creative forces

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.