featurinG
Stories That Connect
Alissa York Don Gillmor Romesh Gunesekera Caroline Adderson Philip Levine Omar Mouallem Paul Wilson Daniel Baird $7.95
SPRING 2011
Bet on It
The Hand We’re All Dealt
Émigré Dreams How Deep Can the State Reach?
Steinbeck Country
Mirages, Myths and Mammals
CoveR UP Islam’s Most Potent Symbol
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Issue 2
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sPRING 2011
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
Photo by Ricardo sternberg
– E. M. fORSTER, HOWaRD’S END
fEaTuRES The MeMoIR BaNk
Don Gillmor
18 All In
Poker, friendship, mortality. aRTICLes oF FaITh
Omar Mouallem
26 Under the Veil
A simple length of cloth? oN The ReCoRD
Paul Wilson
UNDeR tHe VeIL
Marwa Mostafa, a professional model, was photographed by Jessica fern facette at Shadified Salon & Spa
Sometimes a dream can mean exactly what it says. fICTION
oN tHe
coVeR
46 Dream States
Romesh Gunesekera
52 Hazard
Betsy Silveri made her requirements abundantly clear…
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Photo by Steve Dixon - Site No. 17
span
Alissa York Richard Haigh Caroline Adderson
07 Class Mammalia
Steinbeck: Lost and found.
08 Lessons in Democracy
An idea for Stephen Harper.
11 How I Lost The War Against War and
Learned to Love Arnold Schwarzenegger Fighting fighting.
Daniel Baird
12 Have A Little Faith
What do the world’s religions see in one another? nOTEBOOKs
Craig Taylor
16 London Calling
The people of the city. CaRTOOn
Cameron Chesney
25 Said/Heard pOETRY
Tim Bowling Russell Thornton Philip Levine Stephanie Bolster
10 15 31 50
So Much Rain Brothers The Gatekeeper’s Children An Excerpt from Long Exposure pHOTO EssaY
Steven Dixon
37 What We Leave Behind sOUnDInGs
Scott Messenger Jocelyn Brown Paul Matwychuk
59 Stages of Intimacy
The live show is where the magic lies.
61 The Dark Side of Pink
Breast cancer’s ubiquitous brand identity.
63 Gotta Watch ’Em All!
How the Criterion Collection turned movie buffs into object fetishists. BRIDGEs
Craille Maguire Gillies
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66 Big M Shows, Leduc
It seemed like time never passed at the carnival; just ran in circles.
EDITORS’ NOTE
Issue 2
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sPRING 2011
EDITOR Curtis Gillespie SENIOR EDITOR Lynn Coady CONSULTING EDITOR Paul Wilson VISUAL ARTS EDITOR Sean Caulfield GUEST POETRY EDITOR Tim Bowling CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Deborah Campbell Marcello Di Cintio Craille Maguire Gillies Lisa Gregoire Bruce Grierson Alex Hutchinson Marni Jackson Lisa Moore Timothy Taylor Chris Turner CONSULTING PUBLISHERS Joyce Byrne Ruth Kelly ART DIRECTOR Kim Larson wEBSITE Gunnar Blodgett Duncan Kinney UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA LIAISON Marie Carriere BUSINESS MANAGERS Erin Berney Nina Hawkins Eighteen Bridges is a not-for-profit magazine published through the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. The production and design of Eighteen Bridges, along with publishing consultation, was provided by Venture Publishing Inc. For subscription information please visit www.eighteenbridges.com
* put FSC LOGO HERE
A Common Thread We didn’t plan it this way, but many of the stories in this issue of Eighteen Bridges are about different kinds of faith. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised by our second issue’s inadvertent theme, considering the good will and enthusiasm the debut issue of EB generated across the country. The reaction from our supporters was two-faceted. It began with the exuberant, “We’re so glad someone is doing this,” followed by the head-shaking amazement of, “We can’t believe someone is doing this.” What’s amazing to us—in a head-shaking sort of way—is the fact that magazine culture in Canada has come to this: that the debut of a publication like Eighteen Bridges, one that prizes quality narrative above all things, is received by readers as an event little short of miraculous. This is bittersweet for us as readers and print junkies. We started Eighteen Bridges because this is the kind of Canadian publication we were desperate to read, a publication aiming for precise writing and compelling stories. We started it because we wanted to see more of it, that’s all.
So the stories came flooding in for this our second issue, and we couldn’t help but be startled by the clear emergence of a common thread. A story about women, religion and fashion. A story about the spiritual profundities of friendship and loss. A story about going in search of a writer-saint and finding something somehow even holier. A story about belief in our institutions. One absorbing account of human faith after another— faith explored, revealed, affirmed. Like we said, maybe we shouldn’t have been so surprised.
The Editors
A THANK YOU: EB2 magazine could not have happened without the contributions of many people and organizations, and we owe them a great debt of thanks – Ruth Kelly, Joyce Byrne, Kim Larson, Craille Maguire Gilles, Brian McPherson, Bernie Kollman, Cathy Condon, Kathleen Leclair, Stephen Leclair, Timothy Caulfield, Todd Anderson, the University of Alberta Bookstore, Carl Amrhein, Pamela Freeman, Catherine Swindlehurst, Marie Carriere, Erin Berney, Nina Hawkins, Blaine Kulak, Jared Majeski, Pat Gillespie, John Mahon, the Edmonton Arts Council, Stephen Mandel, and Patricia Misutka. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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CONTRIBUTORS
A few of our contributors…
pg 7 ALISSA YORK is a Toronto-based author of novels, stories and essays. Her most recent book is the novel Fauna. For more, visit www.alissayork.com
pg 18 DON GILLMOR is a journalist and novelist living in Toronto. His most recent novel was Kanata. His journalism and criticism has appeared in Saturday Night, Rolling Stone and The Walrus, among others. He is the winner of nine National Magazine Awards.
pg 50 STEPHANIE BOLSTER lives in Montreal and teaches creative writing at Concordia University. Her fourth book of poetry, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, is forthcoming from Brick Books in fall 2011.
And the rest of them… CAROLINE ADDERSON is a novelist living in Vancouver. Her most recent novel, The Sky Is Falling, was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2010 and a finalist for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. DANIEL BAIRD is currently based in Toronto. He is a regular contributor to The Walrus, Canadian Art, and BorderCrossings. TIM BOWLING is the author of nine poetry collections, three novels and two works of non-fiction. His most recent title is In The Suicide’s Library: A Book Lover’s Journey (Gaspereau Press 2010). JOCELYN BROWN lives in Edmonton. Her book The Mitochondrial Curiosities of Marcels 1-19 was recently published. CAMERON CHESNEY is a multi-skilled actor, playwright, designer, illustrator and cartoonist creator from Edmonton, Alberta. STEVEN DIXON is a photographer based in Edmonton, working as a technician in the Printmaking Department at the University of Alberta. CRAILLE MAGUIRE GILLIES is a former editor at enRoute and a National Magazine Award-winning writer who contributes to Canadian Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and Toronto Standard. ROMESH GUNESEKERA is the author of the novel, Reef, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. His other books are Monkfish Moon, The Sandglass, Heaven’s Edge and The Match. He lives in London, England. RICHARD HAIGH is a professor at Osgoode Hall law school. He researches and writes in the area of constitutional law.
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PHILIP LEVINE, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, lives in Brooklyn and Fresno. PAUL MATWYCHUK is the general manager of NeWest Press in Edmonton, as well as the film and theatre reviewer for Edmonton AM on CBC Radio. His blog The Moviegoer can be found at mgoer.blogspot.com SCOTT MESSENGER lives in Edmonton, where he’s a fulltime writer and communications specialist, and part-time musician. OMAR MOUALLEM is the associate editor of Avenue magazine in Edmonton. He is also a rapper and children’s book author. CRAIG TAYLOR lives in London, England. His non-fiction has appeared in the The Guardian, The New York Times, and the Globe And Mail. His third book, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London as Told by Those Who Love It, Hate it, Live it, Long for it, Have Left it, and Everything Inbetween, will be published this fall. RUSSELL THORNTON is a North Vancouver poet whose recent books are the award-winning House Built of Rain and The Human Shore. He won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize for Poetry in 2009. For more, visit www.Thornton999.blogspot.com. PAUL WILSON is a Toronto-based writer and translator who is haunted by recurring nightmares about unfinished projects, one of which is a memoir of his ten years behind the Iron Curtain.
SPAN Reporting back
CLASS MAMMALIA
gettyimages
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knew he wouldn’t be there. Of course I did. So why the disappointment, the lingering sense of loss? I haven’t made a practice of visiting writers’ graves. There’s only been one other, the shady creekside resting place of the woman who penned one of my favourite opening lines: “The river flowed both ways.” So simple, so perfect— a sentence that somehow cradles the entire novel to come. Margaret Laurence is more than a writer I admire, she’s a writer I hold dear, one whose authorial voice shines through the mere mastery of her works to summon up a beloved presence in the room. There aren’t many authors I feel that way about, but I recently went in search of another, beginning with his bones. Steinbeck Country. It may be a cliché, but it’s what I thought—pretty much the first thing I thought—when friends invited my husband Clive and I to visit them at their winter rental in Monterey. We spent the first day marvelling at the benevolent weather, the breathtaking seaside walk. The second day was drizzly, so the four of us drove inland to Salinas, where Steinbeck was born and where, despite all the trouble he had with the smaller minds of that small city, he chose to be buried in the end. The Garden of Memories
Cemeter y was our first port of call. There’s nothing grand about the place; a few towering cypresses are all that save it from being downright ordinary. A painted sign of the variety that directs day-trippers to antiques points the way to the Steinbeck grave. The writer lies with his third wife and widow, and with the parents who brought him into the world. Four plaques on a large stone slab, one of which is decorated with offerings. On the day we came to pay our respects there were coins and pine cones, a golf ball, a charm in the shape of an open book. How many had been there before us? Was I the only one who had trouble connecting the name on that plaque with the name on some of my most cherished books? We drove slowly into the heart of town, passing the bank that Kate patronized in East of Eden, the family home where The Red Pony took shape while its author’s mother sickened and died. We toured the National Steinbeck Center, which, though it reminded me of the books and movies they gave rise to, did little to call up the writer himself. Even Rocinante, the camper he called home during the epic road trip chronicled in Travels With Charley, spoke more of his
absence than anything else: the dog that had been his companion portrayed as a front-seat shadow; the camper with its closed cupboards and half-drunk bottle; the typewriter he would never touch again. Over the following week we did our best to keep the great man in mind. We watched DVDs of Cannery Row (a sweet and silly mash-up that features glorious sets and one of the goofiest dance scenes of all time) and The Grapes of Wrath (a gorgeous, harrowing homage, true to the novel’s message, if not to its final scene). We had every intention of seeking out the cottage where the writer had lived with his first wife, but somehow we never got around to it. Perhaps because the historic home we did happen to pass—once his maternal grandmother’s—had devolved into an abandoned, weed-strangled eyesore that smelled of ghosts. The closest I came to detecting Steinbeck’s presence was on that seaside walk, but even there—where I might have been setting my foot precisely where he had set his—it was more of a hint than a haunting. The truth is, I was taken up with another presence, this one collective rather than singular, and as evident as the other was elusory. Regular walks from our Pacif ic Grove cottage to the fabled Cannery Row took us past a small, sheltered beach. A lovely spot in its own right, it was further favoured as a haulout site for harbour seals; depending on the day, up to a hundred of them gathered there to stretch and scratch, fan their flippers and yawn. Young ones flopped up out of the surf to join their mothers where they lay, some on their sides, some on their shimmering bellies. They shone like polished stones—dark spots on silver, pale spots on blackish-brown. A chainlink fence kept my kind from disturbing them. Time after time, I stood watching through the mesh for as long as my walking companions were willing to linger. It’s as close as I come to worship—Glory be to God for dappled things. They weren’t the only marine mammals in plain sight. There were sea otters too, sweet-faced hunters gliding through kelp forests, keeping the voracious sea WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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urchins in check. After feeding, they wrap themselves in a frond or two to keep from drifting away while they nap. Sometimes they hold paws in their sleep so the current won’t separate them. Mothers cradle their young on their chests; they’ve been known to carry a pup for days after it’s died. I can’t say if the one we got close to was a mother or not, only that it was on its own. As we strolled to the end of a breakwater near Fisherman’s Wharf, it swam a lazy backstroke among the moored boats, a half-eaten sea urchin resting on the furry platter of its chest. We heard sea lions barking from time to time, but it wasn’t until we rented bikes and toured the scenic 17 Mile Drive that we caught sight of the creatures responsible for that jubilant sound. Hundreds of them were congregating just off shore, on and around the tiered island of Bird Rock. They’re more adept on land than seals are—able to rear up and sway, to use their flippers as rudimentary feet—but it’s in the water that they truly come into their own. The bay was alive with them: slick heads and flippers, golden backs and sides. In places they leapt clean out of the surf, their bodies so many drawn and quivering bows. Even from a distance it was thrilling. We humans have our outstanding specimens, but every sea lion is an athlete, an acrobat shaped to perfection by the chase—the silvery prey before it, the sharp-finned predator in its wake. Days later, back at the breakwater where we’d watched the otter swim by, I met a large bull sea lion up close. Asleep on one of the big rocks shored up below the walkway, he posed no threat; even awake he couldn’t have made the climb. He was close, though, very close. I could have laid on my belly and reached down to stroke him where he slept. His pelt was the colour of kelp, a tribute to the gold-green giants that form those underwater groves. I tried not to disturb him, but he must have caught wind of my scent, or felt my shadow fall across his lovely fur. Class mammalia, fierce in battle, devoted to our dependent young. His eye was dark and depthless. W hen it opened to meet mine every nerve in my body caught fire. 8
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Back home IN ToRoNTo, I STood ReSTleSSly by the window, looking down on the snow-bound street. At length I abandoned the whited scene and begin trolling the bookcase, retrieving first Cannery Row, then The Grapes of Wrath. I turned to another of my favourite opening lines: “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” It’s true. There’s less of the stink and noise than there would have been in Steinbeck’s day—before the place became a pretty portrait of itself—but the light and the tone and the poem are still there. Certainly the nostalgia and the dream. Thanks in no small part to the man who immortalized it, the row endures as the neighbouring ocean and its creatures do: in spite of human mismanagement and greed. Setting the comedy aside, I cracked the tragedy, not at the first scene but at the last. Rose of Sharon’s baby has been born lifeless. Somehow, despite all she’s been through, she lies down beside the starving stranger and offers him the milk in her breast. Suddenly there he was—not the Steinbeck who strode along that living shoreline and piloted that old camper and turned to earth in that unassuming plot; I’d never met him and I never would. The creature I was acquainted with— the presence—was where he’d always been: in the unabashed song of that beginning, in the profoundly mammalian moment of that end. – Alissa York
leSSoNS IN democRacy
T
he popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Libya, and Bahrain have justifiably captured the world’s attention, but it is possible that the West’s support and interest emanates partly from a conceit about our own democratic systems. Look what’s happening, we say to ourselves as these events unfold, they want to be like us. We believe that today’s Western democracies are the most open, transparent, and engaged systems of governance the world has ever seen. Why do
we think this? Well, we have hundreds of years of generally positive history and experience to draw on. We’ve created the ultimate democratic tool—the Internet— where little is sacred and all is available. We’ve made real progress in the rights of women and minorities. And even when our history and technology fail us, we have groups such as WikiLeaks prying in every corner of our governments’ operations to expose malfeasance. It’s easy, in other words, to become complacent, even smugly satisfied, with our democratic success. The evidence, however, suggests our Western commitment to democratic principles is fading—and fast. For example, we have, in the United States, the Tea Party and Birther movements, which interpret democracy only in the narrowest of senses. In Canada, the Harper government’s contempt for basic democratic processes deepens. Witness recent events such as scuppering parliamentary committees and overturning decisions made by supposedly arms-length government agencies, not to mention serial proroguing. All this highlights the fact that today’s truly profound expressions of the democratic impulse seem to be occurring in places not previously known for their egalitarian ways. In fact, Canada’s claims to high democratic ideals probably peaked a generation ago. It took place in the fall of 1980 and winter of 1981, beginning with the publication of one of those notices that commonly appear in newspapers across the country: “Individuals and organizations are invited to forward written submissions, or requests to appear, to the Joint Clerks of the Special Joint Committee on the Constitution of Canada,” it read, so as “to consider the document entitled ‘Proposed Resolution for a Joint Address to Her Majesty the Queen respecting the Constitution of Canada.’” In quality and quantity, the response to the Trudeau government’s plan to patriate the constitution (until then a United Kingdom statute) surpassed all expectations. The Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons heard from legions of ordinary Canadians about what they’d like to see in a new home-grown founding
document. Nothing like it had been done before. It was true participatory democracy and represents an ideal of open government that hasn’t often been seen in any country at any time. As I thumbed through hundreds of pages of transcripts, now kept in the Library and Archives of Canada, in Ottawa, I met some interesting characters. Two of my favourites of these respondents give an idea of the breadth of that participation. Based on its name alone, the Fane of the Psilocybe Mushroom Association could not help but pique your interest. Its manifesto began like this: “The Fane of the PMA is a legally incorporated religious society based upon the sacramental use of the psilocybin mushroom.” Then, in the respectful but slightly obsequious manner of a student seeking a professor’s opinion, the group asked the committee to elaborate on the text for religious freedom: “We would appreciate your consideration of the following principle, that ‘Everyone has the right to expand consciousness and to stimulate aesthetic, visionary and mystical experience by whatever means one considers desirable, without interference from anyone, so long as such practice does not injure another person or their property.’” Unfortunately, its submission was never accepted (and the final formulation of the constitution was rather prosaic: “Everyone has the freedom of conscience and religion”). Which of course means that only a few—namely, devout political scientists and constitutional law professors—will ever know that it might be possible to interpret “freedom of conscience” to include the ability to “stimulate visionary experiences.” If psychedelic mushrooms aren’t your idea of a suitable topic for constitutional debate, perhaps mathematics is more to your liking. If so, you would have appreciated the submission of Mr. K.B. of Ottawa. He focused on a madein-Canada amending formula based on provincial representation. An obvious devotee of numbers in all their splendour, K.B. explained, in frankly alarming detail, how the provinces could combine to
reach various amendment thresholds. It was based, for him, on factorials and choice theory. For one option, requiring eight provinces and eighty per cent of the population, he calculated all possible groupings of eight of the ten provinces (using a formula of ten factorial divided by eight factorial multiplied by two factorial, for those who care) which, he deter-
mined, would give us forty-five possible permutations. After listing each one of these, and then cross-referencing with the population counts of the 1971 census, he determined that twenty-eight permissible variations would reach a threshold of eighty per cent of the combined population of provinces. Not satisfied with that, he repeated the same exercise with the proposed “Victoria Formula” (based on six of ten provinces requiring fifty per cent of the population) and arrived at 210 possible groupings of which only nine satisfied the initial conditions. What did all this mean? Only Fermat knows. Mr. K.B. probably wanted to highlight how complicated an amending
formula could be, but I fell in love with the submission simply for its mathematical elegance. Unfortunately, like the Psilocybe Mushroom Association, K.B. was not asked to appear before the Special Joint Committee to offer further insight, so we’ll never know for sure. Still, the unalloyed messiness of democratic decision-making was everpresent throughout the Special Joint Committee’s work; nothing was censored. The intolerant were represented as equitably as the tolerant. For instance, a woman identified as A.A., whose views might have been uncommon in the salons of Ottawa at the time, began harmlessly enough, but quickly landed on the real culprit: “We have a country of races from all ends of the earth and all kinds of religious cults and witchcraft and Moonies and you name it,” she wrote, but this was “all the more reason we true Canadians, French and English, must unite as a nation.” Ms. A.A. was clearly devastated by the thought of entrenching conscience and religion in our new constitution. Why? Because, she explained, “‘Conscience’ is what we learned from our parents, conscience is what tells us right from wrong. Some people have a sensitive very learned conscience like the Pope. Others have a bad conscience learned from unmature, unqualified parents who themselves didn’t know right from wrong. How can these adulterers and homosexuals Trudeau glamourized have a good godly conscience when they brag and claim how great it is to be gay?” For A.A., the final indignity would be to make this part of our constitution because “entrenching religion in our Constitution is the best way to kill Christianity.” Though A.A. was likely unaware of the pretzel logic she was employing, she ended up supporting the very thing she tried to condemn: freedom of religion. What doeS all thIS have to do WIth the Canadian polity in the twenty-first century? For one thing, it makes me believe that open public discussion can be all those things we hope for: respectful, tolerant, WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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engaged, and generally thoughtful. The somewhat wacky, but clearly transparent Special Joint Committee seems many lifetimes away from the rushed, invectivestrewn, and inflammatory political discussions that often take place in today’s Internet-fuelled, hyper-partisan public debates. At the same time, it showed that participation can take many forms, independent of technology. I wonder if we aren’t guilty of believing, as if by default, that it’s only through fancy know-how such as social networking and the Internet that openness, transparency, and true democracy can occur. Of course, we know that can’t really be true—the ancient Greeks had horrible Wi-Fi, for instance—but it’s useful to be reminded. The Special Joint Committee represented a markedly different approach to the current way of doing things; would we even need WikiLeaks if our western governments wanted to hear everything and anything we had to say and invited us to participate in an open democratic exercise, no secrets attached? Whether you love or hate Prime Minister Harper’s government (and those seem to be the only two options), it will never be accused of embracing openness and traditional democratic ideals. The examples alluded to earlier (the proroguing, the dumping of programs and committees, the Prime Minister’s overall My Own Private Canada kind of behaviour) do not demonstrate an affection for the Platonic ideal. Expecting the current government to do something as risky, untidy, and potentially explosive as deliberating major policy through a body like a Special Joint Committee is like expecting the NHL to do something serious about fighting. It’s hard to imagine it actually happening. A nd yet, to borrow the mangled phrasings of a colleague, the portents are aligned; Trudeau was also reviled and idolized, and also occasionally performed in a less than fully democratic manner (invoking the War Measures Act during the October Crisis of 1970, for example). But in the singular act of creating a Special Joint Committee and asking Canadians to participate in this most fundamental debate over our governance, Trudeau left an unforgettable legacy—a legacy of actually caring what citizens thought. 10
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Our government, and we as citizens, have lost some of our passion for democracy. We are lagging behind other countries, as the events in North Africa have shown so sharply. How can we rekindle the fire? Perhaps Stephen Harper (now under no electoral threat, given his recent majority) ought to take a potentially explosive issue and open up the debate to a Special Joint Committee, much like the one Trudeau held. The Prime Minister could, for example, test-drive a new commitment to democratic principles on the death penalty (a topic we know to be close to his heart). Why not formally ask Canadians to submit their ideas, concerns, and
solutions on whether we should reinstate the death penalty? And if so, whether we should go back to hanging, or use lethal injections, or some other method? Such a debate might decide matters once and for all, and in a fully democratic context. Not only that, it may even bring Mr. K.B. and the Psilocybe Mushroom Association back. After all, if the state is going to consider putting criminals to death, it will certainly need a good mathematical analysis of the issue. It may even find that consciousness-expanding mushrooms are a better final meal than cheeseburgers.
SO MUCH RAIN So much rain even the spiderweb rusts. The spider in glistening oilskins creaks the winch that pulls in the dead fly. Something far inside me follows. But only the fly appears to pray. The layer of dust on the floors of the condemned houses of my childhood the layer of dust on the top of my midlife library between the footprints of the boy and the fingerprints of the man – the life that leaves no trace. When I take this steel and gut the years a dark rain spreads all over my hands and a few seconds of my mother’s tears pearl the bitten edges of my nails. The winch of her laundry-line creaks as that something far inside me, that invisible life, shivers and returns to love’s lifted and animate eyes once more in the gentleness of her weather this damp embrace of the essence of our past before she dies. ~ Tim Bowling
– Richard Haigh
How I LoSt tHe waR aGaINSt waR aNd LeaRNed to Love aRNoLd ScHwaRzeNeGGeR
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n 1982, at the fervent age of eighteen, hippy-skirted, long-hair everywhere, I bussed to New York City to be one of the million who rallied in Central Park during the UN Second Special Session on Disarmament. My heroes were Helen Caldicott, Mahatma Gandhi and the Berrigan Brothers, two priests who snuck into a nuclear missile silo and tried to hammer a nose cone into a plowshare. After New York I spent the summer at the Movement for a New Society Life Center, a Philadelphia commune, before returning to Canada to start university in the fall at the University of British Columbia. Throughout my UBC years I faithfully attended countless demonstrations and endured endless meetings in mildewy basements, but by the time graduation approached the non-violent direct action group I was involved with had degenerated into, of all things, poetry reading, and I was heartily sick of the in-fighting of the left. Also, I’d started to write fiction, which required me, if I wished to write it well, to abandon ideology. How conventional I became! I blame it on the writing. The discipline it demanded eventually crowded out other interests, such as world peace and social justice. I still want world peace. I still want social justice. I just want other people to take their turn fighting for it while I write my books. I got married. I had a baby, a son, who is now eleven years old. He’s a nice
boy; many people have said so, not just his relatives. Part of the challenge of childrearing is instilling values. Since our son sprang from the womb somehow already knowing how to share his toys and side-step conflict, I felt I had little to do in that regard. Also, unlike less prepared parents who first must find out what their values actually are, I knew mine. I could say with unwavering confidence, for example, that nice people don’t kill. The war against war started the summer my son turned four, when he was desperate for a water pistol and I refused to let him have one. Water pistols are guns and allowing children to play with them was, I thought, a political act. Did I want my child bearing arms in the playground, signalling to everyone that I opposed the long-gun registry? I did not. Whenever some visiting child (likely American) actually did turn up with a water pistol, the shunning he and his accompanying adult received was always swift and unmistakable, though other children were drawn to the pistol-toter in the same way they were drawn to “Turkey in the Straw” chiming out across the park when the ice cream truck pulled up. That summer was hot by Vancouver standards, not the kindest summer to get our roof replaced. I felt sorry for the workers levering off layers of tarry shingles under the sun, dislodging the carpenter ants. The second day of the new roof my husband took our son to run some errands, more as an excuse to get away from the noise and enjoy the free air-conditioning in the stores. When they returned, I could hear our son’s jubilant cries even above the din of crowbars and hammers. “Mama! Look! Look what we got!” He ran to me, giddy, dragging along a package nearly as tall as him. It contained, in bright summery colours, not only a water pistol, but a water Glock, a water 12 Gauge Shotgun, a water Uzi, a water Flame Thrower. An entire Water Arsenal. Didn’t we discuss this? said the look I shot my husband, which he did not see because both of them were already ripping the arsenal out of the packaging and filling it with the hose. Within minutes,
all hell broke loose. They were darting around the trees, exchanging fire, exactly as if my son had been born armed and dangerous. Guns were tossed up to the sunburned roofers, who joined in, making our yard a veritable sniper’s square in Sarajevo. How strong the urge to pretend to kill things is! I knew my son didn’t get this urge from television because we never watched it. We rented DVDs. (At that age his favourite shows were still harmless— Scooby-Doo and Justice League.) It seemed to me that day that the human male was born with a thumb and forefinger on both hands specifically to shoot guns or, in the absence of a gun, to be guns. (Huh, you say. What about girls? In girls these same two digits seem mostly for plucking petals off daisies.) Yet all the males I knew as a peace activist had pretty much stamped out of themselves the urge to role-play war. This was of tactical importance: they’d done it to themselves. Being judgmental and disapproving would only backfire in the war against war. As the peaceful parent, the one tsk-tsking furiously, I would merely be a petal-plucking drag. Instead, I would have to subvert my son’s play life and hammer his swords into plowshares without him realizing it. So when our next-door neighbour’s grown son handed over his old toys, including about a thousand miniature plastic soldiers in various postures of mortal combat, I whisked them away while my son was distracted with the spaceship. The spaceship, in mint condition, was equipped with four missiles that launched with the push of a button. My son was already fingering the missiles, so I quickly demonstrated (before the neighbour could) how to release the four “food packages.” “When you fly over Africa, press this button and the packages will fall to the hungry people on the ground. Isn’t that wonderful?” He looked vaguely disappointed, but nonetheless went nowhere without the ship for several months. In the fall when kindergarten started he took it for his very first “Montre et Recontre.” Bursting out of the class at the end of the day, he was ecstatic. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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“Mama! They’re not food packages! They’re bombs!” This, you see, is why people home school. Six months before, the Coalition Forces had invaded Iraq. Naturally camouflage was all the rage in Gap Kids that season, not the deep G.I. Joe green of my own childhood, but a dull jigsaw of brown and tan. The wars had shifted out of the jungles and into the deserts, and children’s fashion had followed. Of course my son wanted the whole get up. “Do you realize there are places in the world where five-year-olds are abducted and forced to be child soldiers?” I ranted to every parent who would tolerate my outrage. “Do you actually think that would be any fun?” I didn’t say any of this to my son. I was worried he would say, “Yes!” I permitted him to have a camouflage shirt on one condition. The condition was that we make it. “We’re going to make camouflage?” he said. “How?” “We’re going to tie-dye it!” I bought the white shirt, the dyes, the string. We had a lot of fun scrunching, tying, dipping. The next morning my son marched proudly off to school in his camo t-shirt, looking for all the world like a perfect little hippy. So how did it happen that one evening last spring I came home and found that, not only was my five-year-old eleven, he was watching The Terminator with his dad? The same way, I guess, that by the end of Grade One he had a real camo t-shirt, a camo backpack, camo cargo pants and camo underwear. The only thing he wore unsmirched by the dust of illegally invaded deserts were his socks. I capitulated on camouflage when I learned to see it from his point of view. While I was opposed to children dressing up as soldiers because I knew real child soldiers existed in our wretched world and that, post-Guantanamo Bay, being an adult soldier would probably not lead to glory, my son didn’t. To him, a soldier fought back the alien invaders on Justice League. Also, he had the coolest guns. He had the coolest guns precisely because 12
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he was a hero. Was I opposed to heroes? I was not. So, yes, killing people is wrong: I will not budge on that. But pretending to kill people? Isn’t that another thing entirely? Have I not popped off fictional characters myself, given them cancer, heart attacks, placed them in cars I knew perfectly well would crash? We may be because we think, but are we necessarily what we think? Actually, I think we’re more complicated than that. The Terminator opens in 2027, in the aftermath of the nuclear war I once fought so hard to prevent. A race of machines is battling with the last human survivors who scramble around in what looks chillingly like a combination wrecking yard and killing field. (Exactly how I feared we would turn out.) This in our living room where we’d recently enjoyed all 138 episodes of Get Smart. I asked, “What are you watching?” My son was on the couch wearing what was his preferred get up now: t-shirt that reached almost to his knees, a line across it at waist-level below the caption You Must Be This Short to Fight Me; skullpatched jeans; toque. (The toque is as necessary to the eleven-year-old as the diaper is to the eleven-month-old.) He answered without taking his riveted eyes off the screen. “It’s just a movie, Mom.” In The Terminator the human race eventually triumphs because there is a hero to lead them to victory. So the evil machines deploy an anti-hero, a cyborg assassin, and send him back in time to 1984 to terminate the hero’s mother before he is conceived and born. He comes into our world curled fetal and bucknaked, then wastes no time bare-handedly dispensing with a few punks to steal their clothes. He literally reaches inside one and rips out his heart. But what he really needs are guns, lots and lots of guns. Next stop, the Econo Gun Mart. I knew then it was pointless. If Arnold Schwarzenegger with his AMT Hardballer, his .45 Longslide and IMI Uzi and Colt Trooper and Ithica 37, not to mention his brioche-like muscles, was on their side…Wait a minute! He wasn’t the hero. The cute blonde guy was! Whatever. I had already lost the war.
Or maybe I could mount a non-violent protest, stomp to the kitchen and slam pots, or put on Bach full blast. Or maybe I could sit down and watch. I went to the kitchen. My husband called, “Where are you going?” To make popcorn, I told them. “But don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be back.” – Caroline Adderson
HAVE A LITTLE FAITH
O
n the late January morning I went to meet Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the former Archbishop of Quebec and Primate of Canada, and, since last fall, the Prefect for the Congregation of Bishops at the Vatican, I first paid a visit to the Vatican Museum. The two frescoes I found myself returning to over and over are well known but difficult to contemplate because they are high up on the palace’s ceiling. In one, by Raphael, Christ is on the cross deep in the background behind a broken Greek sculpture that seems ready to tumble over the edge of the painting, set on a sweeping and otherwise empty courtyard. The small painting is in counterpoint to Raphael’s great “School of Athens” fresco, in which Plato and Aristotle, amidst a host of other ancient philosophers, stroll through a palace, framed by an arch and an egg-shell blue, cloud-scudded sky. Plato points to the heavens; younger Aristotle gestures forward, a guide into the future. “School of Athens” is about the absorption of Greek thought into Christianity; the ceiling painting is about the triumph of Christianity over ancient pagan beliefs. The other fresco that captivated me was Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Adam,” in which a bearded God appears to be
pulling away from Adam, who is naked and leaning back on a green slope. Adam’s gaze is full of longing and grief as he reaches out, his finger nearly touching God’s; his sexual presence is so intense it’s hard to look at. “Creation of Adam” anticipates the canonical history that follows: separation from God, the fall and the expulsion from the garden, sin and the torments of desire, and the ultimate longing for grace. Catholicism is an encompassing world-view: it provides a vision of both the course of human history and the history of the spirit, and that vision, like Raphael’s and Michaelangelo’s, is triumphal. It is impossible to understand a place like the Vatican without understanding that it sees itself not just as a favoured Roman location amidst the ancient teeming city, but as occupying a privileged nexus between the unfolding of human history and the divine. Which may be one of the reasons the church finds it so difficult to address its mundane and often disastrous history. I met Cardinal Ouellet at the Casa di Santa Marta, a luxurious residence inside Vatican City built by Pope John Paul II early in his twenty-eight-year reign; it is where the College of Cardinals met to elect Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI and where the next Pope will be elected. On my way through security along the northern side of St. Peter’s Basilica, just past the great, embracing arm of Bernini’s colonnade, I noticed a crowd of lay people spilling out one of the side doors of the palace, squinting in the winter sunlight. They were coming out of one of Benedict XVI’s Wednesday audiences and looked slightly dazed. They were there, I assumed, looking for contact with holiness and wisdom, just as the people crammed into the Sistine Chapel were looking for beauty and genius (despite loud speakers booming from the upper reaches of the ceiling “This is a holy place, please remain silent”). It struck me that virtually everything about the way we are now makes the experience of transcendence difficult if not unimaginable. I waited for Cardinal Ouellet in a small, elegant sitting room, and I was startled when he finally arrived. Dressed in dark
slacks, a sweater and a jacket, a crucifix hanging around his neck, he was hardly an avatar of history but a sturdy sixtysix-year-old man with short white hair who spoke to me in a heavy Quebecois accent. “So, what are you doing here?” he asked, sitting down. “Are you a Catholic?” The question, which was reasonable enough, made me uneasy, since in some sense I had no idea what I was doing there. “No, I’m Jewish.” “Ah,” he said, looking pleased, as though relieved I hadn’t blurted out I am an apostate atheist or I am a Marxist committed to historical materialism. “I was part of the Pontifical Commission on Christian Unity,” he went on, “and we refer to Jews as ‘our elder brothers.’” “Why would Jews be discussed in a commission on Christian unity?” “It’s an acknowledgement of everything Christianity and Judaism have in common,” he said. “What about Islam?” He hesitated, cleared his throat. “Islam is completely different.”
FIFty yeaRS aGo thIS DecembeR, PoPe JohN X XIII summoned the Second Vatican Council in Rome, regarded by many as the most important reevaluation of the Catholic Church since the Council of Trent in 1545 (where the Church responded to the Protestant Reformation). According to Michael Attridge, professor of theology at St. Michael’s College at
feminism were clouds on the horizon, and gays and lesbians were at the back of the closet. T he church was not yet in crisis, but what John XXIII grasped was something deeper: the Second World War and the Holocaust were not only death blows to traditional European society but also evidence of an unprecedented moral and spiritual failure. The society that emerged from this was suspicious of institutions and history, and oriented toward material gain and personal fulfillment. With the collapse of colonialism in Africa, India and Asia, Europe also ceased to be even remotely ethnically or relig iously homogenous. Vatican II addressed an impressive variety of issues facing the church—the liturgy, the nature of revelation, the relationship between the church and individual cultures and modern society in general—and among the resulting documents was one ponderously titled, “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions: Nostra Aetate.” Nostra Aetate, as the decree is known, opens with a description of the questions people turn to religion to answer. “Men expect from the various religions answers to the unsolved riddles of the human condition, which today, even as in former times, deeply stirs the hearts of men,” it says. “What is man? What is the meaning, the aim of our life? What is moral good, what is sin? Whence suffering and what purpose does it serve? Which is the road to true happiness?
this is a holy place, please remain silent. the University of Toronto and an expert on Vatican II, “John XXIII woke up one morning and realized that the church and modern society had drifted too far apart and a council had to be called.” Secularization had been in progress for decades, if not centuries, but as of the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, its overt effects had yet to fully manifest themselves: churches and seminaries were still full, the divorce rate was low, the sexual revolution and
What are death, judgment, and retribution after death? What, finally, is that ultimate inexpressible mystery which encompasses our existence: whence do we come, where are we going?” After applauding the spiritual strivings of Buddhists and Hindus, Nostra Aetate goes on to exhort the faithful that “through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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they recognize, preserve, and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio - cultural values among these men.” The document also renounces the anti-semitic readings of the Gospels. Nostra Aetate became, the day it was released, one of the original calls for what we now refer to as “interfaith dialogue.”
The TeRmS “INTeR-faITh” aNd “INTeR-faITh dialogue” seem to crop up frequently these days. There are inter-faith centres, inter-faith communities, and even interfaith schools of theology in virtually every major city in North America. Priests, Ministers, Rabbis and Imams go to interfaith conferences. But what is inter-faith dialogue? In the Christian context, at least as reflected in decrees like Nostra Aetate, and in claims like “Jews are our elder brothers,” interfaith dialogue carries with it a theological position. In the nineteen-sixties, this approach tended to divide into inclusivism, exclusivism and pluralism. Inclusivism holds that truths manifest in all religions are covert expressions of Christ; exclusivism maintains that Christianity offers the only path to religious truth and salvation; and pluralism embraces the idea that all religions are equally legitimate expressions of the divine. But what is typically thought of as inter-faith dialogue today tends to shy away from the issue of larger theological truths. “I know that the connotation of interfaith dialogue earlier in the twentieth century was about compromise, which is why it was anathema to the Orthodox,” Rabbi Aaron Levi, an Orthodox Rabbi in Toronto and the founder of the Makom downtown Jewish community, told me. “But to my mind now it’s not contentious. I think that deeply held values are attainable both my way and through community.” For Vancouver’s Bern Barret, an Anglican Minister for over fifty years, the governing aim of inter-faith dialogue is also building community as well as promoting peace and justice. “One of the things that made me do more inter-faith work was 9/11,” he told me. “Especially the negative things many people in our church were saying about Muslims. To 14
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the Muslims I say that they have had a further expression of faith through Mohammed, and to the Jews I say that we both come from an Abrahamic tradition that shares ethical concerns. I get around any differences by seeing how they are working toward justice, love and peace.” For Barret, Christianity is less important than aspirations toward peace and justice, focussing on what he calls the relational. “By that I mean an approach to belief or faith that leads to something more important, which is how we relate to one another. I don’t think that Christianity is the only way, it just happens to be the way that I grew up.” Though less radical than Barret, Bill Phipps, a minister for the United Church in Calgary, echoes similar notes. “Part of my impulse is to work as much on an inter-faith basis as I can—I’m always looking for a common church of Canada,” he told me. “I got into the ministry to be an actor in social change.” On the other hand, for Dr. A isha Sherazi, a former research biologist and school principal who has conducted interfaith workshops in Ottawa schools, Islam is largely a personal matter. “I think that sometimes people take religion too literally,” she said. “I don’t think that either people or religions are fundamentally different. I think the soul is multifaceted and it comes down to how you can be the best person you can be spiritually. When I converted from the Hindu religion to Islam, I didn’t pass judgment on others.” “Catholics have always had more trouble with inter-faith issues than Jews,” Rabbi Levy pointed out, “because Catholicism claims to be the universal religion. Jews never wanted to convert others, and most of the time they weren’t in a position to anyway; their main concern was about others trying to convert them. There was, however, a thirteenth century Rabbi in Provence named Menachem Meiri who argued that any religion that has a solid ethical system is not idolatrous, and in a way that’s the basis of inter-faith relations.” While Rabbi Meiri went to often implausible interpretive extremes to argue that Christians are not mere pagans to be avoided, the smiling, preternaturally serene Cardinal Ouellet—who spoke to me with his hands folded on his lap, only
occasionally giving in to the temptation to glance at the big silver watch on his wrist—has been know to become almost petulant when he speaks of the primacy of the Christian family. In an address he gave last spring at the Vatican’s John Paul II Institute for the Study of Marriage and Family, he concluded, “The Christian family shows that the truth of man and the truth of God are inseparable, and the rejection of that alliance pushes us toward the nihilism of which our age has much bitter experience.” For Ouellet, Christianity is universal; outside of it lies nihilism and misery. While Pope Benedict XVI, more than any previous Pope, has renounced antisemitic readings of Christianity and has extended a hand to Jews—his recently published book, Jesus of Nazareth, argues at length against the responsibility of Jews for the death of Jesus—he has also pulled that hand back by condoning traditional prayers for the conversion of the Jews. For Benedict X V I and those like him, religion isn’t ultimately about cultural expression or personal choice or fulfillment, but higher truths. According to Solange Lefebvre, a professor of theology and sociology at the University of Quebec in Montreal, the pursuit of inter-faith dialogue intensified after the events of 9/11, not just because of the ugly stereotypes imposed upon Muslims, but also because religion had become associated with violent fanaticism, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim. This perception was exacerbated by pro-atheist polemics like Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. With its emphasis on shared values, community, social justice and personal fulfillment, the ethos underlying the inter-faith movement is a perfect fit for our liberal, democratic, multi-cultural, and largely secular society. But understood this way, can religion still engage the questions so aptly put in Nostra Aetate in 1965? “What, finally, is the ultimate mystery t hat encompasses ou r ex istence? Whence do we come, and where are we going?” “People understand that our click click click culture is shallow and not enough,” Bishop Thomas Collins, the
Archbishop of Toronto, told me, whereas, “the Pope thinks in terms of five hundred years.” Yes, I thought, but contemporary life plays out in years and months, news cycles in hours and minutes. “People will come back to the church,” the Bishop added, “because holiness and beauty equal truth.” I understood that he believed this. But then it may be that we no longer have the time or the patience or even the courage to take holiness and beauty and truth seriously.
WhIle I WaS SPeakING WIth CaRdINal Ouellet in the Casa di Santa Marta, I found myself wondering what it would
be like to believe God created the world, that God manifested himself in human history, that human beings and human history have a higher purpose. Cardinal Ouellet grew up in a pious Catholic family in northern Quebec; I grew up in Los Angeles where the closest thing to the idea of holiness was drinking gin and tonics by the pool. “I can’t say I’ve ever had a crisis of faith,” the Cardinal said, looking me in the eye as if he knew that not only have I never had faith or even understood what it is, I have also never known the kind of inner peace he exuded. Cardinal Ouellet’s Christianity is as pure and universal as the fathers of
BRotheRS One spent nights on the junior high school roof. My mother had kicked him out when the police told her he was selling drugs, and before that, selling tires he stole from gas stations. One stole a teacher’s car from the senior high school parking lot at lunch time, got a case of beer, and drove around drunk all afternoon, then smashed the car’s front fender when he re-parked it. One threw a Molotov cocktail into a teacher’s home when the teacher accused him of copying an essay. The same one beat up his P.E. teacher. One beat up the leader of a gang. With that gang after him, he started his own gang, he himself its only member, and wore a red bandana and red old lady’s jacket to school every day. No one along the gauntlet that had been set up to stop him touched him. Each one headed to “alternate school.” A year or two, and the school was the bar, the drunk tank, jail. But each one changed, and turned himself around. Here we all are, suddenly in our mid and late thirties, with everyone fooled. Clean-living, clean-looking, all of us successful, and good middle-class boys. One a CEO, one a president of marketing... all with pretty partners, nice cars, nice paid-for houses. And smilers and jokers around a dinner table. Until something comes out after a beer or glass of wine too many, a note in a voice, and we are all there in a row and looking to either side of ourselves at each other, trying to see the thing looking out of our faces as out of cold, dark trees it stands at the edge of and blends in with, each of us knowing it is there, each of us ready to kill it, even when we know it is one of us, though none of us knows which of us it is, only that it is there and it is a lone, long-absent animal, starving and afraid and ready to kill, and our father.
the early church, and his model is Pope John Paul II, who was beatified last year and will almost certainly become a saint. “I was with him [John Paul II] on a plane back from Armenia when he was already extremely ill,” he said. “We were all incredibly exhausted, but still he asked for his brev iar y and began to pray. He was a holy man and there was a light emanating from him, a grace.” After I left Cardinal Ouellet at dusk, I decided to explore Vatican City—after all, I had a name tag and a pass. There was a park nearby with palm trees, soaring pines, flowers, and a chapel, so I headed in that direction. Is it really enough, I wondered, to aspire to be a good person, to promote social justice? Were those things I had ever deeply cared about? Could a faith in man alone qualify as inter-faith, as holy in some way? I thought about the Pope, in the palace beside me, bedecked in royal robes, kneeling in prayer or pouring over obscure texts by early patriarchs in the original Greek. I thought about the sublime frescos of Raphael and Michaelangelo. I thought about how Gregory the Great, the sixth century Pope buried in a vault below St. Peter’s Basilica, described a vision St. Benedict had near the end of his life: “He stood at the window and prayed earnestly to almighty God. While he was looking out, in the middle of the dark night, he suddenly saw sunlight pouring down from above and driving all the darkness of the night away…The whole world was held before his eyes, as if brought together in a single ray of sunshine.” I reached the edge of the garden. There was no single ray of sunshine, just the darkness settling in. Two men in suits with discreet earpieces approached me—closing time—and soon I was at the Vatican City’s front gate. Passing through, I practically ran from St. Peter’s looming dome, across the river, into the labyrinth of old Rome, and to an Irish Pub that was, it turned out, located near what was once the Jewish Ghetto. A rugby game played on the many televisions inside, and pints were flowing freely.
~ Russell Thornton
– Daniel Baird WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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NOTEBOOKS
The Days and Nights of London The endless human flow // BY CRAIG TAYLOR CRAIG TAYLOR is the author of two books, Return to Akenfield and One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, and he is the editor of the literary magazine, Five Dials. For years, he has been cataloguing the habits and behaviours of Londoners in his notebooks, and interviewing as many of them as possible. These notes are the basis of his new book, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London as Told by Those Who Love it, Hate it, Live it, Long for it, Have Left it and Everything In-between, to be published Fall 2011 by Granta in the UK and HarperCollins in the US. Born in Edmonton, he grew up on Vancouver Island, and now lives in London.
short dark hair, energetic, up early for someone who’s been driving a taxi around the city all night
he’s a little older than he lets on at first
Notebook: Clairefontaine 90x140 Pen: Pilot V-5 Hi-Tecpoint 0.5
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a special pair of shoes with Bjorn Borg’s signature on the side
by the sounds of it he was beaten up more often for his musical tastes
he’s got stories of parties, stories of city excess
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THE M E M O I R B A N K
Poker Friendship Mortality
ALL IN BY DON GILLMOR
In the friendly game, everyone is both ally and enemy, no enemy more potent than yourself, with the creeping impairment and pent-up bluffs the evening holds in store. Among the eleven or so players who wandered through our game were several writers, including Nino Ricci, Antanas Sileika, Joe Kertes, George Galt, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall and Paul Quarrington. Paul was also an amateur magician, a sleight-of-hand artist (he wasn’t the only one; until he moved to L.A. Bert Kish would do improbable, worrisome things with the deck while waiting to deal). “Do you ever use those skills?” I asked Paul the first time I was invited to play. “I mean in a game. This game?” “Sometimes,” he said.
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Photo by Ryan Girard
T
he fellowship of the poker table can be an uneasy thing.
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Even without the close-up magic, Paul was a good card player. He had spent thousands of hours with a deck of cards. He understood them and understood the game, had divined that busy intersection between luck and opportunity and the sometimes perverse play of his fellows. One night, years ago, we cracked the new Bicycle deck and Nino took out the card that showed the hierarchy of poker hands on it—from Royal Flush down to lowly pair—and put it in his breast pocket. Hours later, when he was waist-deep in a raising session with Paul, he took it out of his pocket and looked at it, then looked at his cards for two or three minutes, a millennium in poker time. “You don’t know what you have?” Paul said. “Why would you raise if you don’t know what you have.” “I’m thinking.” “Jesus.” They had a relationship that sometimes resembled an old married couple. When Nino announced that his new novel Origin of Species had comic elements, Paul said in that flat voice of his, almost Nicholsonesque in timbre, “We’ll be the judge of that.” We mainly played two games; the ubiquitous Texas Hold ‘Em seen on television—in which every player uses two individual face-down cards and five communal face-up cards to form the best fivecard poker hand—and Omaha, a more complex variant that has a winning low hand as well as a high hand (and which resulted in a year of clarification on the rules after it was introduced). Poker, like love, has a lot to do with anticipation. Waiting for your first two cards is a delicious moment. The joy of paired queens, the heartbreak of another 2/7 combo. Poker is a perfect activity in that it has both collegiality and competition, and it allows for conversation, alcohol and food (an aspect of our game that grew more elaborate over the years). It is a beautiful excuse to get together, and has its own attractions. Gambling, even at this low 20
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level, is rarely dull; that’s one of the reasons people get addicted to it. You run into a streak of bad luck and it’s hard not to feel unjustly punished. By whom? God? Maybe the search for a good hand is the search for God; He rewards the faithful with aces. Luck can be streaky, and your mood tends to move with those cards, the endless string of dead hands, or a rare barrage of contenders. So much is luck. Luck notwithstanding, there are three levels of poker expertise. The first is to recognize what is in your own hand, to know where it fits in the hierarchy, what its odds of success are. The second is to know what others have, to read the other players at the table and know who is bluffing and who has the aces (there is a tournament player who says he could win money without ever looking at his own cards, surely a bluff). The third level is to know what others think you have. This last, zen-like plane is, like heaven, largely theoretical. At some level, moving your chips into the centre of the table is an act of faith. The friendly game works best if there is balance, if over the course of a few years no one emerges as the guy who wins everyone’s money. The amount won or lost has to be commensurate with the players’ incomes as well. Years ago I played in another game, made up of journalists, and we had similar stakes—in the course of an evening it was rare that anyone won or lost more than $150. One evening we played a game where the pot could increase geometrically and it quickly climbed to over $1,000. It was a number no one was comfortable with, in part because whoever lost would have to replace the pot, would lose a grand in a single hand. When the hand was played and the inevitable happened it cast a pall over the game. Not long after, we drifted apart. There were other factors— a divorce that resulted in the loss of our venue being one—but that hand unbalanced our delicate societ y. It spooked us. Our writer’s game used to start at 8 p.m. and go to 2 a.m., but one night while driving back from the distant west end of
Toronto we eastenders decided to lobby for earlier start/quit times. It was almost 3 a.m. and four of us were in Nino’s minivan. Paul was in the front seat, navigating. “You’re taking Yonge Street?” he said. “What’s wrong with Yonge?” Married silence. George was asleep, still recovering from a severe reaction to a flu shot that left him debilitated for the better part of two years and involved an expensive trip to the Mayo Clinic. The rest of us harboured lesser complaints. And there were the resentments and disappointments, large and small, that accumulate as we age. We were over the legal limit, dreamily beat. The streets were busier than you would think. We were all in our fifties and here was mortality: a marooncoloured minivan crashing through the night, filled with existential dread and corporeal betrayal. Still, it was a surprise when Paul announced, a few months later, that he had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
OuR fIftIeS IS a tIme Of ReckONING. It IS the natural order to be overtaken by those who are younger, faster, stronger. As writers we sometimes felt we were being overtaken by the industry itself. The printed word may not be dying, but what emerges from the post-literate/ blogosphere/e-book landscape may be less recognizable to the middle-aged. Certainly it is more difficult to make a living than it once was, though Paul was remarkably adept. He was a talented musician and songwriter, he wrote novels, non-fiction books, magazine pieces, TV scripts, screenplays and taught writing. He was breathtakingly prolific, unacquainted, it seemed, with block or sloth. Paul’s last two novels Galveston and The Ravine were both short-listed for the Giller Prize, his book Whale Music won the Governor General’s award, and his 1987 book King Leary won the CBC’s Canada Reads competition and went from out-of-print to bestseller. Still, he had doubts about his place in the literary world. Most writers are able to simultaneously hold in their heads a rigid belief in
their own genius and deeply entrenched doubts about their work. Even the great Saul Bellow confessed that his seminal novel The Adventures of Augie March might just be “one of those stormy, formless American phenomena.” A few months before his death, John Gregory Dunne told his wife Joan Didion that his estimable work was “worthless.” Doubt comes with the territory. Years ago, Paul once described himself, self-deprecatingly, as a mid-list author. At a poker game Paul told a story of
An old story. Paul was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer, the most advanced stage, when cancer is in both lungs or has caused f luid collection that contains cancer cells around the heart and lungs. This is known in cancer terminology as a malignant pleural effusion. Paul had several litres of fluid taken out of his lungs and pleural cavity after complaining of a shortness of breath. He looked healthy and said he felt good, yet the treatments being discussed were all palliative. The
fall into chaos. We cede authority as we grow older, sometimes to the point of infantilism: wearing diapers, having someone shave us, dress us, read to us. The failure of our bodies is the most fundamental betrayal. Lovers come and go, with their talent for heartbreak, but our bodies contain the essence of our struggle: learning to crawl, then walking, the gawkiness of adolescence when it feels like someone else is controlling our limbs and our urges, and then in middle age when parts begin to wear out—
larger betrayals awaited. being in a small town on a fishing trip. He went to a bait shop and outside, sitting on the steps, was a man reading one of Paul’s books. He hovered over the man, then finally said, “You know, I wrote that book.” The man looked up at him and said, “No you didn’t,” and went back to his reading. Such is mid-list celebrity. A mid-list author wasn’t a bad thing to be twenty years ago. It implied faith on the part of the publisher that you and/or your audience would grow. There is less faith now. Paul’s audience grew but we all worried about the uncertain state of reading and publishing. Who survives the mocking of the remainder bin these days? Once they were filled mostly with oddities, but now they overflow with greatness, V.S. Naipaul’s A Writer’s People ($6.99) sitting beside Tips For Your Ice Cream Maker ($4.95). Even the triumphantly commercial fall prey; I recently found J.K. Rowlings’ The Tales of Beedle the Bard available for $4.99. The culture moves like a freight train now, passing everything in a blur. The writer’s world has always been precarious, and we occasionally recounted its betrayals at our games, but larger betrayals awaited, of course. Diabetes, heart attacks, cancer, neurologic grief, alcoholism, depression, crippling back pain; all of which alighted on friends. It started as a trickle and became a torrent.
oncologist estimated six months to a year. Paul was still in control of his body, though he would have to relinquish it soon, and then relinquish everything.
Paul’S Novel King Leary chRoNIcleS the life of Percival “King” Leary, born in 1900, a hockey legend who is now in a small town retirement home. It was the first of his books that I read. I read it because Paul was my age, and because not long before it came out I had dated a woman who had just broken up with him. He was a real writer, she said, implying, I thought, that I wasn’t (which was true). “He got a grant,” she told me. Well la de da. On the down side, she said, he had a fear of intimacy, that eighties disease. I read King Leary in the way that people who want to be writers but have yet to write anything read books by someone their age: with a combination of trepidation, fear and envy. I dismissed it as too broad, a personal defense against the success it achieved, and more critically, the success I hadn’t achieved. I re-read it when it was reissued a few years ago, and was surprised by its comic delicacy. In parts it echoes Shakespeare’s King Lear. Among the several tragedies in King Lear is the loss of authority. When Lear abdicates power to his two awful daughters, he gives up his political authority, and both his family and England
small, stubborn melanomous patches of skin, the subtle swelling of prostates, the shrinking of muscle mass, the occasional word hanging just out of reach. Gradually these various dots are joined, the way a child draws lines between consecutive numbers to make a bear riding a bicycle take shape; suddenly the image comes into focus. Cancer, that arbitrary button man, alights in unlikely places. If you haven’t already grasped it, your fifties is when you accept that evil sometimes goes unpunished, goodness isn’t always rewarded, that shit, as they say, happens. Only now it’s happening to you. Is there a Divine Plan, or is the world indifferent to our struggles? In King Lear, Gloucester thinks it’s a random universe while Edgar thinks the gods are just. One of the great gifts of faith is it mitigates the randomness that plagues us, a quality that seems to be defining my middle years. Not long before Paul was diagnosed, another friend was told she had cancer. She was a vegetarian who had eaten organically for two decades, who hadn’t allowed any toxic cleaning products, shampoos or make-up into her house and who had no family history of cancer. She became the gold standard for randomness. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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Paul addressed this randomness in his 1997 book The Boy on the Back of the Turtle, which he said was initially about finding God but became more about losing God. The book describes a trip to the Galapagos Islands and ponders Darwin and God. In it Paul presented disease as an argument against God’s existence. “Why would a God cause that to happen? Why would a God tolerate it?” he asked. “A believer would inform me that this is all beyond my comprehension. To which I can only respond, well, um, get lost. Why should I believe something I’m not even capable of contemplating? Why shouldn’t I embrace the notion that disease is, after all, just another form of replication and propagation? It’s a crowded world and competition is fierce; sometimes, very often, the disease wins.” In Paul’s case, the disease won, though it wasn’t a fair fight, given the late diagnosis. The tributes and memorials
was an elaborate fireworks display. We walked onto the mammoth outside deck and watched the fireworks. The smokers lit up. Paul had been a smoker, but he’d quit at the age of fifty. So had almost everyone else. At games, we talked about theories of smoking, how a few cigarettes a day was apparently okay, or how a Marlboro smoked twenty years ago was still rattling around at a molecular level in your system and could suddenly rise up at any moment and kill you. We all had our theories, most of them backed up by expedient science, and we all had stories of long-lived chain smokers and non-smoking casualties. Paul had taken up smoking again. Why not? A few in the poker group kept up with him in a show of solidarity, or perhaps just simple addiction. The theme of the evening was Paul, but the subtext was mortality. I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for the
they spend five hours a day in their cars listening to Talking Books and perky DJs? They might, because they might not have a choice. Middle age is often more about living with choices than making them.
As PAul PAssed the six month mArk, the low side of his life expectancy, the thought intruded: Could this be our last poker game? The settings became more varied. One night we played in an artist’s studio that had been created in old streetcar maintenance barns. There were thirteen guys at two huge tables pulled together. The Irish writer Roddy Doyle, a friend of Paul’s who was in town, was there. The bigger the game, the larger the pot, so there was a certain excitement to thirteen players. But the collegiality suffers. Like an over-large dinner party, the conversation was necessarily Balkanized. We couldn’t chat comfort-
despite his boundless collegiality, he wasn’t an easy man to know. in Paul’s honour, beginning when he was still alive to enjoy them, weren’t held in churches. His faith resided elsewhere— in a concert venue on Queen Street, on the stage at Harbourfront, in the rooms where his faith in music and words and fellowship reigned. What do you do when you find out you may only have six months to live? And who knows what those final months will bring. Paul was warned by a doctor that the endgame could be painful and if he were to succumb earlier, it might be a blessing. There was talk of taking Paul to Dublin for Bloomsday, or to Las Vegas for a gambling spree, but the travel insurance was prohibitive and the logistics complicated. In the end, the poker group went to the casino in Niagara Falls and had a fabulous dinner in a room that overlooked the Falls. At ten o’clock there 22
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next day. A few of us talked about prostate issues or why MRIs were superior to Xrays, and watched the fireworks with our gift for metaphor. We gambled for a while in the casino but casinos are ultimately isolating; the acres of slot machines speak of pathology rather than fellowship. There isn’t much you can do at a casino that you can’t do online. The casino is already a virtual world; gamblers exist in their heads, in those impossible wins and addicting losses. Bert had flown up from Los Angeles for the event and quickly won $600 playing blackjack. But after listlessly wandering the casino floor for an hour we realized we were card players rather than gamblers; we prized fellowship over winning. We went up to the suite and played poker until 3 a.m. I got up at six to get into Toronto in time for my paranoid lung X-ray and was surprised to find that the commuter traffic extended all the way to Niagara Falls. In the two-and-a-half hour crawl I wondered about those around me. If they knew they only had a year to live would
ably as a group, we couldn’t all agree that X’s last book was a disappointment, that Y shouldn’t have won that prize, that Z is a derivative twit. In too large a group, all you’re left with is the cards and their perversity. After a flop (the first three communal cards dealt face up in Texas Hold ‘Em), I was one card away from a straight flush, needing only the eight of diamonds. It’s a classic sucker’s bet trying to draw to an inside straight, and my possible flush was a low one in a crowded field. Still, the betting had been listless and I decided I’d take a chance. But then the betting suddenly caught fire, and a flurry of big, somewhat irrational raises knocked me out. The Turn (the fourth communal card dealt face-up) produced rabid betting. Then came the River; it was the eight of diamonds. The pot was huge. It would have been mine had I stayed in. To have played the hand would have taken a combination of optimism and stupidity, but to lose it was crushing.
Our last game was on December 28, 2009, when we rented a suite at an expensive hotel. Paul had two oxygen bottles with him; the hose came undone when we were walking up and we fumbled to put it back in. He was in good spirits and had a Falstaffian appetite, drinking two bottles of wine and eating twice what I did. He said he had trouble getting up stairs and would be getting the good drugs soon. Paul looked remarkably good—he’d lost neither weight nor hair (people would come up and say, Well, you don’t look like you have cancer). This kept us happily deceived, although it didn’t take much; who wants to explore that cul-de-sac? By 1 a.m. Paul still seemed strong. I wasn’t sure if it was a point of pride or if he was in better shape than I thought, or perhaps he simply didn’t want to sleep and miss whatever time was left. Three weeks later, in the middle of the night, Paul removed his oxygen mask, whispered something inaudible to his best friend Marty and his wife Dorothy (who he had divorced and remarried) and quietly stopped breathing. The next day his body was in an upstairs room in his house and I went to see him. Because of all the worlds he inhabited—fisherman, novelist, musician, playwright among them—he had circles of friends that were more or less mutually exclusive. When I arrived at his wake there were forty people milling about and I only knew three of them. Paul was in a back bedroom, sitting in a chair. He had a white blanket around his shoulders, as if he were cold. His head was down, his hand resting on his leg. His skin had begun its darkening pallor, though even with this blunt evidence it was difficult to accept that he was dead. Mourning is visceral. The life of a man, a piece of ourselves, a view of the future. It all came flooding out. There was laughter coming from the living room downstairs, people remembering moments, anecdotes, fishing trips. Upstairs a combination of smiles and heaving sobs and red eyes with Paul as the centrepiece, his wife running her hands through his hair before the cremators came to claim him. I began sobbing, surprising myself,
and I quickly left and sat in my car for half an hour, thinking about Paul. It occurred to me that I didn’t really know him that well. I used to see him at the poker games and around the neighbourhood and at literary events, maybe a dozen times a year. We went to the same New Year’s Eve party each year. Occasionally, after his divorce, I would see him with a lovely new girlfriend, a woman in her thirties that any mother would describe as suitable and any fifty-yearold would describe as young. They would be shopping for something intimate, like dark chocolate. But the next time I saw Paul, she, like her predecessors, was gone. I was never sure whether to envy or pity his late-onset romantic intrigue. By our fifties, most of our romantic intrigues are behind us, and painful though they sometimes were (incredibly, excruciatingly) they were entertaining in a twisted, William Blake kind of way. I tended to learn something from those break-ups once I got past the takeup-smoking again, mopey, drive-by-herapartment-at-midnight phase. Some kind of epiphany usually lurked. People make the same argument for the physical betrayals that arrive like swallows in spring, that the suffering or the battle has been illuminating. Though what it often illuminates is simply mortality and its fearful stepchild, regret. Why didn’t I spend more time with my children or my spouse? Why didn’t I write that novel or compose that symphony or stick with that dark-haired girl? Perhaps I shouldn’t have given my life to the Motor Vehicles Branch. Though writers and artists often arrive at this same point; was it worth it? It is a life that often involves freedom and economic deprivation. Who is more free, the poet or the teacher who retires comfortably at fifty-five? Paul’s friend Marty told Paul that his life had essentially been what many people would do if they were told they had a year to live: write that novel, play that music, go on that exotic fishing trip, have that fling. It was a full life and a graceful exit. Who could ask for more? Though we all do; we want more time.
Sitting in the car outside Paul’s house, I remembered a line from The Boy on the Back of the Turtle, “I am by nature a private man, even with more wine inside me than is absolutely necessary.” Despite his boundless collegiality, he wasn’t an easy man to know. After Paul’s death, Nino wrote, “One of the paradoxes of his personality was that as close as you felt to him, there always seemed doors in him you could never quite open, as if there was always someone else, some other friend, who was the truer confidant. That other confidant, I think, was his work, for which he saved the most crucial part of himself.” Saving the most crucial part of yourself for anything is risky. Like love, writing is both sustaining and frustrating. It can die without warning. It was cold in the car and I sat there and watched people walk down First Street heading toward Paul’s house, some of whom I knew, others I’d never seen before. I had a series of images in my head: Paul in a tuxedo smoking a cigar; jogging in the park during one of his sporadic health kicks; playing and singing at the Irish pub up the street with his band, the Porkbelly Futures; walking down King Street in his overcoat with his oxygen tanks, looking lordly. We assemble people in death. The pieces we didn’t know, stories we hadn’t heard, small heroisms, minor transgressions. That was what the people in the house were doing while I sat in the car. More stories would come out in the weeks and months afterward; the dead still grow. And there are his books, of course. “Books are not absolutely dead things,” John Milton wrote optimistically, “but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.” But mostly I sat there thinking about Paul’s distinctive voice, its deadpan tone at the poker table declaring that while he didn’t have anything really, he was still going to bet, just to see the cards. EB WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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Apostrophes VII Sleep, You, a Tree E . D. BLOD GE T T
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A R T I C L E S O F FA I T H
Under
Veil the
The personal and political meanings of the hijab
O
n a frigid January afternoon, I sat in the foyer of Shadified Salon & Spa, waiting for my sister to arrive. Across the lobby, I could see mirrors and barber chairs, but most of the customers were hidden by a corner wall. I could still hear their conversations, and when the stylists, many of whom were Lebanese, were done, their customers weren’t just gorgeous, they were, “Gorgeous, wallah!”—a word many in this north Edmonton neighbourhood near Little Lebanon would recognize as, “I swear to God.”
By OMAR MOUALLEM // PHOTOGRAPHy By JESSICA FERN FACETTE 26
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LIke aNy SaLoN, It waS a Room of actIvIty, banter and high spirits. Ceiling speakers shot out songs from the pop stars inspiring the haircuts. The clients waiting with me, however, were subdued and silent, as if stuck in a medi-clinic below a nightclub. A twenty-something woman with wavy hair sat on a couch flipping through an issue of Cosmopolitan. Across from her a tired-looking mother with a lap full of teensized winter jackets stared at a whiteboard of microdermabrasion prices. Beside her, a stylish lady with blonde Taylor Swift curls texted compulsively. Nothing could break the detached concentration of waiting. Until my sister entered. From the neck down, my older sister, Janine Mouallem, resembled the texting woman. She arrived carrying a designer purse and wearing Lululemon clothing. But the similarities ended where the incongruities began. Because here, in a busy urban salon where everything was about the hair, my sister’s was not to be seen. It was concealed by a tight seafoamcoloured lace hijab. All eyes turned to her and lingered a beat too long, as if she had shown up for jury duty in a thong and tank top. Janine sat down beside me, said hi, and glanced at her iPhone: 2 p.m. Just in time, her look said. Behind the till, a young woman in a tight pink and black shirt, sporting big coily hair, instantly recognized her. She said hello and my sister said hello in return. “Martha is my personal stylist,” she said to me.
makeup and ear candling. Janine must have noticed me taking it in. “There’s a lot less stuff,” she said. Martha explained that the salon paraphernalia normally found in the room belonged to a hairdresser who once preferred working out of this room but no longer; it simply got too crowded operating from one small room. Janine removed her glasses and unwrapped her headscarf. Martha removed the second layer, a teal bandana, for her. It felt strangely intimate, because my sister was, in fact, undressing. Yet in that moment, Janine’s hijab was not an emblem of her faith; it was just a piece of cloth. Here is where I have to stop depicting my sister’s hair in any detail: she invited me to her salon on the condition that I would not unveil her with words. Although I’m not religious, Janine is, and though she will unveil to Martha and me, she will not for any man who is not her husband or part of her immediate family. Janine is hijabi, a woman who observes the Islamic code of modesty, which begins with her clothing and ends with her interactions with men. Revealing her hair to an outsider male—in public, in a photograph, or even in an adjective as benign as “brunette”—would defile its sanctity. “I’m thinking of going for a deeper red,” Janine said to Martha, squinting at her in the mirror. “But when I take a shower will I have red coming out all the time?” “No, you shouldn’t.” “Do you think red would suit me?” “It’s going to suit you,” said Martha,
Revealing her hair to an outsider male would defile its sanctity. Mar tha led us down a blue hallway, past a row of women with heads in hair steamer domes, and into a calming yellow room with two salon seats and a washing station. She closed the door behind us. Janine sat in the hydraulic chair. I took a seat in the empty chair beside her and looked around the sparsely decorated room. The only thing on the walls was a purple sign advertising permanent tattoo 28
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“but I could do more of the natural just in case.” Janine seemed unconvinced, so she asked Martha for a hair colour book and copy of Celebrity Hairstyles to look around for a new do, knowing only that she was not going to cut it short. “I’ve tried to grow it out three times,” she said, almost as if to herself, “then I get sick of it and just go short. But I’m going to stick it out this
time.” She was trying to grow it out because her husband finds long hair attractive. He is also, of course, one of the few men who will ever see it.
the headcoveRING kNowN aS a hIjab might be the most evocative personal symbol of Islam. For some, it represents religious commitment even more than fasting during Ramadan or pilgrimage to Hajj, in Saudi Arabia. But is it compulsory? Unlike Ramadan and Hajj, the modestdress code of Hijab is not one of the five pillars of Islam (prerequisites for entry into paradise and a symbol of faith). The word hijab appears in the Qur’an seven times, but in none of those seven instances does it specifically refer to wardrobe. Until recently, the Arabic word hijab meant a literal or metaphysical barrier. When I was an infant, my mother pinned a dangling ornament to my sleepers to protect me from evil spirits. That was a type of hijab. When we would go to the mosque to pray every Eid, my sister and mother would join the women in a section partitioned by a curtain—another hijab. There is, of course, Islamic jurisprudence on dress code. The Qur’an is meant to be read with the books of Hadith, the sayings and teachings of Prophet Muhammad collected by his earliest followers. These scriptures have edicts on modesty for both genders, though for men it’s noticeably more lax. But where these ancient texts get sartorial is with the proper Arabic words for each garment: wear a jilbab, or cloak or coat, when you leave the house; cover your bosoms and much of your torso with your khimar, or headscarf. (And it is worth reminding ourselves that Islam is not the only faith to employ headcoverings, the habit of Catholic nuns being but one example.) Veiling has been constant in Islam and the tradition predates the religion. It was a fashion of upper-class women in Mesopotamia that Muslim women of privilege adopted as a symbol of their own (slaves and concubines were banned from veiling). Later, anti-sex and anti-woman teachings by male philosophers, medieval in both historical period and mentality, drew a direct line between seduction and women, calling for the seclusion of free “believ-
Hijabs (and accessories on following pages) from Maysaa’s Fashion Fusion ing” women. By the nineteenth century, the keeping of slaves and concubines became uncouth, but equating unchaste women to unveiled women remained, even though the Muslim world was entering a modern period more recognizable to observers today. By the nineteen-sixties, the veil was more neutral; it was principally a garment worn by elderly and rural women, regardless of their religion. In films, art and texts created centuries apart, the word hijab was never used to describe the piece of cloth or the principles observed by the women who wore it. The tradition predates Muhammad, but the verb hijab, to cover or to veil, doesn’t even predate Muhammad Ali. Though anti-veil politicking in Europe and Canada (such as the bill currently before Parliament to ban face-veils from voting booths) is recent, some of the first governments to ban or punish veiling were predominantly from Muslim nations such as Turkey, Iran and Egypt. Then, in the mid nineteen-seventies, after decades of such bans and after the decline of the Arab Nationalist Movement following the Six-Day War, Islamization arose, which saw everything through the lens of Islamic doctrine. It was cultivated by a proliferation of Saudi scholarships that attracted young Muslim men from around the world, taught them how core Muslim
values apply to ever yday life, and sent them back home with renewed perspective (often imbued with the doctrine of political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood). It didn’t take long before young Egyptian women, for instance, who’d previously resembled Jackie O with their houndstooth skirts and big sunglasses, were veiling their heads and sometimes their faces. It was a broader social movement, a celebration of faith as well as a rebellion against Western ideals, which the parents of this younger generation wholeheartedly embraced. A new term entered the Arabic lexicon: al-ziyy al-Islami or “women’s Islamic dress.” Whereas previously a khimar was a khimar and a niqab was a niqab, a hijab became a symbol for the countless garments worn by pious women who veiled. Adopters of the hijab became muhajabaas, anglicized as hijabi. Before Hijab, a woman in a headscarf was just a woman in a headscarf. And she was probably not a student at Cairo University. The Hijab movement reached a crescendo during the Iranian revolution. Headscar ves are now mandator y for Iranian women, but until 1979 veiling was outlawed and a veil could be forcibly removed by police. During the uprising, images of young veiled Iranian women in the streets reclaiming their rights and
religion were splashed in newspapers around the world. In countries where veiling was uncommon—such as Lebanon, Malaysia and Canada—women began wrapping the rectangular scarf that we now call a hijab around their heads and necks to identify themselves as believers. “The hijab in Canada became obvious in the late 1970s and early 1980s,” Soraya Hafez, president of the Edmonton chapter of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, explained from Cairo via email. “The new immigrants who came at that time brought that tradition with them and affected the rest of the Muslim women in Canada. When I arrived in Canada in 1970, no one wore the hijab except for older women, who wore it for old age, not as ‘hijab’.” After a recent pilgrimage to Hajj, in Saudi Arabia, Hafez began covering her hair with a bonnet, a word she uses because doesn’t consider herself hijabi. “My position on the hijab hasn’t changed,” she said. “In the Qur’an there is no punishment for not wearing it, and, if it is that important, why wasn’t it included in the pillars of Islam?” Alia Hogben, the executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, said in a recent interview, “In the early nineteen-eighties, one-by-one women were wearing it, but much more than that, it was highly pressured as the way to dress. If you didn’t dress like that, you weren’t a good WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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Muslim.” That makes Hogben, who hesitated to make generalizations, uncomfortable: “It’s not part of my cultural baggage.” A CBC and Environics Research Group survey in 2007 put the number of Canadian Muslim women wearing the hijab at thirty-eight per cent, not counting a small number of women wearing full body veils. Though no comparative studies exist, even a cursory look through archival photos of Canadian Muslims before the nineteen-nineties shows the majority of women wearing skirts and blazers and with their hair openly in the styles of the time. Hijab fashion helped embolden Muslim identity, but today’s generation has many reasons to wear it, as Kathy Bullock found in the mid-nineties when she interviewed Canadian Muslim women for her PhD thesis on the politics of veiling at the University of Toronto. “There are probably as many reasons as there are women,” said Bullock, who wrote the book Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil and is president of the Tessellate Institute, a think-tank for Canadian multicultural issues. Bullock converted to Islam and became hijabi during her doctoral work. From her interviews with other hijabi, she learned that some women veiled to rebel against consumerism, others to be 30
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identified as Muslims. For some, it was to defy their parents’ generation, a generation the youth thought dissolved too eagerly into the melting pot. Of course, Bullock added, it could also have been “any and all of those things.” For my sister, thirty-three years old and a mother of three, it was even simpler still. “Hijab is a symbol of my religion,” she told me. “Everyday I wear it I learn how much it’s a benefit instead of a sacrifice. When I go out in the winter and it’s cold, I’m warm; when it’s summer and it’s hot, it protects me from the sun. When I go out in public, I don’t feel like I’m objectified. If I’m passing by males, for instance, I’m not looked at like I’m just an object passing by. With it on, I become a person.” Before becoming hijabi, she said she could be, “looked at as some thing, not as some one.” When Janine told me this I asked her if the hijab did not also sometimes lead to the very same outcome, if it didn’t make her a thing to some—a foreigner, a threat, a victim of chauvinism? Her response came without hesitation. “I’m sure that to some, in their eyes, I’m not someone but some thing following orders. It’s not something I think about or worry about because I know that what I’m doing is right for me.”
A standard defense of the hijab—one often invoked—is that veiling repels the lustful gazes and catcalls of men. But even if we were to accept the rationale, does the evidence support it? In Egypt, where up to ninety per cent of women veil, eightythree per cent of women, according to the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, say they’ve encountered sexual harassment, from slurs to assault. A 2008 Washington Post story suggested that the hijab exacerbates misogyny because it exoticizes the women who wear it. The reporter pointed out that almost three quarters of harassed women were veiled and that almost all Egyptian women veil, but never connected the phenomena, as my sister did when I told her this statistic. Hijab can diffuse sexuality in decent men, she said, but was still no match for misogyny. Bullock cast doubt on the implications of the Post stor y, noting that such behaviour is clearly unIslamic, but she added that if the story was in any way accurate, then it was, “clear that (this) problem needs to be dealt with through a social-education campaign. The fault lies not with the veil, nor the women who wear it.” Bullock is adamant about two things: The veil is not magic armour, and one cannot understand veiling without
the GatekeePeR’S ChIldReN This is the house of the very rich. You can tell because it’s taken all The colors and left only the spaces Between colors where the absence Of rage and hunger survives. If you could Get close you could touch the embers Of red, the tiny beaks of yellow, That jab back, the sacred blue that mimics The color of heaven. Behind the house The children digging in the flower beds Have been out there since dawn waiting To be called in for hot chocolate or tea Or the remnants of meals. No one can see Them, even though children are meant To be seen, and these are good kids Who go on working in silence. They’re called the gatekeeper’s children, Though there is no gate nor—of course— Any gatekeeper, but if there were These would be his, the seven of them, Heads bowed, knifing the earth. Is that rain, Snow or what smearing their vision? Remember, in the beginning they agreed To accept a sky that answered nothing, They agreed to lower their eyes, to accept The gifts the hard ground hoarded. Even though they were only children They agreed to draw no more breath Than fire requires and yet never to burn. ~ Philip Levine
veiling. Even then, she said, “When you ask a woman about her decision to wear it, it’s amazing how unique her journey is.”
My oldeR SISteR, aNd bRotheR aNd I GRew uP in a moderate Muslim household in High Prairie, Alberta, about three hours northwest of Edmonton. It was Little Mosque on the Prairie without the mosque (which was an hour south). At the same time my sister was arriving at her faith, I was drifting away from mine. I became more
analytical, she became spiritual, and we mostly avoided talking about religion. In fact, it was only a week before she agreed to allow me to interview her for this article that we spoke for the first time about her decision to become hijabi. To say that a woman doesn’t just wake up and decide to become hijabi is probably true in every case but my sister’s. Eleven years ago, she dreamt that she had put off wearing the hijab until it was too late. It was Judgment Day. “I woke up, and right
then and there I told myself that the next time I get up I’m not going to do a single thing—just put it on right away and leave the house so that I don’t change my mind.” The first time she left the house in a hijab, in 2000, Janine became the only hijabi in Drayton Valley, a predominantly white town of a few thousand people about ninety minutes drive southwest of Edmonton, where she’d moved to be with her husband Abdallah. “I had this excitement like I’ve never had before. I came out of the apartment building and there was a group of teenagers just looking at me. I didn’t feel embarrassed. I didn’t feel awkward. I just had this huge smile on my face and I don’t know why.” With her baby boy in her arms, Janine walked into the restaurant Abdallah coowned with his brother. Her mother-in-law was sitting at a table and didn’t recognize her at first. When she did, she made a scene. Abdallah came out of the kitchen. He was elated and proud to see his wife, my sister, dressed like an Islamic woman. “That was important to him,” she told me. “But he’d never mentioned it to me before. And I don’t think he thought I would at that time.” About a month later our family saw Janine in a hijab for the first time. She hadn’t warned us before we left to visit her. When I saw her I was stunned. I was fifteen, she was twenty-one—the age my mother was when she’d stopped wearing the hijab. I was still a baby when my mother stopped wearing it, which meant that for many years thereafter the only women around me in headscarves were my aunts. Now, as a fifteen-year-old, I was confronted by my big sister with her hair hidden and her face framed between folds of cloth. She looked like one of my aunts. Growing up in High Prairie I remember my sister as an average teenager with an above-average sense of style. She wore the brands popular kids wore, usually before the popular kids. Her favourite pasttime was drawing her own fashion designs in sketchbooks she filled with sharply angled skirts and blazers—a little haute couture in our tiny tin pot town, even if they were only drawings. She always wore full makeup, and had a particular fascination with her hair, which was usually coloured WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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and styled after the latest trend. She also did her friends’ hair. As we sat at Shadified, looking at one another through the salon mirror, I told her of these memories. “Actually, I was thinking about becoming a hair dresser,” she said, while Martha folded square after square of tinfoil over every section of her hair until it almost looked as if she were veiled again. Before becoming hijabi, Janine continued, “fashion was everything. It was part of my personality.” She paused. “Wearing the hijab just makes the styles different.” Adjusting to her new hijabi lifestyle was surprisingly easy for Janine. Cultural tolerance has emerged palpably, if slowly, in smaller prairie towns. Arriving in High Prairie in the nineteen-eighties, after years living in a town with a large Muslim Canadian population, my mother, who had jumped on the Hijab bandwagon, was in a situation like Janine’s. She had arrived in a place where she was the only woman in a headscarf. In 1985 she thought it alienated her, so she took it off and hasn’t worn it since. In 2011, my sister lives in Edmonton, a city with several mosques, libraries and tens of thousands of practising Muslims. She lives in the Internet age, when she can find ample religious support online or surf sites like Fashion Fatwa for chic, modest fashions. Edmonton hijabis can now stop by boutiques where window-display mannequins model colourful silk scar ves embellished with sequins, where a row 32
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of heads behind the front counter sport the newest styles. And there is, of course, Shadified and its salon cousins. Women who want to have attractive hair—for their eyes and the eyes of their husbands, that is—can now find a hair salon to cater to them. It’s easier for Janine today than it was for our mother in 1987, and she feels becoming hijabi has brought many positive changes; fellow Muslims call her “sister,” which she prizes. In the presence of non-Muslims, Islamophobic insults have been almost nonexistent (racial slurs have come her way twice, she told me, and both times she “handled it”). Not that there aren’t challenges. “Sometimes when you wear a hijab,” Janine told Mar tha, “people assume you’re a foreigner. But I was born and raised here! Once my sister-in-law, who doesn’t wear a headscarf, came here from Lebanon. She was pregnant at the time, so I made an appointment for her at the clinic. I called ahead to the nurse and told her that I was going to bring in my sisterin-law and that I’d be translating for her, since she didn’t speak English. So we walk in and the nurse comes and shakes my sister-in-law’s hand and says, ‘Hi, Janine, nice to meet you. This must be your sisterin-law.’” This anecdote put Martha into hysterics, which made her rhinestone cross jiggle. It was the first time I’d noticed this religious symbol, which was stylish but considerably subtler than Janine’s. A reli-
gious symbol a woman could wear most anywhere in the world without fear or concern. A religious symbol he could wear as readily as she. Not so the Muslim veil, institutionalized by gender and, for some, not just around the face, but in your face. For many, it remains a symbol, a device, even, for female oppression; the metaphor wrapped around the head as tightly as the scarf.
SeveNteeN yeaRS aGo at the UNIveRSIty of Toronto, in a city that’s now home to almost half of Canada’s 900,000 Muslims, Kathy Bullock’s commitment to Hijab was received differently than my sister’s. Bullock, an Australia-born Muslim convert to Islam, was researching her doctoral thesis and working as a teaching assistant. She worried how students would react. “I walked into the classroom and wrote the word ‘hijab’ on the chalkboard. I said, ‘I’ve become Muslim, I’m wearing a hijab. If anyone wants to ask me any questions about it they can talk to me after class. Right now we’re going to do Hobbes. Sit down, open your books to page seventeen.’ After class. two people came up to me. One person asked, ‘Do you have to wear that in the shower?’ and the second said, ‘Have you heard anything about Jesus?’” I told Bullock about my sister’s positive experience in becoming hijabi, and she speculated that the difference probably had something to do with the fact that
that Bullock was a woman of privilege—a middle-class, white, PhD student. Why, people asked her, would a woman with all these advantages embrace such an oppressive tradition? A friend bluntly told her that she’d just made herself a second-class citizen. The perception of Islam as a religion that oppresses women and uses the veil as a mechanism for tyranny is well documented. In 2006, a Trudeau Foundation poll found that of the thirty-seven per cent of Canadians who hold unfavourable views towards Islam, one-fifth cited the religion’s treatment of women as the primary reason for their negative opinions. (That number has likely risen since the murder of Aqsa Parvez, a sixteen-year-old Mississauga girl whose father strangled her in 2007 for refusing to wear the hijab.) The roots of this perception are deep. In colonial times, when Europeans returned from Middle Eastern and North African travels, they mythologized Muslim polygamy and harems. The West considered itself superior, Bullock told me, and thought anything connected to the Middle East was backward and oppressive; the veil symbolized that. By the time we started to move away from the Christian era and into the secular era of the twentieth centur y, Bullock noted, the Christian reaction of Muslim women being oppressed was picked up first by secularism and then by feminism. “The difference now,” said Bullock, “wasn’t ‘we have to Christianize the people.’ It was ‘we have to secularize an westernize for them not to be oppressed.’” In the early twentieth century, Britain’s High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Cromer, wrote in his book Modern Egypt that the seclusion of women was a “fatal obstacle” to modernizing the region and had an obvious “deteriorating effect on the male population.” This stance was echoed by some Muslims. Qasim Amin, a late nineteenth century Egyptian nationalist who is sometimes called the father of feminism in Egypt, wrote scathingly of veiling and seclusion, which he said made women “worse off than a slave.” Amin’s criticisms were met with anger from Muslim women in Egypt, even though most at this time didn’t veil. Malak Hifni Nasif, a feminist
writer born in the eighteen-eighties (when Muslim women were, in fact, under pressure to not wear the hijab), saw it as yet another example of what we would today call “Hislam”—Islam in the control of men: “If he orders us to veil, we veil, and if he now demands that we unveil, we unveil.” The debate over Muslim women’s right to veil or not to veil has obviously been highly pitched for centuries both inside and outside Islam, and between genders. But it is also nuanced. Sometimes clerics even weigh in on minutiae, such as the tightness of clothing. Young women who wear see-through hijabs but who dress to accentuate their bodies with tight Rock & Republic jeans, and tighter tank tops over long sleeves, are sometimes called “muhajababes.” It’s hard to say what rules they think they’re following because although the Qur’an does condone style to an extent (declaring clothing a divine gift that can “be an adornment to you”), the dividing line between the modest and immodest appears to centre around excessive embellishment, today and historically. The stomping of feet adorned with ankle bracelets (so as to tantalize men with their jingling) was condemned in the Qur’an. But what is excessive today? Makeup, jewellery and other adornments are as normal to Muslims as non-Muslims. How do you define immodest? And who is doing the defining?
house unless she has a male relative companion. Of course, as the religion grows and becomes more globalized, there are more liberal Muslim scholars—male and female—publishing their own interpretations. The tradition of veiling, in other words, is coming under increased, and microscopic, examination. Khimar, for example, appears in the Qur’an, but does it mean headscarf or an unspecific “cover” like a shawl? In Surah 24:31, the most pertinent passage on the subject, only a woman’s private parts and bosoms (depending on the translation) are singled out for covering, the latter to be dressed with a khimar. The verse is actually more specific about which men a woman does not need to cover herself for (every man a woman couldn’t theoretically marry). The passage exhaustively details these men, from a husband to male servants to any child too young to understand sex. Bullock, who, like most exper ts, believes khimar has always meant headscarf, has witnessed increasing opposition to this definition over the last fifteen years. Contemporary writers such as Reza Aslan believe the tradition of khimar as headscarf evolved from Muslim women emulating the Prophet’s wives, who were veiled in much the same way that Victorian women emulated Queen Victoria’s fashion sense. If books by Aslan and Leila
Young women who wear see-through hijabs with tight jeans are sometimes called “muhajababes.” In much of the world, Hijab means wearing a headscarf to cover a woman’s hair and clothing to cover her skin to her wrists, ankles and collar. This is the law according to Hadith recorded by early male and female followers of Muhammad; this means believers like my sister are following God’s will. Still others, particularly men of the Wahhabi religion dominant in Saudi Arabia, say a modest woman should cover every inch of skin but her eyes. Others don’t even spare women that privilege. In rare instances, it’s taught that a modest woman does not leave the
Ahmed, an Egyptian-American scholar who wrote Women and Gender in Islam, become the preferred interpretations of tomorrow, it might mean a good Muslim woman will feel free to wear her hair publicly and guiltlessly. But clearly the hijab will always have considerable religious potency, not just because it’s an ancient ritual but also because it’s so malleable a symbol, able to adopt meaning according to changing history, geography, politics and the zeitgeist. My sister happens to live in a time in which the hijab means piety, not chastity, or privilege. She also lives in WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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a country that doesn’t govern modesty with the rigidity, or righteousness, of Saudi Arabia. The fact that women like my sister choose to dress to their wrists, ankles and collars, and cover their hair, is, at root, a reflection less of the times in which we live than how these times are interpreted by Muslim clerics and religious scholars.
MaRtha left the RooM to let JaNINe’S haIR soak in the dye for forty-five minutes. My sister smiled as she anticipated what was, to her, the best part of any hair cut. “I love when you’re getting your hair washed and your head rubbed …” I suggested that surely there were cheaper ways to get a head rub. She laughed, so I followed with what seemed to me a fundamental question: Why, if the only time she exposed her hair was when she was alone or at home—bearing in mind that every time she removes her hijab and unwraps her hair it must be restyled, and that every time it’s restyled it’s
essay by secular Iranian writer and feminist Azam Kamguian: “The main reason for hijab is the need for controlling women’s sexuality. Veiling internalizes the Islamic notion in women that they belong to an inferior sex, and that they are sex objects. It teaches them to limit their physical movements and their free behaviour. Veiling is a powerful tool to institutionalize women’s segregation and to implement a system of sexual apartheid.” “Is that it?” “Yes,” I replied. “I don’t believe that at all,” she said. “That’s so silly to think that, because on the other side, through my eyes, when I see television shows and commercials with girls moving up and down, their whole bodies exposed, and that being the main point in ever y music video, I think that’s objectifying. And I think that’s making women and their sexuality into objects.” I read her a second passage by Kamguian: “The law of veiling is not only
her hijab does not make her a servant to men but to a genderless deity rewarding pure devotion. done knowing that it will inevitably be rendered unkempt, because she must re-don the hijab when any man from outside her family enters the room—why then would she still dish out $150 to get her hair coloured and cut? Why go to all that trouble for so little exposure? “I’m doing it for myself,” she explained. “It’s nice for kids to see their mom looking good and being in style. And I do it for my husband because he’s my life partner. Just because you cover your head doesn’t mean you don’t want to look good and please your other half. My hair is something special just for him. It’s like a gift to him.” Janine sees Hijab as more than a commitment to her God; it’s also a commitment to her marriage, given that, like many hijabis, she didn’t start veiling until after marriage. I wanted her to see it from the other side, so I read her a passage from an 34
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humiliating to women, but it is an insult to men. It is a clear indication that, in the eyes of Muhammad, all Muslim men are sex-crazed.” “It’s not something asked by Muhammad,” Janine said. “Muhammad is just the messenger. He brought the message. So whatever Allah asks for us to do in Qur’an has been proven time and time again to be beneficial to us. It doesn’t only have to do with sexuality, and it doesn’t mean every man feels that way. But maybe there are men that do, so it’s protecting you from them. There are many benefits to ourselves, to our bodies, to our minds, that we don’t even realize.” She wanted to be clear about two things: Abdallah didn’t make her wear the hijab but he loved that she did and, “the whole reason I do this is that it’s something asked of me by my God.” I asked her if the hijab being so gender-oriented made men the de facto
leaders in Muslim households. It’s not the hijab that makes it so, she said, it’s the Qur’an. But what compels my sister to veil more than any man or cleric is the pressure from within to have taqwa, the love and fear of God. Taqwa is the charge a Muslim gets from praying and the shame she gets from drinking. It is, like Hijab, experienced individually while simultaneously being influenced by teachings in a male-dominated arena. But, for Janine, Hijab does not make her a servant to men but to a genderless deity rewarding pure devotion. When Janine wears her hijab she’s revealing what’s underneath it. Not her hair, but her conviction that this is what a faithful woman does. The veil externalizes her certainty about her faith, and she sees it as but one question on the exam she must pass to enter paradise. Some will tell her she is doing too much, or not enough, but no one will change her mind. Unless she changes it herself. Martha returned and rinsed out Janine’s hair, supplied the treasured head rub at the washing station, then gave her hair a trim. When it was all over and done with, her hair looked lovely to me in ways I literally cannot describe. My sister put her glasses back on and took in her new look in the mirror. Next, she ran her fingers through the strands, pursed her lips. “This is going to take some getting used to,” she said. Martha and I assured her that it was striking. Janine pulled the fitted cap over the top of her head and grabbed her hijab. She stretched it at arms length by the tips and folded the long edge a third of the way down. Next, she pulled the padded straight edge over the top of her forehead and under her chin, then around her neck. Last, she tucked the tail into the front of her sweater. Her hair was gone. She opened the door of the yellow room, releasing the pent-up hair product odour, and walked past the rows of women with their heads inside air steamers, none of whom would have known what my sister’s hair looked like before or after. Janine paid up, then drove home to show her family her new look and, presumably, to let her hair down. eB
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on TH E R E C o R D
dReam StateS Sometimes a dream can mean exactly what it says by pau l w i l s o n
IN the NINeteeN-eIGhtIeS I StaRted having recurring nightmares. The nightmare part wasn’t so unusual: like many people, I’d had my fair share of dreams about being swept away by rogue waves, or driving cars that couldn’t make it up steep hills, or flying in airplanes that couldn’t seem to climb any higher than the treetops. Standard anxiety dreams, especially for a freelancer with more cheques in the mail than in the bank and a desk piled high with unfinished assignments. But these nightmares were different. They were hyper-realistic, entirely devoid of whiteknuckle special effects, and they had a dramatic structure—if that’s the right phrase for it—that never varied, though the details sometimes changed. I would find myself, mysteriously, back in Prague—a city I had lived in for a decade in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies but was no longer legally allowed to visit—among old friends I hadn’t seen in years and never expected to see again. The atmosphere of these reunions was as tangible as the people: they were dark, intense and exciting in the way forbidden things often are, their powerful erotic undertow linked to a mounting sense of anxiety. It was like being Cinderella at the ball; I was thrilled to be there but worried sick about getting home before I was exposed. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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The dream always ended the same way: when the time to leave came, getting to the train station or the airport on time proved to be almost impossible. I’d lose my ticket, or my passport or visa would go missing. I’d get lost in the maze of alleyways and passages, unable to find a taxi. I would try to make it on foot, but the airport or the station was always too far away. I seemed to be moving through molasses, dragging myself through the dark streets (it was always night) with rising panic. Sometimes, the Czech police would stop me and ask for my papers. I’d wake up with my heart pounding. One of the strangest things about these dreams was that there was nothing especially strange about them at all. What I mean is that unlike other recurring dreams I’d had, this one, although frightening, was not deeply disturbing. It didn’t feel like a message from the depths of my mind; it didn’t feature reptiles or mother figures or wild horses or burning houses, which, according to some schools of dream interpretation, might have spelled trouble ahead. The dream didn’t shout out a warning, or cry out to be analyzed. As far as I could tell, it meant exactly what it said: I missed my friends in Prague, and I’d have gone back in a heartbeat if I hadn’t been banished by the police. But that was the point: in my waking life, I had accepted the fact that I could never go back. Or at least I thought I had. The dream was reminding me I hadn’t. The most peculiar thing of all about the dream, though, turned out to be something else altogether: I was not the only one who’d dreamt it. There were, as I discovered, whole communities of people who’d had the very same dream. The dream, in fact, was not so much an emanation of my own private psyche as it was a consequence, a tiny, distant tremor, from the two most calamitous and tragic political upheavals of the century: fascism and communism.
IN the mId-eIGhtIeS, I waS SPeNdING a lot of time in the Czech and Slovak émigré community, mostly in Toronto. Like all émigré communities, this one was stratified, not so much socio-economically, 48
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as you might expect, but rather by different waves of post-war emigration. First to arrive were the Forty-Eighters, who had escaped Czechoslovakia after the Communist take-over in 1948, usually at great risk to their lives. These people had never really experienced life under the Red Flag, though most had lived through the Nazi occupation. This made them a different breed from the next major wave, who left after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
It was through many casual conversations at such venues and events that I discovered two other things that bound this community together. Almost everyone had been tried in absentia by the regime at home for the crime of illegally leaving the country, and hence, almost everyone had a criminal record. And most had had recurring dreams like mine, in which they found themselves back in Czechoslovakia, unable to leave. They even had an name for it—the “émigré dream.”
the dream didn’t shout out a warning, or cry out to be analyzed; it meant exactly what it said. These new émigrés were treated with a certain reserve by the earlier arrivals, who may have suspected them of being tainted, if not brainwashed, by twenty years of life under communism. The third wave washed ashore in the late seventies and early eighties. It was a smaller group, but more acceptable to the old guard, since many of them were human rights activists who brought an aura of martyrdom with them; often, they’d been forced out of the country by a deliberate campaign of intense police harassment and physical intimidation cynically codenamed “Operation Slum Clearance.” But rather than being pulled apart by such differences, this accidental community of exiles was instead drawn together by a kind of natural gregariousness. The Communists had tried vigorously to suppress this quality, since most forms of independent association are anathema to any system bent on total control. But the regime failed to eradicate the instinct, and once released from the draconian constraints of Soviet-style socialism, most émigrés reverted to form, with the result that in the eighties, the Czechoslovak community in this country was teeming with little theatre groups, drinking societies, newspapers, magazines, publishing ventures, jazz bands, church congregations, after-hours schools, folkdancing ensembles and, of course, pubs and restaurants that catered to their particular style of democratic socializing.
We tend to think of dreams as unique to ourselves, all the more so because they are involuntary and afford us glimpses into hidden corners of our being. The study of individual dreams is still a major pillar of psychotherapy. Everyone from Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung, and existential therapists like Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, believed that dreams arose from an entity called “the unconscious,” and that the final end of any therapy was to assimilate what Jung called “the materials of the unconscious” into the conscious mind and thus restore the “total personality” or, in the language of existential therapists, to restore equilibrium to our “being-in-the-world.” The émigré dream seemed to challenge this view in at least two ways: first, because the material of the dream, its contents, came from the conscious mind; and secondly because, in a sense, the dream “belonged” not to an individual, but to an entire subset of individuals. And as I discovered, it was not just a Czechoslovak thing. Other immigrants from the Soviet empire—Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonian, Cubans, East Germans (and even, I suspect, North Koreans and Chinese)—experienced it as well, in one form or another. It was as though everyone who had passed through the fire of a totalitarian dictatorship and managed to escape was somehow branded with a kind of psychic mark of Cain on
their souls that only manifested itself in dreams. You would think a phenomenon so apparently widespread would have attracted the attention of psychologists or psychoanalysts, ever eager for new material to ponder. But when I began looking for studies on the subject, I came up almost empty. There are libraries of books about the interpretation of dreams, including dream dictionaries, dream catalogues, and even booklets offering instruction on how to have the dreams you want. Internet searches will yield millions of hits, ranging from the esoteric to the banal. Yet it appears that the only serious work on the émigré dream as a phenomenon unto itself exists in a handful of academic studies in German conducted among refugees who fled Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933. References to the émigré dream may be rare, but they do pop up now and again in literature. The most recent example is a short story by the Czech writer in exile, Milan Kundera, called “The Great Return,” published in 2002 in The New Yorker. It concerns a Czech woman, Irena, who with some trepidation prepares to return home to a recently liberated Prague in the early nineteen-nineties after many years of exile in France. Shortly after emigrating from Czechoslovakia, presumably in the nineteenseventies, Irena started having “the dream.” Kundera’s description of it is a classic iteration. [S]he is in an airplane that switches direction and lands at an unknown airport; uniformed men with guns are waiting for her at the foot of the gangway; in a cold sweat, she recognizes the Czech police. Another time, she is strolling in a small French city when she sees an odd group of women, each holding a beer mug, run toward her, call to her in Czech, laugh with fake cordiality, and in terror Irena realizes that she is in Prague. She cries out, she wakes up. Irena soon discovers her husband is having the same dream, and so are some Polish friends of hers. She is both
moved and irritated by “that nighttime fraternity.” What is unique about her soul, she wonders, if something as private as a dream becomes a collective experience? “On any given night,” Kundera writes, “thousands of émigrés were all dreaming the same dream in numberless variations. The emigration-dream: one of the strangest phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century.” In addition to her dreams, Irena has involuntary daytime “visions” of places back home, “of landscapes [that] would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly. She’d be talking to her boss and all at once, like a flash of lightning, she’d see a path through the field… All day long, these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia.” None of this would surprise most émigrés. The daughter of a Cuban acquaintance of mine, who left Cuba under traumatic circumstances and still dreams the émigré dream, is also haunted by
dream. Émigrés who relished their newfound freedom tended to have them far less frequently, if at all, suggesting that these dreams are in part a reflection of the dreamer’s capacity—or inability—to embrace the new life abroad. The argument is not entirely convincing. Nostalgia might inspire flash visions of home, but it can’t explain the mysteriously collective quality of the émigré dream, which suggests that its origins lie not so much in the dreamers’ personal inability to adapt to the new life, but rather in the very impersonal, enforced collectivism of the political systems within which they were trapped. When the émigrés left home, the regime slammed the door shut behind them, and that door remained closed regardless of how well they adapted elsewhere. The dreams are not the expression of some vague philosophical notion about not being able to step in the same river twice, or of Huck Finn’s belief that “you can’t go home again.” The sense of being locked
this accidental community of exiles was cemented together by a kind of natural gregariousness. waking images of the streets and places in Havana she once frequented with her friends. I used to have such flash memories myself, though in my case, they were triggered by a word or a phrase in a translation I happened to be working on. They were as vivid and involuntary as a dream, and I worked up a layman’s theory about memory and language lodging in the same region of the brain. A nother Czech w r iter who has touched on the émigré dream in his work is Karel Hvizd’ala, best known abroad for his involvement with Vaclav Havel’s two major autobiographical books, Disturbing the Peace and To the Castle and Back. In the eighties, he interviewed a number of Czech exiles living in West Germany and France, and asked each of them about the émigré dream. Hvizd’ala told me that, generally speaking, only those who felt a powerful nostalgia for home, who were not entirely happy living abroad, had the
out of your own home was as real as the Iron Curtain itself. Looked at in this way, we begin to see that some dreams, at least, point us toward a reality that is more political than personal. And if that is so, does it change the way we understand dreams in general? Or might it point us backward to a far more ancient notion of what dreams are?
AS lIvING cReAtuReS, we’ve AlmoSt certainly been dreaming as long as we’ve been on the planet, but until a few centuries ago, we looked at dreams as divine messages about the world and our place in it. The Old Testament is such a rich repository of dreams and dream interpretation that it sometimes seems as though the whole history of the Israelites was driven by dreams, from the first expulsion from the Garden of Eden to the building of Jerusalem. No one in the Bible interprets dreams as private information, WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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but rather as the voice of God reminding His people of their destiny. Joseph upset his brothers when he dreamt that their sheaves of wheat bowed down to his, but he didn’t rush off to consult a family therapist: they all took it as a sign that Joseph would one day rule over them. He was eventually sold into Egypt, but went on to become the second most powerful man in the land by transforming the pharaoh’s dreams of fat and lean cows into prudent agricultural policy. In the biblical view, dreams always have consequences in the real world. As we move closer to our own era, our understanding of dreams begins to shift, and by Shakespeare’s day, a kind of skepticism has taken hold. In a famous exchange in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio tells his love-struck kinsman that dreams are “the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.” Macbeth’s visions and dreams, so clearly the emanations of a guilty conscience, point forward to our own age, in which the emphasis has shifted decisively toward therapy: analyzing dreams becomes a technique for healing troubled souls. Modern dream study directs our attention inward, away from the external world, as though something as insubstantial as a dream could only make sense in relation to the mind that produced it. Increasingly, we seem to be treating dreams as mere carriers of information about the dreamer, or the dreamer’s brain, while ignoring their wider cultural import. Neuroscience—our understanding of how the human brain works—is the latest discipline to grasp this interpretive baton. Jonah Lehrer, author of an intriguing book, Proust was a Neuroscientist (on how great artists were the first to map the mental processes that science is only now beginning to grapple with), has written a series of posts on his blog, The Frontal Cortex, about an ongoing study of dreaming by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Lehrer calls their research “truly groundbreaking—the best account of dreaming since Freud.” But it’s hard to see precisely what ground has been broken. One of the 50
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AN ExcERPt fRom Long ExposurE Will I be happy. How long will I live. How will I live. Will I always be able to pay eight dollars to spend two hours walking through rooms of photographs. Sorry when they call for donations, not this time. A string of children ambles past, followed by a teen with hula hoops. Later through the glass door onto the courtyard, vivid spins. They spent the morning drawing. When their parents come, they’ll go home. We look and take notes and then we load glass leaf-shaped plates with all that isn’t meat and pay by weight. Water in a jug for two. Our window looks out onto an intersection onto which a woman in an office window briefly leans as though she sees us. My child now sleeping in another woman’s basement on a roll-out mattress I’ve never seen, inches from other women’s children, one of whom she says she loves. If there were an after (there will be an after), the mattress, would stew in flood, would thin to brittle, would grey with mold, no her-shaped indentation left. Rolled up as evidence: someone small slept here and then left. ~ Stephanie Bolster
researchers, Matthew A. Wilson, ran experiments on rats negotiating mazes. “While a rat was running through one of them,” Lehrer writes, “Wilson measured clusters of neurons in the hippocampus with multiple electrodes surgically implanted in its brain. As he’d hypothesized, Wilson found that each maze produced its own pattern of neural firing. To figure out how dreams relate to experience, Wilson recorded input from these same electrodes while the rats were sleeping. Of the forty-five rat dreams recorded by Wilson, twenty contained an exact replica of the maze they had run earlier that day. ‘During REM sleep, we could literally see these rat brains relive minutes of their previous experience,’ Wilson says. ‘It was like they were watching a movie of what they had just done.’”
In a later post, Lehrer attempted to expand on what these experiments had turned up. “Why does the brain replay experience?” he asked. “Wilson and others argue that the dreaming rats are consolidating their new memories, embedding these fragile traces into the neural network. While we’re fast asleep, the mind is sifting through the helter-skelter of the day, trying to figure out what we need to remember and what we can afford to forget.” Ignoring Lehrer’s sleight-of-hand segue from rat to human experience, it seems like rather meagre results for almost a decade of research. To be fair, neuroscience is still in its infancy. Through countless scanning experiments, we’ve amassed entire databases of information about the mechanics of
the brain, but we’re still casting about for a persuasive, holistic explanation of what all that data implies in relation to how we live. Meanwhile, present among us are whole human populations who, like the rats at MIT, spent most of their lives inside the mazes and wire cages created by tyrannical regimes that subjected them to a humiliating array of Pavlovian experiments. Some of those human rats bolted and took up a glorious, liberated existence in the cesspools and byways of the freer world, where the helter-skelter of their days was infinitely more varied and full of risk than it had been inside the cage. Judging by their dreams, the escapees have collectively exhibited a pattern of neural activity that appears to recur over and over again, replaying their experience in the maze, as it were. Yet what is more important: Understanding the mechanics of dreams? Or understanding what it means to be a former maze rat, tormented by nightmares about ending up back in the cage? Maybe that’s what Wilson’s rats are dreaming. Perhaps it’s our human experience that illuminates the life of a rat, and not the other way around.
TheRe IS oNe fIeld—medIcINe—IN whIch the émigré dream may come under fruitful scrutiny; specifically as a symptom of what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, defined as a state of pathological anxiety that typically develops after exposure to a psychological trauma. Usually, such traumas are quick and violent—rape or combat, for instance—and one of the leading indicators of PTSD are flashbacks or nightmares that reiterate the original violation. The émigré dream appears to fit the bill in that it’s a persistent flashback, but what exactly was the trauma that produced it? To answer that, we need a course in Tyranny 101. The “stress” to which the citizen of a totalitarian state is subjected is not just the accidental byproduct of a good idea gone bad. It’s a carefully calibrated system of repression, deliberately and ruthlessly planned and executed. Some people—the hard nuts, the rebels, the non-conformists, the uncompromising, the incorrigible—are imprisoned,
tortured, shot or otherwise ruined; their property is confiscated, their children are banned from higher education, they are forced into jobs for which they are not qualified. As “enemies of the state,” they experience the trauma of repression as an immediate, shocking assault, akin to rape, on their physical and psychological integrity. The rest, the “silenced majority,” are meant to look upon this spectacle of humiliation and take it to heart, though once is not enough: the reminders of one’s true helplessness must be constant. This is why public life in a totalitarian state is an endless series of rituals. The most extreme is the show trial, the main purpose of which is not the trial itself, but the petition, which every citizen is forced to sign, demanding “just punishment” for the so-called traitors. Such ritual atrocities are not meant merely to terrify, they are also meant to implicate. Everyone is made to share in the violation, and this mass participation in evil produces its own special kind of humiliation, inevitably crippling people’s will to resist. The rest of life is filled with lesser rituals, from compulsory Mayday parades, compulsory birthday celebrations for revolu-
Czechoslovakia in 1967, I was unaware of this general misery. The Prague Spring was looming, the thaw was tangible and people were happy that the awful pressures they had lived with for almost two decades appeared to be easing. In 1968 Soviet tanks crushed people’s hopes, and that trauma was followed by twenty more years of slow decay. Such are the wounds the people of “the dream” carry around with them. It was during this period that I heard the story of a young man, which I took to be emblematic. He wanted out, but was determined to play by the rules. Again and again he would apply for an exit permit, and each time the police would ask him why he wanted to leave. Each time his answer was, “Because I want to live like a human being.” I don’t know if he ever made it out, but I think of that story every time I hear someone say that the desire for freedom is what drives people to revolt. In my experience, the desire for simple dignity and justice is far more powerful. Recently, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the crowds may have chanted for freedom, but in one-onone interviews with demonstrators, the words I heard most often were, “We want our dignity back.”
mass participation in evil produces its own special kind of humiliation, crippling the will to resist. tionary “heroes,” compulsory fund-raising drives to support foreign “liberation struggles,” to compulsory voting in elections in which there is no choice of candidates. Each of these rituals, repeated regularly and often, adds a drop of bitterness to the cup. In the early life of a totalitarian regime, such tactics appear to succeed. As the system ages, however, its supporters grow weary and acquiescence becomes merely routine, though no less degrading and humiliating. It is trauma in slow motion, like Robert Frost’s “slow, smokeless burning of decay.” And it’s invisible to outsiders, who often mistake people’s passive, sloganistic expressions of loyalty for the real thing. When I first went to
There were many reasons for the sudden collapse of communism in 1989, but one stands out: when the apparatus that had sustained the system fell apart, the fear and humiliation that had kept people silent for all those years vanished, too, and the people found their voice. A few days after the Velvet Revolution began in Prague, I went back. By the end of the year, the totalitarian police state was gone. The Iron Curtain, the thousands of miles of barbed wire and watchtowers and electric fence that had stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic, was torn down. I stopped having the dream at the same time, and have not had it since. The dream, along with the system that gave rise to it, simply vanished into history. eB WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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E
ver since he had settled in Manila, Cedric Ramanathan’s greatest pleasure had been golf. There was nothing he liked better than to whack a ball down the fairway and then stroll after it with no thought in his head except whether to use a seven-iron or a six for the next shot—the occasional plonk in the pond or hook into the rough his only tribulation. He had been given free membership at an exclusive Greenhills club as part of a deal he had done on Japanese sprinklers—his speciality. Eighteen holes on a Saturday morning, followed by a Caesar salad and a session with Arnold at home, in the afternoon, was as close to a life in heaven as he could imagine. But this morning’s round had been a disaster. He had fluffed every shot. A fterwards he found the salad was off and now, back at his house, it looked as though Arnold was going to be late. Cedric took his putter and stepped out into the neat front garden. He clamped his lips and tried to get the ball into the metal-tongued tray that served as a portable hole. No luck. To sink a long putt on a silent green used to be such bliss. He frowned and checked his watch. At two minutes to three, a little Fiat pulled up at the bottom of the garden. A small wiry man popped out of the car and took out a flat, folded trestle table 52
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HazaRD
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by Romesh GunesekeRa from the back. “Salamat ... ma’am,” he bowed and stepped stiffly away. The Fiat trundled off and he proceeded up to the house with the maroon table neatly tucked under his right arm. He saluted Cedric, who had retreated behind a lime bush as though suddenly ashamed of his crumpled blue shorts and tatty sleeveless vest. “Time, sir?” Cedric unbuckled his watch and shoved it in his pocket. “On the dot, Arnold,” he conceded. The potted shrubs on the patio looked limp. Cedric picked up a watering can. “Water is the thing, isn’t it?” “Yes, sir. Very hot day.” Arnold fanned his face with his fingers. He liked Cedric’s house: the well-tended lawn, the
abundance of plants, the voluptuous goldfish in the pond—though it did have the air, Arnold felt, of belonging to a man who perhaps had had more than his fair share of luck. Still, Arnold was always given a spiced bun and custard tart with his tea at the end of the afternoon. None of his other clients had such tasty refreshments. The tea was from Darjeeling, Cedric had once explained, pointing out the location on a map of South Asia he had pinned to his study wall. “We’ll use the new games room today,” Cedric said, leading the way. Arnold nodded, eager to get on and already a little hungry. The new room was an add-on to the main house. The back patio had been walled in with concrete blocks and covered over with a low tin roof. It had the look of a bunker. Two golf bags stood like sentries by the door and a strip of green baize on the floor simulated an interior practice green. Several towels had been piled up on a chair in one corner. Arnold unfolded his trestle table and locked the metal struts in place. He laid out two of the towels over the maroon leatherette and then called out to Cedric. “OK, sir. Ready.” “You got a lift today, Arnold?” Cedric put away his putter after a quick wipe with a polishing cloth. Usually Arnold came in a taxi. An added charge to the bill.
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“Yes, sir. Last client change the time this week. So she dropped. Very nice Italian lady.” “Not Miss Silveri, is it?” Cedric asked, only half-seriously. “Yes, sir. Madam Betsy. You know her, sir?” Something hard and round tightened in the pit of Cedric’s belly. Did he, heck? Betsy Silveri was the one who had pitched him into limbo, and upset everything.
I
t had happened at the Aguinaldo reception in the ballroom of the Manila Hilton on Tuesday night. He had put in an appearance mainly to pick up a few business cards, nothing more. Then a swirl of silk like some concupiscent fantail had bumped into him by the central water feature. Carnal thoughts were not alien to him, but ever since he had discovered the principles of comfort and convenience that came with maturity and a franchise in Manila, he was able to channel these into the well-oiled grooves of the neon meat-market between Taft and Roxas Boulevard without too much fuss. Next to the spouting pipes and coloured pools that night though, things were happening that were startling for one whose passions had not extended beyond the controlled arc of an imported sprinkler system for years. He had been aiming for the cheese titbits, and she the chilli dip. Betsy tried to catch his flailing arm. “My goodness.” A spray of red wine misted the air and small mosaic tiles of Edam fluttered to the mock cathedral floor. “I am so sorry.” The small red dots turned to bruises on his shirt—a crisp embroidered barong—and the cheese lay like confetti between them. “It’s okay,” he said, staring at the tiny silver cross jiggling on her plump freckled chest. “I just wanted the hot sauce.” She brandished a small sausage impaled on a toothpick. “I shouldn’t have jumped.” “I am Betsy.” “Pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand, careful not to go too far. She
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looked at him with such intensity that he thought he was about to be whacked. Her eyes were dark. Fathomless. He met her gaze and realized he had never really looked into a woman’s eyes before. He had heard of how one’s whole life could pass in seconds when you were drowning, but why was it happening now when he was breathing so hard? And why was she beginning to smile? “I think you need a bit of salt.” The lids of her eyes were painted green. Cedric was well aware that he lacked a bit of go, sometimes. But salt? Was he so evidently sodium-deficient? “Actually, I feel fine. Just got startled, that’s all.” Betsy reached forward for the hem of his shirt, which hung untucked just below his belt. He felt seriously unsafe. “Hold on,” she said and stuck the cocktail sausage in her mouth. He did not know what to hold, but she reached across to the table and picked up a salt shaker. He held her hand which held his shirt and they swayed like dancers on the deck of a sinking ship. “Salt now?” he asked, imagining being force-fed into hyperactivity. She finished her mouthful. “ We should do something straightaway. Those spots look bad.” She sprinkled the salt over the wine balloons. “Really, don’t worry. I do sprinklers all the time.” She looked a little puzzled but smiled charmingly. “I think I better get you a new barong, it’s the least I could do. Shall we meet tomorrow? Tesero’s on Mabini have some lovely ones. I work very near the shop.” She let go of the hem and he felt the course of his life change. His mind flew to scenes of a whirlwind romance in Technicolor, down the coast wallowing in the glow of her smile. “I … I wondered about … whether you like the music?” “I like jazz.” “To dance?” “I’ve got to go, Cedric. But I’ll see you tomorrow. Twelve-thirty?”
C
edric took off his cotton vest and shorts, and climbed up on to the maroon table and lay down before Arnold. Why had he not torn off the shirt that
evening and flung it at her feet on bended knee? If only he had shown the fervour he had felt instead of watching her wobble baloney on a stick. The next day had been fraught. He had an early-morning foursome with a potential client—a hotelier and his two cronies—and every time he tried to speed up, he missed a shot, which slowed the group down. At the clubhouse, despite the prospective deal, he bowed out of lunch pleading a headache, but was corralled by the Greenhills manager over a malfunctioning pump. He admitted culpability and made a dash for the car. He drove thumping the horn like a maniac but only inching his way through the traffic. By the time he had got to Tesero’s, it was after one. There was no sign of her. He went again the next day, at noon, as though two wrongs might make a right. Betsy was not there. He walked up and down the street trying to imagine where she might be working. Not one of those dicey massage parlours, surely? But he looked in a couple all the same without success. By the weekend he had given up, but she kept barging into his thoughts. And every time he teed up, all he could think was how that last wretched round had ruined his chances before the full brunt of middle age knocked him completely out of the game. Arnold slapped his shoulder hard with his trademark start-up. “Ho. Ease up, sir. We begin.” “You do her on this, too?” “Madam Betsy? Yes, sir. On this table, yes. Very strong. Where else, sir?” “Oh, I don’t know.” Cedric remembered how her eyes seemed to reach down through his into some inner recess, cleaving through his whole body as he swayed in front of her. “I thought she might have only wanted her feet, or something, done.” Arnold was a master of other people’s muscles but could not control his own much. His mouth widened like a ripped sail as he blew out his breath. A small gold tooth glittered. “Feet? No way, sir.” He sucked in more, noisily. “Full body, sir. Head to toe. Always the full works.” “Lying down?” “How else? Like you, sir. Just like this.” He pushed a knuckle between Cedric’s shoulder blades.
Cedric grunted and saw small pricks of light in the red mist behind his closed eyelids. He wanted to turn tables and exchange places with Arnold and went into a spin trying to imagine he was both Betsy on the bed—no, table—and Arnold, all thumbs and fingers, knuckling her vertebrae, rolling her over, pressing all the buttons of her bare being, cupping the steam rising from the areola broadening in his hands. “Wait.” “Sir?” He looked over his shoulder at Arnold. Yes, it was still Arnold standing there, and himself disjointed on the table. His beloved putters—the hefty Ping and rugged Schenectady—were pinned to the rack on the wall like implements of torture. “You married, Arnold?”
Now, lost in the doldrums, all he wanted was to twirl his fork around a bowl of spaghetti and watch Betsy Silveri’s pukka bosom heave with pride, her wide and tender Roman tongue slip between her lips as she smiled and melted his own inner beam swinging like a boat’s boom in a darkened cinema. Cedric shifted his sacrum and tried to loosen up. “She has her clothes on, of course? For this rub of yours?” Arnold applied the edge of his palm as though he wanted Cedric’s shoulder flattened to something close to a slice of Parma ham. “No, sir. She has to take off everything.” “What?” “A towel, sir. I put a towel here and there. Nothing else. Like normal.”
She would make the signal by arcing her back. “Ai, naku. Of course, sir.” “What does your wife think of your job with ladies like Miss Silveri?” “She is very happy, sir. Ma’am is very generous. She gives her pukka Italian handbags.” Cedric flinched. Pukka? He wondered how that got into Arnold’s Pilipino vocabulary. In all the months his body had been pummelled, the word had never escaped Cedric’s lips. “She has met her?” “No, sir. My wife is in the provinces, no? I take the handbag when I go home. Ma’am has many bags and when she finds one too uncomfortable for her shoulder, I rub it and she gives it, la.” Arnold demonstrated and Cedric felt another muscle turn to putty. When he was young—before golf usurped his dreams—he wanted to be a buccaneer like Errol Flynn. He would imagine himself sailing across the Pacific and wielding a cutlass against the gold-toothed swine who were after his treasure, leaping from deck to rolling deck. A simple cut and a thrust would deal with any problem and the perfect swing was one that would dispatch the enemy into oblivion. A bag of woods and irons, the rage of middle age, were poor substitutes for the swashbuckling adventures with damsels and mermaids he had once conjured with.
“Good grief, nothing else?” Female nudity in broad daylight was a foreign country that Cedric had not visited since an unexpected holiday on the Adriatic coast on his way back from Lourdes three years ago— due to his sciatica—and even then he had been too shy to take a proper look. He adjusted the thin striped cloth that lay across his middle and let his bones sink. The idea of his skin pressed to the same leatherette that had been touching her bare body, soaking in her sweat where the towel had scrunched up here and there, like scent from Desdemona’s handkerchief, made his blood surge. “Sir, you should empty your head for this.” Cedric snorted. The more he tried not to think of her, the more he did. Arnold paused. It was not uncommon for his clients’ flesh to part from their better judgement: the clenched buttock, the popped nipple, uncontrollable dilation and sly tumescence were all conditions he had learned to handle with aplomb. His job was to please his clients and exercise their muscles; he never shrank from his duty. Betsy Silveri was his favourite because she knew what she wanted and made her physical requirements abundantly clear. On the very first occasion, when he had finished rolling her corrugated cellulite
into smooth silk and had patted her towelled buttock, she had raised her pelvis and sighed. He had not hesitated; he had gone into his special repetoire with vim and warm coconut oil. After that, exactly thirty-five minutes into their every session, she would make the signal by arcing her back, and he would sing. “Sir, you want something else today?” Cedr ic’s body tensed up; all of Arnold’s hard work on the upper shoulders and the lower back evaporated. He might as well have strung a bow. “I want a bloody cigarette.” “Sir, what about your legs?” Cedric reached for the pack of cigarettes on the shelf. He shook one out and lit it with a thick silver lighter. Try as he would he could not empty his head, could not imagine an innocent scene with Arnold’s bony fingers and Betsy on the table. “What does she like?” “Same as you, sir.” Cedric looked at Arnold suspiciously. “Like what?” “Stretch. Pull. Roll. Afterwards she likes to have a cigarette and tea, just like you, but iced.” He drew some smoke in. “Iced?” Arnold smiled loosely again. “Iced tea, sir. Otherwise same-same. She likes the same thing you like. Lucky Strike, Gerry Mulligan, cool sax. Tea.” “But iced.” He contemplated the smoke drifting towards the window. Why did it seem more intimate when it was between a man and a woman, rather than a man and a man? “So, you did a whole pukka session with her—head to toe— before coming here?” “Yes, sir.” “What time?” “Just now, sir. Came straight from her house.” “After she had her iced tea?” “Cigarette, sir. No tea today.” “You know, Arnold, I would like you to do something for me.” “Anything, sir. I will do anything for you. I like to please my client and you are my best, sir.” He started to work on Cedric’s left calf. “My hands are your hands.” “I need your mouth, Arnold, for this, not your hands.” “Sir?” He gave Cedric a sharp slap. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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“I want you to talk to her. Tell her that I am very anxious, I am very, very sorry, I am wanting to…I mean, I want to…” Arnold clucked unhappily. “No, sir. This is not a good message. Ma’am is not so interested in anxious gentlemen.” “Oh, really?” “She likes a strong man. Straight. You must act decisively, sir, without hesitation. Take what is given, you know?” “I have not been given anything except a lot of bloody wine stains on my best barong.” Arnold pulled back the brown emasculated leg and bent it. “You want to meet with her, sir?” T he cigarette glowed as Cedric sucked. Decisiveness was not one of his strengths. He could steer a course once it had been set, but found it impossible to choose one for himself. Even in business, he went with the flow, trusting the trade winds. He had been sent to Manila by his company because of his golf. He played at the level his Manila clientele appreciated. They liked his game and bought his sprinklers more for his handicap than anything he said. He found the commercial world plain sailing compared to the emotional. His head hurt and he longed for a fairway with clearly marked hazards. “Yes.” He took another drag, enlarging his grey-haired chest. “I suppose that is what I want to do.” “Enough then for today, sir?” Arnold looked around for some sign of his afternoon snack. “Next week, sir, she wants to do the same time again. If you are at the gate when she drops me, you have the chance. Speak to her direct. Offer iced tea. Tell and pull, sir.” Cedric looked at the masseur suspiciously. How could he know what she would do?
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he week passed slowly. On the big day Cedric was ready early. He fixed a canopy over the front patio and put out two new deck chairs and a special brass tea table. Then he took his new driver and a couple of irons out to the front lawn. He had to improve his swing. To sort things out. To relax. To listen to the wind whistle, to hear the grass brushed by the 56
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clubhead, to feel something flow. Just before three o’clock, he abandoned the golf clubs for the watering can. He wanted to be at the gate when she arrived, and so he kept watering the roses next to it over and over again. He was on the fourth can when the Fiat puttered around the corner and came to a stop. He looked up. The water trickled all over his feet. “Holy fuck,” he said, a little louder than he had meant to but her windows were up and the little car was wheezing loudly. He took a deep breath and remembered his tee-box mantra: keep your head down, stay balanced, follow-through. Arnold shoved open the door. Cedric quickly went to the car and peered into it. “Oh, Betsy,” he said as though he would never have expected to find her there. “Hello.” She smiled back at him in delight. “So, this is where you hide.” She laughed, which made him almost petrify. He gulped. “You like a cool drink?” She wore the skimpiest dress he had ever seen on a driver; her bare skin glistened as it pulsed. “Must be hot in there,” he added. What else could he say? He thought of mentioning Pompeii, where he had been once and felt curiously at home. “I’m sorry about the other day …” “I have the air-con at full.” She revved the engine. Arnold, who was standing next to the car, stepped out of the way. Cedric looked at him, alarmed, and then again at Betsy. “A glass of nice iced tea?” “Iced?” “ Yes. Very iced.” He could see a small spark of interest in her eyes. Her lips opened. Her teeth were bright and white and he caught a glimpse of her pink tongue as it curved behind them to hide. She was looking at him. Searching his face, reaching out. He felt he was on fire but also being doused from all directions. He put the watering can down on the sodden ground. His face was bathed in sweat and at any moment now he knew he would drip like a slob onto the half-open window. He moved back a bit, anxious not to smear the glass, but worried in case it looked as though he was back-pedalling. He searched his pocket for a handkerchief, or a stopcock, but found only a bent tee.
“That sounds lovely, Cedric, but I just had a coffee and I have to go.” “Coffee?” He looked at Arnold who made a tiny, almost imperceptible, shrug. “I guess the spots must have come off after all,” she added a little sadly. “No, I am sorry they didn’t.” “ W hat a shame you didn’t come then.” She too glanced at Arnold. “Well, enjoy your afternoon. Ciao.” Her hand fluttered and the car eased away. “Wait,” Cedric tried to move forward, but he was too slow. He twisted the handkerchief he found mysteriously clenched in his hands and slung it around his neck like a bandana. “What the hell is this business with coffee, Arnold? You said tea. What’s going on?” “She wanted something hot, sir.” Arnold patted his folded table. “Maybe next week, better luck. Offer your special Darjeeling, sir. Hot Indian tea.” Cedric stared at Arnold, uncertainty lapping, his heart sinking. He said nothing to him and started back towards the house. On the way he picked up one of the clubs that he had dropped on the lawn earlier and tested its weight. A big driver. He had not got the hang of it. The head was made of silvery metal. All his muscles hurt: his arms, his legs, his middle back, his neck, his scuppered loins. He did not think Arnold could ease the tension in them this time. Not with those short clammy prurient fingers, no matter how hard he kneaded. The man may be a master of manipulation, but Cedric’s blood was too thick and hot and stymied to be so easily placated now. A few yards away, the canvas rigged up over the front patio was loose and flapping. An ocean foamed in his head. There must be a way, he thought, to retrieve one’s dreams. The club swung like a cutlass in his hand. He remembered the duels of his boyhood, the galleons he captured, the freebooters he had slain. He could do it then with his eyes open, night and day, blending hope and reality into a life everlasting like a story on a screen. But what could he do now, with time running so short? Wait another week? He turned to look at his useless masseur and saw a small nervous gannet, yearning for a snack. EB
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SOUNDINGS Taking the measure
MUSIC
// By SCOTT MESSENGER
Colin and Scott on stage; photo by Ryan Girard
Stages of Intimacy
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ntimacy and connection are at the heart of musical performance, no matter how large or small the act or venue. Some big names, such as The White Stripes, who announced their breakup this past February, knew how to get at it or were at least willing to try. In 2007, the band staged an ambitious Canadian tour with shows in every province and territory, but odder than The White Stripes playing in Iqaluit was what they did between gigs. On a transit bus in Winnipeg, in a Toronto daycare, on a fishing boat in Charlottetown, the duo played when the impulse hit, building audiences from bystanders.
It was unorganized and unmanaged, and judging by Jack White’s smile in the video footage exactly the way it was supposed to be, as if after ten years of writing, recording and touring, it was moments like these the band was after all along— raucous, unexpected, and, yes, intimate. That’s what motivates and inspires most musicians, the possibility of creating an intimate connection with a listener. You don’t write a song as much to express what you feel as you do to discover what someone feels about it. That exchange is the beauty of playing live. Which is fine if you’re The White WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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Stripes. But the question, at least for an amateur songwriter, is where to find an audience, so as to forge that connection and find that magic. For the past six months or so, my friend Colin and I have been playing open stages in Edmonton. Apart from leaning toward one genre or another, they tend to work the same way: sign up, play three songs, collect your free pint. We’ve played together since high school. Twenty years and several bands later, we’ve settled into a two-guitar configuration with a growing list of original songs, slightly more rock than folk. We’d get up in front of an audience a couple times a week if we could find the time. We aren’t unique. There are thousands of songwriters like us across Canada—so many that most open stages recommend players show up early to book a slot. Venues are catching on and cashing in. On any weeknight in the city, there are no fewer than three or four coffee shops, restaurants and bars hosting short sets by local songwriters. Nationwide, sites like openmicscene.com keep eager amateurs and semi-pros aware of where to play. Even Vancouver, a city known more for its DJ culture than its home-grown musical talent, lists a dozen spots a week.
In a way, we’re the perfect act for the open stage: three songs are all we can handle. On a good night, three songs are enough to get what we’re after.
Brian Gregg, a chatty guitarist known to friends as “Breezy,” remembers when the open stage was virtually nonexistent in Edmonton. Sixty-one, Gregg is a veteran of the city’s music scene. In 1969, just before his bipolar disorder triggered a lengthy stretch of hospitalization and treatment, he played lead guitar for the Angus Park Blues Band, opener for Led Zeppelin at the Edmonton Gardens that spring. In those days, he says, there were more than twenty bars paying for bands six nights a week. You could live by gigging. Now that’s nearly impossible. A good band won’t play for what a house DJ will. Today Gregg busks, teaches guitar and puts in a couple nights a week as a janitor. “Going through my career, I really looked down on open stage,” he said in a recent interview. And maybe he was right to; an open stage performer costs a venue nothing but a beer. While we spoke, Gregg picked at his goatee, neatly trimmed in contrast to the stringy grey hair descending from a signature felt cowboy hat. “I thought, ‘This is a rip-off. This is taking work away from musicians.’” But for more than fifteen years he’s been hosting at least 60
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one event a week, mostly The Little Flower Open Stage, in a dilapidated, wood-panelled club beneath a southside Edmonton grocery store. A local musician friend brought him around to the idea of the open stage, largely as a means of networking, but Gregg soon gained a deeper appreciation. For audiences, the absence of a cover charge makes live, original music easily accessible. “And for players who haven’t developed enough for a whole show,” he said, “it gives them a chance to get their stuff in front of people.” Colin and I have enough originals for an opening set, but Colin has a genetic disorder that’s progressively weakening his muscles and motor neurons. Generally, by the time we’re through two songs, Colin’s fingers are too tired or too sore to grip a pick. So he’ll drop it and carry on, raking bare skin over strings. In a way, we’re the perfect act for the open stage: three songs are all we can handle. On a good night, three songs are enough to get what we’re after. Yet that “what” isn’t easily defined. It changes nightly. For an audience, it ties into Gregg’s working-musician view that “a true performer knows they’re there for the people. It’s not about what the performer’s getting out of it.” On the January night we played his Little Flower stage, a young university student named Katie—pixie-cut blonde, awkwardly effervescent—showed up with a trumpet. After backing up a few acts, she staged a solo set a big-ticket concert would struggle to outdo. Katie read the room, opened her songbook to some Louis Armstrong, and silenced every voice but that of her horn for ten solid, shimmering minutes. “I’m sad that she hasn’t been back,” Gregg told me. “That’s one of the really nice things about open stage, is that you get those magical moments. Not all the time, but now and again. Musical things happen that don’t get recorded, that nobody’s ever going to hear again. It’s a treat for an audience.” On the night in question we certainly didn’t get what Katie got. Nor we’re we entitled to it. “It’s up to the performer to seduce the audience into listening to them,” Gregg said. Being listened to is precious, and is so very different from simply being heard. On some occasions, at other stages, we’ve been listened to. We’ve yet to hold that connection for more than a song, but those moments have been long enough to tell us that it can happen. Even in the days of the disembodied digital download, we all still want to be moved, in person, sharing it with others, which is what keeps drawing musicians to the stage and audiences to attend. That intimate connection is how and why music gets made. Of course, Colin and I know our impromptu shows will never “seduce” a crowd like The White Stripes did between stops during their final Canadian tour. We may never even achieve what Katie and her trumpet did that January night. But because we’ve caught a glimpse of the truer sort of intimacy that can come of it, from onstage or from taking in a show, we want to play them anyway. We need to. Tonight. Anywhere that will have us. It’s not as if there’s anything holding us back. “All you have to do,” Gregg reminded me, “is put your name on the list.” EB
BOOKS
The Dark Side of Pink // By JOCELyN BROWN
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n 2002, when I started working in the breast cancer screening department of what was then the Alberta Cancer Board, one of the recurring agenda items in staff meetings was what to do with the world’s longest pink ribbon. Stapled with intense resolve by Calgary staff and volunteers, many of the 24,000 ribbons inscribed with names of loved ones, it was carefully laid out on the hill behind CFRN TV in Calgary, jubilantly measured at 6,765 feet, certified by the Guinness World Records people and, shortly after, stuffed into large cardboard boxes. We thought a big Plexiglas square might be a striking means of display, and someone got estimates, but someone else thought such a box would have coffin associations. Eventually we stopped talking about pink ribbons, although it seems no one else has. Pink Ribbon Culture, as Gayle Sulik calls it in her 2011 book, Pink Ribbon Blues, is a study in philanthropic trends, cause-related marketing, and the branding of disease. Within a decade, breast cancer has evolved from a stigmatized disease into the dream cause of dozens of corporations that compete to “gain ownership over the issue,” as an Avon spokesperson once put it. In 2008, by way of example, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation had ninety-four corporate sponsors and their Race for the Cure raised over $170 million in 2009. Yet Sulik is one among many critics who claim the six billion dollar Pink Ribbon industry does not benefit women diagnosed with the disease as much as it does corporations, large non-profits, and especially pharmaceutical companies. Pink Ribbon Culture has become pathological, according to Sulik, “inadvertently help[ing] to maintain a war on breast cancer that has little chance of ending in the near future.” Samantha King made similar points in her 2011 book, Breast Cancer, Inc., where she focused on “the philanthropic arm” of breast cancer culture to show how “corporate marketing strategies, government policies, and the agendas of large nonprofits serve to reinforce one another in the social production of the disease.” Certainly there’s nothing subtle about the recent branding of breast cancer: A pink-lit Taj Mahal? The “crawl for the cause” lifelike baby doll? Critiques of the “vast pink sea of the breastcancer crusade,” as Barbara Ehrenreich has called it, are plentiful and anti pink-ribbon activism (such as the Think Before You Pink campaign) has become increasingly widespread. But then, what kind of mean-spirited crank complains about the billions of fundraised dollars for cancer research over the last decade? As Jian Gomeshi asked Samantha King in a CBC interview in October 2010, “Where’s the harm?” Isn’t increased awareness a good thing? After all, breast cancer awareness is now a huge global movement, marked last October by the illumination of thirty-nine historic landmarks within twenty-four hours. The Komen Foundation’s “global mission” to bring breast cancer awareness to women in places like Bosnia and North Africa likely benefits women too, as
does Avon’s Breast Cancer Crusade, a worldwide campaign on the importance of early detection. Like many missionary efforts, however, breast cancer awareness involves the export of cultural values under the mantle of charity, the “awareness” message remaining constant in every environment. In King’s analysis, Avon’s “crusade,” has far more to do with establishing brand identity than improving women’s health. Avon’s success appears to rely on Asian, Latin American and Eastern European markets—their crusaders are the 3.9 million sales reps worldwide who hand out information on breast cancer whenever they sell a pinkribbon brooch. “Awareness” in breast cancer culture means the importance of early detection, but these global awareness crusades ignore multiple factors. As a Ghanaian activist pointed out at the 2002 World Conference on Breast Cancer, “The greatest risk factor facing women living in third world countries [is] living in third world countries.” In Canada, what, exactly, should we be aware of when Estée Lauder lights up the parliament buildings? Under that pink glow last October, were people suddenly aware of the disparity in funding for “good” diseases like breast cancer versus “bad” health problems related to poverty and violence? Did we collectively realize that, despite the billions devoted to breast cancer research over the years, barely a dent has been made in incidence or mortality rates? Why does most of the research money focus on early detection and treatment instead of prevention?
In pink ribbon culture’s “tyranny of cheerfulness,” breast cancer is a battle regularly won by thousands of plucky, reflective, and kick-ass heroines. At the same time, there’s no question that widespread breast health awareness and certain concrete goals have been achieved under the pink umbrella. The importance of reaching “underserved” women, for instance, has meant funds have been granted for many breast-health awareness projects in which more pressing corollary goals—such as creating a peer-support network, or improving access to healthcare services—were also met. In Edmonton a few years ago, an innercity breast-health project meant that several women living on the street received one-to-one support on general health and personal safety issues along with the brochure on mammography. When I was giving workshops on breast cancer, I witnessed, over and over again, how misleading the culture of “awareness” can be. Most women overestimated their risk, having frequently read that one in eight Canadian women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. The context for this statistic—should all women live to be eighty-five—is often missing. Because “awareness” overemphasizes heredity, genetics are widely, and incorrectly, believed to account for far more than the five to ten per cent of breast cancer cases which they do. Many women believe they are at high risk even though their mother or grandmother had the disease post-menopausally and there was no other family history. Most egregious are WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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the “awareness” messages for girls, training them to, in effect, view their developing breasts as potential cancer vehicles. Meanwhile, mass participation in the fight against breast cancer has become highly visible through walks, runs and various “-athons.” Marketing guru Dan Palotta invented the AIDS ride, then the Avon breast cancer three-day walk, after recognizing, as he put it, a “deep hunger on the part of people with AIDS and breast cancer and the people who care about them to do something heroic.” Avon eventually fired Palotta in response to public concern about his forty per cent administrative costs, among other issues. The Komen Foundation hired him to orchestrate their walk, which now raises approximately $40 million a year. In his 2008 book Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential, Palotta claims that altruism is never selfless. “It’s a taste, stronger than our taste for music and art.” Why not capitalize on that taste? Samantha King notes that fundraising walks and races help in “shaping a social context that views America’s survival as depending on personal acts of generosity mediated through consumer culture.” The difficult trick for consumers, however, is “discerning activities that bring social change from those that reproduce the status quo.” Former employees of Palotta Teamworks applied the sixty-kilometre walk formula in Canada by deploying their new company, CauseForce, to produce the Weekend to End Breast Cancer (WEBC), for which I volunteered. Except for staffing the giant colon in West Edmonton Mall, working at the WEBC’s registration day was my least favourite job assignment. CauseForce applied their formula of big production values: blaring inspirational music, slick promo video on a massive screen, an army of pink-clad volunteers, and, in the middle, a store of commemorative trinkets, t-shirts and baseball caps. My job as a representative of the Alberta Cancer Board was to hand out pink breast-health wheels. Although the atmosphere was not conducive to critical thought, many women approached me with questions. They asked if their money really was going to good use, and why, as one woman put it, there has to be “so much effing pink.” Many refused the brochures and breast health wheels, citing environmental concerns. Despite my difficulty with the loud, pink stimuli at the WEBC, I was always moved by the deep commitment many of the walkers had for each other and those they were walking for. While it seemed, on one hand, that this human concern was being exploited, it was clear that the walks gave people a way to fulfill their strong and urgent need to help. Yes, the walk is a commodity (for which, as Palotta says, walkers must raise at least $2,000 for the “privilege” of participating). But it is also a place where people can match intense feeling—love, fear, gratitude—with rigorous action. The optimism of the WEBC was so strong, it was easy to forget that the disease caused suffering. In the Pink Ribbon Culture’s “tyranny of cheerfulness,” as Ehrenreich calls it, breast cancer is a battle regularly won by thousands of plucky, reflective, and sometimes kick-ass heroines who are then feted as “survivors.” In her 2006 graphic memoir, Cancer Made Me a 62
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Shallower Person, Miriam Engelberg wonders what the term “survivor” really means. “Is it just a statement of fact?” Engelberg asks, her cartoon self pointing at a coffin and saying, “I’m alive. She’s not. Na na na na na.” In her 1980 book, The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde created a model for the politically-engaged breast cancer memoir and seemed to foresee its replacement: “Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life…” Forty years later, breast cancer memoirs have become a genre of brightsiding in which cancer is experienced as a personal journey from which a truer self can emerge. As Ehrenreich points out, dissent amongst all this cheer amounts to a kind of treason. While Pink Ribbon Culture may have succeeded in reducing the stigma of getting breast cancer, it has at the same time stigmatized or disregarded many of the ways in which women might experience the disease—anger and despondency being especially unacceptable. Much of my job at the Alberta Cancer Board involved giving breast-health talks in which the main message was: “Get a mammo if you’re over fifty.” The main visual aid was the breast model. Smooth and gummy and embedded with hard round lumps ranging in size from small to large tapioca, women poked at it with gleeful dread. In every group, in every corner of the province, the conversation was the same: “Oh God! There’s one.” “Oh my God, that’s huge!” “Is that what they really feel like?” Perhaps the model allowed us to transfer our fear of breast-cancer away from our own breasts, or perhaps it had an intrinsic squishy appeal, but certainly the breast model provided a simple, necessary reassurance—something like a stressball—in the absence of concrete information. As the expert, I could clear up “awareness” misconceptions, but I had nothing to offer in terms of prevention, given that early detection, a poor alternative to start with, is hardly straightforward. While mammography for women fifty and over appears to remain the best method of early detection, the American Cancer Society publicly admitted in 2009 that the benefits of breast cancer screening have been exaggerated. In 2001, a Canadian task force on preventative health care declared breast self-examination ineffective. Breast-health brochures now say, “Stay aware of your breasts,” something women age fifty and over can hardly avoid, many of us sensing our social capital sag as they do. Awareness takes many forms, of course, from staying “aware of your breasts” to staying aware of who is actually benefiting from the culture of the Pink Ribbon and in what ways; and there is a growing literature devoted to this kind of awareness. Speaking of which, I’m not aware of what became of that world record-breaking pink ribbon we didn’t know what to do with back in 2001. Most likely it was quietly destroyed. Pink Ribbon Culture is all about optics, after all, and if you’re stuck with a giant pink ribbon that you can’t deploy to bright-side someone’s heroic struggle—or, at the very least, use as a motivational tool to convince someone to buy a pink blender—then what good is it? EB
FILM
Gotta watch ’em all!
Castlerock
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n February, the video-streaming website Hulu, once best known as a place to waste time catching up on old episodes of Heroes, made a major announcement: they had struck an exclusive deal with the Criterion DVD label to eventually make more than 800 titles from their back catalogue available online, free of commercial interruptions, through their premium subscription service Hulu Plus. The first batch of films to appear included The 400 Blows, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, M, and L’Avventura.(Sadly, this deal will leave Canadian cinephiles out in the cold; Hulu Plus, like Hulu itself, is unavailable north of the border.) The films, Hulu said in a press release, will be presented with the exquisite attention to detail and the carefully curated supplementary features that have made Criterion the most respected and prestigious brand name in home video. But is a digital version of a Criterion film—intangible, impossible to physically “own” and yet easily available to all—still a Criterion film? Clearly not. Why? Consider Jean Renoir’s glittering 1939 ensemble comedy/drama The Rules of the Game, a film I adore for many reasons. The precarious balance that Renoir maintains between comedy and drama, between satire and empathy, is a thrilling feat of directorial acrobatics. Renoir’s fluid camerawork, often moving among multiple rooms and capturing as many as three planes of action within a single take, is not only spectacular from a technical standpoint, but it also represents a capacious view of humanity. His ability to portray life teeming beyond the edges of the frame—a benevolent belief that no one person, no one storyline, is any more important than any other—is humane and moving. Renoir is not my favourite director of all time, but his loose style and skill with acting ensembles were clearly an influence on the director who is my favourite: Robert Altman, whose 2001 film Gosford Park is partly an homage to The Rules of the Game.
// By PAUL MATWyCHUK
And yet, I probably would never have bought The Rules of the Game on DVD had it not been brought out in a deluxe package from Criterion. It was not even the voluminous DVD special features included in this release (a high-definition digital transfer, a learned audio commentary from film scholar Alexander Sesonske, numerous new video interviews with actors and crew members, a booklet containing new essays by Paul Schrader and Wim Wenders) that convinced me to shell out $35. No, it was the packaging that clinched it: a foldout case covered with black-and-white images of the film’s main characters arranged into a checkerboard-style grid, the whole thing presented in a transparent blue plastic sleeve. As much as I wanted to watch The Rules of the Game again, what I wanted more was to sit on my couch with that Criterion case in my lap and slide off that blue plastic sleeve over and over again, savouring my purchase and all its outward tactile pleasures (not unlike the child on Christmas morning who gets a big, expensive gift and spends all day playing with the box).
The veRy fIRST CRITeRIoN ReleaSeS weRe deluxe laSeRdISC editions of Citizen Kane and King Kong which came out in 1984, at a time when the rented VHS tape was still the dominant mode for watching movies at home. In that context, it wasn’t the packaging of those Criterion discs—as big as LPs and now just as obsolete—that people found noteworthy; it was the idea that a home-video release could contain special features at all. In the modern age of DVD, when even a movie as marginal and unambitious as Furry Vengeance comes with a commentary track, it is easy to forget that the idea that people might want to hear a director or a scholar talking about the movie you’re watching while you watch it originated at Criterion, as WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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did options like music-only audio tracks, letterboxing, trailers and deleted scenes. A “film school in a box” became the shorthand term for Criterion’s approach to home video. In other words, content was key, and Criterion’s core market, especially in the nineteen-eighties, consisted largely of consumers who treated film history and their state-of-the-art home theatres with equal seriousness. Criterion released their first DVD (another Jean Renoir film, the anti-war drama Grand Illusion) in 1998, and have released more than 550 titles since then. They are most closely identified with their deluxe editions of classic foreign films and out-of-print cult classics, but the Criterion Collection has grown to include such unlikely titles as Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy, the 1958 drive-in hit The Blob, and two Michael Bay blockbusters, The Rock and Armageddon.
There is something unsatisfying about buying most DVDs. What Criterion has done with the carefully designed artwork of their releases is find a way to make a mass-produced DVD seem, for want of a better word, artisanal. At the same time, with those spine numbers (another marketing masterstroke), Criterions DVDs also become items within a huge, ever-growing collectible set. You can never own the complete Criterion Collection. They are the highbrow equivalent of Pokémon cards: gotta watch ’em all! Gathering all my Criterion DVDs on my desk and looking at them (which I admit to doing) makes me feel like Albert Brooks in Modern Romance, blissed out on Quaaludes and admiring his record collection: “I have so many great albums! I love ’em! I love ’em!” Of the fifty-five Criterion DVDs and box sets I own, my pride and joy is the 25-disc AK100 box
This degree of fetishism cannot be healthy. Criterion arrived late to the DVD boom, but they were ahead of the curve when it came to realizing that a certain type of image-conscious movie-lover would respond powerfully to the idea that the enhanced picture and sound of a DVD could also be reflected in the packaging. With its earlier releases, one got the feeling that Criterion design was less an end in and of itself than a way to signal to the consumer that there was something unusual, something significant, about these DVDs (even if, as was the case with many early Criterion releases, they contained very few extra features). The design of many early Criterions—Henry V, The Magic Flute, Mona Lisa, Rififi—resembled Blue Note album covers, mixing playfully cropped and sliced black-and-white photos with boldly coloured typography, one of the easiest ways to make a graphic impact on the cheap. At the same time, other releases from this era were crude or downright ugly; it’s hard to imagine the original Criterion designs for The Lady Vanishes or The Long Good Friday passing muster today. I can’t pinpoint when exactly when people began coveting Criterion DVDs purely as physical objects, but for me, it was the one-two punch of Brazil and Rushmore. Here was the genius of Criterion: it wasn’t just that the content of these releases had been assembled with such care and intelligence (such as the ninety-four-minute studio cut of Brazil, a powerful demonstration of how editing can invert the meaning of even the most subversive film, or, in the Rushmore box, a whimsical foldout map of the world of the movie drawn by Wes Anderson’s brother Eric). No, here were DVDs that were meant not just to be watched, but displayed as objects of beauty. There is nothing difficult or arduous about waiting around for the Criterion version of, say, Sweet Smell of Success, but it does seem to say something flattering about your standards all the same. Book lovers can seek out first editions, art lovers can surround themselves with paintings, but until Criterion came along, there was no equivalent collectible artifact that movie lovers could purchase in order to demonstrate their passion. 64
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set brought out to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Akira Kurosawa. I have the out-of-print Criterion editions of Silence of the Lambs, Straw Dogs and Notorious. This degree of fetishism cannot be healthy. I do worry that Criterion has entered its decadent phase with releases like Paul Schrader’s Mishima (packaged in a box wrapped in imitation gold foil) or David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (whose case is designed to resemble a Betamax cassette) or David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (a two-disc behemoth that’s almost as self-indulgent as the film it commemorates). The vigilance with which they protect and promote their image as the repository of good taste is the central joke of Fake Criterions (fakecriterions. tumblr.com), a Tumblr that applies the spare, achingly tasteful Criterion aesthetic to some of the worst films in Hollywood history. It’s a glimpse into an alternate cinematic universe in which Ernest Goes to Jail is marketed as if it were Bresson’s A Man Escaped and 3 Ninjas gets a box that could be filed right alongside Kurosawa’s Sanjuro. In 1877, Walter Pater famously observed that all art aspires to the condition of music. Nowadays, it appears that all movies aspire to the condition of Criterion—or at least all movie case and poster art does. The intellectual benefit that accrues from using Hulu Plus to stream Godard or Tarkovsky or Bergman is abstract and notional. What do you have to show for it after it’s over (other than that pessimistic dimness now clouding your eyes?). Yes, on one level, a Criterion DVD package is simply a culture-snob fetish object, tangible evidence of the buyer’s willingness not just to sit through a “difficult” film but to pay upwards of $30 for the privilege of doing so multiple times at home. But on another level—would “spiritual” be the right word for it?—a beautifully designed Criterion edition of any given movie is like that movie raised to its Platonic ideal, which makes the owner feel like the Platonic ideal of a movie buff. And how often do any of us get to feel like the Platonic ideal of anything? That’s the ultimate Criterion special feature. EB
The Canadian Literature Centre / Centre de littérature canadienne was established at the University of Alberta in 2006, and is the western hub of the Canadian literary community. It brings together researchers, authors, publishers, collectors and the reading public to promote the strength and diversity of Canada’s written culture, as well as research of Canadian literature, in both English and French, of all genres, languages, and regions.
CLC Highlights:
Brown Bag Lunch Series These noon-hour literary readings, featuring upcoming guest authors like Will Ferguson and Timothy Taylor, have become an Edmonton favourite.
Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Now in its 6th year, this annual lecture and reception has featured some of Canada’s most talented authors: Annabel Lyon, Eden Robinson, Dany Laferrière, Wayne Johnston and Joseph Boyden. The 2012 author will be announced soon!
CLC Research Seminars This project provides an ongoing, public research forum for the discussion and study of a wide range of issues relevant to Canadian literature. The seminars are fun, engaging and open to everyone. Visit us at 4-115 Humanities Centre, University of Alberta. Website: www.arts.ualberta.ca/clc/ Phone: (780) 492-9505 Email: cdnlit@ualberta.ca
BRIDGES
Big M Shows, Leduc // By CRAILLE MAGUIRE GILLIES
“R
ide’s closed down!” the carnie shouted. He was wearing a purple windbreaker that, along with all the carnival signs and rides—the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Gravitron, the salt-and-pepper shakers—looked like it was transported directly from 1982. Eye of the Tiger blasted from speakers. The carnie climbed the ride where, one storey up, a three-year-old boy tottered along a small suspension bridge, bewildered, like a kitten up a tree. The kid’s blond hair was styled in a mini-Mohawk. He had on jeans, a black t-shirt that said Rock Legend on the front, and a pair of tiny black Vans. It was the Vans that got you. I scanned the crowd for a mother who might buy her little boy brand-name sneakers and found her: young, tall, long blond hair (no Mohawk), put together just so. The boy had come out just far enough on the bridge to see the ground below and was frozen there. This was the carnie’s moment. We were all looking up at the boy, whose Mohawk and Vans couldn’t hide his panic. Years
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later, he might not remember this moment. The carnival might become a vague memory of his childhood, mere kitsch, something he’d enjoy nostalgically. One day he might tell his mother that he didn’t want a stupid Mohawk, and adopt a costume of his choosing. But on this day, he was stuck up on a swaying rope bridge. The carnie came up behind the kid, marshalled him toward a slide, and pushed him down. The boy landed with a soft thud in the sand at the bottom. He had the look of a sleepwalker who had stumbled out of some parallel dream world, not quite sure what just happened. His eyes searched the crowd for his mother and found her. He was quiet. Tears, yes, but no bawling. Sound came back to the world as the anxious crowd dispersed, the mother and the boy heading toward the parking lot to go home. It seemed like time never passed at the carnival; just ran in endless circles like a record with a skip. If it weren’t for the sun making its way across the Prairie sky you would hardly have noticed it pass at all. EB
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