northshorewoman

My Mother, the Bear

2012-01-17T13:43:00.000-08:00

I will continue with my poem about the Sacred tree,

but I've decided to waylay you with a short story.

My Mother, the Bear.

My mother paints in her eyebrows. Using a Maybelline brow pencil that

needs sharpening, she draws wide choppy strokes along her brow line.

“You should wear your glasses when draw your brows,” I tell her. “And

use a light stroke. You don’t need that heavy pencil.” Her blue eyes

widen, but she ignores me and continues her beauty ritual.

My mother prides herself on her appearance. When people tell her she

doesn’t look her age, she glows. Last month, she turned 78. That means

she has spent 56 years living in Canada. Yet, she still has a heavy

Finnish accent. Her voice cackles at times when she speaks Finnish, an

old dialect from Kauhajoki, the farming region we left behind.

English speakers often don’t understand my mother when she speaks

English. They would say she speaks “broken English.” Even my husband who

sees her regularly has a problem understanding what she’s saying. She

makes up her own words. She uses Finnish grammar when she speaks

English, so her sentences are all mixed up. She code switches, that is,

she throws in English words when she speaks Finnish, and she mixes in

Finnish phrases when she speaks English.

My mother, however, does not think she has any difficulties speaking

English, so she is puzzled when people don’t understand her. She will

repeat herself until her point is made clear.

Nothing stops her from speaking her mind. Nothing.

Her favorite place to shop is the Sally Ann. Every week, she finds a new

colourful used blouse, skirt, or dress. Last week she found a coat and a

purse. Accessories are her favourite. She loves wearing scarves, belts,

jewelry, hats, and gloves—all at the same time. My mother is a colourful

dresser; understatement is not a word in her vocabulary. Everything

matches in her fashion lexicon: stripes with flowers, green with red,

lace with denim, plaid with paisley.

My mother’s lustrous curly hair is her pride and joy. Everyone comments

on her hair, and my mother revels in their attention. “No,” she tells

anyone who asks her, “I don’t dye my hair. I don’t have to. I don’t

have any grey hair.”

My sisters and I shake our heads.

“Your hair is not red, Aiti,” I remind her. “Your hair is brown. And

there’s quite a bit of silver in it now. But you’ve been dying it for so

long, so you think you don’t have any gray hair.”

My mother comes from a family of storytellers. Her father was the

village storyteller of Hyyppa. People came from all around to sit in my

mother’s family’s kitchen and listen to Vesteri’s stories. My mother

grew up listening to her father talking about forest spirits, ghosts,

funerals, practical jokes, neighbours, and people’s misadventures.

Over the years, my sisters and I have noticed that our mother likes telling

stories, too. Like her sister, Irja, she creates new memories all the

time by changing what happened in the past. We tell her: that’s not how

it happened! She laughs at us and continues telling her story of what

happened. She retells family history to fit the truths that she wants to

believe.

My mother drives a car that looks like a small hearse. She wears shoes

that are too small for her feet. She climbs up long ladders to clean

leaves out of the gutter of her rooftop, she mows her own lawn, shovels

her own driveway, drives her 90 year old friends to the doctors and

translates for them, bakes cakes for her church’s bake sales, and writes

poems for everyone’s birthday.

Not that long ago, she heard my father, who died in 2000, talk to her in

a dream. He told her that there was a break in the water line and the

water was seeping into the weeping tiles of the basement wall. He said

the water would cause serious damage that would be expensive to fix. He

told her the leak had to be stopped; he said she had to call the city to

dig up the ground and fix the water pipe. When she woke up, she woke up

my sister, Katja, and told her she had to call the city to come and

check the water line. My sister thought she was crazy, but she called

the city, anyway. Sure enough, when the city workers came to check,

there was a break and water was leaking right where my mother said our

father had told her.

Although my mother’s mouth is small as a rosebud and her nose is small

as a button, that’s all that is small about her. Well, that’s not quite

true. In all honesty, I have shouted at her that she has a small mind.

We argue a lot, my mother and me. We argue about politics and religion.

My voice can get as loud as hers. I can be as adamant as her. Neither of

us ever convinces the other of her truth.

I call her Aiti. That’s the Finnish name for Mother.

If my mother was an animal, she would be a bear. She looks like a

bear—full-bodied, curly hair, brown toned pelt, small inquisitive nose.

Her eyes are like a bears’—intense. At times, when her feet hurt and her

ankles swell, she waddles like a bear does when it walks on two feet.

She is protective like a Mother Bear. She is most protective of her

turf: the Bible and Jesus. If anyone says anything against her Jesus,

her fangs come out and she turns into a grizzly bear. If you challenge

her story of Jesus, she will rise up on her two feet and come towards

you in all her fury. You don’t want to meet her on a path. She will swat

at you, violently. She will rip you to shreds like a salmon between her

paws.

the Divine Goodness*

2012-01-15T20:48:00.000-08:00

A Tree Called Sacred cont'd

Much later, I was brought to Europe,
where I was taken up eagerly.
I gave birth to penniless universities,
flowed in coffee salons of Enlightenment thought.
Abducted by the Dutch, I was smuggled
through the Arab port of Mocha
and spirited away to their colony in Java.

1922. Road through a coffee plantation in East Java from All About Coffee.

I do not do well in high winds, full sun, or pools of water.
My roots breathe and need air.
If you can care for camellia,
you can care for me.
I bloom small white flowers with a jasmine-like fragrance
that spreads sweet and heavy like musk.

COFFEE BRANCHES, FLOWERS, AND FRUIT frontispiece of Ukers' book.

My arms yield clusters of dark red berries
dressed in silverskins. I am seductive.
My earthy scent is irresistible. In the morning,
I crawl next to your sleeping body.
You wake, anticipating my taste.
You hunger for me,
willingly open your mouth,
press me to your lips, and
like liquid gold, I slip inside
and run lightening quick
through your veins.

*the Divine Goodness, from one of the earliest Arabic poems about coffee, 1511

A Tree called Sacred

2011-12-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

Over the next few posts, I will serialize one of my tree poems. This tree poem is a puzzle, too, like my poem An Ancient Riddle Found Standing in the Backyard.

I live on the sides of mountains
in filtered sun, sheltering under the shade
of trees alive with the sound of songbirds
that visit me from the North.

Avocados, banana, jackbean, red-seeded sword bean,
earth nut and monkey nut live alongside me.

I never stray from the Equator.

I call Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, Guatemala,
and Ecuador my home, and lately, Vietnam
but my roots are Ethiopian and Yemeni.

Arab traders carried me to their homelands
With me, created rituals for well-being,
prosperity and the nourishment of friendship.

Imams tended me carefully in their gardens,
guarding me like a secret.
In return, I danced through their veins,
keeping them awake for night prayers.

In Mecca, the Sultan declared me sacred,
but in Turkey, I was grounds for divorce
if a husband failed to offer me daily
to his wife.

trees have rights, too

2011-12-23T10:54:00.000-08:00

Olive tree within a traffic circle within an illegal Israeli settlement within the Occupied West Bank.

Regardless where you stand on the question of Palestine, watching the destruction of olive trees as shown in the video clip above calls into question the tactics Israeli settlers have taken up. Uprooting and burning olive trees? All to claim their rights to, what they call using the Old Testament names, Judea and Samaria, but since the creation of Israel in '48 became known as the West Bank; otherwise known as Palestine. Speaking to the further compartmentalizing of land for political and ecocide purposes yet masked in the rhetoric of claims to "my home," the West Bank has been divided further into Areas A, B, and C:

The Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into three geographic areas. In Area A, in which most Palestinian urban centres fall, the Palestinian Authority is responsible for security (although the Israelis routinely enter Area A at will) but in Areas B and C, which comprise over 80 per cent of the territory, it is the Israelis which are responsible for security. This means Palestinian police are not permitted to protect Palestinian civilians from Israeli settlers in most of the West Bank. The problem is, of course, that the Israelis are not doing this job either and so it should come as no surprise that 95 per cent of settler violence occurs in Areas B and C.

Whether the Palestinian land is categorized as A, B, or C, it seems there will be more uprooting of its trees and destruction of its natural environment to build more homes for Israeli settlers. The Israeli Housing Ministry announced last Sunday that it will build 1028 new homes in ...where? Well, here are more terms to obfuscate the question of where these homes are going to be built:

According to a statement by the ministry, 500 homes will be built in Har Homa in south Jerusalem, on land occupied during the 1967 Six Day War; 348 in the West Bank settlement of Betar Illit; and 180 in Givat Ze'ev, which lies between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

According to official Israeli terms, lands south of Jerusalem are known as Judea, and lands north of Jerusalem, Samaria. In other words, the homes are for Israeli settlers and will be illegally built on Palestinian land that has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

I invite the uprooters of trees and their supporters to watch a short video from System Change. In this clip, Canadian Maude Barlow argues for the movement towards making laws to encode the rights of protecting the trees, forests, oceans, rivers, streams, wetlands, and ecosystems, those interconnected systems of life. She argues for a sacred relationship with Nature, a reclaiming and honouring of these beings / systems of the Commons, protecting ecosystems from marketization, resource extraction, and privatization. I wonder how --and hope that-- the question of Palestine can move forward when the rights of Olive trees are enacted. And let's not forget water as praise for the River Jordan is sung reverently over the holidays.

Canada is not a religion; it's a country

2011-12-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

Rick Salutin on weaing a niqab while taking the oath to become a Canadian citizen. If the clip above doesn't work, look here.

Here are some thoughts he shares, worth thinking about:

people say the niqab doesn't reflect Canadian values but citizenship isn't about sharing particular values, it's about sharing the country.
his grandfather, Himan Salutin, couldn't have been a citizen if he had to share Canadian values of his time; he was an anarchist, He came here from Russia in 1910 and went on strike immediately. That's way he was seen as unCanadian.
Women who wanted the vote were out of step with Canadian values, too.
Today's ultimate Canadian value, medicare, was denounced as unCanadian when it was introduced.
Canadian values are always going through change. If they weren't, Canada would be a religion, not a country.
People who don't share majority values, play an important part, even if they never ask to. Sometimes they help change those values; other times, they help cement them.

Let's all wear niqabs and high heels to protest Kenney's state racism

2011-12-16T18:12:00.000-08:00

Last Monday, Immigration and Citizenship Minister Kenney issued a public decree that women wearing a niqab or burka will have to remove them to say the oath of Canadian citizenship. That in Canada this is targeted at what is less than a handful of women clearly exposes the fears of said minister and the Conservative government he represents and not the impediment to clearly hear the oath, as is his so-called reason. It's only fair and open, says Kenney, if the women want to "join the Canadian family." Our open family. Oops. He just made it clear we are close-minded. He forgot to clarify, too, what type of family he's talking about, which from all the other narrow-minded regressive positions he supports, is clearly not only patriarchal and heterosexual, but also white and Christian -- Evangelical Zionism preferred.

Tabatha Southey has written up a response in the Globe and Mail about Kenney's legal meddling in what women can and cannot wear. Her article, part of which I've excerpted below, chastises Kenney for constricting women's choices. (Meanwhile, in the comments section of Canadian newspapers, one is accosted by the rabid racism and xenophobia that is surfacing in defending Kenney). In her piece, she compares her apparel choices with other women and suggests that whether the choice is high heels or a niqab, what business does the government have in restricting women's choices? Are we a democracy or are we not? I'm reminded of the phrase many years ago when a Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau (Liberal), asserted that "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation"....Those days of inclusive federal thinking are, sadly, gone. As dead as the tailing ponds of the Alberta Tar Sands and our government's Kyoto commitment.

Many people consider high heels and miniskirts to be degrading to women. High heels can restrict a woman's movements. Fitted clothes objectify women, which is intrinsically demeaning to them and prevents them from achieving equality with men – so the theory goes.
Yet women have never worn less and achieved more in the public sphere than they do now, and so – arguably – there goes the theory.
My own feeling is that if it were the men in our society who wore the four-inch Louboutins, we might well theorize that this reflects their privileged position in society: Men know they'll never have to stand all night, or chase after a bus, it would be said of the men in pencil skirts.
....
Mr. Kenney feels that veils are fundamentally at odds with 'Canada's commitment to openness, equality and social cohesion.' Many Muslim women have told him so, he claimed. But surely neither Mr. Kenney nor an unidentified lobby of concerned Muslim women should be making wardrobe choices for adult women, for any occasion – because that is at odds with Canadian values. He's the Minister of Immigration, not Anna Wintour.
Veils are spooky and challenging to many people. You might feel cut off from a woman if you can't see her face, and thus disadvantaged. I'm not sure why people feel they have a right to see a woman's face any more than another part of her body. When my eyes meet the eyes of a veiled woman at my No Frills when her child is yelling about breakfast cereal, they speak volumes, as does her body posture, as quite often does she.
If there's a barrier between a veiled woman and me, it's on my side. It's made of any preconceived notions I might have about why she's wearing what she's wearing, and what it says about her ambitions, education, self-esteem and status in her own household.
I refuse to make those assumptions and I regret any rule that enshrines them. Just as I ask those assumptions not be made about me, based on my shoes. Click, click, click.

Style Covered

on the other side of blue

2011-12-15T13:24:00.000-08:00

If you are feeling blue, here is sound and eye therapy to lift you up, but not in that saccharine way that just makes you feel hopeless--hence, more depressed about the state of the world. The song is "Meadows of Heaven"; it is 7 m. long, but be sure to listen and watch the whole thing.

Written by Finnish musician Tuomas Holopainen (lyrics below) for his band, Nightwish, the song is from from their album Dark Passion Play (2007). Nightwish's music has been called "symphonic metal." Now, do not let that categorization stop you from listening! You will fall in love with this song; it is very captivating. The person who put together the visual clips for youTube has done an amazing job visually mapping the rise and fall, the hopes and despairs, encoded in the song's musical story.

While Tuomas looks like he crafts his metal persona as a cross between Johnny Depp and Keith Richards, in the lyrics for "Meadows of Heaven" he takes up the persona of the little boy inside the man.

Meadows of Heaven. Tuomas Holopainen

I close my eyes
The lantern dies
The scent of awakening
Wild honey and dew

Childhood games
Woods and lakes
Streams of silver
Toys of olden days

Meadows of heaven

The flowers of wonder
And the hidden treasures
In the meadow of life
My acre of Heaven
A five-year-old winter heart
In a place called home
Sailing the waves of old

Meadows of heaven

Rocking chair without a dreamer
A wooden swing without laughter?
Sandbox without toy soldiers
Yuletide without the Flight

Dreambound for life

Flowers wither, treasures stay hidden
Until I see the first star of fall

I fall asleep
And see it all:
Mother's care
And colour of the kites

Meadows of heaven

Grandpa said....hang on to the wind

2011-12-13T08:28:00.000-08:00

Erkki Rankaviita singing "Pappa se sano," a traditional Finnish folk song. Rankaviita, who was born in 1927, is an award-winning folk singer known for old-style humorous working-class folksongs that carry social truths.

"Pappa se sano," which translates roughly to "Grandpa he said" is entertaining and interesting, both for its humour and its historical and social commentary on class, family, and gender roles. It is very much from the oral tradition of story-telling. The video above captures that sense of gathering in the tupa/ the kitchen/living room of the house and sharing one's stories through song.

His song tells a story about Grandpa saying let's buy a house, but then how will we eat? How will Grandpa buy those pretty earrings for daughter-in-law? Grandpa wants more riches; Grandma wants more loving..

He also sings "You, me or somebody else." More Finnish folk songs here.

snow calligraphy and a plume on the lake

2011-12-11T12:16:00.000-08:00

I saw this snow calligraphy on the ice this morning. What message might the hand of the wind on the canvas of snow-on-ice etch?

I woke up a bit groggy and a bit later than usual, but I knew that Tassu would be waiting for me and the lamb bones, so I popped my cosy stockinged feet out of bed and booted it down to pick her up. As usual for Sunday a.m., we walked along the shore of Lake Superior. In years gone by, there would have been a solid ice cover at the shore in December, but winter is no longer as cold and as hard as it used to be. Today, the December ice and water seem to be in a shifting relationship of give-and-take. Even they don't seem to know what to make of it; what is expected of them. What is water one day will be ice the next, what is ice one day may transform into a low rolling wall of vapour, but even on the coldest days, you will see eyeholes or cracks of water and hear the susurration of water as it breathes and laps against the edge of ice.

If you stand quietly by the lake shore early in the morning, you will hear the whispers and groans of ice and water as they find space for each other in the same place. Sure, sometimes you hear a loud snap, but when you turn to look, you see harmony.

The ice is thin; last week much of the shoreline was still water. Last time I walked along the lake, I stopped to watch a big circle of clear ice float and feel its way along the shore, as if it were travelling to a place to call home. Two smaller ice circles bobbed behind it like ducklings paddling behind their mother. I saw a few ducks last week, but now all I saw was this ice bird looking out from the snow dusted ice.

I stood looking at this clear sweep of ice ribboning its way out into the lake for quite awhile. Did someone pull a toboggan way out on the lake? Would someone be so foolish to go out on the ice now when it's so thin, unpredictable, and mortally dangerous? I noticed a thin line running along center of this plume, as if it were a tire tread. Did someone ride a bike way out on the lake ice? Impossible, I thought. The ice wouldn't hold them; they would have broken through and fallen into the lake.

The plume left its own question mark. So, I'm not sure, but I surmise that this is a natural pattern made by shifting plates of ice.

visual poetics or poetic visitation? Suheir Hammad

2011-12-08T21:19:00.000-08:00

Suheir Hammad's recent visual poetics.

Her new poetry project is a multimedia initiative — Hammad in her own words, with activists and artists helping her sing the visual tempo, in an exquisite short film “dreamed, directed and created,” as she says, by Waleed Zaiter. Zaiter is a New York City-based animator, designer and alchemist, according to his website.

Marja Kalaniemi's ryijy

2011-11-27T13:03:00.000-08:00

Marja Kalaniemi, renowned Finnish accordionist

The other night when the moon was new, I did a short storytelling performance for a circle of women. My sister, Katja, assisted in the performance and our sister, Della, participated through long distance mentoring and by singing a song (which we played from her CD). I performed a story that my sisters and I collectively wrote for the last issue of New World Finn; we called our story "The Old Woman and the Barefoot Maiden." It is a Finnish Canadian women's re-visioning of pre-Christian mythic Finnish women as the changing seasons.

When the opportunity came up for me to contribute some creative energy to a women's moon circle, I offered our story, reincarnated through a storytelling performance. So, I set about collecting various props to help me bring the story to life. Some of the things I used in my performance included an upside down sheep skin that stood in for a white reindeer skin; a small deerskin medicine bag that I once bought at the Napapiiri in Finland; inside this small pouch I put small chicken bones that I cleaned and dried, which stood in for bleached ptarmigan bones; a black loopy vest with two black feather boas attached to it which represented the Black Swan who carries the corpse of the Old Woman to Tuonela; a black, white and stone grey Marimekko huivi; old red patterned wool socks knit by our mom; a ball of red yarn; a huge (abandoned) crow's nest I once found down at the waterfront; and a number of other things.

When Katja and I prepared to practise our story last Sunday, I said we need something big to put under the crow's nest; something that I could sit on behind the nest, but that we could then easily pull out of the way. I hunted around my mother's house and found her old brown ryijy rolled up on a top shelf in the laundry room.

"This is perfect!" I said to Katja.

We unrolled the old brown ryijy, put the crow's nest on top of it and began. We went through the whole performance; halfway through, our mother came back from church and came downstairs, wondering what her two daughters were up to. She sat and was our audience as we went through the story one more time.

Of course, knowing my mom, I left out some of the more "pagan" words so that her Christian radar would not come out screaming. There were a few parts that she looked a bit perplexed or troubled by, but, all in all, she loved our story! Of course, she told us how we needed to change vanha akka to ....I said, mom, it doensn't matter, no one will know 'vanha akka' anyway as we are translating it to "Old Woman."

Our satu, our fairytale performance, passed it's first --and harshest (i.e. most important) critic-- an old Finnish woman who doesn't think she's old.

Perfect!

Now, today I was listening to Finnish songs on YouTube and one of the tunes I clicked on was Marja Kalaniemi (one of my favourite accordion players). I watched the clip above and could not believe it--there is the same old ryijy that my mother brought from Finland hanging on Marja's wall! The same dull brown colours (except Marja's is much brighter than my mother's, which is really muted in colour.) Maybe Marja's is a reproduction? I don't know.

On the night of my storytelling performance, the old brown ryijy onto which the crow's nest sat was first used for the centre of our circle, around which the women sat, candles flickering. So this old ryijy was reincarnated on a darkening November night in northern Ontario. Who was the woman who made it? I will have to ask my mother the story of how she got the ryijy.

What is a ryijy?

Taika metsȁ [Forest of Magic]

I ryijy is a textile once used for multiple purposes, depending on the historical time. Made by women on a loom, it has been used throughout the years as a covering for a sleigh, for a heavy winter bed cover, for the wedding prayers -- come to think of it, I think I recall an old black and white photo in my mom's archive of photos that shows her old brown ryijy on the ground in front of an old wooden country church as the bride and groom (my mom and dad? her sister and her groom?) step down the stairs, out of the church's front doors -- and more recently, as wall hangings for decoration.

The ryijy above, The Forest of Magic, was designed by Toini Nyström in 1941. A renowned Finnish textile artist, she designed over 400 patterns between 1918-1950, which are archived at the Friends of Finnish Handcrafts. A prolific and well-loved artist, Toini's unique patterns are visible in many Finnish homes and churches. At her summer home, she became a student of gardening, an initiate of the natural world. Inside her summer cottage, she would sit by the window and look out at the nature around her, carefully studying the natural world to forecast the coming seasons. Her Magic Forest pattern evokes the beauty of the Finnish natural world, which comes alive through her magical hands.

definition of rhetoric

2011-10-14T09:56:00.000-07:00

The powerful short film, "I Am Not Moving," juxtaposes Occupy scenes with footage of the Arab Spring alongside a righteous-sounding Hillary Clinton and Obama on the people's rights of expression and assembly.

I had no idea of the violence being used against the people demanding economic change in the US. I should, of course, have expected it as a Canadian whose own neo-conservative government brought out security forces en masse to stop, harrass, bully and beat Canadians from protesting the G 20 meetings in Toronto.

It seems the people angry at the profits of the economic warlords share concerns about the destructive paths of economic globalization as it touches down in our countries, our cities, our neighbourhoods, our lives.

It also seems that governments, elites, and corporations wherever they are in the world share a 'superstatehood' existence, one that exists above the laws of democracy, human rights, and justice, one of security whose primary goal is protection of the powerful economic winners through the violent suppression of any peoples, anywhere, who are voicing their demands for economic change.

The video above (7 m) shows some of the 'security' tactics taken up by US police forces to stop citizens from expressing their anger over economic injustices. Just who are they protecting these security forces? Corporations? The clip makes clear the hypocrisy of US politicians, the way that they use rhetoric, rhetoric that sounds like change but rhetoric that actually has more in common with clubs, teargas, water jets, and force than with language that actually actualizes political and policy change.

One thing that is missing from the above video, however, is a bit of humour. Now, I know that humour is in the streets, too, as it is a survival strategy of people everywhere to get through anything. Below is a clip that I think should be added to the above: students at a university in Turkey throwing eggs at an IMF speaker who had come to give them a keynote, I mean, more empty rhetoric:

History Lesson poem on Palestine

2011-10-07T16:03:00.000-07:00

Victory. Sauda Camo.

Today, I went out with a poetry crew to put poetry into the streets and other places where people gather in the city. Once a year, in early October, joining other cities in Canada, poets roam the streets, cafes, parks, schools, libraries and other places, dropping lines randomly on unsuspecting people. It's called Random Acts of Poetry.

On Sunday, while I was walking Tassu a few lines popped into my head; I thought, hmm. This is my poem. This is where I start.

Yesterday I sat down at my laptop at 9 a.m. and stayed there til 9 p.m. and wrote my poem. "Don't bother me," I told my family, when they called me to come eat, "I'm writing a poem about Palestine." I pedalled off for an hour to teach a yoga class, then pedalled back and continued writing my history lesson on Palestine in poetic form. My language is straightforward and my rhyme simple, sometimes full rhyme, but also slant or half rhyme, too. Although other years I read a different poem at each stop, this year I decided to bring only this one poem with me to the four stops on the route I was scheduled to participate in. I decided I will encode Palestine's history onto the streets of my town, voice its history to the listening ears of folks in my town, most who know only the Israeli version of the so-called "Palestine/Israel conflict."

Our first stop was Calico's Coffee Shop. What a coincidence that a Zionist-defending female Jewish rabbi from Israel, from Jerusalem, just happened be in the coffee shop when we walked in. Below is my poem that made her so angry. One thing I forgot to tell her as she berated me loudly, that here in Canada, unlike Israel, we are allowed to speak our mind about Palestine in public places. She should not bring her Israeli style silencing to Canada. It won't work here. We can defend Palestine and be pro-Palestinian; it's a constitutional basic human right in Canada. Hopefully, Israel one day will see that this right extends to all people, not just a "chosen few," but all people--especially Palestinians.

63 lines for 63 long years; or, “Don’t Stand in the Doorway, Come in.”

Israel is the state, Palestine is the land
If you don’t know the history, let me lend you a hand.

In the beginning, here’s my word:
Don’t confuse Israelites or Hebrews with the Israeli Jewish population
The first two are Biblical, but the last, a result of Zionist nationalization.

Jews are Semites, but Palestinians are too
So if you accuse me of being anti-Semitic, exactly against who?

European Zionists created Israel in 1948
But they had been preparing for years for a settler state.

A nationalist movement, it is unjust that Zionism sought to install
a Jewish-only state where Palestinians were the majority above all.

Zionist plans for the Palestinian people as written by Herzl and Jabotinsky:
violent colonization, dispossession, dispersal and death if they don’t flee.

Were others involved in this heinous plan for expulsion and dislocation?
Yes, feudal landowners who were Arabs, PM Smuts of South Africa, Lord Palmerston, the British, the Balfour Declaration—there’s a long list of damnation.

Economic relations, racism against Jews, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, too,
helped Zionists replace the Palestinian population with a settler community that was new.

Were there Jewish people in Palestine before ‘48?
Yes, Mizrahi, Arab Jews and Palestinians of Jewish faith.

Understanding the Israel/Palestine conflict is not complicated
It’s the story of colonization through Palestinian oppression, simply stated.

In finding the truth religious fundamentalism is surely a concern here
Especially the homegrown type: right wing Evangelical Christian Zionist fervour.

Let me state: a two state solution is not the solution
It will continue persecution, extrajudicial execution, racism, and more bandustans,
What is needed is just resolution: retribution, right of return, and redistribution of land.

A two state solution will retain all the problems, this means prisons,
illegal settlements, Jewish only highways, sniper towers and militarism.

And let’s not forget water; while an Israeli family takes a dip in their swimming pool,
A Palestinian farmer has no water for trees and crops; don’t you think it’s a bit cruel?

Speaking of trees, olive trees are uprooted daily by Canadian made machines
On an ethical level, I ask you to question what this means.

And did you know, Diefenbaker Parkway and Canada Park are built on occupied land,
funded by Canadian tax dollars? Tell me, shouldn’t this be banned?

Canada, the US and Britain say they speak out for international law and democracy,
But their one-sided ideological & economic support of Israel reveals severe hypocrisy.

1.6 million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, which is the same size as our Giant,
Surely you would agree that a density per km of 4073 would make anyone defiant.

Palestinians in the West Bank number 2.3 million, inside Israel another 1.4 million
many millions more in the diaspora, and refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

A total of 11 million Palestinians are seeking a homeland, a state,
Where they’ll have their freedom instead of Israel dictate.

Arrest without trial, demolition of homes, other human rights negation,
expulsion, land appropriation, depopulation, checkpoint humiliation—
these are only part of Palestinian subjugation.

From refugee crisis creation to Jerusalem confiscation,
The Palestinians have survived, resisting devastation.

All the Israeli state methods of separation and occupation
won’t stop the Palestinians from seeking their liberation.

Their struggles, the Intifada, the uprising, has been 63 years long
But they pass their resistance to the children through stories and song

and Darwish:

You who stand in the doorway, come in,
Drink Arabic coffee with us
And you will sense that you are like us
You who stand in the doorways of houses
Come out of our morningtimes,
We shall feel reassured to be
like you!

The Berlin Wall came down and apartheid in South Africa did decline
But, my friend, where is your voice against the Apartheid Wall in Palestine?

Don’t forget also to join the BDS campaign
that is, boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel’s capital gain.

And, a history lesson without the stories of people is only a part
so I suggest the novel Mornings in Jenin as a good place to start.

Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, and If Americans Knew
can tell you some more—just skip mainstream news, hit the net, the truth will come through.

Say it loud, speak it proud, speak it loud, say it proud
Long live Palestine. Free Palestine

Shop in Palestine

dance for roadkill

2011-10-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

In our city, run over grey squirrels are a regular sight. You better not get too attached to those critters that visit (and sometimes live) in your yard--or house. In my neighbourhood, grey squirrels are always crossing the street, back and forth, up and down, foraging for food, taking risks. Sometimes they cross by squirrelling on the overhead hydro wires that cross the street, but usually they prefer to run across asphalt. Our city is car culture supreme. Cars and trucks are a continuous presence. This squirrel was scampering across Van Norman but, poor thing, it found itself under the tires of a vehicle. Crow notices these sorts of acts of carnage instantly. Crow often comes quick to the spot. Here Crow is doing a dance for roadkill, celebrating supper. However, I warned Crow: watch out, you may be next. Crow kept on dancing, and jabbing in for a peck.

Crow is not he only one who finds roadkill tasty, people dine on it too:

Roadkill enthusiasts in Canada recommend roasting beaver, which should first be soaked in salted water overnight after removing all fat.Squirrel is said to be excellent when broiled on a stick over a camp fire.

re-reading Dalila

2011-10-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

Deception or Samson and Delilah. George Grie, 2008

The story of Sampson and Delilah continues to invite interpretation. Above is a neo-surrealist, gothic, digital visual interpretation of the oft-told tale, that mashes together a digital age, Grecian, Salvadore Dali'an, wilderness landscape, and model-on-the-runway panorama.
Here's a 1949 depiction of the same story, different context, different media, same characters. This is the Samson and Dalila (Sampson and Delilah in English) movie poster for the 1949 film.

It's an interesting film / story to decode for Orientalism, particularly in light of the Palestine/Israel conflict where Palestinians (the victims of oppression and occupation) have been made into violent terrorists--sneaky by nature--through contemporary media representations and discourses.

Along with the way that the characters in the film can be used to support ideas of current Israeli people’s threat from treacherous Palestinians, who are “out to get them” no matter how much the Israelis offer them a chance at peace negotiations, the film has a Biblical mythology encoded, too. The film can be read through these two lenses by drawing on gender, racialization, and power relations.

In short, the film is based on an old testament story; the Old Testament is a Hebrew text that Christianity took up and made part of the Bible. In the biblical story Sampson is an Israelite and Dalila is a Philistine. Neither of these two groups of people exist today. However, many people confuse ancient Israelites with Israelis today and people confuse the Philistines with Palestinians. Both these ancient groups were tribes and while there are some connection to people today, there are many other tribes and ethnic groups that mingled together to evolve into contemporary Jewish people and Palestinians (who by the way also have intermingled). Whatever their complex ethnic origins, the truth is they are both Semites. Family.

Now, it is important to keep in mind that the word “philistine” is a derogatory term that means someone who is uncouth, ignorant and uncivilized. A barbarian. As this word relates to tribes who are one of the ancestors of Palestinians, the connotation of ignorant louts transfers to them.

How can you reason or negotiate with someone who is base?

Base:

a. Having or showing a contemptible, mean-spirited, or selfish lack of human decency.

b. Devoid of high values or ethics: a base, degrading way of life.

c. Inferior in value or quality.

On a gendered level, Delilah is viewed as the seductive woman — the femme fatale — who uses her beauty and feminine wiles to seduce the man, Sampson. She is the dangerous sexual woman who is the downfall of all men. She uses sex to get her man. This is her business. She is a prostitute, an unattached woman. She is an icon that has been repeated over and over again in literature and media. She loves her man, but she’s evil and can’t be trusted. He loves his woman, but she’s evil and can’t be trusted. Lots of movies today repeat this old story in various forms.

And let's not forget Tom Jones belting out "Why, why, why Dee-li-lah?" in 1968 and for many reincarnations afterwards.

In this biblical story that is repeated in a version in the film, because Sampson is powerful, others who want power seek to bring him down. Delilah is sent in--greedily pocketing money-- to find out the source of his power (which is his hair). She cuts it off. There are lots of paintings that show his emasculation at the hands of woman. So, a woman is seen as having the power to wilfully destroy masculine power–make him impotent, powerless. This is a gendered reading.

However, Dalilah (her name is pronounced more like Dalilah in Arabic) is also a “Philistine”– the enemy of the Israelites. Now, the context of viewing and reading shapes what meanings we make; the film was made in 1949, the year after the state of Israel was created by European Zionist Jews who had to make the Palestinians their enemy so they could expel them from the land, wipe out their villages, and ethnic cleanse the cities of Palestinians. It's the story of war: you have to dehumanize the Other "side" so that you can kill them with impunity and go to bed at night with clear conscience.

During these times (and earlier and still to this day) the Zionists were constructing a story about the danger of Palestinians who will seek to “drive them off the land” (I am aware that Zionism is not a monolith and that some Zionists saw themselves as good socialists making a utopia in a new land...except maybe they somehow forgot that the land was being lived on by almost a million people called Palestinians??). But back to the film: the film was based on a book by a Zionist who had written it much earlier (and who did the screenplay), who had been a member of the Irgun, a proto-Israeli terrorist group that went into Palestine to kill Palestinians. These Zionists knew that people had to be removed, by terror, by death.

Sampson pulling down the temple. Looks like his six-pack needs a bit of 21st c personal-trainer-to-the-stars buffing up

In the end, Dalilah not only represents the seductive, treacherous, dangerous woman, but the destructive, treacherous, dangerous Palestinian who by stealth will bring down the power of Israel and all Israeli Jews. After the seductive woman has done her work, the Philistines, in the movie and the biblical myth, cruelly torture Sampson, blinding him. Being a “Man”, however, he is not so easily wiped out (think of the film Rocky here) so he undertakes a feat to show off his power once and for all, show off his superhuman masculine potency, but causes an entire monumental building to fall on him, Delilah, and all the Philistine people, killing them all.

So he gets to be the martyr hero who loses his life but saves his people by killing “the enemy.”

In sum, through the ways the film re-narrates the biblical story at the time of Israel’s establishment (the film was based on a novel by a Zionist, Jabotinsky, who had worked to establish the state; indeed, many institutions and streets are named after him in Israel as he is seen as a “founding father”), Dalilah represents the threat of the Palestinians to bring down the house of Israel. Which is a narrative repeated over and over again in the news media of the West today. The Palestinians are dangerous. The enemy.

Orientalism: Hedy Lamar as Delilah in the 1949 film, Sampson and Delilah.

And in the end, the film and the biblical story can be interpreted to read that only when all the Palestinians are dead is there a chance for Israel to survive.

Maybe the leaders of Canada, the US and Israel, who want to stop the Palestinians' call at the UN to be recognized as a state, have been either

a) watching old Hollywood movies that create simple stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly (with 'the bad and the ugly' being assigned to Arabs), or

b) reading the Old Testament.

divorcing the digital

2011-09-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

image source

Hello readers, I apologize for my absence over the months. The reasons are, of course, many as reasons tend to be for each of us and our complex lives. Our lives don't fit into a tweet, although some people do twitter away their lives in little parcels of words, sending them out like a message in the bottle, hoping someone will respond.

Sometimes I divorce myself from parts of myself that seem undivorceable, like divorcing myself from having anything to do with Finnishness. That's those times when I bear witness to and get angry at the narrow-mindedness, racism, and evangelical fervor that closes ranks rather than opening doors. But how is it possible for me to divorce my Finnish 'part'? Of course, it's not, so I always come back.

Anyway, there it is in the mirror, that Finnish part of me lurking behind my increasingly slanting brows whether I decide to divorce it or not.

I sometimes divorce myself from the Arab or Muslim part of my extended identity (for readers of my blog, you will know that I am neither by descent but both by marriage, children, family, and home(s)). That's when I am challenged to re-think and look deep within myself for the Westcentric--and Christian (even though I divorced myself from my Christian upbringing a long time ago)--ideas that hide in my brain like glass shards even though I have done my best to get rid of them. Maybe it's like Kai and the glass splinter in his eye that he can't get out. It just traveled there and so he has to go on a journey, a difficult one, to remove the icy splinter. So it's those times when my Finnish Canadian upbringing gets exposed for the upbringing that it is: Finnish immigrant and Canadian. Need I say more?

And sometimes I divorce myself from being married...actually, I think I've done that a few times over the years. But I have always come back. Sometimes I divorce myself from the university and its increasingly consuming bureaucracy and my fears of being swallowed by "the system" and ending up becoming one of the professors that I was so critical of when I was a student. The ones who lost their creativity and only talk about other people's creativity. The ones who don't do any social activism or justice work but talk about what an important thing it is to do. Whole conferences are devoted to that. And, there are the ones who teach their students about class, sex, and sexuality, but race/racialization is always the ampersand problem.

And sometimes I divorce myself from motherhood, from being a mother. Sometime I wonder if I have indeed done the best I could or was I too busy with my work and my own pursuits? But divorcing motherhood is, of course, impossible because I cannot return to a nullipara womb--and there are those three adult children whose bodily presence speaks of the motherwork I did, moving in and out of my everyday life.
These past months I simply divorced my digital identity. I had had enough of digital existence. It was hounding me everywhere. I couldn't escape it. I felt consumed by it. So, my blog fell into the ditch of neglect. I saw it lying there, an orange icon staring back from my toolbar. But I just left it alone. It neither called me to come and play, nor did it incite me to put on my grammar gloves and punch out my latest rant and rage.

Who knows why people come back? Maybe it's because it is part of who they are and they simply can't get rid of it--whatever that 'it' is-- even if they want to.

We Are Not All Israel

2011-06-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

Boy George....to Shakira. These folks need to take a stand rather than pretend it's business-as-usual.

I hope more people speak out to challenge entertainers, singers, musicians, writers, and celebrities who do not consider the BDS campaign against Israel. The BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement has a lot of support from different groups, including J-BIG (Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods), PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel), Facebook's Don't Play Apartheid Israel, Boycott from Within Israel, and many more.

The list of entertainers et al who support Israel and fail to contribute to dismantling the oppression of Palestinians includes Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Margaret Atwood, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Boy George, and now, Shakira.

Well, Najla Said, an American actor and writer, has given Shakira some things to think about.

Najla Said: An Open Letter to Shakira: We Are Not All Israel

June 24, 2011

If only everything was like “Waka Waka,” but unfortunately not everything is as euphonious as a pop song.

By Najla Said

Shakira,

Since your trip to Israel this week was ostensibly one of “good will” and humanity, and since in your speech to the Israeli Presidential Conference you stated that you are “convinced…that investing in education is the best strategy for peace and global stability,” I am going to give you an education. In humanity and solidarity.

Let me start by saying that I was a fan of yours before your mainstream American commercial success. I loved your Spanish albums, and I loved you for seeming like a rebellious little punk who dyed her hair funny colors and sang melodiously along to crunchy “rock ‘n’ roll” guitar riffs about how messed up you were over a boy. You reminded me of the Spanish Alanis Morrissette. When you released your first English language album, I was a little sad that the whole world would know about you, but I was also excited for them to, because you loved to talk about being Lebanese. So even though your English lyrics were laughable and you dyed your hair blonde and became a Britney Spears clone like they all do, you were still you, shaking your hips and banging your drums and telling the world that belly dancing was in your blood, because you are Lebanese. And when Wyclef Jean said, “Let me see you move like you come from Colombia,” as you did your famous hip gyrations, a few of us who are also Lebanese cringed, but we got over it because we were proud of you.

Don’t get me wrong, Shaki, I don’t want you to go back to being your younger self. I am glad that you, like Alanis, grew up and discovered love, peace and happiness, but you might have thought a bit about what it means to be educated before you spoke publicly about how important it is. I don’t expect you to be “political.” I know you are an entertainer and it’s not your job to “be political.” But you made yourself political from day one by showing off your Lebanese-ness.

Here is the thing about being Lebanese or Arab; you kind of have to love us for who we are and what we feel as much as you love us for our hummus and our belly dancing because for the first time in a long time we are proud of where we are from and are able to speak out about injustices that have been committed against us and our loved ones for decades. And here you are, making us feel shitty and hurt. You weren’t an Orientalist before because you seemed to be one of us, but now, my love, you are.

The modern state of Israel shares geography, but nothing more, with the “Abrahamic” religions that may have originated there.

As a UN goodwill ambassador, you maybe should have thought about the hundred or so (give or take) UN resolutions that the State of Israel has defied before hugging their President, Shimon Peres. You might have thought of visiting Gaza instead of one of the rare schools in Israel proper, where Israeli and Arab children, who are fortunate enough to be allowed citizenship, learn together. In 2006, you spoke out against the Israeli war on Lebanon, and called for an end to the fighting. In your statement, you said, “We do not need leaders who create dispute, anger and hate, but rather leaders who care about the people and their needs.” Well, your lips lied on that one, honey. Again, I need only to point to your ridiculous love fest with Peres at the Israeli Presidential Conference yesterday to prove my point. People who actually believe in peace and goodwill do not ignore half the people in the equation when they set out to perform acts of peace and good will. They don’t hug former military leaders (even ones who have a Nobel Peace Prize), and they don’t say things like this:

“I am very happy to be in Israel, because I believe this is the perfect place to talk about how urgent it is to make education a priority. Israel has been a great melting pot of cultures for so many centuries. It will continue to be. In my song ‘Waka Waka,’ I sang how we are all Africa. Today I want to say that as part of western civilization we are all the inheritors of an Abrahamic culture and a soul that has been forged here; therefore, we are all Israel, too.”

We are not all Israel, Shakira, and that’s the point. The modern State of Israel shares geography, but nothing more, with the “Abrahamic” religions that may have originated there. Some of us are Palestinian and cannot be Israeli. Some of us are from Gaza and cannot even go to Israel. Some of us are Lebanese and have been bombed by Israel. Some of us are Jewish and don’t believe in what Israel says and does. That doesn’t mean it has no right to exist; it does, but so do we.

And since you spoke of children and education, I’d like to leave you with something that Alice Walker said the other day about her decision to ride on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza. It sums up everything I am trying to say much more beautifully than I ever could:

“I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the Israeli child, the Native American child, etc., is equal to all others on the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behavior that makes children everywhere feel afraid.”

Thank you for your time, Miss Mubarak (Hey, come to think of it, are you related to the dude who ran Egypt for a really long time? Because that would explain EVERYTHING!).

Love,

Najla

Copyright 2011 Najla Said

Strength and Struggle book launch

2011-06-21T07:31:00.001-07:00

Please join Rachel Mishenene and Jody Porter as they launch the book Strength and Struggle: Perspectives from First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples in Canada. This book was edited by Rachel Mishene and Dr. Pamela Rose Toulouse. It includes writing by Joseph Boyden, Cherie Dimaline, Richard Wagamese, Jody Porter, Elliot Doxtater-Wynn, Mishene and Toulouse and many more First Nations, Inuit and Metis writers.

The book will be launched on:

Wednesday, June 22 at 7:30 pm

at the Northern Woman’s Bookstore (65 Court St. South)

From the publisher, McGraw-Hill Ryerson:

"Strength and Struggle: Perspectives from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples in Canada is part of McGraw-Hill Ryerson’s iLit Collection of supplementary student resources for high school English courses. This title is a 149-page, soft-cover book that includes a rich array of short stories, poetry, music lyrics, graphic art, articles, essays, and other pieces that will have students laughing, crying, talking, and thinking. It is a true celebration of First Nations, Inuit and Métis writing and art."

from Lakehead University News:

Rachel Mishenene, a contract faculty member and MEd student in the Faculty of Education, was one of two education advisors for McGraw-Hill's Native Studies / Literacy textbook, "Strength and Struggle: Perspectives from First Nation, Inuit and Metis Peoples in Canada." With her co-author Dr. Pamela Toulouse, Rachel selected numerous well-crafted and inspirational short stories, poems, recipes, songs and beautiful visual and graphic art by First Nation, Metis and Inuit people across Canada and then developed rich corresponding lessons.

Hope to see you there!

the dangerous mathematical formula of finance

2011-05-31T20:42:00.000-07:00

This is not an inkblot test but if it was a Rorschach Test what might this waterscape on a misty morning say about your emotional state? Calm? Depressed? Dismal? Soft? What? I took this photo from the overpass looking down at the breakwater in Lake Superior.

People see different things in the landscape around them, and read things differently. Some read way too much into what's before them. For example, in Toronto, an artist's mural on a railway underpass wall, which he was paid by the city to paint, was erased this Monday by the same city, which "used grey and white paint to completely blot out the mathematical formula incorporating Morse code symbols and grim-faced businessmen with yellow halos" because, because why?

Because one person complained that it was a political message with an anti-Stephen Harper message:

Elyse Parker, a director in [Toronto] city’s transportation services department, said the artwork was erased after a resident complained it was political. City records suggested the older north wall mural was commissioned, but not the one on the south wall, she said.

“This was not approved by the city and we would not endorse any kind of mural with political messaging,” she said. “There was some discussion that the mural referred to Stephen Harper. That’s the suggestion, that’s what it looked like to us.”

Richardson [the artist] says the mural “had nothing to do with Stephen Harper” — while it is “subversive and anti-freewheeling capitalism” — and his friend Benjamin Blais was the model for the businessman.

Good grief. What sort of censorship is this? Isn't art supposed to provoke reactions? Get people to think? Shouldn't we have MORE art like this that challenges people to think about what they're living inside of? Participating in?

This over-reaction says something about the conservative mindset that is in power in Toronto's municipal government. See the "offensive" artwork below:
which now looks more like this:
Seriously, I think some folks working for Toronto City Hall need to have their heads examined. Either that or someone needs to make some art about it.....maybe Joel Richardson, the artist of the dangerous math of capitalism will get paid to make more art now thanks to the city's really stupid move that's sure to create quite the buzz........

I ain't lost, just wandering

2011-05-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

Each day brings something unexpected to our routine of life. You only have to open the door to find the magical just below your feet. Or up in the sky. Or right before your eyes. A gift given to you, unasked. All we need to do is walk into our days with our eyes and hearts open.

Sometimes, I wake up and say to myself, should I go on my walk this morning? I hem and haw. I don't feel too inspired. Sometimes, all the work that I have to do that day will run through my mind, filling every corner, and I haven't even popped my feet out of the bed. If it's past 8 am, alarm bells ring in my work ethic conditioned DNA; I feel anxiety.

OMG, it's late. Get moving! I've got lots of work to do. OK, think. Think. WhatdoIhavetodotoday?

But those mornings when life feels so uninspiring are exactly those times when I need to continue with my routine. With the pattern of my days. And, without fail, some message will cross my heart. Arrive at my doorstep. Or my pedal. Like the other day, when I was pedalling to a meeting with a satchel of notes and printouts, I heard the call of ...a loon? What? There isn't even any water close by. Sure enough, when I stopped my bike to look up into the sky, a loon flew straight over my head, flying due east to Lake Superior, calling out his arrival.

This afternoon, I first thought I saw snow falling outside the dining room window -- which is not improbable right now as we've had some up and down weather, with frosts at night. A snow flurry now? What the....But when I stepped into the porch to get a better look, a squall, not of snow flakes, but of flower petals filled the air. A northeast wind was whipping the flower petals off our neighbour's 60 year old plum tree. The petals had been released into another dance, once closer to death.

Adele. Hometown Glory

I've been walking in the same way, as I did,
Missing out the cracks in the pavement,
And tutting my heel and strutting my feet,
"Is there anything I can do for you dear, is there anyone I could call?
No and thank you please madam, I ain't lost, just wandering.."

Round my hometown, memories are fresh,
Round my hometown, ooh the people I've met,
Are the wonders of my world, Are the wonders of my world,
Are the wonders of this world, are the wonders and now,

I like it in the city when the air is so thick, and opaque,
I love it to see everybody in short skirts, shorts and shades,
I like it in the city when two worlds collide,
You get the people and the government,
Everybody taking different sides.

Shows that we ain't gonna stand shit,
Shows that we are united,
Shows that we ain't gonna take it,
Shows that we ain't gonna stand shit,
Shows that we are united,

Round my hometown, memories are fresh,
Round my hometown, ooh the people I've met,
Are the wonders of my world, Are the wonders of my world,
Are the wonders of this world, are the wonders,
Of my world, of my world, yeah, of my world, of my world yeah.

a Magnolia bandit in my yard

2011-05-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

A bandit wearing a black mask surprised me on Queen Victoria's Birthday! As I wasn't expecting to find him there on my back deck when I looked out the back door window, he startled me. But I think I startled him, too. From behind the hops and the yellow dogwood, he just suddenly appeared on the railing. He looked right at me and then left like a shot. But he was there long enough for me to get a good look at him so I would be sure to ID him. And, the black mask was a dead giveaway. There aren't many who wear black masks, that I knew.

I had gone into the back porch after setting the dining room table with four of my Royal Standard MADE IN ENGLAND bone china coffee cups and saucers with the small blue forget-me-not pattern that my mother gave me for my birthday once years ago (maybe my 40th?). I had already brewed a pot of loose leaf Twinings CLASSICS EARL GREY TEA, and it was almost 4 pm. -- time for royal tea in honour of Queen Victoria.

What else to do on a rainy holiday Monday afternoon but take up a bit of silliness? Of course, if you are a regular reader of my blog you will know that I am not a monarchist, so celebrating a Queen's birthday, a colonial queen to boot, is not exactly a regular habit of mine.

But Monday being the second day of steady grey, drizzly rain, and chilly weather on a long weekend meant to signal the start of summer, and Monday being what in Canada is called Victoria Day in honour of Queen Victoria, and as every now and then I have to do something silly in order to stay sane, I decided to have some British tea (i.e. one of the crops its colonized) in British fine china cups (did they appropriate the process of china, too?) with a slice of cake at 4 pm in the afternoon. I had some willing accomplices: one of my friends, one of my sisters, and my only husband. They were all game for the tea party, albeit some of them (e.g. my husband) more of a a captive audience than a willing participant.

I was so excited when I saw the little bandit! I had never seen him before, not in the city, not in the woods, not on a trail, nor in the neighbourhood. So I did not know his name, but I looked him up and sure enough, there he was. I had no idea if he'd been in my yard before. But he was gorgeous! I just had time to note the black mask across his eyes and his beautiful yellow breast streaked in black. And that he was no bigger than a tea cup!

magnolia warbler

Norman Finkelstein on Obama's speech

2011-05-24T12:35:00.000-07:00

“the wonder is that there are so few skeptics.” Norm Finkelstein

I heard Norman Finkelstein speak about 8 years ago at York University to a packed house. His views on Palestine and Israel are troubling to Zionist and pro-Israeli groups, and the Zionist students had come out to heckle him. The university had sent in police for security but as the majority, like me, had come simply to hear his views on Palestine and Israel, so the police did not have much to do. I hope they found his talk informative!

Failing to recognize International Law, as the Americans continuously do, is hubris, showing once again the US's imperial arrogance. In his recent speech to AIPAC, Obama reiterated the US's iron-clad support for Israel, yet Israel continues to flout international law. Why should the US and Israel be above international law? Above the UN? Do they both believe blindly that Manifest Destiny will see them through the next 20 years? I hope more and more people will go to the borders of Israel on Nakba Day. Maybe one day there will be a million unarmed people at Israel's borders, demanding change. What will Israel do? Kill them all?

Obama's gift of rhetoric cannot hide the hypocrisy of his words. Above, watch a 3 min clip of Norm Finkelstein interviewed on Democracy Now, with some critical words about Obama's speech. Why isn't Finkelstein an advisor to Obama? Maybe CHANGE will become a reality, not just rhetoric.

pink washing

2011-05-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

building illegal Israeli settlements in Ariel in the West Bank

Pink crime? It almost sounds fashionable and desirable. Indeed, I would say it's an (ethical) crime to call a session "Prisoners in Pink," especially as two of the three papers in that session look at women in US prisons, and we know who they disproportionately are. Lawrence Davidson, US professor of history, tells us that pink-washing this academic conference doesn't make rosy the larger crime being committed:

For those who might not know, Israel will be holding a conference entitled "Pink Crime–Women, Crime and Punishment" on 30 May 2011. As the title implies it is all about female criminality: women as drug use offenders and drug traffickers, women murders, etc., as well as how the media covers female offenders. This is an international conference, drawing to it not only Israeli criminologists but also scholars and researchers from abroad. The United Kingdom and the United States will each have at least two participants.

One might ask what the big deal is? True, the internationals are ignoring a growing boycott of Israel by various elements of civil society. True, the Israeli criminologists should actually be giving priority to their government's criminal acts. True, there is something sexist about the entire affair. What is so unique about crime committed by women? Why "Pink"? Still, there is something else that marks this gathering as out of the ordinary. The "Pink Crime"Conference is being held at an illegal Israeli settlement sitting on stolen Palestinian land. It is scheduled for the "University Center" in the settlement of Ariel on the occupied West Bank. To put it more directly, Israel is to hold in conference on crime in a criminal place.

The Blue Purse

2011-05-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

Sharing with you a creative non-fiction piece I wrote a few years ago.

The Blue Purse

As she turned away from her screen to tidy the kitchen, an image of the two of them crossed her mind. Razia and Ethel giggling together under the brilliant summer skies of South Africa. Sitting on a patio, no doubt. Wearing cotton, no doubt. Not a turtleneck or tights in sight. Huddled together, laughing out loud. Heads thrown back, then leaning close, the women exchanging intimacies.

"No!”

“Really.”

“Seriously. You’re kidding.”

“No, seriously. And did you know…”

Oh, under an umbrella, for sure. Their own little momentary Shangri-la under the beating down sun of Jo’burg—a bit of which came across the Atlantic this morning alongside the mangoes and soft orange kanakambra blossoms that Jyoti sent in her email.

For a moment, she felt the warmth of the South bounce off the cold choppy waves of the waters in the harbour.

A chill wind blew across the lake right up to her front door. Rarely did a warm southerly winter wind travel across Lake Superior. Often the wind was northwesterly, cold and hard as a grave in November.

The Lady of the Lake wore many garments, from choppy, bottle-green summer waters with waves that lurched and lapped, to deep blue silks flecked with bronze. At times, when She showered passersby with small, perfect crystal balls made of ice, She wore the black shimmering radiance of early winter.

But for three weeks now, only a solid grey coughed up from the shore. Today, only the narrowest band of blue-mauve broke the leaden skies hold on Nanabijou, protector of the silver harbour.

The overcast skies pressed their heavy dark rain clouds into her kitchen, and the rain beat a song of sorrow against her window.

It was one of those days.

It reminded her of the weather in Hanover that summer. A whole summer full of chill cloudy grey days. Days and days of sweaters in summer, umbrellas in schoolbags. She had never experienced such a lack of sunshine—weatherwise, that is, because certainly the warmth radiating from the sunny smiles she saw first thing in the morning lasted ‘til night dropped Her cloak. She wondered at times: how would things have been different if Hanover had had a lake and a beach and hot sun that summer?

Looking out her window, she thought back to the day they had left Austria. Samira, Fatemeh, Poopak and she had traveled by train to Vienna, where they spent three surprisingly sunny days. But the day they returned back to Hanover had started off just like today. The morning of the day they left Vienna, she and Fatemeh, who had been staying at Nagwa's small apartment at the end of the subway line, looked out the window.

It was cold and grey; the sky was cloudy and there was a strong wind. A bend-the-tree-tops kind of wind. But it wasn't raining. Yet. So she and Fatemeh looked at each other and thought, why not? They would head downtown later to meet Samira and Poopak to catch the train back to Hanover. And out they went, walking briskly arm in arm, along the rushing waters and the rustling leaves. The further they walked the more silent they became.

They strode, matching step to step. They found themselves walking along a canal of the Danube.

Suddenly, the urge to sing came upon them. Fatemeh pleaded, sing the laundry song!

"My laundry song, now?"

Yes, you said, you wanted to memorize the words and the tune and keep it in your heart for when you got back to Iran and found yourself walking alone on a downcast day. You took out your little leatherbound notebook and scribbled down the words as we sang.

"The river is flowing,

rolling and flowing,

The river is flowing

down to the sea

Mother Earth..."

"Mother Earth?"

“Yes, Mother Earth…

Mother Earth, carry me,
your child I’ll always be,
Mother Earth, carry me,
down to the sea…”

By then we’d looped around the path by the canal and reached the end of our time by the water. We crossed the street to the bus stop. As we hurried to the shelter, heavy drops of rain began to warn us of the day ahead.

A small woman, her silver grey hair neatly coiffed under a dark blue hat, stood at the other end of the bus shelter. She, too, was waiting to catch the morning bus. She was off to church, as it looked like she had her good coat on and she was wearing her good shoes and carrying her good purse. And it was Sunday. And it was early morning.

Fatemeh and I huddled together in the corner of the bus shelter, leaning close together, heads touching, whispering our song so that Fatemeh could press the tune into a corner of her mind.

Our whisperings carried above the rush of the wind, over the beat of the rain spangling the glass. I turned to the old woman in blue and said, "I hope we're not bothering you. Don’t mind us. We're just enjoying our last morning here in Vienna, despite the wind and the clouds and the rain. We're unexpectedly happy. We’re singing a song together. It’s a simple song, actually. It’s a song about the River."

"Oh no, girls. Please," she answered in delicately accented English, smiling warmly, eager for the smiles of strangers to break the grey hold of the morning. "Please, go ahead. I don't mind. Truly, you sound lovely. I was enjoying the sound of you girls singing. Don't mind me. Please,” she said, placing both her gloved hands on the clasp of her blue purse. “I was thinking to myself, how nice to hear two young women singing together on a rainy Sunday morning.”

Waving her purse in our direction and stepping away from us, she pleaded, “Please, girls. Don’t mind me. Keep singing.”

The Danube

C for confrontation

2011-05-19T08:34:00.000-07:00

non-violent Palestinian protesters at Lebanon's border with Israel/Palestine.

The non-violent action of Palestinians and their supporters this past weekend to commemorate The Nakba Day is like a black hole in western media. Where is the news about it? When 72000 people join together for a collective public action is it not newsworthy? And this was just those in Lebanon who went to the Israeli border this past weekend.

72,000 Palestinian refugees and their supporters bused down to the Lebanese border with Israel.

Franklin Lamb, who was one of the supporters who joined the Palestinians, writes:

As we approached Maroun al Ras, some of them were anxious, others silent and reflective, and some, like many teenagers from my generation about to see the Beatles or Elvis were giddy and squealing as the bus rounded a bend in the road south of Aitayoun and we looked to the approaching hills. "Is that my country Palestine over there?," Ahmad, a graduate in Engineering who was born in Shatila camp asked. "Nam Habibi!" ("Yes Dear!") came the reply from the microphone of our "bus mother" gripping her clip board and checking the names to keep track of her flock. This bus seemed to inflate with delirium as we all smiled and shouted. Some of the passengers had prepared signs that read: "People want to return to Palestine," inspired perhaps by the slogan made famous in Egypt and Tunisia, "People want the fall of the regime."

The esprit was reminiscent of a Mississippi freedom ride James Farmer of CORE used to tell us about and I thought of Ben Gurion's boast from 1948 that the old will die and the young will forget Palestine. The Zionist leader could not have been more mistaken. The old, many still vital and those who departed this life, continue to teach and inspire the young from their still remembered stories, guaranteeing that the dream of every Palestinian shall never die.

What happened when these people armed with their memories and stories arrived at the border with Israel?

As Rami Zurayk explains:

Last Sunday, on the 15th of May 2011, during the pacific commemoration of the Palestinian and Arab Nakba, Israel publicly executed 11 youth and seriously injured more than 40 others. Israel executed those youth in cold blood, while they were on Lebanese soil. The Zionist executioners chose their victims calmly from among hundreds of unarmed young men and women who were assembled at the Lebanese border with occupied Palestine, behind the fence of Arab shame. [...]

This was their crime: to remember, to belong, to yearn for the land and the sky of Palestine, for the shores of Haifa and the banks of the Jordan River. In today’s world of Arab and Israeli Zionism the sentence for belonging to Palestine is public execution.

Where is the public outcry about these cold-blooded killings in the North American media?

Will Obama talk about them in his speech today about the Middle East?

Will Obama ask Netanyahu when he comes to the US about these killings against unarmed Palestinians taking up non-violent action for their human rights? For their right to return to their homes?

50 years ago, Americans whose only crime was wearing black skin in public suffered similar beatings, killings, violence and public condemnation. Like Palestinians they too were made illegal for wearing their own skins, for having their own histories, for belonging to the land.

Freedom Riders' bus Anniston, Alabama, USA, 1961.

The white mob who pursued the bus, fire bombed it and held the doors shut preventing riders from exiting the burning bus. Finally an undercover policeman drew his gun, and forced the doors to be opened. The mob pulled the Freedom Riders off the bus and beat them with iron pipes.

In May 1961, civil rights activists, both black and white, male and female, boarded buses for destinations in the segregated southern USA, such as Anniston, New Orleans, Mississippi, Montgomery, and Birmingham. Known as Freedom Riders, the activists were taking up collective non-violent action to test US segregation law, to protest institutionalized racism against African Americans, and to demonstrate for the basic civil rights of African Americans. Above you can see what happened to the bus destined for Anniston. Another bus, headed for Birmingham,

When the bus arrived in Birmingham, it too was attacked by a mob of Ku Klux Klan members, aided and abetted by the police under the orders of Commissioner Bull Connor. As the riders exited the bus, they were mercilessly beaten by the mob with baseball bats, iron pipes and bicycle chains.

These vicious beatings and terror tactics of racist southern white Americans did not stop the people seeking justice.

image Civil Rights 1954-1963

In the spring of 1963, the two-month long Birmingham Campaign to end segregation and economic racism was another non-violent action taken up by civil rights activists. This included Project C. "The "C" in the project stood for confrontation, the strategy of nonviolent direct action designed to confront segregation through peaceful demonstrations, rallies, boycotts, and appeals to justice."

To provoke the police into filling the city's jails to overflowing, [Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.] and black citizens of Birmingham employed nonviolent tactics to flout laws they considered unfair. King summarized the philosophy of the Birmingham campaign when he said, "The purpose of ... direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation".

Protests in Birmingham began with a boycott to pressure businesses to offer sales jobs and other employment to people of all races, as well as to end segregated facilities in the stores. When business leaders resisted the boycott, King and the SCLC began what they termed Project C, a series of sit-ins and marches intended to provoke arrest. After the campaign ran low on adult volunteers, SCLC's strategist, James Bevel, initiated the action and recruited the children for what became known as the "Children's Crusade". During the protests, the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene "Bull" Connor, used high-pressure water jets and police dogs to control protesters, including children.

When I speak out against the state of Israel I remember these things

2011-05-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

Audre Lorde cross-stitch

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
Audre Lorde

Tagore and Einstein

Einstein:

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

Tagore:

If no one answers your call
make a stride and walk alone
When everyone is closed and shut
Open your mind and speak alone.

Walk Alone, Walk Alone, Walk Alone

If they turn away and desert
and the wild path obstacles exerts
trample the thorns no matter the hurt
And Alone along blood-lined track traverse.

Walk Alone, Walk Alone, Walk Alone

If no one holds up the light and
a fierce storm troubles the night,
with the thunder flame of pain
ignite your heart, alone, and let it burn bright

Walk Alone, Walk Alone, Walk Alone

This translation of Tagore's Ekla Cholo Re by Shiv's Angels.

Mahatma Gandhi used to sing this song every morning and evening, as the song resonated with his own sentiments. Gandhi said that even if you are in a minority of one, truth is truth, and you should stand up for your convictions without fear.

blame Iran. blame the Lebanese.

2011-05-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

image Gallo/Getty

The scale of the devastation [in 1948] was overwhelming: four in five Palestinian villages inside the borders of the new state were ethnically cleansed, an act of mass dispossession accompanied by atrocities. Around 95 per cent of new Jewish communities built between 1948-1953 were established on the land of expelled, denationalised Palestinians. Referring to these refugees, Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously said that "the old will die and the young will forget". In fact, rather than "forgetting", the Nakba has become one of the central foundations for activism by Palestinians - and their supporters - around the world. Why is the Nakba such a strong framework of analysis and action? Because rather than being an isolated historical event, it is an ongoing process of dispossession and colonial settlement.

Fourteen people were killed commemorating Nakba Day yesterday. Yet this morning when I looked on the online news site of the CBC, Canada's national news, I didn't find even a mention that Palestininans were killed by Israeli forces. Nothing on the Globe and Mail, either, not even in World news. What is the big World News headlines? Some IMF guy is accused of sexually assaulting a maid in a hotel room but his wife says it's a lie and she stands by her man.

Is it any wonder that these mainstream newspapers are losing readers to online sources? Why would anyone stay in their narrow straitjacketing of news that too often sounds like entertainment for a celebrity-obsessed culture where reality shows are more important than politics and economics?

The online Toronto Star did include a short article: Israeli army opens fire on protesters, as many as 13 Palestinians dead

However, although I found the article on the front page headlines early this morning (way down at the bottom), it is now filed under Yesterday in the World News section, so people will have to do some sleuthing to even find it. The article, which starts with the Israeli perspective (the standard way of subliminally shaping the public's perception), gives us Netanyahu's point of view on this and soon we learn that an Israeli army spokesman blames Iran for the "provocation."

I guess Iran was behind the creation of the state of Israel in 1948?

Seriously, when are root causes going to be examined rather than deliberate distortions by the powers-that-be?

This articl doesn't even mention that Israel made illegal the public commemoration of the Nakba Day.

It seems that some human rights are not newsworthy to note. It seems some demonstators demanding their rights during this Arab Spring of uprisings, protests, and non-violent gatherings are to be blamed rather than commended for their march for justice. This is true if one happens to be Palestinian, Bahraini, or Yemeni. Where is the clamouring to address their just causes? Where is the critique of the regimes that stifle their legitimate demands?

In that same Toronto Star article, it states that Israel denies killing the Palestinians who gathered at the Lebanese/Israeli border yesterday. They blame the Lebanese Army for shooting and killing them.

Not surprisingly, another perspective is found in Lebanese news reports:

"Israeli troops Sunday shot dead 16 people and wounded hundreds more as Palestinians marched on its borders with Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, as part of commemoration of the Nakba - the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948.

On the Lebanon border, 10 protesters, all Palestinian refugees, were killed by Israeli gunfire and more that 100 were wounded. A critically wounded protester died Monday, raising the death toll to 11, security sources said.

Protesters had taken part in Nakba Day commemorations in the south border town of Maroun al-Ras, some of whom had descended to the fence separating the two countries and pelted stones at Israeli troops."

Memoricide and May 15th

2011-05-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

Memoricide is the killing of memories. It is not just the forgetting of the past, which might happen to any individual who thinks history is dusty or who has lost his or her family stories. Rather, memoricide is the determined policy of getting rid of parts of history that trouble the preferred history of the powerful, those whose stories have the most political, economic, social, and cultural currency.

Memoricide is accomplished by destroying both physical places and conceptual and imaginative spaces. For example, by destroying and building on top other peoples’ living, gathering, or sacred places (such as building a highway over Indigenous graves) or by killing the ability to imagine what used to be (such as replacing one way of thinking with another that disparages the concepts of the former; e.g. through language).

In a democracy who could imagine that not only another history is disparaged and dismissed but even talking about it with others would be a crime? That making memories public becomes an illegal act?

Yet this March 22 Israel did just that by passing The Nakba Law. Beginning May 15 it is illegal in Israel to publicly commemorate the Nakba. Arabic for “catastrophe,” the Nakba marks the loss of the lands of Palestine and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, cities, and villages through the creation of the Zionist state of Israel in 1948.

Israel’s new Nakba Law criminalizes stated-funded organizations, bodies and schools from observing May 15 as the Palestinian catastrophe, instead of Israeli Independence Day. Through this law, Israel has outlawed commemorating the Palestinian story that lies inside Israel’s creation.

Stories, histories and memories, however, cannot be killed even if they are made illegal.

Palestinian teachers, groups, and communities dedicated to non-violent resistance against memoricide are challenged this May 15 to bring into public places their call for the recognition of their human rights, for their right to voice history as they see it and tell their stories in public.

Who could imagine that telling and listening to stories is such a dangerous pastime? Stories hold memories and histories and through their telling and circulation, history cannot be killed.

Stories can’t be killed even if languages, lands, and people are lost, killed, or made illegal.

Nakba demonstrations at Qalandia checkpoint

democracy and human rights under the gun in Israel

2011-05-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

87 year old Eisha describes her family's flight from Beit Nuba in 1967.
Stories hold memories and histories and through their telling and circulation, history cannot be lost.

You can find more images of where the Palestinian villages of Imwas, Beit Nuba and Yalo once existed on Excursion to Canada Park. Although most Canadians have no knowledge about Canada Park because it is not a story visible in our mainstream media, this park "happens to be located in the Occupied Territories sitting atop of what once three thriving Palestinian villages, Imwas, Beit Nuba and Yalo.During the 1967 Israeli-Arab War, nearly 10,000 Arab residents were driven out of their homes and forced to march for days over rocky hillsides to safety. Some died along the way. Israeli soldiers then set about destroying the villages and plowing under their orchards. The villages ceased to be as if they never existed and the former residents now live as refugees."

One cannot escape discussion of human rights these days. This morning, watching AJE on satellite TV, I was dismayed to hear of the ever increasing repression of human rights in Bahrain. After the recent protests and the violent clampdown on peaceful, unarmed demonstrators rallying for their human rights, the country has been more repressive. The US, Canada and Britain are silent on defending the human rights of the Shia people of Bahrain. They are not speaking out to support the cry for justice and democracy by the Bahraini population. The US, Canada and Britain are not critical of the repressive measures of the ruling government.

More than 2000 Shia people have been fired from their jobs, the opposition newspaper has been shut down, many doctors and medical personnel have been arrested and are missing, a Reuters journalist was kicked out of the country. A leader of the opposition died in custody; cause "kidney failure." Five members of one woman's family are missing and she wonders why the world is not speaking out, asking why, where, how? She says the silence leads her to believe that the violent attacks on the Bahraini demonstrators had/have US support and complicity.

Shia mosques have been torn down, bulldozed, and removed from public consciousness as even the rubble has been carted away leaving empty lots. Memoricide, I said to my husband. It seems those in power have been taking lessons from Israel. Wiping out history by physically removing what is in place, by physically destroying memories. They count on many people forgetting or never knowing what was there. What happened there. Whose place it was. What they have to say. What concerns they have. What criticisms and questions they have.

Without physical places to meet, to bear witness to existence, it can be argued through the histories told by those in power that those places--and their people-- never existed.

The struggle for human rights, however, cannot be shut down, but it is indeed an arduous struggle these days.

Even in places where it's supposed to be a given, it seems some would like human rights--the human rights of particular people, that is-- to be gotten rid of.

Although the North American corporate and mainstream media continuously touts Israel as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, it seems increasing numbers of Israelis want no part of democracy or human rights and are especially critical of academics who strive to create discussion about them.

I can't imagine entering a classroom and not being able to speak about truth and knowledge from many voices, many perspectives, especially the marginalized or misrepresented. I can't imagine having to defend teaching democratic principles and human rights, as if these are problematic concepts. But it seems in Israel that professors in academia have a much harder time than me.

Indeed, here are a few of the troubling situations faced by Israeli academics who seek to bring critical discussions of democracy, human rights, citizenship, and multiculturalism into university spaces:

1. "the Education Minister wants to erase democracy and citizenship studies from the curricula and replace it with Zionism and Judaism."

2. some students film professors to monitor what is said in class, selectively edit what they have filmed , send this "information to donors in the US or England and a handful of these donors send letters to university administrations pressuring them to stifle academic freedom."

3. "It’s becoming increasingly impossible to hire people who are critical of the Israeli government, or who have signed a [critical] petition."

4. "There’s an assault on Israeli academia in general. It involves an alliance between forces such as IsraCampus and Israel Academic Monitor on the one hand, who try to convince donors to stop giving money to universities that harbor leftists, and Im Tirzu, which tries to mobilize government Ministers and Members of Knesset to pressure the top university executives to discipline recalcitrant academics."

Read the full text of an interview with Israeli professor Neve Gordon, Chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University, by Dahlia Scheindlin, adjunct faculty member at Ben Gurion University.

"It has been a troubled year for Israeli academia. The rising nationalist sentiment in the government, legislature and civil society has spilled over into bitter struggles on campuses throughout the country. Nationalist groups such as IsraCampus, Israel Academia Monitor, and the ultra-nationalist Im Tirtzu have set their crosshairs on academia, seeking the dismissal of faculty members and control over curricula, and urging foreign donors to withdraw funds unless the faculty they have targeted are removed. They have published blacklists and ranked each university and department according to political legitimacy.
....

DO YOU FEAR FOR THE FUTURE OF ISRAELI DEMOCRACY?

We don’t need to imagine a dark future, we’re already there. Democracy is severely curtailed, we’re on a dark path, and unless something radical changes, unless a miracle happens, I think that within not so many years, the last remnants of Israeli democracy might be lost. The pattern may still change, but if the youth polls are correct, Knesset legislation in the future will be even worse. Democracy will be destroyed."

The travelling sauna, part 1

2011-05-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

The story of my travelling sauna begins like this:

This old house of ours (102 years old) does not have a sauna. The house was not built by a Finnish immigrant; it is a Victorian-style turn-of-the-century (19th-20th) tall brick house that has no Finnishness in its construction at all. It is unlike any house I grew up in, many that were built by my dad. None of the people who have lived in this house over the years, and there must have been quite a few, felt the need to put a sauna in the basement.

When we moved out of our previous house, which did have a sauna in the basement that had been built by the previous owners, descendents of Finnish immigrants, I lamented the loss of the sauna. How am I going to manage without a sauna?

About a year ago, we had a leak in a tap in the basement. Whoever had done some remodelling in the basement in the 1970s made the mistake of hiding this tap inside some panelling. Smart guy. Obviously, not a Finlander. Somehow over the years, the tap squeaked itself open unbeknowst and water leaked for quite some time, ruining walls and panelling and stuff in boxes.

Once my son had ripped out all the walls, I said happily, "Now, we can put in a sauna! Don't put up any sheetrock; I want a small sauna right here. Either build the sauna or buy a small pre-fab sauna kit and set it up right here."

Well, eventually, my son found the sauna he wanted to put in the basement.

"Mom. Look at this," he said. I looked over his shoulder at the laptop. "It's an infra-red sauna. It's really easy to set up. It's not very expensive. It's small and nice. It's made of wood and has a glass door. You just plug it in, warm it up a bit, and go sit inside." He told me a bit about how it worked. "Mom. You'll like it."

"I don't want an infra-red sauna," I said. "I want a regular sauna. How can it be a sauna if you can't throw water on the rocks? I can't sit in a dry sauna. What is this infra-red energy? Is it even safe? What? Am I going to be micro-waving my body? I don't think so. It doesn't make any sense to me. Get me a regular sauna. Forget this infra-red stuff."

Months passed.

"Mom. Canadian Tire has an infra-red sauna for sale this week. It's $799 from $1200. You'll like it. It detoxifies; it warms up like a regular sauna; you'll sweat, feel relaxed. You'll like it. You just have to get used to a different kind of sauna. Don't be so stubborn. So, it's different from what you're used to. Mom. Don't be so stubborn."

"No, I don't want an infra-red sauna. I want a real sauna."

End of the week came.

"Mom. Dad says let's get the infra-red sauna. It's easy to put in; a regular sauna is way too much work to build. Look at it this way: we'll use the infra-red sauna for awhile and if you don't like it, we can sell it and then put in a real sauna."

I could see that I would not be getting a real sauna any time soon.

"Whatever...Go get the infra-red sauna then. I don't care. I don't think I'm going to like it, though."

a walk on Mother's Day

2011-05-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

Question: What do you suppose this is? Can you guess? I walk by it each Sunday when I pick up Tassu on my way down to walk over the overpass and along the shore of Lake Superior.
I have been out for my morning walks, although I have been leaving a bit later than usual because I have been staying up too late working. I pass quite a few anglers on the shore of McVicar's Creek these days trying to catch rainbow trout. Although the creek is long, they seem to bunch up in the same place, where the rapids are. Yesterday I passed the police who had driven their cruiser up the path to stop and question two Anishnawbe folks, Victor and his new friend, who were standing by the creek. The cops said, Morning, Ma'am, to me; I was not stopped for being on the path. I don't know how many times Victor gets questioned by the cops as this is not the first time I've seen them stop him. I will tell you my story about Victor later.

On Mother's Day, before I went over to have cake and coffee with my Mother and bring her the hanging basket I had bought her, I picked up Tassu and walked down to the lakeshore, where the water was still as glass. There wasn't a breath of wind to be found anywhere. You could see the morning sky reflected in the waters of Lake Superior.

My Mother had made a lovely whipped cream cake, which we, my Mother, my sister, Katja, and I, ate with yogurt ice cream. Later, I made a coffee crunch cake and brought it over to some friends who had invited my husband and me over for a visit. They had bought cake with whipped cream to share with us. Later on Mother's Day, my son brought over a New York style cheesecake that he had baked, with blueberry topping. At this point, all caked out, I said I think I'll eat a slice of that cheesecake tomorrow.
I saw the mink running along the rocks, close to the water's edge, and earlier I saw a groundhog pop up its head out of the rocks, but I have noticed that there are less ducks around because of the ongoing construction at the marina.
Answer: melted plastic in the window (see it on the right) of someone's old trailer that sits in a lot I cut through on my way down to the lake. Some Finlander could make a good sauna out of this old unused trailer (scroll down for instructions to get you started!)

Tomorrow I will tell you about my travelling sauna.

Now thou art come unto a feast of death--Shakespeare

2011-05-06T11:43:00.000-07:00

What does Temudjin have to do with Obama? Nothing.

Temudjin was a warrior; Obama is a hitman.

Temudjin, who was compelled to battle his blood brother, Jamukha, upon capturing him, set him free. Gave him a horse--and a horse, to a 12th c Mongolian male, was more important than a woman.

Obama, on the other hand, feeling compelled to follow in George Bush's warsteps, upon capturing their arch enemy, Osama (who they created), shot him in the head. Bin Laden was unarmed. His body was dumped in the sea.

Last night I watched Mongol (2008). It's not the type of movie I usually watch, and if someone would have told me it has these gory battle scenes, with heads getting chopped off, men and horses being impaled, men against men in violent confrontations, abductions, and war as a fact of life/survival, I would not have watched it.

But my husband started watching it on Netflix, and when I looked up from my book, the cinematography grabbed me. Where is this beautiful place? I wondered (the steppes of Mongolia and Kazakhstan, I read on the film credits). Then, the story line riveted me. The acting was exceptional, too.

The music was riveting, too. Strange, so strange to me. Strange because I thought it sounded somewhat like old Finnish men chanting! When Temudjin and Jemukha chanted together in the yurt, I thought, their breathing and sounds were oddly familiar to me.

OK I wasn't imagining that; the film credits list Tuomas Kantelinen as composing the film score. I laughed. "Yeah," my husband said, starting to hum and chant, "it sounds like some of that weird stuff you play."

Sergei Bodrov, the director, did an exceptional job re-imagining the 12th c tale of Mongolian nomads on the steppes, of Temudjin, the man who became Genghis Khan. What is amazing to me is that this film is successful in humanizing male warriors.

I made my husband skip through the worse parts of the battle scenes, though.

I couldn't help but think when watching Temudjin set out to do battle, how war has become something else today. So much of it is divorced from individual courage or bravery. War is politics. War is played out in rooms. The recent assassination of Bin Laden, so glorified in the US, among its youth, in its media, and among some Canadians, too, is disturbing. Has assassination become hip? Canadians don't even have the death penalty and yet folks think killing Bin Laden in this covert "operation" is ok?

Why is it an 'operation' when the West does it, but terrorism when someone from the Middle East does it?

American constitutional lawyer John Whitehead writes in Bin Laden, Gaddafi, and Modern Warfare: On the Highway of Death:

Modern technology totally dehumanizes warfare and, in the process, totally dehumanizes us as human beings. While it allows us to wage battles from afar, modern technological warfare also reduces the act of killing human beings to nothing more than targeting blips on a screen--a macabre video game with faceless victims and no danger of someone shooting back. And when an American drone annihilates innocent civilians in some far-away land, this is simply written off as yet another technological blip. [....]

The fact that modern technological warfare is turning human beings into non-feeling killing machines should cause us to tremble. It should give us reason to pause and question how we could let ourselves travel so far down the road to perdition. We have placed others on the highway of death. In the end, however, it is we who are traveling the highway of death. May God help us all.

I carry clout

2011-04-29T11:43:00.000-07:00

Katja, not quite a teenager yet. 1966

When it was my sister, Katja's birthday in January, I racked my brains to think about what I could give her. I didn't want to buy her something useless, but I didn't have too much time to make her anything, either. At the time, I had been working with my students to get them to think about how consumer culture gives us many of the gender scripts (and race, class and sexuality scripts, too) that we take up. So I decided I would look for advertisements from women`s magazines from the 1970s, when my sister was in her teens and twenty something (this term, however, wasn't invented until 1990), so we could think about what were some of the media texts that influenced us to shape our identities as young women.

These were the years when we were learning to be young Canadian women, that is, not our mother. Our mother couldn't help us with this. We were on our own. As a working-class, non-English speaking Finnish immigrant woman, she was not like our "Canadian" friends' mothers; she was not like our female teachers; she was not like the women we saw in our school books, on tv, in films, in catalogues, or in magazines. She was not what we wanted to be. We wanted to fit in.

Mork and Mindy. tv series 1978-1982

As I needed to refresh myself on exactly what was in style what year, I did a bit of research on the net to find out who were the popular singers we listened to, what songs were our favourites, what movies and tv shows we watched, and what were the things we coveted to buy in the 1970s. Then I thought I`ll go look for some old magazines, look through them for advertisements targeting young women that I remember looking at, cut them out, and paste the advertisements in a scrapbook for my sister, along with bits and pieces of the media culture that was popular.

Later that day, as I walked down the hill to the downtown Bank of Montreal (BMO) to deposit a cheque for my daughter, I wondered to myself: where am I going to find some old women's magazines from the 70s now? I needed to have the scrapbook ready for the next night, so I chastised myself for once again leaving things until the last minute. By lucky chance (ain`t this often the case?), wasn't there a bookcase of second hand books and magazines at the BMO, with women's magazines from the 70s.

So, I collected about 5, left about $4, stuffed them in my bag, and left, not believing my good luck.

Later that evening, I set to work to cut out ads. I could not believe how many I remembered. The pile grew. One of the ads I cut out from a 1976 women's magazine was the same as this one:

I found this image from a 1977 magazine on ebay. Someone is selling this ad for $5.99 US. I guess if I have some time on my hands I can sell some of the ads I found in those old magazines and recoup my $4 and more!!

I gave my sister the scrapbook I made her at our RedShoes writing group meeting. The 1976 ad for the Master Charge card (it was renamed 'Mastercard' in 1979) was, as we looked at it closely and thought about it, one of the early campaigns to get women to use credit cards. We all used cash in those days. This particular ad uses the language of feminist empowerment to sell bondage to consumerism. As if buying things on credit will free you, give you status.

Well, 36 years later, Canadians are drowning in consumer card debt:

"In 2010, the average household's consumer debt reached $36,350, an increase of of 87.9% over the last 20 years."

It seems the ads have been highly successful.

At our writing group, we thought we would take back that clout from consumerism and re-feminist it. We decided to write for five minutes with the prompt:

I CARRY CLOUT

Here's what I wrote:

I carry clout

in my Finnish face

in my blue eyes

that my Aunt Anja

stares back from

I carry clout

in my wide feet

that walk and run

and stomp and stand

tall in mountain pose.

I carry clout

in my loud voice

sharp and shrill

that cuts the air

and carries up to the third floor

to call my son downstairs.

I carry clout.

I pack a punch.

I carry clout

in a classroom

because I get to say

to a roomful of young minds

that we need to think about race and class

gender and sexuality

about power relations

about who is privileged

and who is disadvantaged

and why is that

and why we should care.

I carry clout

in my family

I carry clout

in my community

I even scolded

the new old mayor

In a Letter to the Editor

and told him that

he is an old-fashioned moralizer

who wants to use methods that never

worked in the past

for complex problems

of continuing colonization today.

I carry clout

like an old woman

who won’t shut up

who knows some stories

and isn’t afraid to tell them.

I carry clout.

the rock below my feet

2011-04-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

The great Canadian Shield at Cascades Conservation area. While out on a hike last Friday to the Cascades, no matter how many times I visit this place, I find the beauty breathtaking.

art and the Egyptian Revolution

2011-04-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

How to stop multi-tasking: Focus (do one thing at a time), Filter (delegate so that you don't take on too many tasks or too much information) and Forget (read: exercise, take breaks, clear your head).

The article I linked to above is directed at executives and those in the corporate world, and perhaps with its head stuck in a corporate glass tower can be forgiven for forgetting one key strategy to rid one of multi-tasking: make or engage in art in all of its beautiful diversities.

Making or engaging in art can help us through so many days, whether those days are mundane or difficult. Granted, at times, it may be very, very difficult to produce art when one's world is literally exploding with gunshots, tear gas, and other weapons of violence or one's life is at risk.

But artists never lie still for any length of time. Artists are those unique beings who help us see the world in new ways. Artists also help us to see the world -- that which is right before our eyes, but in our sleepwalking or rushing through our days (and some of us, wrapped up in our cell phones and other handheld digital devices, literally failing to see what is right before our feet).

Artists also enable us to see complex political, social, economic and historical events in ways that, no matter where it happens, we can all bring to our hearts some of that which did happen. Sometimes it makes the heart skip a beat. With art you never know what to expect, so be forewarned: your life may flash before your eyes and you may begin to question all that you have held as truth to date.

Below are links to, and excerpts about, four art exhibits that have risen out of the Egyptian Revolution and can be found in Egypt. Visual art was part of the Revolution, helping the demonstrators-for-justice withstand the forces that Mubarak sent to disable them. But the protesters, those visionaries, would not be silenced.

Here are some visual art/i/facts that speak to the indomitable revolutionary spirit:

1. an exhibit by the state institution, at the Egyptian museum (which will travel Europe, too)

2. an exhibit by university students on the campus of the American University of Cairo

3. an exhibit by artists at a neighbourhood art gallery in Cairo.

4. an exhibit by a Spanish artist inspired by the role of wireless technology in the Revolution

some of the people who were killed during the Egyptian Revolution. image from anamasry

1. Art Exhibition about Egypt’s 25th of January Revolution

The exhibition will first be shown in Cairo and then tour 14 European countries [...] [and] will consist of a collection of art in various media created by Egyptian artists to reflect their views on Egypt’s Revolution, and it will also include a photo gallery showing scenes of Tahrir Square as well as the demonstrators. [...]

a collection of archaeological replicas will be included with the exhibition. [...] these replicas are meant to reflect some themes of the Revolution, for example a replica statue of the Egyptian goddess of truth and justice Ma’at symbolizing the concept of justice, while peace and prosperity will be symbolized by the god Osiris, god of the afterlife.

[...] photos of people who died during the Revolution as well as some of their personal belongings, such as their clothes and flags they held, will also be displayed with the exhibition. [...]a collection of books about antiquities will be provided for the exhibition, including those printed by the MSA, a selection from other archaeologists, and those by Dr. Hawass. In addition, a collection of brochures and newsletters concerning Egypt’s archaeological sites and tourist attractions will be on display in an attempt to promote tourism from within the country and outside.

After the exhibition has completed its tour in Egypt and Europe, Hawass announced, it will be placed on permanent display at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC), now under construction in the Al-Fustat area of Old Cairo. The purpose of the NMEC is to display the history of Egyptian civilization from prehistoric through modern times, and this exhibition will make it complete, Hawass stated, displaying the latest saga in Egypt’s modern history.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2. at the American University in Cairo:

‘Tahrir!’ Photography exhibit opens on campus.

A selection of more than 100 photographs taken by 20 professional photographers was displayed at the “Tahrir!” photography exhibition launched last Sunday, April 3 at the Photographic Gallery, Abdul Latif Jameel Hall [American University of Cairo].

The Tahrir exhibition captured the true celebratory spirit of life in Tahrir during the Egyptian revolution. “We wanted to make it a group exhibition with as many photographers as possible to show the different angles of the revolution,” said Nora Bahgat, the curator of the exhibition.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3. at the Art Corner Gallery in Cairo:

Yasser Rostom. white doves attacked by red-eyed ravens.

Neighbourhood Egypt Revolution art exhibition

Artists express dark detainment, cruelty, the rise of Egyptians and the euphoric victory of the 25 January Revolution in an Art Corner Gallery exhibition. Proceeds from four paintings will be donated to hospitals.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
4. Egyptian Revolution goes 'Wireless'

Spanish artist Xavier Puigmarti exhibition ‘Wireless’ is on at the Mashrabia Art gallery [downtown Cairo], a tribute to the Egyptian RevolutionA few steps up, inside one of the European-style buildings in downtown Cairo, the Mashrabia Art Gallery was packed with Egyptians, foreigners and the media, to view the latest artwork by Spanish artist Xavier Puigmarti at his 'Wireless' exhibition, which opened on Sunday 10 April 2011.

Puigmarti’s exhibition includes colourful abstract visuals that express the freedom that Egyptians have achieved, through wireless communication connections and technology, during the massive protests that took place in Tahrir Square and ended when the president Hosni Mubarak stepped down.

“Although I began working on these pieces shortly after the Egyptian revolution had begun, I had the idea of ‘Wireless’ before the revolution,” says Puigmarti. “I wanted to speak about wireless technology and its effects on the modern world we live in,” he explains.

a missing few weeks

2011-04-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

We had finally gotten rid of the snow and it was getting sunny and springlike. This is a view facing south towards Lake Superior, down Dufferin Street, which has a steep hill. This steep drop off use to be the shoreline of the ancient lake that preceded Lake Superior. You can see the feet of Nanabijou in the far horizon, a laker in the waters of the harbour, and sheets of solid ice still close to the shore. And, of course, you can see the hydro lines that crisscross the streets of our city.

photo by Dean Salerno

I found this photo on the WeatherNetwork site. This is the ice breaker that goes out into the harbour and chops up the ice so the lakers can come in to load up.

photo by Chris Garbo
Photo of the Aragonborg loading up with malt in Thunder Bay
and will be headed to Ireland.

A better view of that ship out in the harbour, by the grain elevators.

Then we had a sudden hailstorm. The sound was something fierce; at first I didn't know what that was pinging loudly against the windows of the house. The hail was the size of ping pong balls. My friend, Armi, who bought herself a brand new little Pontiac last summer, has her car in the shop now. The bill for hail damage: $5,600. Our cars were unaffected. Something about thicker steel on the body of the car, depending on the make of the vehicle, I believe. Then we had a winter storm return back, making everyone grumpy. The winds were fierce, we had a lot of snow, and it was back to boots and winter coats. Tassu loved it more then ever because it was bitterly cold again. I worried that the daffodils that had just started to sprout out of the ground in my garden would be killed even before they had a chance to greet the spring.

Today, most of the snow has melted although there are big patches here and there in my yard and around the city. McVicar's Creek is rushing water again and there's an open patch where the creek meets Lake Superior. Canada geese, mallards, ring-billed gulls, and migrants passing through can all be found paddling in the water. Most of the shoreline is still frozen solid, except for the odd patch of water. Someone new to town with a small packsack on his back went down to the lakeshore, sat on the old log that is in just the perfect spot, and, well, just sat.