snow calligraphy and a plume on the lake

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

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

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

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

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

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