Abstract reporting
Fall 2018
Attempt number one
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The Zine Team The Zine Editorial Joel Robertson-Taylor Martin Castro Cat Friesen
Production and Design Joel Robertson-Taylor
Illustrators
RenĂŠe Campbell Mikaela Collins Kayt Hine
The Zine Submission Judges Joel Robertson-Taylor Martin Castro Cat Friesen Mikaela Collins Laurel Logan
Cover Art: Mikaela Collins Cover Type Mark: Caleb Campbell
Photo: Caleb Campbell
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Contents Poetry | Chandy Dancy Octopus Milk
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Allie Risley | Visual Art That's My Home
Poetry | Chris Brechin The Sea Rages
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Visual Art | Rei van Liempt Juliet
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Sidi Chen | Visual Art Want - Domestic Disguise of The Foreign Tongue
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Visual Art | Madeleine Hildebrandt Bloom
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Chandy Dancy | Poetry Mitochondrial Eve
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Poetry | Alex Rake sometimes, pacing through your gallery
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Scott McQuarrie | Poetry Current
Essay | Michelle Pahl Mundane Miracles
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Poetry | Jordan Wolfe Maybe If I Knew How To Change A Tire, I Could Be Your Boyfriend
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Pahl | Poetry 22 Michelle philosophical soundbite
Visual Art | Sidi Chen Where I Am When I Am Walking Through Mountains
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Poetry | Caleb Silveira Cracked Castles
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Visual Art | Allie Risley Desvelado
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Visual Art | Allie Risley Point Taken
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Photo: Caleb Campbell
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McQuarrie | Poetry 20 Scott Jogger (Not) Michelle Lussier | Visual Art Another Breath, Another Bloom
Louwerse | Essay 23 Colter Gaza Nonviolence Op-Ed
26 Carissa Weins | Poetry Distaste
Collins | Visual Art 28 Mikaela Portrait of a Woman House Sitting for
her Parents with her Boyfriend Staying Over Some Nights
Diespecker | Visual Art 30 Katie Anxiety
Essay | Michelle Pahl Disaster Movies Poetry | Jordan Wolfe Control
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Lussier | Visual Art 47 Michelle Pale Hands, Red Heart
Brechin | Poetry 32 48 Chris As Usual, the Segulls
Visual Art | Caleb Campbell Show Posters
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Friesen | Poetry 49 Cat Love Letter to October
Visual Art | Cassie de Jong Can You See Me? Can You Feel Me?
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Castro | Poetry 50 Martin at the station an engineer
Q&A | Jesse Boyes Q&A with Wade Davis
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Poetry | Caleb Silveira Falling Wild Flowers
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Poetry | Jordan Wolfe Sunday
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Visual Art | Caleb Campbell Show Posters
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Visual Art | Ray van Liempt Lisa Braid
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Visual Art | Katriana van Woudenberg To Keep You Save
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Visual Arts | Sidi Chen Des Conteneur de l'or
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Poetry | Erin Froese Tulips
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takes his time to punch
51 Alex Rake| Poetry
one please for the garden of eden
Rake | Poetry 53 Alex good or Silveira | Poetry 54 Caleb The Knights of the Great War Sprott | Poetry 55 Steven Gloucester Cathedral under renovation Srott | Poetry 56 Steven For the old downtown, unrenovated (from a parking lot)
English | Visual Art 57 Elyssa Hunter's Moon Diespecker | Visual Art 58 Katie Teary Eyed
59 Alex Rake | Poetry day
POETRY CONTEST WINNERS
NON-FICTION CONTEST WINNER
VISUAL ARTS CONTEST WINNERS
Alex Rake | one please for the farden of eden
Michelle Pahl | Mundane Miracles
Michelle Lussier | Another Breath, Another Bloom
Caleb Silveira | Cracked Castles
Rei van Liempt | Juliet v
Contributors Alex Rake is a UFV
alumni, once a writer and editor for The Cascade and Louden Singletree. Aside from poetry, he writes plays, stories, and music, fronting folk-punk band "Alex Rake and the Leaves." He lives in the foggy parts of Mission with another artist and a couple of ferrets.
Allie Risley is a student
of UFV’s BFA program, pursuing her career in the arts. The medium she works in is Encaustic: a unique blend of beeswax, damar resin, and raw pigments. She has had several pieces purchased by UFV as well as a show in the S’eliyemetaxwtexw Gallery.
Caleb Silveira is a stu-
dent at UFV in the Bachelor of Arts program with a major in English Literature.
Carissa Wiens is a third
year student at UFV residing in Abbotsford with her husband and cat. She is an avid reader of contemporary fiction in her spare time and enjoys writing poetry for adults and children. Her inspiration is gained from life experiences and the works of art she reads.
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Cassie de Jong is an
artist and local arts and culture enthusiast residing in Abbotsford BC. Her practice uses themes of symbolism and iconography within a variety of mediums. Through the use of various repetitive patterns and simple shapes, she explores how symbolism and representation can affect the human condition.
Cat Friesen is a writer,
Managing Editor of The Cascade, and recent graduate of UFV. If she’s not writing, she can be found reading, eating cake, or getting lost in the forest.
Chandy Dancey is a
Bio major in her third year trying to bridge the gap between creativity and objectivity in the sciences; to her, organic chemistry is an art form and petri dishes are canvases. A majority of her writing revolves around dark subject matter, but really she’s a glass-halffull type of girl who’s just happy to be here. She also thinks that writing poetry that rhymes is like, really cool.
Caleb Campbell is a,
Abbotsford based musician and artist.
Chris Brechin is a sec-
ond-year Mathematics major. His fascination with the world around him has lead to a love of mathematics and a taste for literature. His works in poetry and fiction often focus on the underlying magic behind the quotidian and its beauty.
Colter Louwerse is
a UFV alumni and Phd researcher in Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, UK.
Erin Froese wrote one
terrible short story in Grade 2 and got it into her head that she was going to be a writer. She would just like to say, from the bottom of her heart, it’s not a phase, Mom.
Elyssa English is a self-
taught Canadian artist and freelance illustrator, skilled in a variety of mediums, both traditional and digital. Art is a journey, often filled with challenges, and for her a great sense of pride comes from conquering such challenges to create something beautiful. Jesse Boyes is a student at UFV interested in biology and psychology.
Jordan Wolfe is an
emerging writer from Maple Ridge who studies creative writing at UFV.
Katie Diespecker is a
UFV alumni and artist from Agassiz primarily working in acrylic, watercolour, pencil, and digital media. She has done digital design and illustrations for UFV’s Academic Success Centre. Although partially self taught, she has taken several visual arts courses at UFV.
Katriana Van Woudenberg is a first year science student, planning on majoring in biology with the goal of becoming a veterinarian. Self-taught, she focuses on drawing animals, figures and fantasy. Katriana’s favourite mediums are coloured pencil, pen and ink, and graphite.
Madeline Hildebrandt
was born and raised in Abbotsford, and is in her final year in the BFA program at UFV. She is doing a Visual Arts major with a focus on painting and drawing. Growing up around the ocean and temperate rainforest, Madeline’s work is inspired by local plant life.
martin castro writes.
he writes for the moon, he writes for the forests,
he writes for his sister. he writes about being & living & loving. he writes for himself. he writes reviews & scripts & poems & songs; he thinks writing should be mmmmm yes yum sharp & liquid. martin castro also writes for the cascade.
Michelle Lussier is in
her first year attending the University of the Fraser Valley and is in the fine arts program. She has a vast background with visual arts and little to no background with writing. Her hobbies consist of drawing, spending quality time with her cat named Mittens and walking around town.
Michelle Pahl studies
economics and political science, has picked up certificates in various areas, has travelled and lived life. She’s currently a returning, mature student to UFV, a designation she hates, because it stops her from pretending she’s not growing older. However, it brings wisdom and beats the alternative.
Scott McQuarrie is
a student again after working in a technical field for twenty years. He is exploring the other half of his brain, taking courses in Art and Creative Writing. His two young children think it is way cool that he is at school just like them.
Sidi Chen is a traveling
artist from China who participates in multidisciplinary practices, including painting, illustration, sculpture, performance art, poetry, and translation. Inspired by his 10-year traveling, Chen is meant to built a body archive to explore the authenticity of humanity in alternative environments.
Steven Sprott is a writer, clarinet aficionado, and lover of lemons. He drinks Turkish coffee and once tried to learn to play the flugelhorn.
Mikaela Collins is a UFV student and the Multimedia Editor at The Cascade.
Rei van Liempt primar-
ily explores classical subject matter in traditional or mixed media. She dislikes writing bios.
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octopus milk by Chandy Dancey
Right: “Juliet” 4.74 cm x 18 cm; linocut print by Rei van Liempt
the soft ooze of a puss filled arm the sun baking gently the flesh that gave birth to a ripe son who is nowhere to be seen the life/death/life cycle laying ruin to the joys of motherhood tarnishing the holy temple marring the mother mary leaving salt-encrusted gills saturated with the fact that there can be no redemption in this deep rot the hands of the tide reaching retracting coaxing the soul out of that bloated half-dead body so spent from a labour of love promised entrance to the land of milk and honey but the taste of octopus milk is the tang of blood on your tongue
The Sea Rages by Chris Brechin
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The sea rages simply because it exists. Don’t tell me of the moon and the wind, or the pull of gravity – a force that keeps me here, on this shoreline. You may argue that her swells are not her own, that such a wanton mood is founded in the very laws of our universe. I don’t need your evidence. As Jonah and I have witnessed: the sea’s rage is precipitated solely by its existence.
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Title: Bloom (2018) Dimensions: 22x22 inches Medium: Ink on Paper Madeleine Hildebrandt
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sometimes, pacing through your gallery by Alex Rake
sometimes when i am waiting for godot i forget that i am waiting for godot and i can kill time happily. sometimes when i am killing time the clock screams and the watched pot boils in reverence. sometimes when i’m in a church i am all alone except the watched pots watching me pray. sometimes my prayers seem answered by god sometimes by women sometimes by a vibrating telephone. sometimes i drop my phone on purpose hoping for something better next time. sometimes next time never comes and all your portraits make sense again. sometimes pacing through your gallery i trip on the priceless bust of god or a woman or a vibrating phone. sometimes i repeat myself to prove to myself that i can’t repeat myself and fancying myself a scientist i smash my false beliefs with fiction or a hammer. sometimes i bang bang bang against your wall just so you know i’m thinking of you. sometimes i’m not thinking of you and the clock screams and the watched pot boils. sometimes time’s some son of a bitch on wheels. sometimes i wait or sometimes i wait but i wait sometimes and in times of waiting i forget what time it is and a voice whispers, it’s time! and i ask, time for what? and i wait for an answer until i forget what i’m waiting for and for one more moment i can kill time happily and with gloved hands around time’s throat, i think here i am! this is it! i could really love you, sometimes. 4
Mundane by Michelle Pahl
I think God is a big picture individual and doesn’t focus on the day to day minutiae as much as we wish He might.
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I
was having an imaginary conversation with some imaginary strangers while sitting on my deck this morning. This is not entirely unusual; I often have imaginary conversations with imaginary people about contentious topics. Today, the topic was Moses. I have no idea why it came up but suddenly, there I was, debating whether God really spoke to Moses on the mount. You see, I generally don’t believe in religious miracles. I don’t believe in biblical flood stories, or the resurrection, or origin and original sin myths, or stories about sages who lived into the many hundreds of years. I think these stories have been inflated with the passage of time. What I do believe about religion is that there are a lot of very similar rules for life across a great many religions and philosophies, and that the truth contained in those beliefs is self-evident. The fact that we almost universally developed simple rules on how to live a good life is a miracle that gets little in the way of attention. Not lying, not cheating, and not stealing from or harming others are good philosophical positions to hold. Do I think the people who at various points in history articulated the rules were sages and deep thinkers? Absolutely. Do I believe they received direct messages from God? I think that’s unlikely. I think God is a big picture individual and doesn’t focus on the day to day minutiae as much as we wish He might. So, do I think the commandments are a miracle? Probably not. I do believe in miracles, however. I just think we look in the wrong places. Take a flower. It’s a damn miracle sitting there,
Miracles unnoticed, right in front of you. So many things have to happen to make a flower possible. You have to have an appropriate environment; there has to be dirt. The dirt has to have nutrients. There has to be adequate light and water. Animals or the wind have to fertilize the seed. The seedling has to not get eaten and not suffer blight. The weather has to be conducive to the growth cycle. There are a lot of factors in play and yet more often than not, they all come together and the next thing you know, there are flowers blooming alongside the deck, flaunting their glory, with bright colours and brilliant smells lightening up a formerly arid environment. We seek miracles in the wrong places. We look for a burning bush and we ignore the miracles that happen all around. We ignore the miracle of our own existence. We ignore the miracles contained in the mundane. The fact that I can get clean drinking water from a tap. The fact that I can read books online or at all. The fact that I’m here. The presence of friends. The existence of art.
Music. These things are all miraculous and mostly unappreciated on a day to day basis. Studies show that a practice of gratitude can have a positive impact on your mood and well-being and yet historically, I’ve struggled to come up with things to include. I get tired of writing “friends and family” repeatedly. Yet I, too, miss the point. We encounter things to be grateful about and for every minute of every day. The computer I’m writing this on and all the people who contributed to its creation and evolution. The potato I had for lunch, and the farmer who grew it, and the store that sells it, and the purveyors of the hot sauce I topped it with. The engineers who designed the furnace that brings me heat. The fact that there’s such a thing as a domesticated cat. These are all miracles that I can be grateful for and appreciate. I think I’ll bring that point up the next time I’m sitting on the deck participating in an imaginary debate. y
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Maybe If I Knew How to Change A Tire, I Could Be Your Boyfriend by Jordan Wolfe
She called me after her professor cancelled class, angry about the wasted time spent driving to Abbotsford and angrier that on the drive home her tire caught a screw. My palms sweat as I rushed to her aid, imagined twisting the last bolt onto her replacement tire, freeing her from hours of sitting on the side of the road enduring the smell of rotting pumpkins and November air. I arrived drenched in false confidence, heart in my throat. She looked relieved and praised me with thanks until I went to work on the sagging rubber, unable to assemble the jack. I forgot I was a poet. She called a tow truck and I waited in silence with her, embarrassed. The truck arrived and out hopped a man with grease stained hands who picked up her car with one and changed the tire with the other.
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Where I Am When I Am Walking Through Mountains Ink on canvas, 48 X 54 inches by Sidi Chen
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Cracked Castles by Caleb Silveira I. The moon is veiled in a fire fog guise and with it she hides her pale face concealed together with this continuous pea soup sky. Setting tune to the Pied Piper’s suicide. II. I walk among the concrete ruins Clack. Clack. And remember that footsteps today will be the first sounds of tomorrow. Black cats flash their yellow saucers in the foggy darkness that is this night and I welcome their unfortunate luck waiting for doom to strike in my eternal favour… But in the meanwhile! I recall that my name has no meaning and its legacy is short-lived or forgotten let’s say three generations. It is these bricks, here, and mortar that live on mocking the name that I take — dare say nobility. 9
III. Ah! Cracked Castles and dusty white gloves death to the simple times and dawn into the faggoting ideologies of the Modern Era. No, society’s a barren grain field forever ridden with salt, and the people grasp, with cracked lips and swollen stomachs, such pain, at air. With it comes the wait of season till the Farmer’s hoe and the Seven Horsemen with crooked tridents uproot the dead and call forth Revolution! Dump the overpriced diesel fuel — in tempest — into the oceans or let flood the streets to stain and then to pause and hear the institutions of God call Revelations. IV. Speak the truth the end may be near and many forego the right to see. And here from my Cracked Castle with an empty name full of misery I watch as black bouts of water like lies ooze out of fields of dead people and dying ideas to flood the cities. Sweeping up pregnant women carrying the innocents of our futures into the torrents of the Styx 10
writhing and wreathing until left thrashing in the Sea of the Dead. * From these eerie placid waters where the desperate, frantic, tread a ripple domes and the bubbles spread. From the distance the Dragon roars and from below the maelstrom brews unsettling the chilled waters. I saw the beast breach the sea. He had ten horns, seven heads and eyes that spoke pure tyranny. At the Dragon’s bidding and by the beast’s wretched hands like the last of man’s wars the women of Carthage, the women of the streets. Dead, dead with the last of the reasoning beats. V. I call for reflection begging to understand my place * While the Old World is forgotten and the New drives onward windows open, off the nearest ledge… Seeking Destiny! Damn this high noon too little time to think and only the briefest for action 11
to pause, to wait, to hesitate …only to let the sun in my eyes. This is the condition of our broken state. Banished to Elba in my indecision until either I build an Ark of Mercy and venture onto the dreadful waters …or I submit to an eternity of isolation locked inside my own dungeon. Sanity or Insanity one cannot simply choose both. So I venture and leave Queen Alcyone to manage my affairs while I row out into the Black Stench that is the Dead Sea. VI. And begins The House of Fame burdened by the modicum of our aspirations longing for our love affair to let it go. Last, to leave her name on the strand. And our safe havens our Cracked Castles vanish under the imposing Shadowing Mists Darkness imposes its presence leaving my lantern — my only friend — resting on its dinghy seat to muse my empty wanderings against the distant Dragon’s roars 12
or the nearby Fenian hordes and their eternal splashing gunpowder a’ waiting * I love this lantern. Its light smooths the calluses of my beating heart. A welcome calm in this turmoil. VII. The women lay like bloated whales and one by one they burst leaving the fetal-like spawn to swim idle — alone — save the grace of my light self-proclaimed a savior I lead them in until the rot-filled waters kiss the lips of my ship. How I hope one is aged enough to utter a single cry. They suffer and the demons have cut their life anchors to be unjust and sly. VIII. Smoke and fire spread, the babe, my knee, so tired snore. My Castle rubbled and dead, Alcyone spread eagle with gore. I ascribe to dread! IX. With tempest! Challenge me great Devil! Crack my head, split my bone bare me down, end me now * 13
I walk among these rubbled ruins Clack. Clack. And I know that the Dragon will not come the sounds of today will fall deaf upon this child’s ear. No lessons will come of it. My struggles, tomorrow’s numbers Perhaps… I am the last historian so this book may serve as Mankind’s final woe. Ignore it as we have. So the child rested swaddled in his blankets the book on its chest while the historian welcomed the drowning warmth a Pied Piper’s suicide. X. “And if that olde bookes were awaye, Y’Loren were of remebrance the keye” The lamp cracks and the Boat of the Dead explodes into a funeral pyre setting first light to his face.
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Above “Desvelado” Dimensions: 38” x 48” Medium: encaustic medium on wood cradled panel by Allie Risley Right: “That’s My Home” Dimensions: 8”x10” Medium: Encaustic medium with bird’s nest on wood cradled panel
by Allie Risley 15
Right: “Point Taken” Dimensions: 11” x 8.5” Medium: Wet media (marker) by Allie Risley
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Left: “Want - Domestic Disguise of The Foreign Tongue” Dimensions: 33” X 44” Meidum: Embroidery on inkjet canvas By: Sidi Chen
Mitochondrial Eve by Chandy Dancey
You are the hand that feeds dripping energy, ATP I feel you inside my cells when they reproduce, compelled I pass on your message that survived the presage The mother tongue lost in translation now we speak in this 4 letter narration: golf alpha charlie tango Somehow the fertility of the others slowed Theorists call it a bottleneck event but mother’s gift came from the descent The experience of an African sun could you foretell what was to come? Were there omens to be witnessed or did you die of simple sickness? We thank you for our daily bread with glucose we will go ahead Our cells buckle down and breathe time capsule in a double sheath Thrust from the garden now risen to scientific stardom You are the mother absolute gained knowledge through forbidden fruit
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Two poems by Scott McQuarrie
Cast and back-cast. The flow and ebb of river, rod, and reel. Backing to mainline, to tippet to fly, I tie one on.
Current
My waders eddying the current, a breakwater in the rushing flow that plots to pull me along its predetermined path. Four pound, six pound, eight pound test, my vest a store of treasures. Raging Prawn, Aggravator, Still Water Damsel. Their names a reflection of their likeness, and their creator. Flies fly from my fly-box. Hope renewed with every knot, I tie another one on. Waiting for tight lines, to fill my net, a moment of release. Cast and back-cast. My fly-box is full and my day is empty with promise.
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Jogger (Not)
Warm-up. Shorts and T equals regret. Grey, cold, prickly day. Playlist: Chill Mix. Perfect for staying in bed. First Leg. Muscles and attitude aligned in doubt. Icy asteroids crater my skin. Playlist: Chill Mix. I am a popsicle, so it works. Second Leg. Hope peaks at half-way. Rain and grey fall with ill intent. Playlist: Chill Mix. I hear nothing but the thump, thump, thump. Third Leg. A roaring furnace, I relish the curtain of wet poured out upon my world. Playlist: Hair Metal Essentials. I am a Joggernaut. Nothing but my timer can stop me now.
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philosophical soundbite by Michelle Pahl it is an impossibility, an illusion we’re racing and chasing and striving to achieve, certain the right combination of action and intention, the correct execution will somehow result in near perfection for our lives and our persons; based on the mistaken assumption that our choices and actions are relevant and significant, and contain scientific certainties and are absolute — a fallacy encouraged by our disregard, both willful and unconscious, of the truth which is that in the face of all that is and all that could be we are small, momentary, and incredibly finite — insignificant biological inhabitants with insular pursuits in an incredibly complex world that is whirling through an incomprehensible universe, and the only thing that’s certain in our short and simple lives is our obliviousness, which for some fades for brief moments
Left: “Another Breath, Another Bloom” Dimensions: 20” x 18” Medium: Acrylic on canvas by Michelle Lussier
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Gaza Nonviolence Op-Ed by Colter Louwerse
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n 2011, the customarily conservative Economist magazine published a rare, uninhibited, and veracious op-ed on nonviolent resistance in Palestine. It deviated from the typical stance taken by Western media, proving itself prescient: We've asked the Palestinians to lay down their arms. We've told them their lack of a state is their own fault; if only they would embrace non-violence, a reasonable and unprejudiced world would see the merit of their claims... If crowds of tens of thousands of non-violent Palestinian protestors continue to march, and if Israel continues to shoot at them, what will we do? Will we make good on our rhetoric, and press Israel to give them their state? Or will it turn out that our paeans to non-violence were just cynical tactics in an amoral international power contest
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staged by militaristic Israeli and American rightwing groups whose elective affinities lead them to shape a common narrative of the alien Arab/ Muslim threat? Will we even bother to acknowledge that the Palestinians are protesting non-violently? Or will we soldier on with the same empty decades-old rhetoric, now drained of any truth or meaning, because it protects established relationships of power? What will it take to make Americans recognise that the real Martin Luther King-style non-violent Palestinian protestors have arrived, and that Israeli soldiers are shooting them with real bullets? Nonviolence definitively “arrived” in Palestine in 2018. (In fact, as more perceptive observers have documented, it has never been absent.) Over the past seven months, tens of thousands of Palestinian inmates of the
Gaza Strip have advanced, unarmed, upon the Israeli prison fence, which cages them in an unlivable space, in a desperate plea for international intervention. Their efforts have been met by global equivocation, and a hail of very “real bullets.” The immediate impetus for the protests lies in Gaza’s precarious humanitarian condition. With some 1.9 million people packed into 365 square kilometers, it is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Eighty per cent of the population are refugees, expelled from their homes in 1948 by Zionist militias who cleared the land for the establishment of a Jewish state. Some 70 per cent are reliant upon humanitarian aid to survive; half are children. Since withdrawing its settlers and soldiers in 2005, Israel maintains a ruthless occupation from outside the territory, exercising continued “effective control” over the Strip’s borders, coastline, electricity supply, and people’s registry. Concurrently, Gaza’s young, dispossessed, and stateless peo-
ple have been subjected to a brutal and inhuman Israeli blockade, implemented in tangent with Egypt. The blockade is unanimously condemned by human rights organizations (Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, B’tselem, to name but a few) as “collective punishment of a civilian population.” Indeed, Gaza’s economy is “collapsing,” reported the World Bank this year, and “will never improve” so long as Israel’s draconian restrictions on free movement of people and goods aren’t lifted. Escaping this man-made hellscape is nearly impossible—while polling indicates that 50 per cent of the population wants to emigrate, Israel and Egypt sharply restrict exit permits. Every few years the plodding economic strangulation of Gaza is interrupted by what Israeli Defense Force (IDF) officials fondly refer to as “mowing the lawn”—extensive military operations which pulverize Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and have killed thousands.
Israel argues that the blockade is necessary to prevent the flow of arms to the Islamist militant
The sniper bullets don’t come in quick succession. It’s not a barrage of fire...You wait a few minutes... Another shot, another body drops. organization, Hamas, in Gaza. This pretense collapses under cursory examination. In 2010, the Israeli human rights organization Gisha obtained a partial list of items banned under the Israeli blockade, among them “cement” and “iron,” but also “construction wood,” “potato chips,” “choco-
late,” “jam,” “industrial margarine,” “fresh meat,” “biscuits,” “sweets,” “size A4 paper,” “goats,” and “toys.” (One leaves it to readers to imagine the lethal potential of a Palestinian teddy bear.) Moreover, it is not only imports but also Gazan exports which are restricted by the blockade, while fishing limits imposed by the Israeli navy have caused the once thriving Gazan fishing industry to concave. Documents obtained by WikiLeaks reveal the civilian population as the true target of the protracted siege—the Israeli Defense Ministry once counted the individual calories needed for human survival in Gaza. The goal is to impose a “diet” upon Gazans—to keep their economy “on the brink of collapse” as punishment for voting Hamas into power in a 2006 election declared by international monitors like the Carter Center to be “professional and impartial.” Israel’s attempts to economically “de-develop” Gaza have been remarkably successful. In 2015, a UN report concluded that “if present trends continue,” Gaza would be “unlivable by 2020.” In 2017, Robert Piper, the UN coordinator for humanitarian aid and development activities, told Reuters that the previous assessment had been unduly optimistic: “When you're down to two hours of power a day and you have 60 per cent youth unemployment rates ... that unlivability threshold has been passed quite a long time ago.” In sum, Israel has reduced Gaza to what has been described as a “toxic slum,” in which Palestinians are “caged […] from birth to death” (former UN high commissioner for human rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein); a “sinking ship” (International Committee of the Red
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Cross); and a “ghetto” (Haaretz editorial board). Faced with the “breakdown” of their “entire society” (Harvard professor Sara Roy) and the destruction of their “whole civilization” (former UN high commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson), Gazan men, women, and children took to the fence separating Gaza from Israel. Dubbed “The Great March of Return,” the goals of the movement—well-grounded in international law and formulated by a grassroots organizing committee enjoying backing from all Pal-
territories has noted, the Israeli response constitutes a sick augmentation of Talmudic dictate: “An eye for an eyelash.” The myriad and overlapping conclusions of respected human rights organizations buttress Lynk’s assertion. Israel has carried out a “murderous assault against protesting Palestinians … who pose no eminent harm” (Amnesty International), and has “shot and killed protesters on the basis of a policy,” resulting in “a bloodbath anyone could have foreseen” (Human Rights Watch). These acts, international monitors de-
“Innocent human beings, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink, and likely by the soil in which they plant.” estinian political factions—are twofold: First, to draw attention to the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes they abandoned during the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Second, and more immediately, to compel Israel to adhere to the demand of the 2014 UN fact-finding mission in Gaza: lift the illegal blockade “immediately and unconditionally.” As Michael Lynk, a Canadian law professor cum UN special rapporteur for the occupied
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clare, amount to “willful killing” and probable “war crimes.” The demonstrations have been undertaken at massive human cost—since March 30, 2018 some 171 Palestinians have been killed (57 more in other circumstances). The violence peaked on May 14—the eve of the Palestinian commemoration of the Nakba, and the day chosen by the Trump administration to celebrate the opening of the United States embassy in Jerusalem. While Ivanka Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood
cheerfully in Jerusalem, Israeli snipers expertly executed some 60 Palestinians at the border. A reporter for The Nation described the cold-blooded ease with which the Israeli soldiers carried out the massacre from afar: The sniper bullets don’t come in quick succession. It’s not a barrage of fire. It is methodical, patient, precise. A single shot rings out and someone falls. You wait a few minutes. The crosshairs settle on the next target. Another shot, another body drops. Again and again and again. It goes on for hours. Yet the death toll misleads as to the true extent of Israel’s brutality towards the protestors. “The aim was to hurt rather than to kill,” notes the Israeli journalist Amira Hass, so as “to leave as many young people as possible with permanent disabilities.” A volunteer doctor in Gaza aptly summarized the logic underpinning the Israeli tactic: The Israelis understand that the world counts the dead and considers the injured or the wounded a lesser crime, so to speak, and so it is an attempt at creating an “iceberg effect”: that is, a situation where what is apparent is the killed but the real crime is in the wounded [who are not as visible] and the type of wounds that have been inflicted […] we were looking at something closer to a World War I– type carnage than a demonstration. Hunting ammunition is used against protestors. It is designed
to “expand and mushroom inside the body” upon impact. Doctors Without Borders, which runs clinics in Gaza, has explained the sordid effect these bullets have upon the human body: “The exit wounds are fist-size. Bone is pulverized into dust.” Those who sustain a direct hit to the leg are fortunate if they avoid amputation. Stated one international surgeon volunteering in Gaza: “I have worked in Rwanda, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Soweto and I have never seen such a high number of catastrophic limb injuries of the same nature—anywhere [emphasis added].” According to data from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), almost 6,000 Palestinians have been injured by live ammunition. The bullets are supplemented by extensive and indiscriminate use of tear gas. In total, some 12,000 have been hospitalized with injuries, including “1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedics, and 115 journalists” (Amnesty International). Israel has attempted to mask the reality of its “campaign of barbarism” in Gaza, under a veneer of “self-defence.” In particular, the Israeli military and political echelon argue that the protestors are not unarmed nor civilian, and in fact serve as cover for armed Hamas militants posing a violent threat to Israeli soldiers and civilians. Yet the IDF itself also acknowledges that in the context of the seven-monthlong protests, only one soldier has been recorded lightly injured by protestors after being “struck by a rock.” Indeed, while Gazan protestors have utilized the symbolic weapon of the stone and (occasionally) the Molotov cocktail, Human Rights Organizations report that they have “not
Distaste by Carissa Weins When I eat alone I look into the mirror, curse myself for every spoonful of dinner that enters my mouth. I grab the repulsive rolls attached to my midriff and imagine a knife slicing them off like a happy couple blissfully cutting their cake. When my stomach roars of hunger during class I cough harshly to mask the constant reminder of my desperate desire to eat freely. I wear stretchy jeans to cover the dimples glazing my ass and thighs; looking at them would be accepting my body for what it is: disgusting.
documented instances where protesters posed an imminent threat to life.” If the Israeli army maintains the opposite, it has refused to provide evidence. Yehuda Shaul, a founder of the Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, has noted that “Every sniper’s ‘spotter’ films every shooting.” “If protesters were really armed, posing a mortal threat,” he inquires, “then where are the videos?” Israeli politicians have also pointed to the use of incendiary kites by Gazan protestors as justification for its maintaining the siege and use of force. Yet the damage caused to Israeli property (a mere $2 million) by these kites pales in comparison to that caused to Palestinian property by the blockade, not to mention Israel’s routine spraying of herbicides along the border, which
each year renders hundreds of acres of otherwise arable land in Gaza unusable. As Israeli defence officials admit, the threat caused to Israelis by the Palestinian “terror” kites is marginal at best. “All the whining about the kites drives me crazy,” one senior officer told Haaretz reporters. “It’s also the complete opposite of what you hear from most of the people who live here […] People say openly: ‘We like it here; we want to live here, despite the fires.’” And as one Israeli farmer on the Gaza border explained on Israeli television: “It’s not terror […] it’s a fire. We put it out and continue to plow.” Israeli ministers have called for those launching the kites to be assassinated, and some have even labelled the kites as a justification for war. Yet as the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy aptly concludes: “There
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has never been a just war started over a kite.” Statements by the Israeli leadership betray its utter disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza. In August, Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman stated that all “168 people” killed at the fence up until that point were “Hamas,” while Education Minister Naftali Bennett declared that “I would not allow terrorists to cross the border from Gaza every day… and if they do, we should shoot to kill.” The ministers’ callous rhetoric is mirrored in statements made by the IDF: “We know where every bullet landed,” the army bragged on Twitter after a bloody day at the fence, additionally warning that a bullet to the leg would be “the least that anyone who tries to cross the security fence between Gaza and Israel will face.” IDF snipers have been assured that they need not fear any sanction for their actions: “We will give [Israeli soldiers] all the backing they need,” Netanyahu proclaimed, “to do their holy work.” Human rights organizations have recorded who the “Hamas” “terrorists” as described by Lieberman and Bennett really are. A brief selection of examples vividly clarifies the nature of Israel’s “holy work”: Razan al-Najjar, a Palestinian nurse who, by the account of multiple witnesses, as well as photographic evidence, “was fatally shot by a member of the security forces who was aiming directly at her as she was standing about 25 metres away from the fence, despite the fact that she posed no danger to him or anyone else and was wearing a medical uniform” (B’tselem). Former Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon slander-
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ously claimed on Al-Jazeera that al-Najjar had had a bomb strapped to her, while the Israeli army deliberately misquoted a statement of Najjar’s so as to depict her as a human shield, before finally claiming that she had been mistakenly killed by a ricocheting bullet. Abdallah Sabri al-Qatati, a volunteer paramedic “who was shot in the back while he was about 100 m away from the fence, and was pronounced dead in hospital less than an hour after being shot” (Amnesty International).
“Does
Israel have the right in the name of self-defense to poison one-million children?”
Ahmed Masabah Abu Tuyur, a 16-year-old boy, who was filmed “being shot… as he was waving his hands at a great distance from the Gaza/Israel fence, east of Rafah. He was shot in the chest and died” (Amnesty International). Shadi Abdul Aal and Nasser Azmi Mosbeh, both just 12 years old, and both fatally shot in the head (Amnesty International). Mousa Abu Hassanein, a civil defence worker who rescued the Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani after he had been shot in the legs. Only an hour later, Abu Hassa-
Left: Portrait of a Woman House Sitting for her Parents with her Boyfriend Staying Over Some Nights by Mikaela Collins
nein was “was fatally shot… in the chest” while standing “about 200 metres from the fences at the time” (Human Rights Watch). All too often, media and scholarly coverage of the situation in Gaza is couched in the technical legal discourse of “proportionality”—it questions whether Israel is utilizing “proportionate” or “disproportionate” armed force in what is assumed to be an ultimately justifiable project of “defending” a “border.” Consider instead only one fact about Gaza: as a result of the Israeli blockade, 96 per cent of the tap water is unfit for human consumption. Concretely, Oxfam reports that untreated drinking water is the leading cause of child mortality in Gaza. The World Health Organization warns that one million people are “at risk of contracting waterborne diseases,” and a comprehensive RAND study concurs that unless immediate action is taken to reverse current trends, an epidemic outbreak of waterborne disease (cholera, etc.) is a question of “when,” not ‘“if.” This reality is acknowledged even by the Israeli military. As early as 2016 IDF officials warned that Gaza was on the cusp of humanitarian disaster, while a 2017 report by the Israeli State Comptroller pointed up the need to address Gaza’s water pollution
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problem—not out of concern for the Palestinian population, but because an epidemic outbreak in Gaza has the potential to spread into Israel. Sara Roy, the foremost expert on Gaza’s economy, soberly summarizes the dire water situation in the Strip: “Innocent human beings, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink, and likely by the soil in which they plant.” Given this unassailable fact, the parameters of the contemporary debate over proportionality in Western media and scholarship merely obfuscate the fundamentally horrific reality of life in the Gaza prison. Indeed, “The only morally sane question presented by the situation in Gaza,” note two respected Jewish commentators, “is, Does Israel have the right in the name of “self-defence” to poison one million children?” One might assume that the aforementioned question need only be rhetorical for any informed observer endowed with a conscience, but the response of the international community to the deliberate poisoning of Palestinian children throws this assumption into doubt. As the Economist predicted seven years ago, Western “paeans to [Palestinian] non-violence” have withered in the face of the Israeli onslaught. To be certain, the image of unarmed men, women, children, journalists, and medics being gunned down by Israeli have on occasion elicited international outrage—the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council have both passed resolutions condemning Israel’s use of “disproportionate and indiscriminate force” against Palestinian civilians. Yet despite the calls of human rights organizations like Amnesty In-
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ternational for an arms embargo, the Great March of Return has failed to compel the international community to act to restrain Israel. “We have lost the battle for public opinion,” a prominent Gazan organizer lamented. “There is no international community,” a volunteering doctor tending to the thousands of wounded in Gaza likewise despaired: “the international community [as a figurative watchdog] is not there.” Palestinians have long been sermonized to on the efficacy of Gandhi, Mandela, and King. Yet now, in its moment of truth, Gaza is abandoned like never before in its history. Efforts at the Security Council—the sole United Nations body capable of authorizing force or sanctions to end Israel’s human rights abuses—have been predictably vetoed by the United States, which under the Trump administration has become the most obsequiously pro-Israel in the country’s history. Moreover, as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen are engulfed in fratricidal bloodletting in the wake of the Arab Spring, it has been difficult for Gaza’s suffering to claim and retain the international limelight. Finally, even Gaza’s erstwhile regional allies, who once might have used some of their influence with Washington to reign Israel in—have forsaken it. While Egypt and Turkey have both recently pursued multi-billion-dollar oil pipeline deals with Israel, the Gulf States, led by Saudi Arabia, have formed a close alliance of convenience with Israel over their shared loathing of Iran. Canada, too, has abandoned the people of Gaza to their fate. After the Canadian doctor Tarek
Right: “Anxiety” Dimensions: 16” x 20” Medium: Mixed media By: Katie Diespecker
Loubani was shot and injured by Israeli snipers on May 14, a professedly “appalled” government of Justin Trudeau speciously called for an independent inquiry into the violence. But a mere two days later, in an act of mind boggling perfidiousness, Canada voted against just such a Commission of Inquiry proposed by the UN Human Rights Council. One’s pulse should not stay steady as a Canadian reader examines the ghastly “black record of Gaza’s martyrdom.” Nor should one’s anger and indignation at the miseries torment of two million people half a world away go un-acted upon. Conscientious Canadians must speak truth to power about what is happening in Gaza, and must compel their government to join the ranks of those unequivocally condemning and pressuring Israel. So long as the international community remains dormant, the heroic efforts of the Gazan people to resist their destruction will be in vain. The “real Martin Luther King-style non-violent Palestinian protestors” have done far more than their part requires of them; it is time for those in solidarity with them to step up to the plate. ➶ Colter Louwerse is a UFV alumni and Phd researcher in Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, UK.
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disaster movies by Michelle Pahl
I
love a good disaster film. As far as I’m concerned, the greater the level of destruction, the better. I don’t want to see actual carnage. I have no interest in observing piles of mangled and devastated bodies. I’m okay with implication. Long shots of waves wiping out whole populations or tornados ripping apart cities are best enjoyed when actual death is glossed over. I like to focus on the spectacle. I can’t enjoy them if I think too closely about what’s happening or see bodies lying around. I wonder about my affection for these kinds of films sometimes. What is it about the collapse of a city at best and society as we know it at worst that appeals to me so much? I’m not a sadist; the real-life random suffering of people holds no appeal. I also don’t enjoy slasher films — Too much gore and ugliness and very little in the way of redemption. It’s the redemption I enjoy, I think, and the fact that the 31
main characters rise above their plight. They’re not perfect people, ever, in fact; at the beginning of the film, they’re usually moderately unappealing and realistically flawed. They’re horrible spouses or bad parents; they’re rude to everyone they encounter or are professional fail-
ures. But then di- sasters happen, and they change. They see the chaos around them and they step up. They begin to exemplify the best we have to offer as a species, demonstrating qualities like charity, selflessness, and bravery. I like see-
ing that in people, even when it’s make-believe. The best seems to be in short supply these days, but in disaster movies, it’s there for the taking. The heroes demonstrate courage, they fight when they need to, they persevere, and despite the obstacles they face, they get it done. These are good characteristics to aim for if you’re struggling. It takes a lot to fight the internal fight. It’s fatiguing to be in there, day after day, slugging it out when no one even notices. The bruises don’t show. The wounds are invisible. The fatigue is misunderstood. It’s tempting to give up at times, to lay down your weapons and let the wrong-headed thinking take over. It takes courage — the same kind I see on screen in disaster pics — to keep going. Seeing the characters on screen persevere even when things are utterly dark, and hope seems pointless, inspires me in real life. I want to be like them. Their courage inspires. They keep going
no matter what. Every time they get knocked down, they get back up. They persist. I used to think the fact that I wouldn’t stay down meant I was a slow learner, but I’ve come around. You never get anywhere if you give up and that’s true no matter the battle, whether it’s digging yourself out of a building that collapsed following the biggest earthquake ever, or pulling yourself out of bed one more time, despite the apparent futility of it all. The best part about these
heroes is that they succeed. They may not avert the disaster (and wouldn’t that be a boring movie, the climate shift that almost happened,
they get it done. I want to get it done. I don’t want to live through a massive disaster. I have enough small-scale problems to work through. I do like thinking that I could be like the heroes I enjoy watching so much. It occurs to me, however, that I could emulate their character assets without a societal collapse. Perhaps that’s why I like disaster films so much. They demonstrate that in our darkest moments, we are still capable of shining through. m
These are good characteristics to aim for if you’re struggling. but didn’t) but they achieve what they set out to accomplish. Whether it’s making their way through challenging conditions to warn the powers that be, or rescuing their family and keeping them safe,
Control by Jordan Wolfe Through a crowd of white suits a woman in black sits behind a porcelain desk in the middle of a white room. Her inkblot hair tied up with an elastic. Runaway strands walk a tightrope on the smooth edge of her glasses that distort her black eyes. Her soft voice snakes through the crowd and wraps around my neck, her tones vibrate through me and darkness creeps to the edge of my vision. Under her spell I slip, down her black peacoat, past her black jeans, beneath her black flats tapping the white floor, the rhythm my heartbeat. The tapping slows and her voice rises and I choke on air. Darkness obscures my vision and I blink faster faster as she taps slower slower until she stops. 32
Title: Show Posters Medium: Ink on paper by Caleb Campbell
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Can You See Me? Can You Feel Me? Following a narrative of patterns representing social anxiety and a lack of connectivity between human beings, "Can You See Me? Can You Feel Me?" is a textile art piece hung in four separate chiffon panels, representing the veil between ourselves and the people around us. The purpose of the piece having been split into four panels, in addition to separating the four distinct patterns, is to elicit a sense of interaction between them and to create a space which can be entered. Various psychological studies have found that expansive patterns with small holes or thinly spaced lines can make certain people feel uncomfortable. This fact is utilised within the piece, so that while you pass by the panels, gazing through them at a friend or passerby, something about the experience may feel odd, or distressing. The stark contrast between the black and the white is meant to act as an obstruction of light. The black markings are shadows that are refer to how social anxiety works against us in communication with other human beings. "Can You See Me? Can You Feel Me?" is overall, a piece about human beings that attempting to break free from their fear of social interaction. Title: "Can You See Me? Can You Feel Me?" Medium: Dyed Chiffon Panel Dimensions: 2.2’ x 5.5’ 35
by Cassie de Jong
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Q&A with Wade Davis by Jesse Boyes
It’s fascinating how ayahuasca has gone from being a completely obscure thing when i was your age ... to now of course it’s become not just common knowledge but commonly used by people everywhere. 37
Wade Davis is a professor of anthropology, the B.C. Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia, was the Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 1999 to 2013, and is a prestigious storyteller. Davis is a writer, a photographer, and a filmmaker. He holds a degree in anthropology, another in biology, and a PhD in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. A passionate defender of what he calls the ethnosphere, his philosophical vision as a young man was influenced by such mentors at Harvard as the explorer and botanist Richard Evans Schultes, and social anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis, who he describes as being in the scholar-as-activist tradition. What is cultural relativism? Cultural relativism is something very specific to a way of thinking about culture through the anthropological lens. The fundamental idea of cultural relativism is that the world in which you were born is just one model of reality, the consequence of one set of adaptive choices that your cultural lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago. Whether it’s a yak herder in the Himalayas or a Voodoo acolyte in Haiti, or a hunter in the Arctic, all these peoples teach us that there are other ways of thinking, other ways of being, other ways of orienting yourself in social, spiritual, ecological space. Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human, and alive? When the peoples of the world answer that question, they do so in the 7,000 voices of humanity. In that sense, anthropology is the antidote to nativism. It’s the antidote to Trump. As Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas’ student said, the entire purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences. Cultural myopia, the idea that my way is the real way and that everybody else who’s not like me is a failed attempt at being me, or a failed attempt at being modern, or whatever we say, has actually been the curse since the dawn of consciousness. It’s what’s been the source of all
Wade Davis. Photo by Adam Dillon
conflict, right? Religious wars, cultural wars, you know—nativistic, nationalistic wars. As the world has become a more integrated place, we really have no choice but to struggle to figure out how we’re going to truly live in a pluralistic multicultural world where the issue is not the traditional versus the modern, but the rights of people to choose the components of their lives. The goal isn’t to freeze people in time like some kind of zoological specimen or have us go back to a pre-industrial past. It’s to find a way that all peoples can benefit from the genius of the best of modernity, the best of science, without that engagement demanding the death of who they are as a people. Ultimately culture is not decorative; it’s not the songs we sing or the prayers we utter or the clothes we wear. Culture is ultimately about a body of moral and ethical values that we envelop every human being in to keep at bay the barbaric heart that haunts humanity, and has done so for a long time. It’s culture that keeps civilization intact. It’s culture that allows us to make sense out of sensation, to find order and meaning in a uni-
verse that may have neither. Culture is such a thin veneer over the barbaric heart of humanity; and that’s not a hyperbolic statement. Look what became of the Germans in the 1930s, look what’s happening in the United States as we speak, look what happened in Cambodia in the killing fields, look at Mao Tse Tung—none of these people set out to do what they thought were the wrong things. Mao in 1957 thought he was moving China forward, even if it did result in 48 million dead. Is that why your work highlights the vitality of story and myth? If you want to communicate the lessons of anthropology you can’t do it through polemics or through politics. You really have to do it through storytelling. Narrative and stories change the world. I certainly think that, and that’s what I am. I’m a storyteller. The medium might be film, it could be books, it can be public lectures or whatever, but fundamentally it’s storytelling—telling stories through the lens of anthropology or history or culture. That’s why I strongly believe in the activist
tradition of anthropology. You tell an epic story in your book One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest. Many wonder, how did you develop the ability to write so enchantingly? I taught myself to write because I had to. I took the assignment in Haiti and went from being flushed with money to having no money. Of the two main mentors/ backers—one of them died and one had a stroke within 24 hours. I peddled the idea for a book to a literary agent and then wrote two chapters that I thought were the best things since the Bible. I tried to send it back and he said try again. So I had to teach myself to write, and I did. Speaking of language, you’ve said that with “The Neolithic Revolution — which gave us agriculture at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the—” —prose of the priesthood. This sounds very profound.
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Falling Wild Flowers by Caleb Silveira
I dream, a dream, a dream, a dream, of wild flowers, capsized off dining room tables, who cry out: “Save us Baby Sisyphus!” But… He is busy, pushing small rocks over mole hills, “Save us Lord!” The Wild Flowers plea. But… He is busy, oppressed by coming Modernists. “Save us Someone!” The flowers cry; as the frigid waters flow over them,
and the Titanic sinks.
There’s a very big difference between a shaman and a priest. A shaman is an individual who is concerned with the release of the individual’s wild genius, right? This is why shamanic traditions use psychoactive substances. Ultimately the reason why psychedelics are so subversive is that: they’re subversive! I mean, they’re uncontrollable, and what happens is beyond. Whereas with a priest, his entire job is to ac-
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tually socialize people into a congregation. A congregation which can be managed by the state. That’s what it is, right? The shaman’s role is to either invoke some technique of ecstasy so that he or she can individually soar off on the wings of trance to work their deeds of rescue, or to catalyze the individual spirit and release the individual for whatever purpose. It’s the opposite of a kind of state-sponsored religious ideology which by its very
structure is designed to secure people to a certain way of thinking, generally to the benefit of a powerful orthodoxy and a powerful leadership. So, those plants that have been so subversive and difficult for our culture to integrate… Mhmm. They’re becoming more common knowledge: psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and others. Do you think there’s a future of culturally sanctioned use of these plants in the West? I could come back in 1974, tell someone I’d just taken ayahuasca, and they wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about— to now of course it’s become not just common knowledge but commonly used by people everywhere. I think there’s a resurgence of interest in the clinical applications of psychedelics which is long overdue. These substances have immense potential particularly in therapy, which of course in a way was the genesis of the psychedelic movement. The reason that Leary and Alpert became so excited about LSD was that they were frustrated by the failures of their own profession. There had been a famous report that came out that said that—and you know Leary was a serious social psychologist—no matter what the intervention in psychiatric or psychological challenges, a third of the people got better, a third got worse, and a third stayed the same. It called into question the entire utility or even the point of his academic discipline, right? Right at that
moment, he discovered mushrooms and later LSD and suddenly these substances, in cracking open the mind, struck him as the holy grail they had all been missing or looking for. I always say that our parents said “Don’t take these substances, you’ll never come back the same.” That, from our point of view, was the whole point. They did transform one’s life. That’s why I always say that I wouldn’t write the way I write, I wouldn’t think the way I think, I wouldn’t treat women, I wouldn’t understand nature, I wouldn’t appreciate biology, I wouldn’t understand cultural relativism—all this stuff was deeply impacted by my subjective experiences with psychedelics. So, in that sense, the parents were correct. Much of your interest in plants, language, and story ultimately comes down to how humans relate to the land and to each other, right? You’ve made a home for yourself in the Stikine Valley and put a lot of your time into protecting it from devastating industrial developments. Well, I haven’t been so successful. I tried. I’ve wondered what’s happening there now. You can look up a couple of things I’ve written recently. There was something in The Narwal just a month ago. The Red Chris mine, on Todagin Mountain, is just the most egregious example of corruption that I know of in all my lifetime in growing up in British Columbia. I think it’s extraordinary that it never got more at-
tention. Almost a billion dollars of tax money spent to essentially subsidize one mine that employs 300 people for 20 years. All set in motion by a government beholden to the owner of that company. I mean it’s so corrupt, it’s beyond imagining, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten much traction. The problem is that Canadians like the idea of the North, but none of them go there. It’s very diffi-
I think there’s a resurgence of interest in the clinical applications of psychedelics which is long overdue. cult to get Canadians to think of anything that exists outside of the major cities. How can readers in the Fraser Valley act on the advice which you’ve quoted Gary Snyder as saying—the best thing young people can do for the environment is— Stay put? Yes. I think that that’s a wonderful idea, fidelity to place. That’s one of the things we can certainly learn from First Nations. Even when the Red Chris mine went ahead—not five kilometres from our lodge—I promised my daughters and I promised my friends that I would never abandon the Valley. The advice I have for young
people is something Peter Matthews said, which is that anyone who thinks they can change the world is both wrong and dangerous. What he meant by that is obvious. He had in mind people like Mao and Hitler and Pol Pot. None of these people thought that they were doing the wrong thing, but look what the consequences were of their megalomania and their zeal. Another way of looking at it is that you do have an obligation to bear witness to what’s going on which is what you do as a writer, but at the heart of that comment is a Buddhist notion that life is not about a destination; the destination is a state of mind. What I mean by that is that if you think of life as a series of encounters that you’re going to win or lose, you run the risk of becoming disillusioned and embittered in the wake of a series of, quote-unquote, losses. If you expect there to be a moment, which is something that is sort of instilled in us through the Christian faith, where good is somehow going to triumph over evil, and you set your life up with a mission—a kind of Sir Galahad mission to be the force of good—well, you really run the risk that you’ll become exhausted and disappointed. The truth is that you’ll never vanquish evil. When Lord Krishna was asked by a disciple why there is evil in the universe, he said “To thicken the plot.” In other words, the Buddhists have a very different idea, as do the Vedic scholars. It’s, you know, evil exists and it’s useful to think, instead of thinking I’m going to triumph over evil which is sort of a Christian idea, it’s more healthy to think of it in terms of “Okay, I’ve got a choice: what side do I want to be on? The side of darkness or the side
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of light?” If you recognize that in choosing, for example, the side of what Christians might call righteousness, or the side of light, or pure thought, love, and compassion in the eyes of the Buddhist, it doesn’t mean you’re going to vanquish evil. You’re just deciding what perspective and what place and point of view you’re going to occupy in your life. The advantage of this is that it allows you to continue. In other words you don’t become disillusioned; you have no expectations.
The British Columbia government allowed what I think is demonstrably a series of egregious
The destination is a state of mind. acts of systemic and grotesque corruption which led to the destruction of the biggest wildlife sanctuary in British Columbia. I don’t let that bother me anymore.
It happened. I did what I could. It happened. That’s not a cop-out; it’s a way that I can conserve my energy for the next fight, because there’s always going to be a next fight. Life is an ongoing process. One works, all the time. I’m now writing my 23rd book and it’s just as difficult as the first, but I can be doing this because I no longer think about the first 22. I’m here in the moment working right now on what I hope will be a beautiful thing. n
Right: “Show Posters" Medium: Digital By: Caleb Campbell
Sunday by Jordan Wolfe
From the floor I watched my father melt into the recliner in his living room on God’s day. His eyes inseparable from the big screen TV. He was a religious man six days a week. On Sunday, he was faithful to a God of spiralling pigskin and cracking helmets. From the first morning kickoff til the last touchdown 41
on Sunday night: a lump of flesh and bones in his favourite chair as I sat at his feet melting crayons into my colouring book. He drank Bud Light like sacramental wine. Celebratory fuck yeahs were his hymns as they echoed throughout our house. Dinner on TV trays as Patriots fought Buccaneers and Cowboys duelled with
Redskins, two point conversions and fifteen yard penalties, touchbacks, and touchdowns. Go long, boy! during a commercial, throwing a plush football. I ran to the other side of the room, only to be met with the disappointment of my father’s face as I dropped the ball. Catch it, for the love of God!
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“Lisa Braid” Dimensions: 11” x 14” Medium: watercolour By: Ray van Liempt
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“To Keep You Safe”
Above
Dimensions: 9”x12” Medium: graphite and markers By: Katriana van Woudenberg
Below
“Des Conteneur de l’or” Dimensions: 40”x 60”
Medium: oil, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas By: Sidi Chen
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Tulips by Erin Froese Loving you, it’s like blooming. It’s a billow of silk on a breath of air. It’s the first bite of an overripe fig, when the skin bursts under your teeth and juice streaks down your chin. It’s when you’re a kid eating watermelon and you spit the seeds through your teeth because you know better than to swallow them. It’s closing a book and squeezing it to your chest because that’s the closest thing to imprinting the story on your soul. It’s lying on your back at night, watching the stars, and seeing a plane blink bright red across the sky and wondering where it’s going and waving as if the people onboard could see you and are waving back. It’s dragging a knife against a sack of rice and watching the grains spill out across the floor like sand. It’s swimming after dark and peeling off your swimsuit, watching it float along beside you, bobbing like a bath toy, and letting the water slide over sun-starved skin because hell, it’s midnight. 45
No one can see you except the stars and maybe those people on the plane. Loving you, it’s like I’ve swallowed the seeds. They’ve taken root somewhere inside me and I’ve started to swell. The vines run parallel to my veins and the leaves burst from my mouth. I let them stain my chin, my neck, my shoulders, dark and cherry-red. I let them wrap around my fingers like jade rings. Am I in bloom? You don’t ask aloud but you eye the ferns falling from my face. I will take your hand in mine, let my vines climb your wrist, hope you don’t pull away. I will open my mouth and release the tulips from my throat, red, yellow, streaked with white, and I will speak no words, but it will be answer enough.
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As Usual, the Seagulls by Chris Brechin As usual, the seagulls expatriate a picnic table. Inconspicuously, they slip through the gate, multiply in asymmetrical groupings and then flagrantly land on the table part of the picnic. Anchoring themselves against the wind, they form chains to keep themselves down so that while one smokes the others may draw in the fumes. Their jackets are always dark, their t‐shirts are always sleeveless, while their yellow beaks squawk praises to Bacchus. Besides their subtle entrance to the safety of the beach, the gang that comes around rarely surprises me – I’m assuming they’re all related.
If I do catch them before they’ve touched down, I am witness to the fluidity of their movement – a coordination so military and swift, that it is as such a stark contrast to their awkward perch upon the tabletops. With their spindly legs tucked underneath, resentfully comfortable complexions, and a nervous twitch of the collective brow, they take turns beating their helmets in a festive drum. Their décolle is also pointedly noticeable. A leap and a burst of wing; they are grey-white lightning rescinding into the realm of Loki, disappearing behind his shifting façade. They spit their goodbyes and curse the Grand Con-
science that sends them into the uncertain wind. Nobody misses them when they’re gone, but the astute will notice evidence: the boot-prints of their sentinels’ stamping, the butts of cigarettes strewn about the assimilated tables by the fury of their departure. Every now and then, the resident fowl – among many, the timid mallard and her brood, the bachelor songbird, and I, the solitary loon – can hear their boisterous and ritualistic chanting. It finds its’ way through the crashing of the waves into the blind spot of our ears and shakes our waterfront shelter to its foundation.
Left “Pale Hands, Red Heart” Dimension: 20” x 18” Medium: Acrylic on canvas By: Michelle Lussier
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Love Letter to October by Cat Friesen The lucidity, the clarity of late October; cold of the approaching winter rushes amid silhouetted skeleton trees, whispers pleasepleaseplease. But we’re not there yet. Here, leaves wither, twist and snap from branches, pivot like broken ballerinas caught in gales the strength of giants, gales the strength of where were you last night? Do you recall when you said necessity breeds ingenuity? Do you recall the way your hands twined around my neck like hedera helix? There’s a light on in your window; I can see the fire pop with the voracity of a wolf howling at the moon.
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at the station an engineer takes his time to punch lips smacking bright sunshine at two and a half past midnight four days ago a bird i spot spits out a cigarette and gliding rip its bird suit off revealing under purplewaterflesh the singing hot gem mechanism of reflexive breath at birth inside its travelling body gears of diamond flowers all lubed up with gin & laughter shift their teeth into each other in an orgy of efficiency churning birdbody into and onto itself becoming itself cuts silent thru what there is and groundwards kerplunks into a pool of forest clouds whose rainpinksugarmagma shivers the brightness of life after all what are birds if not holes in my ticket as I board the train home
by Martin Castro
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Photo: Caleb Campbell
one please for the garden of eden
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by Alex Rake the garden of eden reopened last weekend. rides were half off so i went, wandered, admired the gimmicks: • teenagers dressed as adam and eve re-enacting the infamous scene • a ferris wheel powered by the purity of its riders • and a donut kiosk i think you’d like, called the womb of sin and it was all pretty cheap, but none of it as good as we remember so after half an hour, i found the furthest park bench sat and thought of you until a fat man with a flashlight asked me to leave.
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good or by Alex Rake six p m will it rain and who to ask the clouds so high and turned away the roof won’t leak in any case and the gas is fine but will it rain just to know not knowing what good knowing knows eleven a m i dropped some change out the window at the bank three stories high and a bum from nowhere swiped them up then i felt good so am i good and who to ask
twelve p m the bankman smiled when i signed his form so am i good i signed the form seven times seven signs and one thin grin two p m just to know i’ve wandered home the sink is clogged but is it good four p m i’ve fixed the sink i’ve fixed a drink and think or know remember falling coins an accident but smile
and six p m and who to ask and will it rain some journaling some wondering wandering what evering back and forthering through the kitchen never leaking ever heating nothing it’s a way to spend my time when it might rain but is it good or is my roof or is my heat is one thing good or just where it’s put this whole house beneath high clouds
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The Knights of the Great War by Caleb Silveira
and the charging cantering brown jobs, fall into the Jerry’s Labyrinthian trenches, and the crowning big boy bombs, tear from their aeroplane mothers’ wombs, and they’re screaming, and they’re stillborn, and they slap into the mud; unused. And — all the while — the Brewster Knights march on wooden plank bridges, tyrannically ruling step by step; owner’s of this hellish landscape, forcing the drowning jobs to their final rests. And when the Knights lie, under tank treads and collapsed trenches. After all these years; the farmer’s hoe, strikes at the sleeping boy bomb, and lets out one, last, final, cry.
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Two poems by Steven Sprott
Gloucester Cathedral under renovation The cathedral stands sovereign over a field cleared with construction, looking over gravel splay and machinery, encroaching slowly upon its walls; Clutching and clambering, on one end sieging with stark scaffolding and boards, the stiff solemn aspect of the church, an indignant fortress, (accessible only through a serpentine walk lined with tall wire fences in parallel) is unmovable.
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For the old downtown, unrenovated (from a parking lot) Your crooked telephone poles, one left, one right, playing tug-of-war with wires (still drooping) — Strokes of sunlight highlighting your warped wire-fenced courts, unused, at peace — And brushed clouds, grey teased towering over little city offices, distant pines & dead space, Reaching, indifferent to your grid lines of controlled cars and floor-focused eyes, creatures pushing shopping carts or marching, intent, or driving blundering pickup trucks;
Here’s a little tree in a pot, drinking rain through sogged butt-ends and paper castaways into dry riverbed pebbles: you keep your trees gently boxed or set them working at dutiful electrical attention, stolid, suited in array of intricate necessity, stripped of their nature’s adornments, clean-shaven, forlorn — integrally part of your city, excepting those that play lazily with your wires over empty cracked parking lots, disrespectfully.
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“Hunter’s Moon” Dimensions: 13”x 15” Medium: Digital By: Elyssa English
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“Teary Eyed” Dimensions: Medium: Digital, photography By: Katie Diespecker
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59 Photo: Caleb Campbell
day by Alex Rake two p m woke up late brushed my teeth then i ate
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