensive, there were people in the room who understood exactly what she meant, and weren't afraid to say so. We started having a roomfull of people discussing why a corporation's bottom line comes before a human life, and they started coming up with solutions none of us performing had even considered. It was pretty incredible.

And I last week I realised why this type of theatre works, and what it's capable of. Augusto Boal, the originator of the concept, talked about popular theatre as a tool for confronting the parts of our lives that oppress us, and those that empower us. By using the convention of performance as a tool for discussion of very real issues that shape the way we live, you quite literally begin a 'rehearsal for revolution.' And you don't have to have to go to Julliard to do it. Popular theatre works when everybody in the room is simply there to tell their story and to tell it well.

So finally understanding the way this kind of theatre can be a platform for people who may not have a voice, I started connecting dots with hip hop and thinking again about rap being 'the poor people's weapon.' What they have in common is their ability to let anyone, of any standing or colour, from any country, in any language, speak up and be heard. But I wonder now, who am I, mostly white, able to afford a university education, living in a middle class family in Canada, fluent in English, to tell other people how they can become empowered, to identify with the hardships of my brothers and sisters struggling to feed their families, to fight Hollywood imperialism, to live through civil war? I wonder as I wander.

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posted by Christopher at 7:28 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Saturday, December 02, 2006

It goes without saying

I try so hard not to fall for TV testimonials of how wonderful this or that organisation is, but I've been home a little under the weather these past few days and tonight I was glad of what we had with us on television.

Since today (it's still December 1st, by a hair) was World Aids Day, TLC was running a special about Ashley Judd and Salma Hayek and a visit they were doing with YouthAIDS to publicise the work the organisation is doing in Central America and shed some light on the people they help. I really did my best to keep in mind, Okay, these are celebrities, just because they're being photographed doesn't mean this is an unbiased picture of what YouthAIDS does and donating to them won't necessarily make a difference...

And then I stopped myself and turned off the Poverty Analysis NGO Management Development Modernisation Dependency Paradigm part of my brain.

Reach out to someone today. Or tomorrow, or even better, today and tomorrow.

Sometimes a healthy dose of cynicism makes me realise compassion is much much more healthy.

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posted by Christopher at 1:54 a.m. | link | 0 comments
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