The Point

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Life seems swell

I CAN'T SAY WHY, BUT SOMETHING ABOUT THE TIDE OF LIFE SEEMS TO SUGGEST THINGS are on the up, so I'm going to take a step back this week from keeping you abreast of my musings on serious events things and let you in on what I have been somewhat more abstractly contemplating lately. Not to say you shouldn't keep up on certain happenings in the world today. This might turn out to something of a preview of books you'll see more about on here later.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Edmonton, about home, about where the borders and edges of this place are, and I'm very interested in a new book by the Edmonton Journal's own Todd Babiak that seems it might be going some way to exploring these things. We're a new city, you see, our historical narrative is not quite deep enough to swim in at the moment, and stories about ourselves are, when written, either seen as humdrum (especially in light of Canada's more glamorous, glitzy metropoli) or not worth reading at all. So The Garneau Block, a book first serialised last year in the Journal, comes as something of a welcome sign to me that we finally be ready to tell our own stories.

I haven't read a page of it yet, though, except for a few snippets I caught last fall, so I'm pretty excited to rip into what's been described as a fairly engrossing novel about a neighbourhood not too far from where I live. I've spent the last few months rediscovering my city, figuring out my own interpretations of our particular mythologies, and trying to seek out the stories here. There are a lot to be told. This books looks fresh, funny, and Todd is also a really compassionate and interesting person, so I am thoroughly looking forward to this read.

At the moment, I'm reading a book called What We All Long For, by Dionne Brand. Brand won the Governor General's award a few years ago for a book of poetry called Land to Light On, and What We All Long For reads like poetry, in a way only really well-written novels can, and it has its stumblings, but I'm interested to see where it lands. It's a book about a city, really, as much as about the characters it follows; we talk a lot about multiculturalism in Canada, but if you're looking for a city where cultures really collide in this country, Brand's Toronto is one place you'll really smell its curried, peppered, shapka-wearing, cab-driving, briefcase-carrying, djambe-playing shapes in all their strange beauty, and her characters breathe this city's hopes and contradictions out of every pore of their bodies, melting into the streetcar tracks and 7-Eleven grunge of College and Spadina. It's keeping me up at night.

What really catches me about this book is the way Tuyen and Jackie and Carly and Oku's histories are shaken up, scratched out, to reveal who they're becoming. Brand is a secretive mistress, and sometimes I feel like her desire to let us sketch out our own mysteries is unnecessarily difficult, but she has a great way of catching you up in their fallacies and graces. The story follows these four young friend's lives as they accelerate forward, and backward, and into and between one another, and there's a subtle sense of pain here in their voices that pulls you into them. It's also about Quy, Tuyen's brother, who was lost in the mad rush of refugee boats on a shore decades before the story happens, as their parents fled Vietnam -- for safety? for democracy? out of selfishness? Brand makes it intentionally difficult to place anyone's motives on firm ground, and challenges your assumptions about choices and dreams her characters move through. She has an inconspicuous but deft hand, and I recommend exploring it.

This last book is one I've had recommended to me through routes that seem to suggest the universe is trying to tell me something. In the past little while, I've read more than a few books, purely by coincidence, that seem to be exploring the same ideas of weight and lightness and questions of the soul, and what path it takes. Have you ever heard of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being? (Well, if you read this regularly, maybe you have). It's a book about a question, really, of whether our lives repeat, or whether they only happen once, whether when we are dreaming we are really seeing our lives ahead or behind us, already being lived. Purely by accident, I happened to read One Hundred Years of Solitude immediately after, and I was somewhat taken aback to see Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most prominent Colombian authors, has been plumbing some of the same depths as Kundera, a Franco-Czech writer whose connections to Márquez, if they exist at all, I have been unable to find. There's something to this question of alchemy, something I don't quite understand yet, that I will have to get back to you on.

Anyway. If on a winter's night a traveler, by Italian author Italo Calvino, seems set to be the next novel in this vein I stumble into. That's all I can tell you for the moment, and I apologise if you were looking for something more politically satisfying this week. Who can write about the state of the world today, when Naguib Mahfouz has met his end? Ah, life looks intriguing these days, my friends. Write me and tell me what you think about it.

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posted by Christopher at 10:40 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Robert found.

I am very sorry to say that earlier today, Robert Barrington Leigh was at last found, but not at all the way his family and friends or any of his community had hoped. Police said they recovered a body in the North Saskatchewan River this morning, which his family confirmed to be that of their son, last seen at Folk Fest last Sunday.

There was a memorial this evening, with some really touching speeches about Robert. So, just so you know. He's been found. My sincerest consolations to his family.

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posted by Christopher at 12:28 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Monday, August 21, 2006

Find Robert

Have you seen Robert?

This young man, Robert Barrington Leigh, went to my junior high, lives just down the street from me, and went missing last Sunday, August 13th. He was on his way to Folk Fest from Old Strathcona through Mill Creek Ravine. There's been a fairly large outpouring of volunteers and community involvement to find this guy, and his family is asking anyone with any information to please step forward and contact them. The police and community members have been searching in Edmonton, but have recently widened their efforts to Toronto, where he is a math student at U of T. If you know anything at all about Robert's whereabouts, or would like to volunteer to help find him, please go to findrobert.ca.

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posted by Christopher at 1:38 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Thursday, August 17, 2006

It is a hard thing


A grandmother remembers at this week's International AIDS Conference. (Tanja-Tiziana Burdi)

PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER, CURRENTLY ON A TOUR of Canada's North, took a moment today in Whitehorse to address concerns about his failure to make an appearance at the week-long International AIDS Conference currently underway in Toronto. The government, he said, is being adequately represented at the conference, and added that he believed the Canadian government was committed to fighting what he called a serious health crisis; today, he announced that they would not make expected announcements on new funding for the battle against HIV and AIDS because the issue had become 'too politicised.' This should not come as a surprise from a government dragging its heels on an issue its predecessors barely feigned commitment too, especially since Prime Minister Harper still seems to believe the HIV/AIDS pandemic is primarily a health care issue.

This crisis has moved far beyond the dimensions of health care, and has become a serious social and political issue that is threatening the very fabric of social structures all over the world. India recently overtook South Africa as the country with the most number of people living with HIV, and within the next decade, India and China are expected to become increasingly major centres of the AIDS pandemic. It is, quite simply, disgraceful--and insulting--that the government of one of the richest countries in the world continues to avoid taking responsibility and leadership in this fight, and no amount of platitudes from Canadian Health Minister Tony Clement are going to negate that.

A couple of years ago, I thought I was going to volunteer somewhere in Africa with Canada World Youth. I'd been entranced by the idea of going to South Africa especially because of a movie my class had seen called The Power of One, an adaptation of an empowering book I also grew to love. I probably still exoticise the idea of going there from this moment with a choir in a prison from the movie, but it led to a book being handed to me by good family friends called Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton (and inscribed with only one word: 'Give'r!') This book has stayed with me ever since, somewhere in the back of my mind, humming, sighing, pushing me forward, and in this book about South Africa, written almost sixty years ago, one may find moments of greatness, sadness, and hope, that speak volumes about the need to take up the heavy burdens in our lives sometimes and do what is right.

The main character in the book is Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo, a man with a quiet life and family in his town of Ndotsheni, whose simple, if not easy, life is shaken by a letter calling him to Johannesburg to come to his sister Gertrude, who has left the village a number of years ago and not been heard from since. Arriving in the city, he is amazed and taken aback in equal parts by the appalling divisions of the society he is part of; visiting the black slums on the outskirts of the city, he sees the poverty and hardship the people there are living through, and wonders why it must be so. At home, he and his wife do not have such an easy time either, and as he departs for the city, Paton beautifully observes her parting with all of their savings to allow Stephen to search for Gertrude and their son in the city; 'she sat down at his table,' Paton writes, 'and put her head on it, and was silent, with the patient suffering of black women, with the suffering of oxen, with the suffering of any that are mute.'

If you were to look for those bearing one of the heaviest burdens of the HIV/AIDS crisis across Africa, where the pandemic is still taking its greatest toll, you would not be amiss to meet the grandmothers who are left to raise the families of their children who have succumbed to it. On the opening day of the Toronto conference this week, a meeting of 'Gogo' grannies was held to introduce grandmothers from Africa raising their children's children (many of whom have contracted HIV themselves from parents) to Canadian grandmothers trying to establish international bridges and systems of support for their African counterparts. This is a truly wonderful initiative, a perfect example of international solidarity and support raising awareness of a cause and making way for concrete change. But the AIDS crisis is so large, impacting so many people in so many ways, that it is still but a small step in a number of monumental ones that must be made if we are to fulfill the slogan chosen for this week's meeting of over 20 000 delegates: Time to Deliver. Each of these delegates represents but one person for every 1500 living with HIV today.

Cry, the Beloved Country was written in 1948, a year before the white South African government formalised the policy of apartheid it continued until in the 1990s, under heavy pressure from the international community to abandon it. In this book, Paton writes passionately that the thing that kept the spirit of apartheid most alive with whites in South Africa at the time was fear; fear of losing a priveleged place in society, fear of losing power. And yet this fear caused so much damage, wrought so much pain; this is mine, that is yours, I will keep to myself and you keep to yours, and you'd bloody well stay on your side of the line. What are we afraid of when we continue to defer truly confronting this pandemic until some distant point in the future, some other time, when it will almost certainly have only grown in proportion and killed millions more? Don't give me the Tony Clement line, that Canada is doing fine, that it's the rest of the international community that must step up to the plate. Not good enough. Canada is committing $800 million the global initiative to fight HIV/AIDS? Great. But how many billions more are needed to provide anti-retrovirals, for the food it must be taken with for those who have none, and for other medicines, and to pay nurses, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, police officers whose economies have been savaged by a disease that cuts across all sectors of society? And now our government has cancelled announcements of further commitments for the entire week of the conference. Where is our moral leadership now?

Of a loss of centre, a loss of place, among the young men and women we are met with in Johannesburg, Paton writes this:

Yes, there are a hundred, and a thousand voices crying. But what does one do, when one cries this thing, and one cries another? Who knows how we shall fashion a land of peace where black outnumbers white so greatly? Some say that the earth has bounty enough for all, and that more for one does not mean less for another, that the advance of one does not mean the decline of another. They say that poor-paid labour means a poor nation, and that better-paid labour means greater markets and greater scope for industry and manufacture, And others say that this is a danger, for better-paid labour will not only buy more but will also read more, think more, ask more, and will not be content to be forever voiceless and inferior.


Of course, what he speaks of is a predominantly black country living under overwhelmingly white rule, and the injustices therein. But there are voices not being heard now, as the AIDS crisis grows. Here in Canada over 60 000 people are living with HIV; last year, the global epidemic claimed more than 3.1 million lives, of whom more than half a million were children. Fields are being left with no one to tend them, schools with no one to teach, children with no parents to raise them. This is not just a health problem anymore, and I am extraordinarily proud of high-profile members of the fight against AIDS like UN Special Envoy for HIV and AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis and former US-president Bill Clinton for demanding lives be put before ideologies, that conditionalities on how money for HIV should be spent, such as on abstinence-only programs and not for sex workers, be scrapped. 'These conditionalities simply never work,' Lewis said yesterday. 'They are usually more destructive than they are in any way effective.'

Let us not fear to be bold, to take action, to put ourselves fully into this fight and to meet it head-on with the people living through it, for this is all of our crisis. Let our politicians put all the resources they can summon into this battle, and let the lives of the millions of people not afforded a spot on stage in Toronto beside Alicia Keys be not ruled by the whims of wealthy donors, though efforts like Bill Gates' are impressive and commendable, but let them instead be empowered to use all the resources we can gather collectively to build capacities and get the drugs they need and let us fight this thing together.

'There is a new thing happening here,' says Kumalo, of his village seeing a rebirth. 'It is not only these rains, though they too refresh the spirit. There is hope here, such as I have never seen before.' Let us carry this hope forward and show we can do more than hold press conferences and make empty promises. Let us be bold.

On another note, if you have been following events in Uganda, you may wonder why I have not written about the tentative peace talks underway between Museveni's government and the Lord's Resistance Army rebels, whose leader, Joseph Kony, has emerged from hiding for the first time in years to work out a deal. The answer is that I am simply waiting and seeing what becomes of this, I am hopeful it will lead to an end to the brutal violence in the region for the millions of people caught up in the war, but if the government keeps shooting rebel leaders and Kony and his troops are not held accountable for their atrocities... well, I am not certain what to think of all this. Write me! Let me know your thoughts on all these things.

Thank you for your patience, for your ears.

This week's photos of the International AIDS Conference were generously provided by Tanja-Tiziana Burdi, a Toronto-based photographer.


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posted by Christopher at 1:02 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

This thing


Come back tomorrow, friends, when new things written by my hands will grace this page as they should have today.

In the meantime, please enjoy the musical stylings of Jason Collett, who is 97% guaranteed to brighten your day.
posted by Christopher at 2:02 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Queremos paz


DOES JUSTICE MATTER? I'VE BEEN WONDERING LATELY. IS it important that a person's rights as a human being be respected? Are we all entitled to the same rights?

One of the more unfortunate controversies here in Canada recently is the issue of multiple citizenship. Because so many Canadians trying to evacuate Lebanon in the past few weeks have been living there for extended periods of time (sometimes years), some are questioning what Canada's responsibilities are to them as citizens. Should our government be obligated to provide a safe means of evacuation from war zones for citizens who haven't been in the country for a number of years? What defines a citizen? And what rights are those citizens entitled to?

I just happen to know of a woman who has not just been considering these questions, she has been living out her loud and resonant answer to them for the past few decades. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala is Rigoberta Menchú Tum's bold, arresting testimony of her life as a Quiché Indian woman in Guatemala, as told to anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debay, and first published in Spanish in 1983 under the title Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. Menchú's life story is as passionate an appeal for the urgent need for recognition of all peoples as equally deserving of basic human rights and freedoms as you will find. I guarantee you that reading her account of the culture and history of her people, and their struggles with the Guatemalan government, will change the way you think about politics and freedom.

I, Rigoberta Menchú is alternately about Menchú's experiences growing up, the culture and history of her people, her family's struggles in their mountain village in the Guatemalan Altiplano, and her gradual embrace of the part she has come to play in fighting for her people's recognition and rights. The book loosely follows her journey from childhood, growing up in her family's village and harvesting corn and other crops down on fincas, to her eventual role as an outspoken advocate for human rights in Guatemala, and passionate work for social reform and workers' rights in her country. Members of her family were arrested and tortured on suspicion of connection with the mostly leftist guerilla rebel groups then engaged in what would be the 36-year battle with the government, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives before it finally came to an end in 1996. Among those arrested were her father, Vicente Menchú, a well-known community leader who helped found organisations fighting on behalf of the rights of poor peasants, and her brother, who was brutally murdered by the Guatemalan army. The book is not a condemnation of Spanish-speaking ladinos, who are only one of the country's twenty-three main ethnocultural groups, and who seem to her as a child to be wholly oppressors and exploiters of her people, but rather a continuous unfolding of layers to reveal the fundamental humanity that binds all people.

One of the most powerful moments in the book for me was when Menchú realised that it was not only Indians who, like her family, had to journey to the coast every year to harvest crops for miserable wages in inhuman conditions; ladinos too, she realised, could be poor. When she sees this for the first time, it transforms how she sees herself and her community in relation to other people living in poverty and powerlessness within in the Guatemalan state. The sense of injustice she feels on behalf of her people for having to migrate to the mountains when rich families take over their land, for the needless death of her two older brothers to malnutrition, for the ignorance of their existence by so many in the upper classes until their clothes become fashionable... it becomes transformed, through a reasonable alchemy, into a sense of injustice on behalf of all oppressed peoples, indigenous or otherwise, and a realisation of her part to play in fighting for their voices to be heard on an equal playing field.

I say this idea, of the need to recognise all peoples' rights to be fairly represented and to fully benefit from their society, is especially pertinent this week because for the first time in over 40 years, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly known as Zaire, has just conducted a national election. Despite claims by some candidates and media that voting irregularities have occurred, incumbent president Joseph Kabila and main rival (and former rebel leader) Jean-Pierre Bemba have so far not been critical of the conduct of the election. It is, to say the least, an encouraging sign in a country where a five-year civil war that ended in 2003 has left millions dead and may yet erupt again; the fighting in the DRC, it should be noted, is connected to a number of regional conflicts, including those in Uganda and Rwanda. This year's election, called by Kabila to establish a democratic mandate for the country's government and replace the interim administration, which includes a number of former rebel leaders, with a fully-democratically elected one, is a landmark in the country's history, and politicians and foreign officials in the region have suggested it could, if successful, set a precedent for the entire continent.

Why does it matter if people have a say in their representation in government? Why bother conducting an election in this vast central African country with a population of around 60 million and an electorate of 25.6 million? Kabila, the successor to his late father Laurent Kabila, who was killed in 2001, certainly could have chosen to hold firmly onto his post, as so many of the country's dictators have done since the DRC's independence in 1960. The country has had a brutal and bloody history in the past few centuries, so why is it worth bothering to strengthen the peace process between the government and former rebels, and give the people of the DRC the ability to choose their leaders?

Rigoberta Menchú Tum's father, Vicente, was the elected leader of their community until the family became closely entangled in the violence spreading throughout the country. Not like a king, she notes, but rather a respected member of the community with influence and guidance in decision making (and a role along with his wife as abuelos, or grandparents, to the entire village). The distinction is important, and though she has a great amount of respect for Catholic traditions and beliefs, and comes to study the catechism to obtain an education, she is critical of Catholic leaders who condemn their level of trust and commitment to these chosen representatives. Their way of cooking, of eating, every tradition their people hold sacred, 'the elected fathers of our community explain to us that all these things come down to us from our grandfathers and we must conserve them,' she explains. 'This is the main purpose of our elected leader -- to embody all the values handed down from our ancestors. He is the leader of the community, a father for all of our children, and he must lead an exemplary life. Above all, he has a commitment to the whole community.'

For Menchú's family, these are luxuries not afforded by the government. Barely growing enough to eat in the Altiplano, they are forced, like many of their friends and neighbours, to make the long journey to work the more fertile fields on the coast for rich landowners in order to make a living, however meagre. I don't mean to romanticise their lives, but Menchú's description of the pain she sees her mother go through as she is forced to watch her children starve to death despite their back-breaking labour is... well, it's difficult to read, let alone swallow. And yet, the government of Guatemala, Menchú shows us, is unsympathetic to the struggles of their people throughout her formative years; the long arm of the law favours educated Spanish speakers (and must be greased with heavy bribes), land seizures by wealthy families are common and turned a blind eye to, and grievous abuses of workers' health and dignity are frequently ignored, if not quietly sanctioned.

It is with an eye to this complete lack of representation that a number of Indians and poor in Guatemala at the time began to take up arms. Vicente and a number of other protestors stormed the Spanish embassy in 1980 to draw international attention to their situation and pressure the army to move out of the heavily-repressed town of El Quiché. 'I am a Christian,' he tells her, 'and the duty of a Christian is to fight all the injustices committed against our people. It is not right that our people give their blood, their pure lives, for the few who are in power.'

Peasants, students, workers, and unions from all over the country joined together to march in the capital and demonstrate against the increasingly militant repression of unions and rebel groups by the government. Every single one of the 'compañeros' who occupied the embassy died when it went up in a fierce fire whose source is still unknown. Having known her father was willing to lay down his life fighting for their rights, she is not stunned so much by his death as by the deaths of so many compañeros in their struggle at once. 'All they wanted was enough to live on, enough to meet their people's needs,' she reflects. The event hardens her conviction to continue to fight for the rights of those in her country who don't own vast cotton farms or hold government posts.

Does Menchú's story matter? Is freedom, real freedom, worth the cost of a life, of a father, of a brother? We have reasonably free federal, provincial and municipal elections on a regular basis in Canada, and many people I've spoken too seem to think the political process is irrelevant, that participation in a democracy isn't worth the effort, that politics are something that happens to other people, and what goes on the in the news has only the most tenuous connection to everyday life. Why then, after 40 years of dictatorships, bloody fighting over resources, plundering of gold and cobalt by domestic and foreign corporations and militias and a humanitarian crisis that perhaps dwarfs even that in Darfur, does it matter that by the end of this month, 25 million people in the DRC will have had their chance to have a say in which direction their country is going? If our participation in the political process is really so irrelevant, why has Kabila bothered?

I admit, I'm not as familiar with Joseph Kabila's attitudes as I am with, say, Peter Mackay's. But a part of me hopes, and earnestly believes, that this election is being conducted not just so a bunch of military commanders and career politicians can validate a sense of entitlement to the run of their country. A part of me believes this election is really being called in the interests of the people who may be able to move the peace process in the DRC forward and have their voices heard in their national assembly. I don't think I'm crazy.

Since Rigoberta Menchú Tum won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, controversies have arisen over alleged factual inaccuracies in the account of events in I, Rigboberta Menchú. In response to these claims, the Nobel Committee dismissed calls to revoke the award, noting that it was not given solely, nor even predominantly, on the basis of the book. It is worth noting the controversy, however, and recognising that the testimony is just that, and as she says, 'The important thing is that what has happened to me has happened to many other people too: My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people.' So while some events deviate from strict biographical observance of what really happened, the book is primarily important in its account of the history and story of an entire people, and in that sense, it is one of the clearest calls for justice, for everyone, that I have ever read.

There are some things worth fighting for, and I don't mean with an AK-47. Justice, I think we can fairly say, is one of them.

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posted by Christopher at 11:20 p.m. | link | 0 comments
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