Friday, July 04, 2008
A root of evanescence
Have you ever heard of Sankofa? It's a concept that stretches across many cultures in west Africa, about the idea of going back to get what you have lost. It's usually symbolised by a bird turning back to its own tail, sometimes with an egg in its mouth.
Sometimes a thought can be better expressed in poetry than in prose. Tell me what you think of this poem about Sankofa by my fellow blogger Fenix.
Sometimes a thought can be better expressed in poetry than in prose. Tell me what you think of this poem about Sankofa by my fellow blogger Fenix.
------
Sankofa
if it was important enough to be taken from you
then it is important enough to be fought for
if you've lost sight of your legacy
and you can't place your roots
if you know what was taken from you
Return and get it.
if it was important enough to be taken from you
then it is important enough to be fought for
if you've lost sight of your legacy
and you can't place your roots
if you know what was taken from you
Return and get it.
Black Fenix, "The Spirit of Sankofa"
Monday, June 23, 2008
Sauvage
All right, I'm about to get all NPR on you.
On Friday I was riding my bike home from work, and I almost literally ran into strawberry season. I was riding by the Peterborough Artspace, and I saw this sort of epic sculpture made out of plump, poised red berries, and I noticed a sign out front that implied, 'Come in - something is new and there might be a handful of fruit in it for you.' I immediately parked my bike to investigate.
I walked in and admired some of the acrylic paintings hanging of places I was familiar with, but with all of their English and French names erased. Instead, they were painted over with older names, a few of which seemed vaguely familiar (Tyendenaga, something that sounded like Ottawa) but most of which were totally foreign to me. But they were all around this place where I am living now. Someone came in to offer up the plates of strawberries for the taking if we were hungry. I took a paperplateful. I kept looking and sucked all that sour sweet red nectar off my fingers. Standing with a friend I'd run into staring at one of the paintings of two different maps of the Great Lakes region, my friend asked me what we were looking at. A woman came up beside us and said, 'Turtle Island.'
Within a few minutes I was surrounded by about 40 more people, and just when I thought I was going to collapse from the heat of all those bodies, the woman who'd announced the upforgrabsness of the fruit welcomed everybody into the space and told us she was proud to host this, artist Christi Belcourt's showing, as the kickoff for the weekend long Ode'min Giizis, or Strawberry Moon, festival. There was more prayers and songs in Anishnaabe and then Christi took us all upstairs to see a slideshow of her family and their story.
She was from Curve Lake, a First Nation not far from here, but her parents and her grandparents never taught her their language (which I gather was Ojibwe, but don't quote me on that). In this tepid but much needed debate that started about the legacy of residential schools in Canada after Harper apologised on behalf of the Canadian people this month, it was powerful for me to see and hear the loss in her voice and in the pictures she showed of this sudden break in the continuity of her family history. It reminded me of the breaks in my own family's continuity, severed nerves that should have linked me back to Hakka, to Danish, to Gaelic, to Dutch and lord knows what else. To feel that immediacy of sensing that something unknowable is lost and can never really be brought back.
She talked about her experience trying to relearn the names of places around North America, or Turtle Island, that they had before the Europeans arrived. About her art's attempts to reconcile her past and this deep well of collective memory she was trying to tap into that was cut off from her by centuries of settlers claiming ownership over 'true' naming rights on this land, claiming the right to say what the real names are of the rivers and moraines and forests they met. She showed us a film her husband made of her painting a work she called 'So much depends upon who holds the shovel.'
The night after that it rained, and it rained hard. Lately I seem to be just missing it as I bike home; as soon as I get inside my building, I can hear the thunder and feel the pressure change and the wind shift and suddenly it's a torrential downpour outside and I worry about rust. It was dark outside, pretty late at night and I was on my laptop when suddenly lightning cracked not far away (thank you, science lessons I learned from Poltergeist) and all the lights went out inside my apartment and outside on the street. I went to the window to watch the world for a little while surviving without the permanent orange twilight. By the time I'd thought to get dressed and get my keys, everything had flickered and rumbled back to electrical life.
Sunday night was the end of the strawberry festival, and it was kind of funny to see so many people's eyes light up getting directions to U-Pick strawberry fields and buying our little green plastic baskets fresh from Havelock or wherever and just savouring that juicy burst of flavour that just makes you stop and savour this moment, happening right now, not going anywhere at all but over your tongue. My friend Thalia and I were speculating as to why the seeds of a strawberry are all on the outside. She guessed that they're probably just too lazy to grow flesh over the whole thing.
Headlining the last concert of the festival was Cambridge Bay-born 'Edith Piaf-like' throat-singing goddess of the esophagus Tanya Tagaq. Tagaq played with Björk for quite some time touring for Vespertine and collaborating on a capella electronic opera Medúlla, which is about as much work for the untrained ear to enjoy as you might imagine but well worth the journey. It was my first time seeing her play live, and I was pretty pumped because my friend June interviewed her last summer for her radio show on CJSR when she played at the Edmonton Folk Fest, and she just sounded like the craziest, funniest woman, someone who did what she did well and wasn't afraid to do it boldly and still make fun of herself. (June, did you ever get to air it?)
Good lord was it wilder than I could have ever imagined. A few friends of mine went to, and when I told them I couldn't find a seat in the cramped little bar, they said it didn't matter, because we'd be up dancing before long anyway. Dancing? For a singer whose music was mostly grunts and groans and wails?
She came on stage and told us she was 'about to bleed.' Her words. She rubbed her belly. She said she loved being a woman. She's got this deceptively squeaky, adorable voice that she used to tell us how in love she was with her body and being who she was. At the time, of course, she was strutting around in a zip-up black top and the shortest hot pants you've ever seen, with a red hairband though her hair (which I guess was somewhat thematically appropriate with her new album out called Auk/Blood) and a polar bear claw bracelet. It looked like a dagger.
At that point, Tagaq let the cellist and the beatboxer introduce themselves 'sonically,' and she honestly looked so excited, it was like she'd never heard them play before. And then without any clear transition, they started riffing off one another, taking leads from one another, and before I knew it the whole room had swelled and she was on her knees and people were swaying back and forth and sure enough, there were women up dancing around and around. A baby was crying behind me, and I thought of the lightning and I thought of the joy of those strawberries and the sound of a voice and the incredible sexiness of this woman who really and completely owned her body and every sound it made. And I thought of this author David Gessner, who talks about how all of us can live with these wild moments in our lives every day, this wildnerness, that keeps us alive. The sound of grief. The squeal of birth. The pop of a seed sizziling in hot oil. A lover's touch.
Wild moments.
On Friday I was riding my bike home from work, and I almost literally ran into strawberry season. I was riding by the Peterborough Artspace, and I saw this sort of epic sculpture made out of plump, poised red berries, and I noticed a sign out front that implied, 'Come in - something is new and there might be a handful of fruit in it for you.' I immediately parked my bike to investigate.
I walked in and admired some of the acrylic paintings hanging of places I was familiar with, but with all of their English and French names erased. Instead, they were painted over with older names, a few of which seemed vaguely familiar (Tyendenaga, something that sounded like Ottawa) but most of which were totally foreign to me. But they were all around this place where I am living now. Someone came in to offer up the plates of strawberries for the taking if we were hungry. I took a paperplateful. I kept looking and sucked all that sour sweet red nectar off my fingers. Standing with a friend I'd run into staring at one of the paintings of two different maps of the Great Lakes region, my friend asked me what we were looking at. A woman came up beside us and said, 'Turtle Island.'
Within a few minutes I was surrounded by about 40 more people, and just when I thought I was going to collapse from the heat of all those bodies, the woman who'd announced the upforgrabsness of the fruit welcomed everybody into the space and told us she was proud to host this, artist Christi Belcourt's showing, as the kickoff for the weekend long Ode'min Giizis, or Strawberry Moon, festival. There was more prayers and songs in Anishnaabe and then Christi took us all upstairs to see a slideshow of her family and their story.
She was from Curve Lake, a First Nation not far from here, but her parents and her grandparents never taught her their language (which I gather was Ojibwe, but don't quote me on that). In this tepid but much needed debate that started about the legacy of residential schools in Canada after Harper apologised on behalf of the Canadian people this month, it was powerful for me to see and hear the loss in her voice and in the pictures she showed of this sudden break in the continuity of her family history. It reminded me of the breaks in my own family's continuity, severed nerves that should have linked me back to Hakka, to Danish, to Gaelic, to Dutch and lord knows what else. To feel that immediacy of sensing that something unknowable is lost and can never really be brought back.
She talked about her experience trying to relearn the names of places around North America, or Turtle Island, that they had before the Europeans arrived. About her art's attempts to reconcile her past and this deep well of collective memory she was trying to tap into that was cut off from her by centuries of settlers claiming ownership over 'true' naming rights on this land, claiming the right to say what the real names are of the rivers and moraines and forests they met. She showed us a film her husband made of her painting a work she called 'So much depends upon who holds the shovel.'
The night after that it rained, and it rained hard. Lately I seem to be just missing it as I bike home; as soon as I get inside my building, I can hear the thunder and feel the pressure change and the wind shift and suddenly it's a torrential downpour outside and I worry about rust. It was dark outside, pretty late at night and I was on my laptop when suddenly lightning cracked not far away (thank you, science lessons I learned from Poltergeist) and all the lights went out inside my apartment and outside on the street. I went to the window to watch the world for a little while surviving without the permanent orange twilight. By the time I'd thought to get dressed and get my keys, everything had flickered and rumbled back to electrical life.
Sunday night was the end of the strawberry festival, and it was kind of funny to see so many people's eyes light up getting directions to U-Pick strawberry fields and buying our little green plastic baskets fresh from Havelock or wherever and just savouring that juicy burst of flavour that just makes you stop and savour this moment, happening right now, not going anywhere at all but over your tongue. My friend Thalia and I were speculating as to why the seeds of a strawberry are all on the outside. She guessed that they're probably just too lazy to grow flesh over the whole thing.
Headlining the last concert of the festival was Cambridge Bay-born 'Edith Piaf-like' throat-singing goddess of the esophagus Tanya Tagaq. Tagaq played with Björk for quite some time touring for Vespertine and collaborating on a capella electronic opera Medúlla, which is about as much work for the untrained ear to enjoy as you might imagine but well worth the journey. It was my first time seeing her play live, and I was pretty pumped because my friend June interviewed her last summer for her radio show on CJSR when she played at the Edmonton Folk Fest, and she just sounded like the craziest, funniest woman, someone who did what she did well and wasn't afraid to do it boldly and still make fun of herself. (June, did you ever get to air it?)
Good lord was it wilder than I could have ever imagined. A few friends of mine went to, and when I told them I couldn't find a seat in the cramped little bar, they said it didn't matter, because we'd be up dancing before long anyway. Dancing? For a singer whose music was mostly grunts and groans and wails?
She came on stage and told us she was 'about to bleed.' Her words. She rubbed her belly. She said she loved being a woman. She's got this deceptively squeaky, adorable voice that she used to tell us how in love she was with her body and being who she was. At the time, of course, she was strutting around in a zip-up black top and the shortest hot pants you've ever seen, with a red hairband though her hair (which I guess was somewhat thematically appropriate with her new album out called Auk/Blood) and a polar bear claw bracelet. It looked like a dagger.
At that point, Tagaq let the cellist and the beatboxer introduce themselves 'sonically,' and she honestly looked so excited, it was like she'd never heard them play before. And then without any clear transition, they started riffing off one another, taking leads from one another, and before I knew it the whole room had swelled and she was on her knees and people were swaying back and forth and sure enough, there were women up dancing around and around. A baby was crying behind me, and I thought of the lightning and I thought of the joy of those strawberries and the sound of a voice and the incredible sexiness of this woman who really and completely owned her body and every sound it made. And I thought of this author David Gessner, who talks about how all of us can live with these wild moments in our lives every day, this wildnerness, that keeps us alive. The sound of grief. The squeal of birth. The pop of a seed sizziling in hot oil. A lover's touch.
Wild moments.
Labels: aboriginal stuff, arts, life, music
Monday, May 26, 2008
Undelicate interplay
I was biking to school today and caught a mouthful of insect. There's pollen everywhere. I haven't breathed normally in a month. Oh my god, spring is so erotic.
Labels: life
Monday, April 21, 2008
The damndest thing
So, apropos of nothing, a story.
This weekend, I went to a big Bengali New Year to-do in Toronto. Big event, lots of samosas, harmoniums everywhere, kids running around waiting to get back to their ipods in the car. And I'd really been looking forward to it. I went to the concert two years ago, and last summer my friend Muniq, whose parents perform in it every year, brought me back a panjabi she'd picked up while they were visiting. It's basically a really long loose shirt, nice buttons up the front, and convenient pockets at the side for your matches, your moustache wax, whatever.
The concert goes great. She and her sister and her cousin and I have a blast tagging off selling CDs outside the hall and ducking in to see the performance. When I get to the auditorium I feel ever-so-slightly self conscious being the "fairest" dude there by about seventeen shades but I meet lots of aunties and uncles and it ends up being a great time. Afterward, her cousin says he wants to go to Denny's. So we go home to Brampton and drop off our stuff, and Muniq and her sister change out of their saris and we drive down for the all-day breakfast.
We're looking at the menus, and Muniq and I are flexitarian so we decide to get a veggie omelette and the other two go for the same. The waiter comes by, takes our order, looks at us - Muniq's cousin and I still in our panjabis, the other two in sweaters or whatever - and he says:
White toast or brown?
I think I was still laughing when the onion rings arrived.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
One hundred clicks
The lytic phase, the lytic phase!I took a bio class in university for the first time this semester. I like biology.
1. I get to play with expensive chemicals
2. I get to figure out how things work, but I'm not always right and often there are many things which remain a mystery
3. I am passing the course by a wide margin, giving me a smug sense of self-satisfaction thinking of the registrar's office at my old university telling me I would be unable to do so
4. There are increasingly bizarre things to learn about every day. Like bacteriophages, viruses that attack bacteria. The picture above is an actual electron micrograph of one. Bizaaaare.
Also this is my one hundredth post. Yay! Have a piece of cake on me.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
A heart collapsing
In the interest of keeping in mind that no story can ever be told as if it were the only one, here's a very different take on September 11th by Suheir Hammad, sent to me by my good friend Maria. It's decent to hear from someone who felt very differently about all those bodies that fell with all that steel and glass, dig.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
The Heart is a Lamentable Hunter
I CAME TO A REALISATION/NON-REALISATION THE OTHER DAY about the music I listen to. For some reason, I am powerfully attracted to artists who are fascinated by the stories of where they come from. Lhasa, Tagaq, Amal Murkus... these women sing in languages I don't even know how to conjugate verbs in, but I can't stop listening.I thought about that this evening at dinner with my grandma. Yes, I took my mom and my grandma out for Valentine's Day dinner. As horrible/adorable as that is, it was completely worth it for this moment right before we were about to put our coats on. It's generally hard to see any resemblance between them either physically or in personality, though they were both born back in Guyana. But just as we were about to head out, my mother turned to my grandmother and said, 'Are you wearing bifocals now?' To which she replied, 'Well, yeah, and?' And my mom put her face up close and said, 'So am I!' and showed her her brand new 'progressive lenses.' I asked if that meant they voted NDP and got a withering glare.
Ana Castillo seems like she's been consumed by the same questions for her whole life. One of the most renowned Chicana authors, her work straddles the intimacies and contradictions of lives straddling Mexican and American traditions, languages, and identities. Where Sandra Cisneros is a cold Chicago day though, Castillo's writing is more restless, more urgent, more hungry. Her 1986 book The Mixquiahuala Letters is a raw, candid series of snapshots in the vagrancies and heartaches of two women living through these questions of self and self-love and half-love.
The book is written as a series of correspondences from one woman, Teresa, to another, Alicia. Teresa is mestizo - chicana, hispanic, that sweet compromise between Indian and European (in the Latin American sense) - and Alicia is white as day (take that as you will), and both are helplessly drawn again and again back to Mexico, where they travel throughout the book not to meet anyone but themselves, not to lap up any beach but the landscape of their own bodies, their own capacities.The words 'passionate' or 'fiery' come to mind when I think of Teresa, but neither is appropriate for her busty recklessness, her determination to become herself after she briefly entwines with man after man, her steely sense of never being able to be just one thing at one time. Imagine if Penelope Cruz in Volver met Malena, and they went drinking, and they started arguing, and they started shouting, and then this woman neither of them knows comes up, finishes their bottle of whiskey, and starts dancing with their boyfriends. This might approach Teresa.
The book is as much about the chasms between men and women as it is about their questions of being gringa or Indian, Mexican or Nuyorquina. Teresa and Alicia seem at best cynical about the prospects of genuine love. Most of the men that pass through their lives are sad, abrasive, or beautiful and heartless, which is not a completely inaccurate summary of our gender, but Teresa especially seems to chafe against the expectations of what being a man or being a woman means in these cultures.
'Alvaro Pérez Pérez,' she writes, 'was a self-proclaimed healer, an alcoholic, and in love.' One afternoon she waits for him to meet her in the main square of his hometown in Mexico to show her around. Sitting on a bench, she sits expectantly with all her bags for him to arrive, and when he does, he saunters casually over in dark sunglasses and sits down beside her without a word.
'We said nothing for several minutes. Our minds weighed like ripened fruit on the branch,' she says. 'When one is confronted by the mirror, the spirit trembles.'
In and out of fate, superstition, love and grief she and Alicia run, away and toward each other, not tourists but travellers, journeyers of the soul. But the journey they take, like so so so many, is back to themselves. I chew on this as I reflect on the most action I got on this Valentine's Day, and realise it was the Purity Test I took in The Gateway. I did shamefully well.
Ana Castillo photo credit: Steve Tienda. Photo contest results tomorrow.
A note: copies of The Mixquiahuala Letters are not easy to find above the 49th parallel. I ended up ordering mine used from Texas on Amazon (for about $2.00 Canadian, plus $8 postage). Worth it.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Let's meet
Festival Internacional de Poesía de MedellínHere is a really cool example of how poetry can be an integral, positive part of a local culture:
The International Poetry Festival of Medellín started as a protest against the political violence and hatred prevailing in Colombia and especially in Medellín. In the early 1990s, Medellín was ruled by fear, political terror and fighting between criminal groups. Some 100 people could be murdered on a weekend. After 6 pm, the city was usually dead due to a curfew imposed by the paramilitary.Initiator Fernando Rendón says: "It seems a difficult task to find flourishing and tranquil decades in our country in the last 150 years, but the decade of the nineties was particularly sombre and mournful. (...) The festival arose from a proposal to overthrow the wall of terror and fear imposed by the internal feuds of our country." It was an attempt "to create through poetry an atmosphere that without ignoring the spiral of death and the inertial strength of hate could put a little light in this sombre scene."
The idea was simple: By organising poetry readings in the streets, the Festival initiators helped people to re-establish a cultural life and reclaim their city. More and more listeners overcame their own fear and attended the poetry readings.
In 2006, the festival won the Right Livelihood award for its role in creating a vibrant, raucous venue for contemplation and beauty amidst an atmosphere of authoritarianism and intolerance.
Says Fernando Rendón: "The Festival has the conviction that culture must and has to play a fundamental role in any process of development. It has the certainty that arts and poetry will contribute decisively to the up-surging of a new humanity, a new human society."
"The International Poetry Festival of Medellín has maintained and will maintain its efforts, as a way of opposition to barbarism and of looking into alternative routes of democratic and peaceful resistance to the extreme violence that strikes our country, seeking the strengthening and defence of the fundamental rights of the Colombian people: the right to live, the right to have liberty of expression, the right of meeting and the right to create."
You can read more about it here.The motto of the Festival is "Por una paz más activa que todas las guerras." – "For a peace which is more active than all wars."
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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
aside
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