Blog # 118…June 2021

Poets Laureate aren’t anything new – Geoffrey Chaucer was paid 10 shillings a year in the 1300’s to write for King Henry 1 and there’s been an unbroken line (of males with Carol Ann Duffy, 2009-19, the one exception) in Britain ever since.  Canada climbed onboard with Dennis Lee (2001-04) taking on the role in Toronto and George Bowering appointed (2002-04 ) at the federal level - called Parliamentary Poet Laureate. We’ve done a bit better in the gender balance with 3 women Parliamentary PL’s since.   

                                        

Louise Halfe, the current poet in parliament, checks many boxes - she’s a Cree elder (at 68) from northern Alberta, a professional social worker with a special certificate in drug and alcohol counselling. Taken from her parents at the age of 7 to the Blue Quill residential school where she spent 10 years, she brings the experience as a survivor of that system as well as an indigenous feminist perspective to her poetry. Louise tells the stories of women who came before her, the kinship relations between women and their importance in Cree culture.   She incorporates white space into her poems to emphasize the isolation and loss felt by her people. She also uses code switching - I know, I had to look it up - telling a complete tale by weaving the Cree language and teaching into her poems as a reminder of the devastation of losing language and the fragmentation of history, culture and land that can’t be conveyed in English.                                                                                                 

In Toronto since Dennis, the past 2 decades have seen a range of poets, including Dionne Brand (2009-12), Anne Michaels (2016-19) and today, Al Moritz.  George Elliot Clarke (2012-15) with his typical exuberance, followed the Toronto gig with a hop scotch into the Parliamentary position (2016-18).

All the provinces and 2 territories honour poets laureate and in fact two areas led the field, with Yukon appointing their first in 1994, New Westminster in 1997 and Cobourg in 1998. Some have appointed them for life, in Cape Breton, Rita Joe is the lifetime poet laureate of the Mi’k maq people. Ottawa has both French and English. I don’t know about you but I had no idea there was such a substantial poetry subculture lurking just below the surface, toiling in the fields, working from the bottom up, so to speak,... Poets link us to our environment and to traditional knowledge, serving as ambassadors of language and culture. It’s good to see them being recognized.

Now, Ontario boasts Randall Adjei, a spoken word artist as its first poet laureate.   Although not yet thirty, he  brings years of personal experience and community organizing and is the founder of RISE - Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere. A self confessed bad boy (he was arrested at 12) Randall has turned his life around and is committed to helping other young people do the same - providing a safe and inclusive space for expression, connecting and developing a more positive sense of themselves.  This newest position was created in memory of Gord  Downey of the Tragically Hip and it's particularly moving that the first recipient shares Gord's love of the lyric word and a passion for drawing attention to stories of injustice.   

Randall and Louise couldn’t be more different at first glance, but their commitment to bringing their backgrounds and experiences into the light through their work is the same. Code switching, rapping, using not only words but language forms, music and visuals serve to attract and inform us. Listening to the voices of poets  helps connect us to the world we share, and to appeciate and make some sense of it and of each other. There's a poet somewhere out there who will speak directly to you and steal your heart, break it, make it sing, maybe both...keep your eyes and ears open to welcome them in.                                               .

                                                            

Finally, huge congratulations to Michelle Good, Louise's fellow Cree from western Canada, a lawyer, also in her 60's, who just won the Amazon Canada first novel award for Five little Indians. It's on the short list for the Governor General's award for fiction. And poet and Rhodes scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt's memoir A History of My Brief Body, about growing up indigenous and queer is up for non fiction. Results  announced on Tuesday, June 1...fingers crossed!

See you next on Canada Day.

 

Blog # 117…May 2021

Early in 2020, around the time rumours of the corona virus started creeping into our consciousness, I was on a Toronto street car and saw a couple of people move away from an Asian woman, one even pulling her coat collar up over her mouth and nose -  I’m sure the woman noticed too.  It was the first of many such incidents, some much more direct and hurtful. And tragically, six Asian women were targeted and murdered in Atlanta by a white man earlier this year. The pandemic did originate in Wuhan, China, drastically affecting their population before moving on to us. Systemic racism dates back a couple of centuries and has always lurked just below the surface; it’s now raised its ugly head and become part of a public discourse.

My friend Margaret,who was born in Seattle of Japanese parents, reports verbal abuse being hurled by young men passing her house in a car…not brave enough to confront a tiny, solitary 90 year old woman in person!   She describes this and her family’s experience being interned during WWll in her wonderful video An Extraordinary Gift. Take a look and see what bravery looks like:      https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=TLGGExz5mH4vjZwxMTAyMjAyMQ&v=FxikA8Akk7E&feature=emb_title

Toronto’s Chinatown was one of the first neighbourhoods to feel the impact of SARS in 2003, and then, of COVID 19 in 2020. A decline in business and an increase in harassment was noticed as early as January 2020. So, on top of sharing the anxiety we all feel over the pandemic, the threat of violence looms over many Asian-Canadians.

Asian artists have stepped forward to confront the situation with political expression, forming Tea Base, an arts collective to explore experiences of anti-Asian racism as well as the joy of community. Three Toronto artists with connections to Chinatown use their art to explore aspects of their identity, being perceived as foreign although they may be, feel and identify as Canadian.

The Anti-Displacement Garden created an intergenerational neighbourhood hub in the lower courtyard of the Chinatown Centre mall, replacing a pile of bricks with zucchini, corn, broccoli, lemongrass, bok choy, mint and an array of herbs. Tea Base, located inside the mall, is co-directed by conceptual artist Florence Yee (a third generation Canadian) who documented the lush garden last summer and had the images printed on white cotton. Yee says ”The garden is an example of how taking care of a space creates some connections between us, the neighbouring businesses and the people that come by.”

Photographer Morris Lum has travelled across North America recording the unique architecture and community institutions in cities with a significant Chinatown - restaurants, mom and pop stores and cultural hubs that may be invisible to passersby. His goal is to document how gentrification, economic challenges and settlement trends of more recent Chinese immigrants are affecting the look and feel of these neighbourhoods.  Lum, who was born inTrinidad and grew up in Mississauga, uses his lens to focus on these community institutions before they disappear, providing an appreciation for how these unique but similar Chinatowns made it easier for future generations to move to North America.

Christie Jia Wen Carriere, the other director of Tea Base, is a painter and illustrator who uses her art to explore her Chinese-Canadian identity, the long history of sexualizing Asian women and cultural appropriation. In her more recent work, The Chinatown Mall Project she’s finding ways to showcase joy within the Chinese community and Chinatown. A series of vibrant paintings feature shopkeepers in the Mall surrounded by the special wares they sell – jade, traditional Chinese herbs or Hello-Kitty branded snacks. Pain and trauma are under the surface, but survival and joy  shine through.

Inspiration for this blog came from a piece sponsored by the Goethe Institute and featured in The Kensington Issue of the West End Phoenix.  WEP is a great indie newspaper, leaning to the west and the left, on issues that concern us all.  Check it out at   www.westendphoenix.com and read the whole piece - Political Expression…or better yet subscribe, you won’t regret it.                                                                         

I’m sending this on May 1, International Workers’ Day, I’ve already expressed my concerns about workers.  So, on a lighter note - since I've been able to walk around with my new hip, I've been delighted by the whimsy of the many fairy doors comceived and constructed by my neighbours. 

THANKS, whoever you are! 

 

And finally, if you have difficulty opening Margaret's  video with the link above, different operating systems respond differently. try:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=TLGGExz5mH4vjZwxMTAyMjAyMQ&v=FxikA8Akk7E&feature=emb_title