Blog #
79…March 2018
The world’s
shifting population has ramped up in the past few years and it’s provided rich
material for art forms to capture in fiction, film and theatre.
And music…Safe Haven was a recent presentation by Tafelmusik, the baroque orchestra that performs at Trinity St Paul’s Centre in
Toronto on instruments authentic to the period. Music has a way of conveying
emotions that words on their own simply cannot. The concert offered some surprising revelations and changed our ways of hearing Bach, Vivaldi and Corelli amongst others.Threads of narrative were woven
with music with a focus on the stories of refugee artists throughout history
and the cross pollination that resulted.
Here in
Canada we've had the luxury of welcoming immigrants in a measured and
somewhat controlled way. Not so in some
of the European countries, who've experienced sudden, overwhelming arrivals
by water and on foot. Our eyes and hearts have been shocked by news photos of
bodies lying on beaches and throngs of people hanging off the sides of small,
unseaworthy looking objects. A recent
film from Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki – The
Other Side of Hope takes us backstage in scenes where local Finns struggle
with an influx of migrants, who look, speak and behave in alarmingly unfamiliar
ways. Despite Kaurismaki’s usual
critical and unromantic look at his country and fellow citizens, he manages to represent the viewpoint and position of everyone in this film, - Finns, long term immigrants and recent
migrants with clarity and humour. At
times they all warrant our attention, understanding, compassion and affection.
A number of
novelists around the world have tackled migrants’ stories in their work, but
the one that moved me and has stuck in my thoughts was a short story in The
New Yorker many years ago. An elderly
woman had been brought from India to live with her son, his US born wife and their
two children a few years after the death of her husband. She had been happy enough in her village, but
her son thought she must be lonely, so brought her to his large suburban house in California. Although she missed her friends and didn't speak English, she loved to clean, do the laundry and cook...only thing was, the neighbours objected when she hung the wash out in the garden, the family complained when she moved their things to clean...and they preferred pizza and burgers to her biryanis.
I often think of that woman, even if she was fictional, as we work to support our family from Iraq who arrived last July. Hiyam cooked us a wonderful middle eastern dinner last week for International Women's Day. We love her biryani, kubba and pomegranate salad ...and as we struggle to help her and her family adjust to life here, wonder if we're getting it right.
