SHOULD WE BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY? JOHN CAGE’S SECRET LIFE AS A CANADIAN HOW THE STUDENT STRIKE CHANGED !UEBEC FOREVER Plus: ART GALLERIES OPEN THEIR VAULTS

GAYSFOR

THEGOD !UEER EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT IS COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET. CAN IT TAKE ON THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT?

ISSUE 45 • FALL 2012 • WWW.MAI SONNEUVE.ORG

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Front Comic 4 Letters & News 26 HEADCASE by MARC BELL. 5 Contributing Artists & Masthead Cover Story Comment 28 GAYS FOR GOD The religious right is the most power- 6 LET’S TALK ABOUT DEATH Fifty years ago, Canada exe- ful obstacle to LGBT equality in America. But, CLANCY cuted a criminal for the last time, REGAN BURLES writes. MARTIN reports, a growing movement of gay evangelicals Should we have a national conversation about capital is challenging homophobia from within the faith. Their punishment? message: We’re here. We’re queer. We’re Christian. Get used to it. Open House 9 NOTES FROM THE END OF THE WAR On the battlefield, Features success is fleeting and memory is short. JONATHAN MONT- 34 THE PLACE WHERE ART SLEEPS The vast majority of the PETIT reports on the last days of the Canadian mission in Art Gallery of Ontario’s priceless collection isn’t on dis- Afghanistan. play—it’s tucked away in high-security, top-secret vaults. As he explores the hidden world of art storage, CHRIS 12 A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE PUNCH Plays have fights in HAMPTON discovers that some museums are starting to them, KAITLIN FONTANA writes, because lives have fights in open up. them. 40 WHAT’S EATING LITTLE PORTUGAL? Forget Africentric 14 THE MAPLE SPRING Quebec’s uprising started as a student schools: Toronto’s Portuguese community has the highest strike, JESSE ROSENFELD reports, but it became something dropout rate in the city, ERIC ANDREW-GEE reports. How much larger: a revolt against power itself. did a flourishing immigrant population wind up so poorly educated—and what can it teach us about how to succeed 18 THE BOOK ROOM by MAISONNEUVE STAFF. in Canada?

19 THE MUSIC ROOM by CHANDLER LEVACK. Fiction 50 HUSBAND by SARA FREEMAN. Photo Essay 20 TAKE ME TO THE FAIR The county fairs of rural Ontario. Poetry Photographs and text by FINN O’HARA. 56 TWO POEMS by RICARDO STERNBERG. Writing From Quebec WAS JESUS GAY? That’s the implicit 58 PIPE DREAMS At the start of Quebec’s student strike, question posed by our cover, which de- VALÉRIE DARVEAU didn’t support disruptive protests. But picts the Son of God wrapped in a rain- after weeks of seeing the movement’s ideas dismissed, she bow shroud. The image, photographed by changed her mind. Kourosh Keshiri and designed by Anna Minzhulina, is arresting and provocative. Profile But that raises another key question: why 60 JOHN CAGE’S CANADA The twentieth century’s most should it be controversial to portray Jesus important avant-garde composer may have been Ameri- as a gay man? Christ is love, after all— can, CRYSTAL CHAN writes, but he found his greatest in- and, as Clancy Martin reports in “Gays spiration north of the border. for God” (page 28), a growing movement of queer evangelicals seeks to permanently banish homophobia Letter From Montreal from the American religious right. Although many liberal church- 64 THE STRIKING LIFE by MICHAEL NARDONE. es promote gay rights, this movement is uniquely ambitious: it challenges conservative evangelism from within the faith, putting itself on a collision course with the country’s most right-wing reli- gious leaders. As the US presidential election approaches, cultural issues like same-sex marriage have galvanized voters on both sides, but gay evangelists offer a third way: it’s possible, they say, to be both queer and Christian. After all, God made us who we are.

2 LETTERS & N EWS CONTRIBUTI NG A R T I STS 45

WWW. MAIS ONNEUVE. ORG DANIEL EHRENWORTH nearly became a filmmaker, but — “quickly learned that being a film buff doesn’t make • FALL 2012• the process of making a film any less horrible.” He PUBLISHER decided to pursue photography instead, but wasn’t Jennifer Varkonyi EDITOR!IN!CHIEF fully prepared for the medium’s unique challenges. Drew Nelles Once, while shooting an ad campaign, Ehrenworth ART DIRECTOR was “approached by a blond Australian man who Anna Minzhulina was drunk on Red Bull and vodka, and wanted to be ASSOCIATE EDITOR in the photo. When we told him he couldn’t be part Amelia Schonbek of the campaign, he got all up in my assistant’s face, PUBLISHING ASSISTANT Jaela Bernstien started clenching his fists, and then proceeded to lec- INTERNS ture us about how ‘all we cared about was fucking Erica Ruth Kelly, Taylor Tower money!’” Ehrenworth’s photos accompany “What’s WRITING FROM QUEBEC Eating Little Portugal?” on page 40. Melissa Bull EDITORS AT LARGE Madeline Coleman, Matthew Fox, Paloma Friedman, Carmine Starnino HERYL OISINE Graphic designer and illustrator C V has CIRCULATION MANAGER had “the natural impulse to make and draw” since Eithne McCredie she was a child. “It’s always made me happiest and WEB DESIGN most fulfilled,” she says. The work that results draws Cody Django, Antonio Starnino heavily from Voisine’s personal history. She wants MAISONNEUVE IS A NOT-FOR-PROFIT MAGAZINE PUBLISHED her drawings to spur emotional responses in her QUARTERLY BY MAISONNEUVE MAGAZINE ASSOCIATION. — viewers; most often, she says, she’s aiming for “per- M AISONNEUVE MAGAZINE plexed intrigue,” as in her illustration on page 58. 1051 BOUL. DECARIE These days, in addition to designing a line of wallpa- PO BOX 53527 SAINT L AURENT, QC, H4L 5J9 CANADA per and textiles, she works with Montreal collabora- TEL & FAX: (514) 482-5089 tive drawing group En Masse, and its sister project, Subscription care: TO SUBSCRIBE, MAKE A SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRY En Masse pour les Masses, which aims to make art OR CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS, PLEASE CONTACT MAISONNEUVE: CALL 1-514-482-5089 OR more accessible. EMAIL [email protected]. A ONE-YEAR CANADIAN SUBSCRIPTION IS $24.95, PLUS APPLICABLE TAXES. FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE VISIT MAISONNEUVE.ORG.

OCCASIONALLY MAISONNEUVE MAKES ITS SUBSCRIBER NAMES AVAILABLE SWITCH (ISSUE 44) TO COMPANIES WHOSE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES WE FEEL MAY BE OF MICHEL HELLMAN says that, “contrary to what most INTEREST TO YOU. TO BE EXCLUDED FROM THESE MAILINGS, PLEASE SEND people believe,” being a cartoonist is a pretty un- YOUR REQUEST, ALONG WITH YOUR SUBSCRIPTION NUMBER, TO 1051 BOUL. DECARIE, PO BOX 53527, SAINT L AURENT, QC, H4L 5J9 eventful job. Hellman rarely leaves Mile End, his OR EMAIL [email protected] OR CALL 514-482-5089. Montreal neighbourhood, except to take trips to the Submissions: FOR GUIDELINES, SEE OUR WEBSITE. UNCHALLENGED Canadian North. He’s currently working on a book Advertising: EMAIL [email protected] I might have enjoyed J.J. Levine’s series of photographs a queer thought? And is this “nuanced understanding” an objec- about Plan Nord, a government proposal to open vast TO REQUEST OUR ADVERTISING KIT. Postmaster: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES (“Switch,” Issue 44) were it not for the intro. Levine’s cli- tive characteristic of the art, or Levine’s own pat on the back? parts of northern Quebec to natural-resource extrac- AND UNDELIVERABLE COPIES TO: chéd, self-congratulatory artist statement rhetorically beats This criticism does not speak to Levine’s art in form or sub- tion. “The North fascinates me,” Hellman says, “and MAISONNEUVE C/O CDS GLOBAL, PO BOX 819, the reader into looking at the work with an equally narrow ject; the portraits are interesting. I’m criticizing a sorry example I’m worried about the social and environmental costs STN MAIN, MARKHAM, ON L3P 8L3. and uninteresting point of view. Come on: “photographs that of tired art writing. If every artist’s work challenges hegemony, of this massive project.” Check out his illustration de- CANADA POST PUBLICATIONS MAIL AGREEMENT #40674001. question the stability of gender, identity and aesthetics”—how then the art world is undertaking the most pathetic revolution picting the Quebec student strike on page 64. ISSN 1703-0056 many times has this very phrase been used to describe a di- ever staged. Levine is by no means alone in providing boring art WE ACKNOWLEDGE THE SUPPORT OF THE CANADA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS WHICH LAST YEAR INVESTED $20.1 MILLION IN WRITING AND verse mountain of artworks? It seems, depressingly, that all explications, but as the editors of a cool, smart magazine, you PUBLISHING THROUGHOUT CANADA. you have to do to be an artist today is choose a topic and then should be demanding more dynamic writing from contributors. “question” its “stability.” Levine implies over and over: I’m —Harry Cepka trying to look beyond rigid gender roles and express a queer RAINA KIM point of view. That’s fine. I’d like to hear that once—and then MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR, RIGHT HERE • Born in London, England, photographer FINN O’HARA WE ACKNOWLEDGE THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA THROUGH THE CANADA PERIODICAL FUND (CPF) FOR OUR some new ideas. The rhetoric Levine uses makes it sound as We are thrilled to say that, on June 7, Maisonneuve won Maga- moved to Canada when he was young. But it wasn’t PUBLISHING ACTIVITIES. OISINE OISINE

though “Switch” is the very first photography series to “chal- zine of the Year at the National Magazine Awards. This marks V until after an English-literature degree and some lenge” a dominant idea. Who, specifically, at this point, is be- the second time in our ten-year history that Maisonneuve has travel that he decided to pick up a camera. “I decided ing challenged? received Canada’s most prestigious magazine prize. (We previ- to live life with no regrets,” he says. “I didn’t want CHERYL Lastly, what gives with this final sentence: “reveals the mal- ously won the award in 2004.) Maisonneuve art director Anna • to be old and grey and wonder, ‘What if?’” With a MAISONNEUVE SUPPORTS THE MARKETS INITIATIVE ANCIENT FOREST FRIENDLY leability of gender, while reconstructing relationship dynamics Minzhulina also won Silver in Art Direction for a Single Mag- friend’s support, he procured a Hasselblad kit; thus PUBLISHING INITIATIVE. with a queer, camp sensibility, creating a nuanced understand- azine Article for “Monuments: The City in Three Parts” (Is- began a love affair with photography that would lead THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO DONATES THEIR TIME AND TALENT TO THE ing of portraiture and photographic representation”? The care- sue 39), and our contributors received seven Honourable Men- him to create an intimate, situational and visceral PRODUCTION OF THIS MAGAZINE. AND THANK YOU, DEVOTED READERS OF less use of the word “reveal” makes it feel as though Levine is tions. Hearty congratulations to the other nominees for Maga- body of work. The photo essay “Take Me to the MAISONNEUVE! MICHEL HELLMAN MICHEL magically lifting a veil from your hetero-Neanderthal readers’ zine of the Year—Outdoor Canada and Sportsnet—and to all • Fair” (page 20) is no exception. INE eyes. Has the sophisticated Maisonneuve readership never had the evening’s winners and nominees.  HARA ’ V LE . J

. © 2002–2012 MAISONNEUVE MAGAZINE ASSOCIATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. • WE WELCOME YOUR LETTERS AND COMMENTS AT LETTERS@ MAISONNEUVE. ORG • J O FINN MAISONNEUVE [MAY-ZON-UHV] TAKES ITS NAME FROM PAUL CHOMEDEY DE MAISONNEUVE (1612–1676), THE FOUNDER OF MONTREAL. MAISONNEUVE, WHICH MEANS “NEW HOUSE,” SUGGESTS THE FRESH TALENT AND SENSE OF COLLECTIVE 4 5 ENTERPRISE THIS MAGAZINE GATHERS UNDER ONE ROOF. COMMENT against, 127 in favour. Since then, the oft-ignored characteristic of legal au- problem: the legitimacy of capital pun- subject has mostly slipped out of the thority: its inherent violence. ishment’s foundational authority. public consciousness, reappearing only To most people, laws appear largely We are hesitant to wade into these when some particularly heinous crime innocuous, inscribed as they are into conversations—perhaps because we Let’s Talk About Death briefly reignites Canadians’ desire for everyday life. We don’t often question fear the unsettling conclusions we Fifty years ago, Canada executed a criminal for the last time, retribution. laws that regulate workplace safety, for might draw—but, regardless of our re- This December will mark the fifti- example, or even day-to-day police activ- luctance, traces of this violence can be Regan Burles writes. Should we have a national conversation eth anniversary of the hanging of Ar- ity. A closer look at the authority upon found in the aging pages of Department about capital punishment? thur Lucas and Ronald Turpin, which which the legal system rests, however, of Justice files. Political and legal docu- makes the death penalty’s recent topi- shakes such presuppositions. In his es- ments about capital punishment refer cality surprisingly fitting. Earlier this say “Critique of Violence,” famed po- to the law as though it charts a course Illustration by G É R A R D D U B OIS. year, during a debate about the rising litical theorist Walter Benjamin writes determined by forces outside of human costs of housing prisoners, Conserva- that a “latent presence of violence” per- control—as if it has a power all its own. EVERY CONVICTED CRIMINAL ever ex- 5, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s purpose.” The precautions were effec- tive senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu meates the law in all its forms, wher- The orders-in-council condemning Lu- ecuted in Canada was hanged, and the cabinet decided not to commute the tive. On the day before the hanging, a told reporters that “each assassin should ever it exists and however it is imple- cas and Turpin to death state that “His last two were no exception. On De- two men’s sentences, but kept the deci- single protester paced before Toronto’s have the right to a rope in his cell to mented. Benjamin identifies two types Excellency the Governor General in cember 11, 1962, Arthur Lucas, found sion confidential, even from the prison- Don Jail, placard in hand. make a decision about his or her life.” of legally sanctioned force: law-making Council is unable to order any interfer- guilty in the gruesome murder of a po- ers, until the day before the execution. Historically, Canada has had an am- The statement provoked outrage from violence, which creates new laws and ence with the sentence of the court.” In lice informant and a witness, “came to As a memo to Minister of Justice Don- bivalent relationship with the death opposition parties and suicide-preven- sets the bounds of a particular political his report to cabinet, Lucas’ trial judge his death at the Common Gaol of the ald Fleming explains, this was, in part, penalty. Since its founding, the coun- tion advocates. Although Boisvenu order (think European colonial adven- writes of the law in the same manner: “I County of York ... from being hanged a way “to keep to a minimum the time try executed 710 people—697 men and retracted his comments, he triggered tures), and law-preserving violence, have no recommendation to make that by the neck until he was dead.” With in which persons opposed to such a de- thirteen women—before abolishing the a conversation that quickly gained which sustains an existing political or- the law should not take its course.” him on the gallows was Ronald Turpin, cision may attack it prior to the execu- practice in 1976. (By comparison, the traction in the media. A Toronto Star der (think mandatory military service). Even the documents from Canada’s also convicted of murder, who met an tion of sentence.” United States executed 15,269 people poll found that 63 percent of Canadi- The connection between coercion and very first execution strike a similar identical end. For its part, the CBC refused to air a between 1608 and 2002, according to ans would support the death penalty the law is a bond that cannot be bro- note. On December 11, 1867—ninety- By then, executions were uncom- radio broadcast of a speech by Osgoode one report.) In 1986, bowing to public in certain situations; the National Post ken. No amount of goodwill or enlight- five years to the day before Lucas and mon; between 1957 and 1963, fifty-two Hall law professor Desmond Morton, pressure, Brian Mulroney’s Progres- reported similar findings, citing a 2010 ened policy-making can change the fact Turpin met their maker—one Ethan of the sixty-six death sentences handed who had written an op-ed in the Globe sive Conservative government held a survey indicating that 62 percent of the that “what parliament achieves in vital Allen was hanged. His file, compiled down in Canada were commuted. Be- and Mail condemning the coming ex- free vote in the House of Commons on population believes the punishment is affairs can only be those legal decrees while the nation was still in its infancy, fore hanging Lucas and Turpin, the ecutions. The network’s spokesperson the question of whether to reinstate appropriate for murderers. that in their origin and outcome are at- contains far less material than those of authorities took considerable measures reasoned that the speech “would not be the death penalty. Mulroney himself Boisvenu thinks it is. The senator tended by violence.” Lucas and Turpin. But though its pa- to avoid a public outcry. On December in good taste and would serve no useful was against it; the final tally was 148 was quick to call for a public dialogue Nowhere in the legal code is this pers are more brittle and yellowed, its on capital punishment, remarking that, more evident than in the death pen- handwritten pages lacking a typewrit- “as a society, I think that is something alty. “Where the highest violence, er’s precision, the language is the same. Regan Burles has written for the Toronto we should discuss.” Soon after, Nation- that over life and death, occurs in the “In this case,” reads the report sent to Star and X-Ray. He is a graduate student in po- al Post columnist and editor Matt Gur- legal system,” Benjamin continues, cabinet by Minister of Justice John A. litical science at the University of Victoria. ney seconded the proposition, writing “the origins of law jut manifestly and Macdonald, “the law should be allowed that Boisvenu had “awkwardly stum- fearsomely into existence.” In other to take its course.” bled onto a potential winning issue.” words, when the state kills someone, it The law can “take its course” be- Two high-profile criminal trials—the exposes its essence. To question capital cause, once established, the political Russell Williams and Tori Stafford cas- punishment, then, necessitates ques- and legal bounds it sets are unquestion- es—have also sparked new calls for a tioning the entire political context in able. For Benjamin, the law is consid- return to the practice. which it takes place. In the face of this ered legitimate because it is seen as “the While some might cringe at the realization, the usual conversations representation and preservation of an thought of revisiting such a divisive surrounding the death penalty—those order imposed by fate.” It is not appeals debate, a national conversation on the dealing with economic efficiency, to reason that uphold the legal system, death penalty in Canada has the poten- criminal deterrence or the possibility he argues, but rather its mythical force. tial to transcend tired arguments about of rehabilitation—appear petty and In 1962, the federal cabinet and the crime and punishment. Such a discus- superficial. Arguments for or against CBC actively tried to limit public dis- sion could instead draw attention to an executions ignore a more important cussion of capital punishment. Today, politicians, bureaucrats and broadcast- ers don’t need to stifle discourse—we do it for them, as the scolding delivered upon Boisvenu demonstrates. But we Church and State must challenge the sense of inevitabil- -BY- ity that is innate to legal authority, and VANESSA DAV IS a national conversation—one that sees the death penalty not as a problem to be solved but as a window onto the law IS

V itself—is a good way to start. Only then | Sign me up! will we be able to imagine alternatives to a sovereignty founded and main- ANESSA DA ANESSA

V tained by violence. 

6 7 OPEN HOUSE

5 REASONS DRAWDOWN D E P T . TO SUBSCRIBE TO Notes From the End of the War On the battlefield, success is fleeting and memory is short. Jonathan Montpetit reports on the last days of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan.

WE WON MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR—the industry’s highest I LANDED AT KANDAHAR Air- 1 honour—at the 2012 National Magazine Awards. field one Sunday morning on a knackered-looking plane out of Dubai. I was the only journalist on board. Aside from me, there OUR ACCLAIMED TENTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE was featured were Russian flight attendants in media outlets like the CBC, CTV and the National Post. and a few bearded private-se- 2 curity types. It was the fall of 2009—what you might call the beginning of the end of the Ca- WE PROVIDE A HOME FOR THE COUNTRY’S BEST nadian mission in Afghanistan. There had been no all-out fight 3 emerging and established writers and artists. against the Taliban since Opera- tion Medusa in 2006. Instead of combat, the troops got anodyne ambushes from an enemy who YOU’LL BE ENTERTAINED, provoked, challenged and had trouble holding a Kalash- infuriated—we promise. nikov straight—but who could 4 make and plant roadside bombs with deadly genius. Kandahar Airfield, or KAF, NOW MORE THAN EVER, small Canadian magazines need refers to the enormous interna-

tional military complex that has A CANADIAN SOLDIER ON FOOT PATROL DURING AN EARLY-MORNING OPERATION IN HAJI BARAN, AFGHANISTAN. 5 your support. been built around what would otherwise be a forgotten air- port. It is one of the main staging areas He was worried his boys were going Jonathan Montpetit covered the Af- for NATO troops in southern Afghani- soft. But the Americans were also ghan war for the Canadian Press. His previous “Here Maisonneuve is, fighting the good fight and winning, stan, but it’s better thought of as a happy to let the Canadians do most of article for Maisonneuve was “The Neverending upholding the great but lately neglected tradition of the general interest small city, with paved roads, churches, the fighting in Kandahar, and the Tim Story” (Issue 22). a hospital and a bus service. There are Hortons was allowed to stay. magazine with a literary bent and an eye for classically sleek design.” rumours of gang activity and, after The general rule for war corre- There was no spin outside the wire. dark, prostitution on the boardwalk. spondents was to spend as little time As long as you humped your own bag —The Montreal Gazette— When I arrived, the boardwalk hosted at KAF as possible. It was a news vor- and never slowed the troops down, a Pizza Hut, a Tim Hortons and a fast- tex. Sure, you could get booze, or even they would tolerate your presence, and food joint that sold burgers and fries score hash from a fixer. But, despite might even tell you something interest- twenty-four-seven. The French even being more than 10,000 kilometres ing. Like what model Mustang they’d Subscribe to Maisonneuve for only ran a place where you could get a de- away, KAF was still too close to Ot- buy with their deployment bonus. Or cent espresso. tawa. While preparing a story about the colour of their baby daughter’s +tax Among many troops outside the Remembrance Day, I once asked a eyes. You could sit with them as they 95 wire—that expansive place where you colonel if the date carried any added watched Rambo on a laptop, a naked got shot at and mortared every other significance in a war zone. The colo- light bulb swinging overhead. A captain 24. fucking day—KAF was a dirty word. It nel began, “When you’re fighting the might take you aside and explain why was this asymmetry of comfort that, in Taliban...” Then she stopped herself, he insisted on leading every patrol. He Visit www.maisonneuve.org, 2010, led US general Stanley McChrys- turned to the media relations officer couldn’t live with himself, he’d say, if tal, a notorious hard-ass, to strip the leering over my shoulder, and asked, he let one of his boys step on an IED— email [email protected] or call 514-482-5089 to start your subscription right away.

COURTESY THE OF CANADIAN FORCES boardwalk of most of its restaurants. “Are we allowed to say ‘fighting’?” an improvised explosive device. The

M ADE IN C ANADA.

9 troops are young. The captain would The Van Doos have a good thing go- old girl, and her injuries were critical. useless; 3. RMC”—Royal Military Col- point to one, whom they called Guns: ing here, so let’s not fuck it up. I found The captain called for a nine-liner—a lege—“grads still think they learned sandy hair, a raffish smile, pimples. the outgoing CO sitting on a cot in a medical evacuation—and the girl was to lead in university and that degrees cramped dormitory. He said that he’d airlifted to KAF, where she died. Upon make good leaders; 4. Never get in- CANADIAN HIGH COMMAND spoke of- love to talk, but he was leaving on the seeing her grieving father, the troops volved in a land war in Asia.” When I ten about “breaking the back of the in- next chopper. He pointed me instead decided to do something. It wasn’t long came back in 2010, the bathroom stalls surgency,” though really it was just try- to a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant, before the Van Doos caught the three were covered in black paint and the ing to consolidate its hold on the area’s Jérémie Verville, who still had a cou- men who had attacked the base. They graffiti was gone. most prized piece of land: Kandahar ple of days left in his rotation. Verville recovered the mortar tube to present An end-game vibe had taken hold. City. In the initial years of its deploy- told me the story of what happened in to the father. This, Verville said, was a American and Afghan soldiers were ment in Kandahar, the Canadian mili- Belanday. turning point. doing more of the fighting in Kandahar, tary was spread too thin; 1,500 soldiers Tensions slackened after that. The the Canadians progressively less. There covered an area the size of New Bruns- IN JULY 2009, the Van Doos arrived to Van Doos adopted a stray dog and be- was a final push to get Canadian celeb- wick. With American reinforcements a ghost town. There was an Afghan friended local children, even teaching rities to KAF for morale-boosting visits. arriving as the war in Iraq wound National Police unit hunkered down them some proper Québécois slang. One of the slick fellows from Dragons’ down, Canada was able to focus its in a school compound, but otherwise The kids would shout, “Tabarnak!”— Den showed up and spoke about the attention on a smaller, more manage- the village was empty. The ANP had or some Pashto approximation of it— entrepreneurial spirit. And then it was able area. Toward the end of the 2009 been stranded by its superiors and cut as they scampered past the sentries at all over. On July 5, 2011, Canada was fighting season, word began to spread off from the supply chain. Without the school. transformed from a nation at war to a that there had been some progress in food, money or ammo, the police had As Verville was telling me all this, nation, more or less, at peace. It was Dand, the district southwest of Kanda- taken to stealing from the locals, who an explosion sounded, and a burst of easy to miss the occasion—a prince har City. fled. The school soon became a regular gunfire was directed our way. Verville and princess were visiting Canada at I took a Chinook to one of the dis- target of mortar attacks. rushed into the command post. As I the time. trict’s success stories, a village called The captain’s orders were to carry waited for him, I struck up a conver- The military spent the next sev- Belanday. On the chopper with me was out the kind of COIN operations that sation with a voluble military-intel- eral months packing. A logistics team a contingent from Princess Patricia’s his superiors were reading so much ligence officer, who told me that a sifted through the leftover equipment. Canadian Light Infantry, which was about. His troops promptly moved in Canadian engineer patrolling the out- The crap was sold at auction; the cheap relieving Quebec City’s Royal 22e Regi- with the police and brought them in skirts of the village had just stepped stuff was shipped by truck through Pa- ment, better known as the Van Doos. line. They offered the few villagers on an IED. He bled out and died, and kistan; the good stuff was taken back While the military braintrust talked they could find some cash to fix up the within an hour the news began to filter to Canada on a fleet of cargo planes, about “winning hearts and minds,” it school, dig ditches and join in other through the base. When Verville finally ready for the next war. Nothing was fell to the frontline troops to actually make-work projects. The military be- emerged from the CP, he looked tired, left behind. Even modest memorials get this done. That meant leaving the lieved the fight could become winnable suddenly much older than his years. that soldiers built to honour their dead safety—and relative comfort—of for- if it just knocked out the day-tripper “There’s still work to do,” he said, comrades were dismantled and put in ward operating bases for more exposed insurgents. According to its intelli- and then went to a meeting with the storage, or, in one case, buried in the positions inside villages. It meant more gence, Taliban commanders—the hard- village elders, who had been sum- desert sand. One by one, the Hercs and foot patrols, more face time with Af- liners—were paying farmers to plant moned to the base. A special-forces of- Globemasters left KAF, taking with ghans. This was classic counter-insur- IEDs, hide weapons and take the odd ficer blocked my way as I tried to fol- them a presence that had once seemed gency theory, a body of military knowl- potshot at a foot patrol. Many villagers low them into the room. so vital but had become, somewhere edge resurrected from end-of-empire were ideologically ambivalent but fi- For the incoming soldiers, it was along the way, an afterthought. wars. But as hot as the senior brass ran nancially persuadable. I asked Verville: a rough start to the rotation. They I, too, stopped thinking about the on COIN, the grunts were just as cold. So who, exactly, is the Taliban? would lose several more men before war after my last trip to Kandahar. “If one of those motherfuckers even “Someone who will risk his life for getting their chance to return home. About a year later, I was diagnosed looks at me the wrong way, I’ll light about four bucks,” he answered. But they stuck to the plan in Belan- with post-traumatic stress disorder. him up,” said one Pat as he waited for With the ANP behaving and money day. By the time I returned to Afghan- When these things happen, they let the helicopter. starting to flow, villagers returned to istan a year later, it was among the you take time off work; you’re dis- When we landed in the village, the Belanday and warmed to the Canadi- calmest parts in the Canadian area of patched to a therapist. You’re supposed incoming soldiers were met by their ans. But the Taliban continued to mor- operation. In Dand, or at least in this to watch funny movies and read paper- commanding officer, who gave them tar the base at night. Toward the end of village, the Afghans bought what the backs. But I often found myself thrown a short briefing. He effectively said: August, a stray shell struck a nine-year- Canadians were selling. Or the Cana- awake at night by dreams of the war. dians bought what the Afghans were I’d sit alone with my dust-caked note- selling: a truce in exchange for money books, recalling the noises of the heli- and security. It was as pragmatic a copters and jets, the whistling rockets, deal as it was fragile. the totalizing stillness that would sud- denly envelop the Kandahar night. I BEFORE LEAVING KAF for the long jour- wanted to hear these sounds again. I ney back to Montreal, I went to the needed to resurrect every detail of the bathroom, where all great thinking is war: The smell of burning garbage. done, even in war zones. I stared at The shouts for a medic when an IED IS

V the latrine door before me and read goes off. The sweet Afghan tea. It can | “Business or pleasure?” the graffiti carefully: “Things you’ve all fade so fast. Now is the time to read learned on this tour: 1. French soldiers the writing on the wall, before the or- ANESSA DA ANESSA

V are useless; 2. Signals majors are also der comes down to paint it black. 

10 11 early seventies. They were both good- with our thumbs in our mouths, soci- away in embarrassment. My mother, looking and talented. ety would grind to a halt. Instead, it on the other hand, looked directly at That she got diverted is not a re- makes perfect sense that children who the woman. Stared, in fact, until the gret. She says she didn’t want it bad have to fill that gap will often do so woman returned her gaze. “It hurts, STAGE COMBAT D E P T . enough, hated auditions and couldn’t with the missing adult pieces. And yet doesn’t it,” my mother said. “Being see herself devoting her life to “the I never liked playing house. If it came hit.” The woman squirmed a bit in craft.” Upon graduation, she floated down to it, I’d play the cool aunt visit- her seat, then let out a strangled “yes.” A People’s History of the Punch off to study history. Carver floated off ing from out of town. There was nothing more—the man re- to Broadway, and his Wikipedia page I look like her, my mother, but more turned and hauled her away—but my Plays have fights in them, Kaitlin Fontana details his many roles and his Tony like my father. My sister is closer, but mother had reached across that gap. award, won in 1993 for Kiss of the neither of us is really that close. At Other waiting customers now looked writes, because lives have fights in them. Spider Woman. A birthplace—Cran- various points, my father broke my quizzically at the woman who’d spo- brook, British Columbia—is now all mother’s nose, shifted her jaw off its ken up. I blushed and wished she’d he and my mother share. hinge, damaged a cheekbone. The face kept her mouth shut. If my mother had a Wikipedia page, she had at twenty-five and the face she In high school, I starred in a play in Illustration by P ETER MITC HELL. it might say something about how, in has at fifty-eight are similar, but dif- which I played a bossy and bitchy but 1981, she married my father in Fort ferent. Like her younger self and her ultimately loveable teenage girl who Steele, BC, under a gazebo built to older self are sisters. I’d like to picture stops her peers from doing drugs. The match the gold-rush town’s surround- her as a young woman; I’ve seen pic- pivotal scene was one in which I con- ing buildings—most of which were tures. But I can’t. fronted a friend and slapped him in the unoccupied facades, long since aban- face for falling prey to bad influence. doned. If it was a well-researched en- STAGE FIGHTING STARTED BECAUSE My fellow thespian and I couldn’t fig- HERE IS A PATTERN. This pat- try, it might also say that she almost plays have fights in them. Plays have ure out how to fake a believable slap, tern exists for your safety, and didn’t go to her own wedding, that she fights in them because lives have fights so I just hit him outright. I told him I’d for your partner’s. In stage asked my grandfather to keep driving in them. The first role my mother loved do it softly, but I did it hard when we fighting, as in life, it’s safest to when he reached the turnoff. But she to play more than anything was Lucy actually performed, and he ended up Tstick to what you know. The instructor decided to go through with it. in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, with a big bruise, and I with stinging is a slim redhead with a dancer’s pos- We do not really understand each which she performed in high school. fingers. My method acting earned me ture, who follows every direction with other, my mother and I. She often re- Her Lucy was a bruiser, one who went an award. Later, when my co-star ex- a self-confirming “yeah?” that makes it minds me that I was the weirdest kid around hitting and pushing the boys, pressed his annoyance with me, I told sound like she’s spent time teaching in she’d ever met, which, when you’re yelling at them. “These five fingers. him he could slap me back. I closed my Australia, or Britain. Her partner is a talking to someone who’s been a teach- Individually, they are nothing,” Lucy eyes and breathed out in preparation, hunky recent acting-school grad, who, er for more than thirty years, is some- says at one point, splaying out her but he chose not to. It would be the as my mother points out, has beauti- thing indeed. She did not understand hand. “But when I curl them together closest I’d ever come to being hit. ful stage hair; it moves just right. Mo- why I was so long as a baby, when she into a single unit, they become a fight- ments later, on demonstrating a slap, take this as a cue. The slap is precise fist. I’m either so mad in the moment and my father were both fairly short. ing force terrible to behold.” My mother the instructor says, “Doesn’t he have and sudden: you swing your hand that a slap is not enough, or I’ve di- She did not understand why I seemed still loves that line. Playing Lucy like a Kaitlin Fontana is the author of Fresh at beautiful stage hair?” She says it to swiftly. Remember, you are not close gested your wrongdoing and realize to sleep through the night at an un- hard-living tomboy with sensitivity is- Twenty: The Oral History of Mint Records (ECW Press). Her previous article for Maisonneuve, me, my mother and the rest of the au- enough to actually hit the other per- that only a punch will do.’” A punch, commonly young age, but that when sues gave the character’s psychiatric- “We Will Not Leave This Place” (Issue 42), was dience sitting along the back wall. My son. Your hand does not touch your in other words, is a decision. she went into my room in the morn- advice-stand scenes more weight: she nominated for a National Magazine Award. mom winks. She’s always been good at partner’s face, but he reacts, his face I look at my mother. She is watch- ing and turned on the light, I would is an adult-like little girl who wants finding hunks. This is what makes her following the arc of the slap with what ing her students learn to fake-slap and be standing up, eyes open, in my crib to be treated with respect, to break good at casting high-school musicals. looks like the appropriate amount of fake-punch each other. Her face is im- in the dark. I did not smile. I peered through the elementary-school glass ON OUR SECOND!TO!LAST NIGHT in And because it seems like a crime that follow-through. Your partner will also passive. Beyond her, through two sets up at goo-gaa-ing strangers and gave ceiling. She picks on Charlie because New York, we see a production of she’s loved musical theatre for so long bring his hands together sharply, right of external windows that allow us to them fuck-you looks. I was thin and she wants him to like her. She falls for West Side Story. My mother and I, side but has never gone to its primordial in front of his body, making the ideal see into the adjacent room, a dance didn’t grow much hair, and I rubbed the sensitive, unthreatening Schroed- by side, are rapt; the kids and other ooze, Broadway, here we finally are. A sound effect. Put all together, it looks is being choreographed. Based on the my little fist in my eye socket until I er, but he ignores her because he loves moms around us prefer the bombast bunch of moms and me all watching a very real. languid neck movements and the jazz gave myself the baby approximation music. The play got rave reviews, and and comedy of other shows we’ve seen. group of teenagers from my hometown A slap is not a punch, the instruc- hands, I judge it to be Fosse, or a Fosse of a black eye. As I grew a bit older it my mom signed her fellow cast mem- The fighting in West Side Story is more learn stage fighting in New York City. tor reminds us. It is swift, sudden and derivative. This is something I know continued: I didn’t like hugs, I refused bers’ programs “Love, Lucy.” like dance, but it’s still muscular, mas- I feel a bit like I should be watching sharp. It smacks rather than thuds. It how to recognize because of the wom- to lie. I read and read. I turned off the Once, while she was helping me get culine stuff, Gene Kelly-esque. At the my own child up there, except I don’t stings but does not hurt. A punch, on an next to me. I poke my mom in the TV by myself, after an appropriate apartment insurance, my mom and I beginning of the song “Somewhere,” have one. My mom watches me make the other hand, lands. A punch, she leg and point. She mouths the word amount of time. Made my own lunch- sat in the waiting area of a bank on my mother and I begin crying simulta- notes. says, is oh-so-different from a slap. “Fosse” and winks before turning es. Tucked myself in. Wished myself Hastings Street in Vancouver. A man, neously, as if on cue. Afterward, as we There is a pattern, and it goes like A slap is untapped emotion, the con- back to the chorus of thuds and claps goodnight. smelling like booze, body odour and weave our way through Times Square, this. Plant yourself, squared to your tinuation of electricity from the heart around us. Research into child behaviour in cigarettes, dragged a woman in by the one of the kids recalls what the fight partner. Look him in the eye. Test through the palm to the face. The households where domestic abuse or arm. He left her there while he went to choreographer taught them about dis- the distance between the two of you slapper reacts; the puncher plots. “A WHEN SHE WAS A TEENAGER, my alcoholism is present reveals common see a teller. She was beautiful, her head tance. He wonders how close the ac- with an outstretched hand. If you can punch is calculated,” says the instruc- mother wanted to be an actress. She extremes: children either regress or be- shaved bald around a nasty, freshly tors were to one another. He knows reach the other person, you are too tor in a bright voice. Her feet are in a and her high-school classmate Brent come instant adults. The latter seems sewn-up scalp laceration. One eye they weren’t, probably, but maybe close. Step back. Now, set the slap: perfect first position, like a ballerina’s. Carver were both groomed to take the to me to be a survival-of-the-species was black, the other tearing up. She they were actually punching each oth- raise your hand, palm flat, your arm “A punch says, ‘I’ve given this some acting world by storm. Theatre, film, kind of thing. If there were hundreds bit a split bottom lip. I looked at her er? We know the truth, my mom and I. at a 90 degree angle. Your partner will thought. I’ve curled my fingers into a why not? It was the late sixties and of thousands of us walking around once, covertly, then looked down and But we don’t say anything.

12 13 IT’S THE EVENING OF MAY 4, and Max enfranchised generation and unrepre- Silverman and I are returning to sentative state power—has dogged me SEMIOTICS OF THE STRIKE COMING INSURRECTION D E P T . Montreal from Victoriaville, Quebec, across three continents. where fierce clashes erupted between THE RED SQUARE: Le carré rouge— student protesters and police outside a ON MARCH 20, I had arrived in Mon- based on the French expression carré- The Maple Spring ment dans le rouge, or “squarely in the convention of the province’s governing treal to cover what I thought would Quebec’s uprising started as a student strike, Jesse red”—is a symbol of the Quebec stu- Liberal Party. Although I had arrived be the final weeks of a powerful yet dent movement that first appeared dur- Rosenfeld reports, but it became something much larger: in the rural town on a student-union routine strike against a proposed 75 ing the 2005 strike. Supporters often a revolt against power itself. bus, I leave in Silverman’s car; he’s an percent increase in Quebec’s univer- pin small felt squares to their clothing, old high-school friend whom I first met sity tuition fees. As an undergraduate and illustrators incorporate the symbol in the small world of adolescent Toron- at McGill, I had participated in Que- into evocative designs. One popular to Trotskyists, and he hopes that my bec’s last strike, in 2005—students image plays off of the famous I bNY press pass will protect us from police here regularly protest for accessible t-shirts by replacing the heart with a red square, as in J’ N MTL. In May, the looking to arrest remaining demon- education—and I was curious to see if website OpenFile reported that Mon- strators. As we take the highway to- the upheaval sweeping the globe had treal dollar stores were running out of ward Montreal, passing squadrons of poked the province’s consciousness. red felt due to overwhelming demand. cop cars racing in the other direction, Instead, I found something much big- CASSEROLES: Banging on pots and I catch word that police have boarded ger. The demonstrations had turned pans as a form of protest started in the the same bus I’d taken hours earlier. into widespread social unrest, becom- 1970s in Chile and was called cacerola- Everyone is being arrested. The irony ing a movement that contested the aus- zo. It later spread across Latin America isn’t lost on us, and Silverman, a wry terity agenda—and the legitimacy—of and the world, gaining particular no- law student and activist at the Uni- Quebec’s ruling class. toriety in Argentina in 2001 during versité du Québec à Montréal, doesn’t By then, more than three hundred rallies against unpopular economic hesitate to point out that he saved me thousand students were on strike. measures. Casseroles came to Que- bec in May, when a professor named from the cops. The dispute had been raging for over François-Olivier Chené created a Face- a month. Premier Jean Charest’s gov- book page encouraging people to adopt Jesse Rosenfeld has written for the ernment refused to negotiate with the the tactic in protest of Bill 78, which Guardian, the Nation and the Toronto Star. movement’s most active elements, and aimed to curb demonstrations. For boisterous protests were met with a weeks this summer, thousands gath- Quebec is embroiled in the largest blunt police crackdown. Mass arrests, ered in Montreal for neighbourhood and longest student strike in North pepper spray, concussion grenades and casseroles every night. American history, and the Victori- batons were regular responses to the ANARCHOPANDA: In early May, a aville riot exemplifies the province’s thousands of students walking picket guy in a panda suit began to appear at fracturing social contract. Pacing lines, blocking bridges or occupying rallies and night demonstrations. He around Silverman’s coffee table later government offices on a near-daily ba- was an unnamed philosophy profes- that night, trying to call activists on sis. As the number of arrests grew and sor who wanted to use his alter ego to dispel tension between police and the bus, I finally connect to a nervous students’ demands went unheard, it protesters; online photos and videos of voice whispering on the other end of became clear that the government was Anarchopanda doling out hugs quick- the line. The voice says that the cops more interested in breaking the strike ly went viral. On June 5, the panda are not letting people use their phones, than in coming to a solution. This launched a court challenge to the con- and that the bus has been turned into realization changed students’ under- stitutional validity of Montreal’s anti- a holding cell outside a police station. standing of what they were fighting, mask bylaw, and had to reveal his true The voice adds that all passengers will and transformed the struggle into a identity: Julien Villeneuve. face charges, ranging from participat- popular revolt. FEMINIST GABRIEL NADEAU-DUBOIS: ing in a riot to unlawful assembly. “This has become about more than As more and more media attention Then the line goes dead. a simple policy,” David-Marc Newman surrounded the strike, then-CLASSE spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois’ It’s 1 AM. After a few more unsuc- says, referring to the tuition hikes. blue eyes, boyish good looks and pro- cessful calls, I check my notes and “We need to change what permitted gressive politics made him an overnight slump onto the couch. I’ve spent the that being an acceptable policy to in- heartthrob, with even the BBC report- last four years reporting on emerging troduce.” Newman is a Toronto fran- ing on his “rock star appeal.” Waves of popular uprisings around the world: cophone with democratic-socialist internet attention followed, including in the Middle East, before and dur- politics. He and I spent our undergrad fuckyeahgabrielnadeaudubois.tumblr.com, ing the Arab Spring; in Europe, where years as activists, trying and failing a site modeled after the hugely popular austerity policies triggered massive to rally McGill’s masses. This year, as Feminist Ryan Gosling blog—you know, street battles; and in New York, at the a graduate student in translation, he those pictures of the actor with text that begins “Hey Girl.” The site datedaily. height of Occupy Wall Street. Today, I spent most of the spring organizing a com also created GND photos, with saw riot police use rubber bullets and strike at the Université de Montréal— captions like, “Hey Girl, let’s make our tear gas to push back some 1,500 pro- with considerably more success than safe word ‘Charest.’” testers, many of whom responded with we saw at our alma mater. barrages of rocks. The chaotic famili- Newman and I first bumped into —Taylor Tower arity of the Middle East creeps over each other on the evening of April me. I can’t shake the sobering realiza- 25, a night that epitomized the pro- tion that this conflict—between a dis- tests’ transition into what is often Photograph by D AV I D V ILDER .

14 15 called le printemps érable, or the Maple ton Consensus, enlighten us with the the protests spread beyond students. that democracy doesn’t start or end Spring (a homophone of le printemps New World Order.” It ends in French, The emergency law closes campuses at the ballot box—resonates tonight. arabe, the French term for the Arab with a message for the elite of Quebec for the summer, bars picketing at post- Thousands of casserolers march down Spring). CLASSE—la Coalition large and the world: “Are you beginning to secondary institutions, and makes St. Denis from the Villeray neighbour- de l’Association pour une solidarité understand that you’re alone?” spontaneous demonstrations of more hood, encountering thousands more syndicale étudiante, the biggest and We file into the streets. There is than fifty people illegal. Student- and people in Place Émilie-Gamelin. Amid most radical student federation—had no predetermined route, and a po- labour-union leaders who encourage fireworks and packs of riot police, the just been kicked out of the first round lice helicopter follows overhead. violating the law face massive fines. divisions in Quebec society crystallize of government negations. In the belief The crowd chants, in a mock-ghostly Seen as an attack on democratic once more. that participation is central to popu- voice, “Charest! Oooooh!” After a rights, Bill 78 further polarizes the Later, as cops fight with students lar strength, CLASSE is organized few masked protesters trash an army province, and pushes labour and civil in front of Charest’s Montreal office, around direct democracy; its demands recruitment centre on Ste. Catherine, society behind the students. Quebec’s I think back to March 15, 2011. That are formed on the floor of local stu- police light up the night with flash- Liberals are also caught in a widening day, I was in Ramallah as thousands dent-union general assemblies. As a bang grenades. They charge, batons scandal over corruption in the con- of Palestinian youth, touched by the result, when the education minister swinging and tear-gas canisters flying, struction industry, and Bill 78 arrives scenes from Tahrir Square, took to the booted the group from the table, ac- into the crowds. While some protest- amid increasing cynicism about the streets of the West Bank and Gaza, de- cusing it of violating an agreement to ers respond with rocks and bottles, political establishment. On May 22, manding the democratic transforma- scale back disruptions, many students others escape onto side streets, where around three hundred thousand peo- tion of their political institutions and took it as a slap in the face. many regroup and continue to march. ple clog downtown Montreal to protest a new, popular leadership. Both Fatah Within an hour of the talks’ col- Some aren’t so lucky. I see police in the law. It’s the largest demonstration and Hamas, the two major Palestin- lapse, my email inbox and Facebook full riot gear corralling, beating and in Canadian history. ian political parties, were increasingly newsfeed begin filling with notifica- arresting demonstrators. People of all ages take to their balco- seen as interested only in maintain- tions of a spontaneous nighttime dem- An hour later, Newman and I are nies and streets to clang pots and pans ing their own marginal power under onstration. My hopes that the negotia- still marching along St. Denis, trying in opposition to Bill 78. Inspired by Israel’s divide-and-rule occupation. tions would give me some downtime to understand why everything now similar movements in Argentina and Crowds packed Ramallah’s Manara from a week of clashes and marches feels so different. This is the start of Chile, these are dubbed “casseroles,” Square, vowing to stay until their de- are dashed. I throw on a Hawaiian what will become months of nightly and, like the night marches, they turn mands were met. shirt, spark a joint and pick up my demonstrations. into a daily expression of defiance. Fatah officials in the Palestinian press pass. Police crackdowns are met by a more Authority first tried to co-opt the pro- Arriving in Place Émilie-Game- A WEEK EARLIER, I had interviewed militant response in the streets; some tests, calling their youth wings into lin just after 8 PM, I find hundreds of Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, at the time demonstrators build barricades, light the streets of the West Bank. But news people packing the concrete square, a CLASSE spokesperson, at a café in them on fire and throw Molotov cock- quickly spread of Hamas security forc- an area usually occupied by commut- Jean-Talon market. A well-coiffed and tails at police lines. Neighbourhood es beating student demonstrators in ers, punks and a handful of transit tightly handled student representa- general assemblies, similar to those Gaza, and the same fate was in store cops. Steady streams of demonstrators tive, Nadeau-Dubois is simultane- organized by the Occupy movement, for those in Ramallah. As darkness de- continue pouring in, wearing red felt ously a media darling and a contro- spring up around the city in an effort scended, the pageantry of co-optation squares—the symbol of the strike— versial radical. He avoids slogans and to move direct democracy beyond the ended, and PA security forces waded and the occasional Guy Fawkes mask. buzzwords, and, although scathing student unions. into Manara Square with clubs and Television-news vans line the park’s in his critiques of Charest, he doesn’t By this point, people are exhaust- rifle butts. Ambulances, their sirens entrances. The air is full of anticipa- come off as deluded. The government ed. Charest shows no signs of back- wailing, whisked the injured away. tion and indignation. “is saying that collective action is not ing down. The night demonstrations The Occupied Territories’ fractured The crowd swells to perhaps ten legitimate and that private rights of wane through the summer, attend- political establishments had unified thousand people. They bang drums individual institutions should take ance dwindling from thousands to to crack down on Palestine’s budding and blow horns. Under the dark sky, priority,” he tells me. He describes the hundreds to dozens, and many com- Arab Spring. the noise tapers off as a woman’s voice mounting student alienation as the re- mentators declare the movement dead. Although rooted in different social booms through the speakers: “Speak sult of an ideological impasse: “When But the lull is short-lived. contexts and political dynamics, the rich en tabarnak! As if we don’t know Mr. Charest talks about education, in awakenings in both the Arab world about how you lead a financial crisis.” fact he talks of economy.” The govern- ON AUGUST 1, sitting at my laptop, I and Quebec are linked: they use the Roaring cheers emerge as the crowd ment, he argues, is trying to change watch Charest call a widely antici- power of the streets to force a discus- realizes that the speech—written by education from a collective right to an pated provincial election. He declares sion that the elite would rather ignore. Marie-Christine Lemieux-Couture— individual commodity. it an opportunity for Quebec’s “silent After the election announcement, the is a modern adaptation of Michèle In the weeks that follow April 25, majority” to decide the outcome of the Parti Québécois—the alternate face of Lalonde’s “Speak White,” a seminal the nightly protests continue and Mon- social crisis. He accuses the sovereign- that same elite—tries to simultaneous- Quiet Revolution–era poem about the treal becomes ungovernable. Students tist Parti Québécois—a fitful ally of ly appropriate and distance itself from English domination of Quebec. seem willing to sacrifice their semes- the student movement—of engineer- the strike, pressuring students not to But Lemieux-Couture’s version ter for the cause, and as the demon- ing disorder. In essence, he is offering protest during the campaign and focus speaks to this generation’s cosmopoli- strations and confrontations drag on, Quebecers the chance to re-legitimize instead on ousting the Liberals. These tanism; rather than calling for nation- their resolve hardens. a political establishment that has re- demands are widely ignored, and the al liberation, it challenges the global Images of street battles play on peatedly ignored their demands. PQ’s cynicism is evident. On August 1, disparity of wealth and power. “From television sets and computer screens The hundredth night march is also as I watch the street push back against Thatcher to Reagan, in Friedman or across Quebec. So, on May 18, when scheduled for the evening of August the state, I am closer to the Middle von Hayek’s words,” the voice booms the provincial government passes Bill 1. I join the masses streaming out of East, straddling a growing fault line in English, “bring us to the Washing- 78 in an effort to curtail the unrest, their homes at dusk. Their message— between power and freedom. 

16 17 THE BOOK ROOM THE M USIC ROOM BY C HANDLER L EVACK

The Devil’s Curve (Douglas & McIntyre), Toronto’s Metz remained the Arno Kopecky’s first book, follows the de- FEATURED ALBU M : DIAMOND RINGS city’s best-kept secret for far too velopment of a 2009 anti-mining protest in After years of playing in guitar-rock bands, solo artist Diamond long. The band’s debut self-titled Peru that ended in dozens of deaths. But the Rings (a.k.a. John O’Regan) strapped on a synth and rode a gen- album (Sub Pop Records) bristles story quickly broadens: Kopecky, a journalist, der-bending glitter rainbow to success. On his sophomore record with the furious post-punk en- also travels through Colombia and Bolivia, re- Free Dimensional (Astralwerks), he expands his lo-fi beginnings into ergy of Husker Dü and a Bleach-era Nirvana. vealing how Canada’s free-trade agreements mainstream pop, channeling contemporary icons like Robyn (“Stand As guttural guitar lines ping-pong over an as- and overseas resource extraction impact indigenous Ama- My Ground”) and Lady Gaga (“A to Z”). The album is catchy but lacks depth; sault of drums, Metz deploys an arsenal of noise zonians and their environment. Part history lesson, part O’Regan’s opaque lyrics and ill-advised rapping cloud the record in fluffy platitudes. (“Sad Pricks,” “Negative Space”). thriller, part ethnographic investigation, Kopecky’s account Free Dimensional’s strongest moments are personal revelations about life on the fl aims to fill in the spaces between news headlines. The story road: “Either way it’s all the same to me / mini bars, guitars and TV,” O’Regan sings Stars should get ready for its that results is eye-opening and critical, but never moraliz- on “Day and Night.” close-up; the band’s sixth record, ing; graceful, poetic writing makes the heavy subject matter DIAMOND RINGS The North (Soft Revolution Re- approachable. cords), is its most inspired album —ERICA RUTH KELLY in years, full of exuberant elec- fl tronic and instrumental touches that recall early All Souls’ (Signal Editions), Rhea Tregebov’s Kate Bush and 1980s cult band Prefab Sprout. seventh collection of poetry, unwraps the ba- Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan turn their nal, beautiful experiences of a uniquely Cana- lover’s quarrels into elevated, energetic pop. dian life. The lines are delicate but visceral: fl “Soon / it will rain, soon wind will spread / On Animator (Paper Bag Re- the prairie dust, moths will give up / their lives cords), Montreal’s the Lyas cre- against the glass,” Tregebov writes in “House ate an evocative psychological Work.” Tregebov’s poems are thoughtful and confident, but landscape in which electronic never overreach. Her use of language is effortless, allowing samples shred like frayed nerves. the book to contemplate—sometimes quietly, sometimes Singer Jessie Stein’s childlike vocals and gift for more forcefully—the way in which small moments speak to lyricism chart a course through memory and a larger human consciousness. adolescence; behind its icy refrain, standout —TAYLOR TOWER track “The Quiet Way” suggests a deep well of fl emotion. In Rawi Hage’s Carnival (House of Anansi), CHRISTINE POUNTNEY fl a taxi driver named Fly roams through an un- How To Dress Well (a.k.a. Tom named, magical-realist version of Montreal, Krell) takes the listener to a holy ferrying about drug dealers and nymphomani- place on Total Loss (Acephale Re- acs before returning home to masturbate amid FEATURED BOOK: CHRISTINE POUNTNEY cords), his much-anticipated fol- the stacks of his massive library. Line for line, low-up to 2010’s Love Remains. Carnival is a beautiful read, but it sags under Christine Pountney’s third Buoyed by Krell’s soulful falsetto, tracks such the weight of its nonlinear ambitions. In an effort to avoid book, Sweet Jesus (McClelland as “Struggle” and “Ocean Floor for Every- a straightforward narrative, Hage leaves much unresolved; thing” sound like a gospel session recorded during the novel’s final act, the murders that propel the & Stewart), ties together the underwater. plot seem to spring from nowhere. Still, Hage has created a stories of three characters— fl memorable protagonist in Fly—an erudite, unreliable nar- two sisters and their estranged Animal Collective layers sunny rator who invites us into his cab for a twisted night ride. Beach Boys harmonies onto a can- —DREW NELLES brother—who reunite on a road vas of world music on Centipede fl trip that winds from Toronto to Hz (Domino Recording Compa- And the Birds Rained Down (Coach House ny), an ecstatic dance album that Books) by Jocelyne Saucier (translated by a mega-church in the American might be the pinnacle of globalization in indie Rhonda Mullins) unravels the intertwined Midwest. The book critiques rock. Culling from disconnected streams of folk stories of a handful of old folks who live off and psychedelica (like Peruvian cumbia, Japa- the grid in northern Ontario. Among them US-style evangelical Christi- nese thrash-punk and a dash of Pink Floyd), are two woodsmen with a suicide pact, their anity, and, at times, that criticism is overly facile— tracks such as “New Town Burnout” find pop’s mangy mutts and, later, a fragile yet genteel sweet spot. woman named Marie Desneiges. The book is as much his- churchgoers are portrayed as pushy, loud and naïve. fl toriographic metafiction as it is improbable fable; stories of But Pountney also digs into difficult questions about Mercury prizewinners the xx natural disasters, institutionalization, addiction and isola- can forget about the sophomore tion are patched together via recovered paintings, pictures faith, its foundations and its place in modern life with IN CASE YOU MISSED I T: MOON KING curse: the trio’s second album and recollections. One of the characters is a photographer, a rare sense of nuance. She does all this in gorgeous, From the remains of Toronto psych-popsters Spiral Beach comes Coexist (Young Turks) is a mini- and visuals often drive the narrative. Saucier describes with vivid prose—a character stands at the door of a train, Moon King, whose five-song EP Obsession I (One Big Silence) adds malist triumph. With aching bass particularly riveting tactility the 1916 forest fires that rav- My Bloody Valentine grit to the band’s catchy experimentalism. The lines and break beats as its Spartan backdrop, aged much of northern Ontario. his jacket “flaring open like the wings of a moth.” result is one of the most stellar debuts of the year: the sweetness of the romantic interplay between Romy Madley-

—MELISSA BULL —AMELIA SCHONBEK BYDLOWSKA JOWITA WONG NORMAN “Only Child” and “Sleeping in My Car” just might cause gut rot. Croft and Oliver Sim exudes low-key regret. 

18 19 PHOTO ESSAY

TAKE ME TO THE FAIR

Photographs and text by Finn O’Hara.

20 21 BEGAN SHOOTING COUNTY FAIRS IN THE SUMMER OF 2007. I grew up in rural Ontario, and, during summer and fall, fairs were always a source of fun. Some of them are older than Confederation, and their traditions make up the fab- ric of country life in Canada. In the age of heartless big- box stores and highway commutes, county fairs are what I bring rural communities together.  PREVIOUS S PREA D, FROM LEFT: A BLACK ANGUS IS PRIMPED FOR COMPETITION; LIONS CLUB MEMBER GARRY RYAN SELLS RAFFLE TICKETS AT THE BEACHBURG FAIR. BELOW: A CEMETERY OUTSIDE BEACHBURG, ONTARIO. OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: TWO CARS FACE OFF DURING THE BEACHBURG FAIR’S DEMOLITION DERBY; THE TOP THREE FINISHERS AT THE DERBY GATHER AROUND THE WINNING CAR; CHAINSAW CARVING. FOLLOWING S PREA D, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: A CARNIVAL GAME; WAITING FOR THE KIDS TO FINISH THE ORIENT EXPRESS RIDE; BEACHBURG RESIDENTS CELEBRATE THE 150TH YEAR OF THE BEACHBURG FAIR.

22 23 24 25 COMIC BY M ARC B ELL

26 27 COVER STORY

LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR D E P T .

GAYS FOR GOD The religious right is the most powerful obstacle to LGBT equality in America. But, Clancy Martin reports, a growing movement of gay evangelicals is challenging homophobia from within the faith. Their message: We’re here. We’re queer. We’re Christian. Get used to it.

Photographs by K OUROSH KESHIRI.

28 29 F LGBT EVANGELISM has a spiritual father, it is Ralph stream evangelical movement—the most powerful anti-gay Blair, a suave seventy-three-year-old New York City force in America. In a recent survey of over two thousand psychotherapist with an almost entirely gay clientele. evangelical ministers and leaders in 166 countries, the Pew He started advocating for the rights of gay Christians Center found that 84 percent of them think homosexuality Iin 1962, while a member of the Inter-Varsity Christian should be discouraged. The teachings of three prominent Fellowship at the University of Southern California. Two American evangelists—Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge years later, after delivering a pro-gay talk at Yale, he was and Don Schmierer—inspired a Ugandan bill that initial- not reappointed to IVCF staff at the University of Penn- ly imposed a death sentence for gay sex. Earlier this year, sylvania. In 1975, he founded a group called Evangelicals the high-profile televangelist Pat Robertson, who often con- Concerned, which, as far as I can tell, is probably the oldest demns homosexuality, said that gayness is “related to de- queer evangelical organization in the world. monic possession.” Blair has never had a problem reconciling his homosex- The fight over gay rights has also gained a foothold in uality with his faith; other evangelicals, he says, wouldn’t the 2012 presidential election, which most pundits predict- have a problem either if they took the gospel as seriously as ed would turn upon Barack Obama’s handling of the econo- they claim. “Long-term, monogamous gay relationships are my. In May, Obama announced that he personally supports completely compatible with New Testament teachings,” he same-sex marriage; three months later, the Democratic Par- told me as he prepared milky iced coffee in his office on ty’s platform committee endorsed marriage equality for the the Upper East Side. “And I believe that the New Testa- first time. Both of these decisions followed Obama’s Decem- ment is the revealed word of God. I’ve felt an obligation, in ber 2010 repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy that for- my life, to help others understand that. Certainly, to help bade gays from serving openly in the military. gay Christian evangelicals who feel they have to choose be- But opposition to LGBT rights has been even more ve- tween their religion and their sexuality. But also, and per- hement. Both Mitt Romney and his Republican running haps more importantly, to reach out to the Christian evan- mate, Paul Ryan, oppose marriage equality. (Interesting- gelical movement as a whole in this country.” ly, though, neither is an evangelical Protestant. Romney is Like other queer Christians, Blair and his fellow LGBT Mormon and Ryan is Catholic.) In May, one of Romney’s evangelicals believe that Jesus saves, and that marriage be- foreign-policy advisors stepped down after he was outed there, under the strobe lights, with tween same-sex couples should be legal. But as evangeli- as gay. And this summer, Dan Cathy, the evangelical presi- Depeche Mode booming in the back- cals, they take their faith a step further, dedicating their dent of the fast-food chain Chick-Fil-A, spoke out against ground, Robert and I kissed. lives to converting LGBT nonbelievers, and reaching out same-sex marriage, saying his company, which has report- I felt nothing. Friendship and sin- to mainstream evangelicals who have been forced into the edly donated millions of dollars to anti-gay groups, sup- cere affection, sure. Robert and I re- closet. They’re also also stricter in their faith than other ports “the biblical definition of the family.” His remarks mained close. But I realized I couldn’t Christians, emphasizing personal salvation and conver- caused a heated controversy, with gay-marriage advocates will myself to be gay, no matter how sion, the literal truth of the Bible and the superiority of staging “kiss-ins” outside Chick-Fil-A locations and their badly I wanted to be. It was out of my Christianity over all other faiths. opponents organizing a “Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day” in hands. God had created me straight, No firm statistics exist on how many LGBT evangeli- response. Although gay conservative groups like the Log and no man—not even Robert—could cals there are in America. Like the early Christians, who Cabin Republicans and GOProud are trying to change Re- unmake what God had made. were actively repressed, most queer evangelicals practice publicans’ minds on homosexuality, there’s no doubt that Over twenty years later, I’m mar- their faith in small, private groups (usually in Bible stud- the party is still beholden to America’s right-wing evangeli- ried, have three daughters, chair a ies in someone’s home), or, much less commonly, in open- cal movement. philosophy department and no longer ly gay-friendly churches. Their message is twofold. First, As difficult as it is to imagine how Blair might make in- know what to think about the exis- contrary to the claims of mainstream evangelicals, biblical roads into this world, he insists that he can. “Evangelicals tence of God. When I teach gay rights scripture does not prohibit homosexuality. Second, a com- only listen to other evangelicals,” he explained. “An ordi- in my Contemporary Moral Issues munity of practicing LGBT evangelicals is out there, wait- nary gay Christian speaks and they just turn off their ears. class, my students constantly argue ing to receive gay fellow believers. But an evangelical Christian speaks and, even though he’s about Christianity and sexual orien- Blair profoundly believes in his cause. The appeal of gay, they’ll give him a shot.” tation. Naturally, I’ve always known his approach is that he reads the Bible as an evangelical— It’s hard to be Christian and to evangelize. It’s consider- that Christian evangelicals in gener- strictly, even literally—but arrives at a different conclu- ably tougher to be gay and to “evangelize”—to spread the DECIDED TO BE GAY in 1990, shortly after I al, and Baptists in particular, are opposed to homosexu- sion: that it is not a sin for a man to have sex with anoth- word that homosexuality is okay. But imagine having to started graduate school. I had just earned ality. But even when I was a card-carrying Baptist, I’d be- er man. The Old Testament passage most often cited as a spread the word both of Christ and of queerness. Because my BA from a Baptist university in Waco, lieved in queer rights, and so did my professors and men- prohibition against homosexuality—“Thou shalt not lie of the religious right’s hostility to homosexuality, gay evan- Texas, and I wanted to try something differ- tors. I understood homophobia as misguided politics and with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination,” gelicals are generally disliked—or even openly despised— ent. My new best friend was named Robert; amateurish, biased textual interpretation. Until recently, from Leviticus—is revised, according to Blair, by the love not just by straight Christians but by other gays, too. And I understood that he had a little crush on me. it had never occurred to me what it would mean, in a per- of Christ. Blair is not suggesting that we throw out the Old the LGBT evangelical movement faces its own internal di- Like me, Robert was a Christian—we were sonal sense, to think that God might be opposed to your Testament, but he believes that Christians must reinter- visions, which threaten to undo all the progress it’s made. both studying the great Danish theologian sexual orientation. pret or reject passages that are clearly incompatible with Queer evangelicals have the potential to cast homophobia and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—but he Then I began to meet some new people: men and wom- Christ’s instruction to love one another as we love our- out of the religious right and change the face of American didn’t have my evangelical education. One en who are fighting against the idea that one has to choose selves. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul lists gay politics—but only if they can keep their own movement night, in a wild underground club in Aus- between being gay and being an active—even a conserva- sex as a sin, but, as Blair points out, anal sex was consid- alive against the odds. tin, I resolved to kiss Robert on the dance floor. We were tive—evangelical Christian. They call themselves LGBT ered a form of humiliation in Paul’s day—something one young and drunk and surrounded by beautiful men, and (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) evangelicals. They would do to a slave or an enemy. Paul was warning against AST SUMMER, I traveled to Oakland, California I thought, “Here’s my chance.” Many of my heroes were are among the kindest, gentlest people I know. They are al- violent and degrading acts, not loving ones between con- for ConnECtion, the annual convention of Evan- Igay, such as Oscar Wilde and even Kierkegaard, probably. so among the most unwanted and unrecognized. But they senting partners. gelicals Concerned Western Region. (At the time, I had prayed about it; I had asked God to make me gay. So are determined—and their numbers are growing. But that interpretation puts Blair at odds with the main- L Evangelicals Concerned was divided into two

30 31 halves, the Eastern and the Western.) At the conference, lism,” the man said, holding his hands out toward Blair, lifetime of celibacy as a consequence of their Christian- “Then I meet with other gay evangelicals and I real- there were prayer meetings, performances by contempo- who sat at the back of the crowded room. “He is its proph- ity. Lee is an A gay, but he recognizes that some gay evan- ize, no, I don’t have to choose between my faith and my rary Christian rock musicians and break-out sessions to et.” The atmosphere had that odd electricity and breath- gelicals still believe that the Bible prohibits homosexual- sexuality,” Daniel said. “I’m not ashamed. We believe teach people how to promote the LGBT evangelical mes- lessness you get in a church or concert or football game. ity, and he doesn’t want to exclude them. Blair, by con- in Christ and in spreading Christ’s word. And we are sage. There was also lots of “sharing” around the hotel bar. The attendees were dressed casually, but their clothes trast, is a hard A-man—he thinks all gays should accept uniquely suited to do that, because we are gay. Because It wasn’t as overt as conference sex-talk sometimes is, but, looked deliberately chosen, as though they’d arrived for their sexuality. But both agree that their movement is there is a huge group of Christ’s children out there who as I chatted with various couples, they admitted to having a party. In a brown button-down shirt, khaki pants and making some progress among mainstream evangelicals. have rejected Him because they think they can’t believe first met at this conference or one like it. It occurred to me handsome glasses, his blue eyes flashing, Blair stepped up Indeed, there are encouraging signs. Last year, rep- in the evangelical faith of their upbringing. But they can. that it’s hard enough to meet a suitable partner in my own to the podium. resenting the powerful evangelical coalition Faith in Jesus wants them back. God wants them back.” straight, agnostic shoes; it must be so much more difficult He got right to the point, launching into an attack on America, Dr. Jack McKinney, who is straight, presented for a gay evangelical. Coldman. For Blair, “radical inclusion” is wrong because a ten-thousand-signature petition to the Southern Baptist OU CAN’T have it both ways,” Ralph Blair I met Eunice Coldman on a bench in the mezzanine of it is relativistic, and ignores the fundamental incompat- Convention, calling for it to “stop misusing the Bible to told me. “Either Christ is our Lord and the Marriott Hotel, where she was counseling a shy, slen- ibilities between the world’s religions. It is also “a stra- promote religion-based bigotry” and “perpetuating abuse Saviour and all other religions are wrong, der transgender man in blue jeans and a Western shirt. tegic blunder,” because traditional evangelicals only take against gay people.” The Southern Baptist Convention is or he’s not. I’m a Christian evangelist. I be- Coldman wore a nose stud, dreadlocks and turquoise ear- their queer counterparts seriously when they hold true to arguably the most staunchly homophobic branch of the “lieve ChristY is our Lord and Saviour.” rings. She was discussing “the radical inclusivity of Jesus the gospel. And it constitutes “an abandonment of devo- evangelical movement, so it’s hardly surprising that it did Blair possesses a zealotry about him that most other Christ.” tion to Christ.” For these reasons, Blair said, his voice ris- not endorse the petition. But the fact that McKinney, on queer evangelicals do not. I wonder if all his years of deal- ing in religious fervour, Coldman “must be removed from behalf of thousands of ministers and followers, was call- ing with the inflexibility of the mainstream evangelical Clancy Martin is a contributing editor of Harper’s. He has writ- the board.” ing the Southern Baptist Convention to account—from movement have affected his way of seeing the world. To ten for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, GQ and Esquire. Stunned silence. Coldman left the room. within the evangelical tradition—was a landmark. me, Eunice Coldman has the right language for the differ- His novel How To Sell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was a Times Literary I caught her outside, about fifteen minutes after the “The saddest thing,” Lee told me, his expression ear- ence between Blair’s approach and her own: her style is Supplement Best Book of 2009. Originally from Calgary, he is currently speech, in a hallway near the hotel bar. She took a deep nest, “is that if there’s one thing you ought to associate inclusive, and his is exclusive. It’s hard to reconcile that the chair of philosophy at the University of Missouri. breath, her fingers fluttering. “He’s making the same argu- with Christian evangelism, it’s love. But instead, the tra- exclusivity with the real-life problems of gay evangelicals ments they always make,” Coldman explained. “This is the ditional evangelical establishment has turned everything today. “Jesus wants us all,” she said, flashing an enormous, same argument the straight folks are using for keeping LG- on its head. We’re viewed as intolerant, unkind, even It would be too much to say that Blair has lost touch winning smile. “That’s the heart of his whole teaching. I BTs out of the church. Most of America thinks Christian hateful. That’s the real tragedy of Christian evangelism with his own movement. But he is a hard-liner, uncompro- don’t care if you’re practicing voodoo. If I don’t try to un- evangelism, they think of intolerance. And we just heard in this country today.” mising, and I suspect that the future of LGBT evangelism derstand what you believe and where you’re coming from, it. Why do you think most gay folk reject their religion? One of the ugliest faces of that intolerance is the so- will be more open than his particular brand allows. The how can I hope to talk to you? How can I expect you to Arguments like you just heard from Ralph Blair.” called “ex-gay” movement, spearheaded by Exodus Inter- more I spoke with members of the movement, the more I hear what I’m saying?” national, a group tacitly endorsed by mainstream evan- wondered why the label “evangelical” even matters. For The young man nodded. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. N A BREWPUB, under the dappled shade of grape- gelicals. Exodus claims that “Christ offers a healing alter- Blair, it’s crucial, because it defines a set of very strict in- “It’s a place where I feel safe. Where I fit in. Where I be- vines, I spoke with Justin Lee, the thirty-five-year- native to those with homosexual tendencies” and offers terpretations of the gospel; for Coldman, “evangelical” long.” old founder and executive director of the Gay Chris- LGBT Christians the “freedom to grow into heterosexu- seems to mean “spreading the word,” and does not carry a Coldman’s message is a departure from the traditional tian Network. GCN has nearly twenty-two thousand ality.” Its mission is exactly the opposite of that of groups lot of doctrinal weight. stance of Christian evangelicals, and her presence at the Isubscribed members, up from just eighteen a decade ago. like Evangelicals Concerned: Exodus wants to convince As it turns out, Coldman won the battle: ECWR has conference—she was newly confirmed for a position on The group’s function is to provide a safe online gather- gays that, through Christ, they can become straight. Exo- since dissolved, and its membership has joined Justin the ECWR board of directors—was a direct challenge to ing place for gay evangelicals: to help them coordinate dus even holds an annual “Freedom Conference” to teach Lee’s Gay Christian Network. Both Lee and Blair are Blair. The crucial difference between their philosophies with one another, to run conferences, to bring in other attendees—pastors, therapists, young gay people who pleased with the outcome and remain friends. Anyway, lies in the question at the heart of all Christian evangelism, queer groups like the Evangelical Network—which Blair come with their parents—how Christ can change a per- there are larger battles to fight. Lee’s forthcoming book, gay or straight: what does it really mean to be an evan- describes as a “more conservative, Pentecostal, countri- son’s sexual orientation. Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians De- gelical? For Blair, it is the acceptance of the “evangel”— fied” set—and to produce educational materials that can In an effort to learn more about the ex-gay movement, I bate, argues that there’s a common misconception that the good news that Christ is God—and the obligation to be used in prayer groups and “open-to-gay” evangelical tracked down a man named Daniel at ConnECtion. Dan- gays and Christians are enemies, on opposite sides of a spread the word of that news. For Coldman, it is the more churches. iel is from San Francisco, and he is a teacher and self-de- culture war. The truth, he says, is that a lot of people general idea that anyone can be a Christian, regardless of Lee has alopecia, and his gentle, eyebrow-less face, scribed “victim” of an ex-gay ministry that pre-dated Exo- are somewhere in the middle. The book tells the stories sexual orientation, gender or race. According to Blair, this pale skin and oval head give him a saintly quality. He has dus. He was immediately disarming and open; in fact, none of people who feel torn—compassionate pastors, Chris- represents the introduction of relativism to the evangeli- no formal training, and he founded GCN more or less by of the evangelical gays and lesbians I met had that intimi- tian parents of gay children, and queer Christians them- cal message, threatening its purity and therefore its very accident after he graduated from Wake Forest Univer- dating, off-putting quality unique to the deeply religious. selves—and shows why the gays-vs.-Christians myth must Christianity. sity in 2000 and started blogging about his attempts to “I thought I had taken care of my ex-gay stuff with gay- be banished for the sake of people on both sides. Even the fact that Coldman is a woman was considered square his religious beliefs—“I never doubted that I was affirmative counseling until I was in that room praying For Blair, at the end of the day, the movement is about a provocation. Women, it seemed, did the vast majority of a true Christian evangelical”—with the fact that he was half an hour ago, and then I started having flashbacks,” theological truth. But for people like Lee and Coldman, it’s the work at ConnECtion; every time I sat in the large con- sexually attracted to men. Soon, others with similar pre- he told me. “‘I’m a failure.’ ‘Christ doesn’t love me.’ also about the day-to-day reality of being gay and Chris- ference room where most of the talks and prayer circles dicaments began contacting him, and GCN became a full- ‘Christ won’t change me.’ That ex-gay kid inside who suf- tian. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter how many little were held, it was women moving chairs, hanging white- time job. He lives in evangelical country: Raleigh, North fered so much just won’t listen to what my rational mind schisms might occur within LGBT evangelical groups, or boards for workshops or manning the registration tables. Carolina. knows. But I get in there and suddenly it all comes out, even if queer evangelism becomes—as Blair fears—just And there were probably six men for every woman in at- “There are lots of gay Christian churches in the coun- and I remember that God wants me to be gay. And that plain old queer Christianity. Whichever arguments you tendance. It’s hard to escape the thought that the “G” in try,” Lee explained to me. “And that’s a good thing. We scared ex-gay kid inside of me was listening.” rely on—as with all biblical exegesis, the theological de- LGBT is what mattered most here. This also reflects a long- are a movement. We are a place evangelicals can come to Daniel started to tear up, and I had a small glimpse into bate will surely go on endlessly—both Blair and Coldman running tension in gay-rights activism; many lesbians, learn about why gay is okay in the eyes of Christ. We an- what that must have felt like: to be told that God Himself can genuinely help other queer believers hold on to both transgender people and queers of colour have historically swer questions and spread information. That’s our role as wants you to be someone else. Your parents, your friends, their faith and their sexuality. I still don’t know whether felt sidelined by white gay men. Christian evangelists.” your pastor—everyone you love and respect—are all pray- God exists, whether He makes us who we are. But I do One day, in the conference room, a boyish, elfin man Lee’s line is softer than Blair’s: he includes both “A” ing for you to completely alter who you are, and Jesus is know that there are a lot of people who believe in Him, fawningly introduced Blair, who was slated for a speech. gay Christians—queer evangelicals in committed, long- cheering them on. You stay the same, but you feel guiltier and who believe that He watches over them, no matter “Ralph is not just the pioneer of LGBT Christian evange- term relationships—and “B” gays—queers who accept a and guiltier, dirtier and dirtier. whom they love. 

32 33 FEA TURES

S TILL LIF E D E P T .

THE

PLACEWHERE ART SLEEPS THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO’S PRICELESS COLLECTION ISN’T ON DISPLAY—IT’S TUCKED AWAY IN HIGH!SECURITY, TOP!SECRET VAULTS. AS HE EXPLORES THE HIDDEN WORLD OF ART STORAGE, CHRIS HAMPTON DISCOVERS THAT SOME MUSEUMS ARE STARTING TO OPEN UP.

ABOVE : BERNINI’S 1655 BRONZE THE CRUCIFIED CHRIST IN THE E.R. WOOD GALLERY. OPPO S I TE: VOLUNTEERS WORK IN THE MARVIN GELBER PRINT AND DRAWING STUDY CENTRE.

N JULY 2010, a small team at biggest piece in AGO storage—and sculptures and installations account the Art Gallery of Ontario carried by pump truck down the hall for roughly eleven thousand pieces disassembled David Altme- into Shipping and Receiving. Most of in the vaults, while photography and jd’s The Index, an acclaimed the boxes, too big to keep on-site, were works on paper make up the other multimedia installation loaded into a trailer and taken to an seventy thousand. This isn’t unique that had held court in the undisclosed storage facility. Because to the AGO. Art institutions are a bit museum’s first-floor atrium the three remaining crates contained like icebergs; the public sees less than for a year and a half. Over taxidermied animals—mostly birds a tenth of their holdings. But that may a week’s time, the team— and small rodents—they had to stay finally be changing. While security made up of Altmejd’s personnel and an in the gallery with their government and conservation remain top priori- art handler from the AGO—disman- papers. ties, galleries are beginning to experi- Itled the work’s mirror-and-steel bridge I first saw The Index in October ment with new ways for the public structure. They carted away the bird- 2009, a year into its atrium tenure, to engage with their broader collec- men dressed in business suits, each of but when I returned the following tions. Visitors increasingly want to see which got its own case, 3 feet by 3 feet summer to revisit it, I was too late. In- everything—including what’s behind by 8 feet. Delicate chunks of dismem- stead, I found understated stone carv- the scenes. bered werewolf were placed in crates, ings by the Inuit artist Lucy Tasseor as were mushrooms and dildos, crys- Tutsweetok. The Index had gone into HE AGO’S ON!SITE PAINTING tals and quartzes and shards of glass. storage, the information desk clerk and sculpture vaults are locat- The team worked carefully, manoeu- told me. I wouldn’t see it at the AGO ed in the building’s subbase- vring around Bernini’s The Crucified again anytime soon. ment. Renovations in 2008 Christ, a 357-year-old bronze of Jesus Of the AGO’s eighty-five-thou- Tcreated a functioning storage space on the cross, on display at the centre sand-piece permanent collection, only that’s visible to the public, and, with of the E.R. Wood Gallery. Altmejd’s about 3,900 works are on display right the opening of the Weston Family whole magic world was packed up— now. At any given time, 95 percent of Learning Centre in 2011, two other Photographs by L ORNE BRIDGMAN. fifty-three containers in all, the single the collection is in storage. Paintings, vaults also became viewable. But, for

34 35 and conservation, recounts these de- Haupt recalls a nineteenth-cen- to contextualize it. I take it with me of the Museum,” an essay from 1917, tails with an everyday familiarity, my tury watercolour by Lucius O’Brien as an idea, but I’m quickly off to the American librarian John Cotton Dana mind wanders toward hero worship. called Mount Hermit Range, Selkirk, next one. Haupt is a caretaker; she’s wrote that the institutions were like Do Frederick Varleys sleep next to van B.C., near Glacier Hotel, which depicts interested in the life of the work and “remote palaces and temples—filled Goghs? Mary Pratts by Picassos? I’m a stand of conifers winding down a the preservation of history for genera- with objects not closely associated left to speculate; exact storage loca- mountainside, white peaks rising in tions to come. Though she never says with the life of the people who are tions are kept confidential. the background. “The colour change it exactly, she makes it plain: some- asked to get pleasure and profit from Reading from a selection called the caused by light exposure is very sub- times conservation and exhibition are them.” Dana imagined a new muse- AGO1000—a list of roughly a thou- tle, but seems, to my eye, to depict a at odds. Opening your storage vaults um, one better attuned to public ser- sand essential pieces from the gallery’s landscape under a sun which is hotter to the public or mandating rotation— vice and less concerned with “piling permanent collection—Haupt fires off and brighter than when I first saw the nice as it sounds—is not that easy. up treasures.” The museum shouldn’t a number of gems that haven’t moved work,” she says. just be a storehouse, but rather a place upstairs in some time. There’s a Rich- Haupt has a very different relation- HE DEBATE over whether mu- of popular education. ard Serra sculpture called Untitled ship with art than I do. I enjoy the seums should preserve their Dana’s vision became a touchstone Steel Corner Prop, acquired in 1986, aesthetic and the history of a piece; collections or serve the public in the ongoing evolution of public arts that hasn’t been installed since 2004— I look to make some meaning of it, is not new. In “The Gloom institutions. Museum director and the only time the piece has ever made T scholar Stephen E. Weil captured the it into the gallery. Serra’s Corner Prop attitude of the new museum in his series explores the post-and-lintel con- 2000 essay “Collecting Then, Collect- struction system; Untitled Steel Cor- ing Today: What’s the Difference?” He ner Prop is composed of a steel mass wrote, “a museum’s collection—which hoisted to waist height and pinned might once have been thought of as its against the corner of the room with a ‘end’—can now be seen as a ‘means,’ single metal leg. Exhibition services as an instrument for the achievement jokingly calls it “the widow-maker.” of a larger end and simply one among a “We don’t install it that often because number of resources that the museum it’s hard to install safely,” Haupt says. can employ to carry out its service ob- “We don’t want visitors to get hurt.” ligations to the public.” Other pieces aren’t displayed be- While this change in thinking— cause they require additional mainte- from collection-centred to audience- nance. The conservation department focused—has occurred over the last is currently working on a Picasso century, Lynne Teather, a professor sketch from 1907, as well as Chardin’s emeritus of museum studies at the 1758 still life Jar of Apricots. The Pi- University of Toronto, takes a longer casso hasn’t been out in four years view. She reminds me that the Lou-

and the Chardin hasn’t been out in . vre—once a palace, then a storehouse ORK

eight. Montreal-born abstract painter Y for the royal collection, then a gal-

W

Claude Tousignant’s Gong 88—made E lery for aristocrats and elites—only up of coloured, concentric circles that N became a public museum during the are said to vibrate like a gong—has S), French Revolution; the National As- AR

likewise evaded exhibition for the ( sembly thought it was the people’s IETY

past eight years. Work that is par- C right to see their nation’s master- O

ticularly old rarely goes on display. S works. Teather sees experiments in S

The AGO has a five-hundred-year-old HT transparency like the AGO’s as an- G TUDY ENTRE VOLUNTEER EXAMINES A FIVE HUNDRED YEAR OLD PRINT OF LBRECHT ÜRER S DAM AND VE I A S C - - - A D ’ A E . R print of Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and other step in the growing public-ser- S T Eve that almost never leaves the Print S vice mission of the museum. She says RTI

and Drawing vault. A that there’s a financial angle, too. Less • • security reasons, the AGO does not heavy steel doors, wooden skids and I ask Haupt if she has a favou- E government support means that more offer general tours of its vaults. Ac- labelled racks of boxes—suggest ware- rite piece in storage—something she SS money has to be made from visitors, ATI cess is limited to curatorial staff, the house, prison and library all at once. thinks ought to be displayed in the gal- members and private donors—people . M H conservation department and the art It’s hard to believe that these rooms lery. “You’re speaking to someone who who want to get their money’s worth. handlers. house a half-millennia of priceless hu- trained as a paper conservator,” she ION SS E

In the subbasement, a single corri- man history. says. “I don’t want it on the wall, be- CC OLLOWING MY CONVERSATION dor leads to each of the ten vaults. The The painting vaults look much the cause I don’t want to lose it.” But then U with Haupt, I make an ap- four largest are roughly 3,000 square same, though, in place of shelving Haupt indulges the question. “I love pointment to see Dürer’s Ad- feet apiece, while the others are vari- units, dozens of metal screens line the old master drawings and I love topo- am and Eve in the AGO’s Mar- ously smaller. In contrast to the pomp rooms. The screens slide into the mid- graphical watercolours. Both of those S 2012 © Fvin Gelber Print and Drawing Study

of the galleries upstairs, these rooms dle of the space, and paintings hang are really light sensitive. I believe that NTARIO Centre. Since it opened in 1993, the O are shamelessly pragmatic, designed in their frames from both sides of the I can see changes when something is Study Centre has kept regular hours OF for cataloguing, preservation and safe- mesh, jigsawed around each other, ar- exhibited once for just four months. during which visitors can book per- keeping. The sculpture vaults—with ranged first by size and then by artist. To my mind, I can see change from the sonal appointments to see any of its ALLERY A PRINT OF HENRI MATISSE’S JAZZ ICARUS SITS ON A PUSHCART. VISITORS CAN VIEW MANY OF THE SEVENTY THOUSAND their cement floors, white cinderblock While Margaret Haupt, the deputy light exposure. I’d just as soon that it G seventy thousand works—part of the WORKS HELD IN THE PRINT AND DRAWING VAULT. RT walls, high ceilings, CCTV cameras, director of collections management not go on the wall.” A AGO’s effort to expose the public to

36 37 its broader collection. After learning counterparts. It has two floors, and varying sizes in which paper works permanent collection and takes ap- that I was researching an article, the a catwalk hangs around the perim- are stacked on top of each other. pointments for those interested in vis- assistant curator of prints and draw- eter of the room. A waist-high work I’m given a pair of white cotton iting works held in storage. The AGH ings offers to select a few other gems surface bisects the aisles of moveable gloves and led to one of the tables at has also begun to digitize its perma- for me to visit. storage shelves. Prints are stored on the centre of the study room. A vol- nent collection in its Virtual Vault. The Study Centre occupies the one side of the room, drawings on unteer rolls over a pushcart and un- The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in south-westernmost corner of the first the other. On the upper-level catwalk, loads a pile onto the desk in front of Buffalo proactively rotates its work, floor of the museum. It’s a handsome similar shelves line the walls. As a me. As I take the works one by one, bringing more pieces out of storage room, with bookcases set along the rule of thumb, works before 1900 lift up their protective mats and re- and on display. Collection curator northern wall and large worktables are kept upstairs, and works after move the thin paper coverings, I’m Holly Hughes says that she remem- running down the centre of the space. 1900 are kept downstairs. They are met by a series of masterpieces. The bers visiting the museum as a child; There’s dark wood everywhere. Be- then organized by nationality and first is an etching and aquatint from she always knew where Gauguin’s hind the bookcases, the prints and date, and alphabetically by artist. The 1969 by David Hockney. Pregnant The Yellow Christ was because, back drawings vault is visible through a work is stored in hundreds upon hun- Celia depicts his long-time muse on a then, it never moved. Albright-Knox plate-glass door. This vault is even dreds of solander boxes—black, leath- stool, wearing her floral-print dress now uses its more iconic works to larger than its painting and sculpture er-bound, acid-free clamshell cases of with her hands at her lap, just below introduce visitors to other parts of her swollen stomach. Next, I uncover its collection. Walking down the hall a pen-and-ink-on-newspaper by Hen- is like thumbing through the pages ry Moore, The Artist’s Mother, from of a textbook on modern art—Fran- 1927. Moore sketched his mother knit- cis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Frida ting or darning on page eight of the Kahlo, Wassily Kandinsky—but, in Essex County Standard. Moore’s ink the radial corridors, visitors find con- strokes overlap the bus schedule for ceptual portraits by Cindy Sherman Colchester and Brightling Sea: “From and works by Helen Frankenthaler. Colchester Bus Park: 8.15, 10.0, 11am Opposite a Lee Krasner and a Jackson PRINTS OF HENRI MATISSE’S CIRCUS AND RECLINING NUDE SIT ON DISPLAY IN THE MARVIN GELBER PRINT (not Thursdays).” Then I come across Pollock, the main hallway lets off into AND DRAWING STUDY CENTRE. a pair of Rembrandts, Three Heads of a lower gallery, where a giant wooden Women: One Asleep and the artist’s girl by Marisol sits on the ground. collaboration with the viewer and the and-sky setting constructed from in- own rendition of Adam and Eve; both Behind her hangs Toccata and Fugue means to question the artist’s role.” flatable vinyl bags, water and blue are etchings on paper and roughly 375 by Arman—seventeen violins bisected What does it mean to the &man, so food colouring—and past the bank of years old. Every mat I open contains down the neck and arranged guts-out conscious of his relationship with old tube TVs, their flickering screens another jewel—a Munch, then a Luc- in a black display box. Upstairs, in an the viewer, when his show is packed covered in acrylic paint, I see the ien Freud. exhibition called “Decade: Contempo- up and stored away—when the work sculptor Evan Penny. A swarm of Finally, I come upon Dürer’s Adam rary Collecting 2002–2012,” Albright- “goes to sleep,” as he puts it? “There’s AGO staff follows him from room and Eve, a 1504 print from a cop- Knox is highlighting works that it a tiny bit of sadness, but at the same to room. I recognize Penny from his .

per engraving. Gardner’s Art Through ORK has acquired over the last ten years. time, you’re moving on and making sculpture Old Self, Variation #1—a Y

the Ages, an art-history classic, says W Hughes says that, in the face of tight- new things,” he says. “And you know hyper-realistic silicone bust of the art- E

that this is the work in which Dürer N ening budgets, the gallery has been im- they’re well kept.” ist imagined as an old man. (He looks

first used arithmetic ratios to perfect S), porting fewer exhibitions, and instead The question seems uninterest- much younger in real life.) He’s point- AR

the proportions of the human body, ( is aggressively building programming ing to Baxter&, so he refocuses it: ing around the space, imagining it as

bringing classical Italian style into the IETY around its permanent collection. “In the future, museums will ask, though Baxter&’s works—an entire C German tradition. Eve stands next O The AGO has been trying to make ‘What works would you like to see?’” Smart car, taxidermied animals piked S to Adam, taking the forbidden fruit S better use of its own resources, too. Baxter& envisions fully digitized col- atop exhaust pipes—weren’t there. HT G I

from the serpent’s mouth. Haupt’s R In the last year or so, the gallery has lections that will allow visitors to

S sentiment comes to mind: though we T put on exhibitions of works by Betty vote on which pieces make it into S studies journalism at may want to see all the artwork we RTI Goodwin, Jack Chambers, Greg Curn- the gallery space. The work won’t Chris Hampton A Ryerson University.

can, sometimes exhibition comes at • oe and the General Idea collective, ever go to sleep; you’ll be able to E

the cost of preserving what’s truly SS bringing many of the shows up from instantly call it up and study it. He beautiful. ATI the basement. Right now, the fifth sees online cataloguing as a whole Penny looks excited as he discusses . M

H floor is filled exclusively with new new means of storage, giving the where his “stretches”—a series of mas-

PEN!DOOR STUDY CENTRES ION and old acquisitions from the contem- public total access to the collection. sive busts that look like they’ve been SS and visible storage displays E porary collection. Earlier this year, Working with Adam Lauder of York pulled out of shape in Photoshop— CC are two of the AGO’s re- U the floor below hosted a career retro- University, Baxter& has begun to should be placed. This fall, his work sponses to the growing de- spective of Iain Baxter& (pronounced gather his own works online. The will be installed here. One of his Omand to see its permanent collection. “Baxter-and”). It drew heavily on the IAINBAXTER&raisonnE is an “elec- pieces will make the elevator ride up

Other galleries have answered differ- . © 2012 S gallery’s own holdings and archives, tronic collection, virtual exhibition from the AGO’s basement, while the S

ently. On a few special occasions, the RT and I went to take a look. platform and research environment” rest will come in from other galleries A

Vancouver Art Gallery has offered OF that brings the traditional catalogue and their respective storage spaces.

guided vault tours. Ottawa’s National N 2005, Baxter& had an amper- raisonné—a comprehensive record of Baxter&’s Bagged Landscape with Wa- TITUTE

Gallery gives storage tours to patrons S sand legally grafted onto his sur- an artist’s output—into cyberspace. ter will then perform the changing N I who have purchased a certain type name. He told Canadian Art that As I walk around the AGO’s Bax- of the guard, rejoining the thousands HYGROTHERMOGRAPHS RECORD FLUCTUATIONS IN HUMIDITY AND TEMPERATURE. of membership. The Art Gallery of it symbolized a “non-authorial ter& exhibition, past Bagged Land- and thousands of pieces that sleep be- ETROIT Hamilton welcomes the study of its D Itake on art production ... an unending scape with Water—a cartoonish lake- neath the gallery floor. 

38 39 Forget Africentric schools: Toronto’s Portuguese community has the highest dropout rate in the city, Eric Andrew-Gee reports. How did a flourishing immigrant population wind up so poorly educated—and what can it teach us about how to succeed in Canada?

SCHOOLED D E P T . Wh!t’s E!tin"

FOUR STARS CAFÉ, LOCATED AT Li#l$ THE INTERSECTION OF DUNDAS AND DUFFERIN, IS A POPULAR HAUNT FOR PORTUGUESE CONSTRUCTION WORKERS.

PortuPhotographs by D ANIEL E HRENWORTH"!. l?

40 41 chocolate factory, which belches cocoa higher than the municipal average, fumes day and night. and almost four times the rate for From the very beginning, and with Chinese students. The Toronto Catho- unusual persistence, the Portuguese lic District School Board doesn’t keep community in downtown Toronto set track of dropout rates by language N 1953, a ship called about recreating its motherland on group, but, according to a source in the Saturnia docked Canadian soil. “They never really left the TCDSB, their Portuguese students in the Halifax har- home,” proclaimed the headline of a have the same problem. bour. Its hold was full 1973 Weekend magazine article. Al- While that 42.5 percent figure in- of ghosts. The vessel though many Portuguese have since cludes some Portuguese speakers from had transported Ital- spread throughout the Greater To- Brazil and Angola, the current genera- ian shock troops to ronto Area, Little Portugal remains tion of dropouts is, by and large, sec- Eritrea in the 1930s, the community’s spiritual centre, and ond- or third-generation Portuguese. and in the forties it served as a floating a strikingly realistic miniature of its According to the TDSB, just 17 per- hospital for American GIs wounded namesake: squat, modestly sized hous- cent of the children of Portuguese im- during the Allied invasion of Italy. es, often with glazed tiles of the Virgin migrants have a BA or higher level of Now,I as it bobbed in Nova Scotia’s cold Mary beside the doors; little paved- education—the lowest number among second-generation Torontonians. In an Ontario-wide math test, 14 per- cent fewer Portuguese-language stu- dents reached the expected level of proficiency than the average Toronto student. Other studies indicate that only about one in twenty Portuguese Torontonians has a university degree, compared to the city average of one in four. Just 6 percent of Portuguese work in the professions, compared to 18 percent of all Toronto residents. And, defying the timeworn stereo- type of upward mobility, the chil- dren of Portuguese immigrants do not make significantly more money than their parents. The signs are unmistakable: To- ronto’s Portuguese community is fac- ing an education crisis. Why haven’t Portuguese charted the same ascen- dant course through Canadian society ABOVE: A STRETCH OF STOREFRONTS ON OSSINGTON STREET IN LITTLE PORTUGAL. as, say, Italians or Indians? And what OPPOSITE: JOE GOMES LOOKS OUT THE WINDOW AT A LOTA SEAFOODS, WHERE HE IS AN ASSISTANT can the answer tell us about how to MANAGER. ASKED WHETHER HE REGRETS DROPPING OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL, GOMES SAID, “ANYONE WITH A succeed in Canada? NORMAL MIND WOULD REGRET IT.” Atlantic waters, the ship carried the over front yards; the alternately sweet VER THE PAST DECADE OR SO, victims of another dictatorship: people and sea-salty smells of bakeries and O a loosely affiliated cadre of aca- fleeing the poverty and repression of fish markets; fado, the plaintive Portu- demics, community activists and edu- António de Salazar’s Portugal. They guese folk music, booming out of store- cators have set about trying to diag- were the first Portuguese to come en front stereos and filling the streets. nose the problem. According to one masse to Canada. But Toronto’s Portuguese brought theory, advanced mostly by a handful Sixty years later, there are hun- something else with them: miserable of scholars, racial discrimination is to dreds of thousands of Portuguese Ca- academic performance. Although the blame. David Pereira, a PhD student nadians, including 170,000 in Toronto high dropout rate among black stu- at the University of Toronto whose alone. Early Portuguese settlements in dents has grabbed headlines in recent Master’s thesis was on education in the city were centered around now- years, prompting the creation of two the city’s Portuguese community, trendy Kensington Market, which for Africentric schools in Toronto, it’s links the issue to Pierre Bourdieu’s many decades was a low-rent landing Portuguese who, according to a 2006 theory of “symbolic violence”: the strip for newly arrived immigrants. Toronto District School Board report, kind of oppression that becomes so As more Portuguese came, the com- have the highest rate in the city: natural it starts to go unnoticed. munity drifted west and planted roots 42.5 percent. (Another report puts An obvious rebuttal is that the in a patch of red-brick semi-detached the number at 34 percent, but these perpetrators of such violence must be row houses collectively known as estimates vary wildly over time, and operating at Rimbaud-like levels of Little Portugal. The neighbourhood’s the historical mean is closer to 40 obscurity; unlike the more overt rac- most notable building is a Cadbury percent.) That’s nearly 20 percent ism that, for example, blacks or Arabs

42 43 might face, anti-Portuguese bigotry is The weekend after I spoke to Mach- set his expectations low. “My Grade 8 time to help the Portuguese Canadian salt-and-pepper hair and thick silver for Economic Co-operation and De- all but impossible to detect in Toronto. ado, I attended a session of a Por- teacher said we’re all going to be car- community succeed. In one 2004 pa- rings on her fingers, Ponte oversees velopment. What if poor academic But Pereira and others bring up a va- tuguese Canadian tutoring program penters like all the other Portuguese,” per, he laments that Ottawa doesn’t On Your Mark, the tutoring program achievement comes from some coil of riety of examples: curricula that focus called On Your Mark, held at St. Mary’s he answered. “Unless we study.” consider Portuguese youth eligible where I encountered Felipe. She came Portuguese culture? on dead white men; educators who Catholic Secondary School. I sat in the His friend Bryan added, “Some for affirmative action in education to Canada from Portugal as a girl. pressure ESL students to catch up back of a classroom filled with about student teacher came in in Grade 7 or the job market. But above all, he “Our kids get their cultural educa- N 1891, an anonymous correspon- with the rest of their class; teachers twenty surly tweens, most of them and said Portuguese kids don’t like thinks Canadian school curricula are tion through their families,” she told I dent for Blackwood’s Edinburgh who assume that kids from poorly ed- not thrilled to be in class on a Sunday. to study.” ethno-centric and make newcomers me in her paper-strewn office on the magazine spent several months in ru- ucated communities have little chance A plain wooden cross hung over the Fernando Nunes wouldn’t be sur- feel alienated and confused. When northern edge of Little Portugal. “I’m ral Portugal and penned a travelogue of success. Indeed, the sub-standard blackboard, where four tutors were prised to hear it. A professor at Mount we spoke, he mentioned that, on a happy they have events that celebrate about his experience. He noted that performance of Portuguese Canadian giving motivational speeches punctu- St. Vincent University in Halifax, he test for gifted students, his son was cultures, and Portuguese is one of an unusually progressive education students has become something of a ated by self-conscious wisecracking. is the chief apostle of systemic racism asked how far Canada is from Eng- those—that’s great. But I don’t think law had been passed in 1878. The law self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s what Mi- One of the tutors, Shahiq “Shaq” as an explanation for Portuguese Ca- land. it’s about the curriculum.” made school attendance mandatory

LEFT: ST. MARY’S CATHOLIC SECONDARY SCHOOL HOUSES THE ON YOUR MARK TUTORING PROGRAM FOR STRUGGLING NOVA ERA, A PORTUGUESE BAKERY, FILLS DUNDAS STREET WITH THE SMELL OF TRADITIONAL PASTRIES. PORTUGUESE AND HISPANIC STUDENTS. RIGHT: DAVID PEREIRA, WHO BELIEVES DISCRIMINATION HELPS EXPLAIN THE POOR PERFORMANCE OF PORTUGUESE STUDENTS, STANDS OUTSIDE MASSEY COLLEGE, WHERE HE IS A PHD STUDENT. chael Gerson, a longtime speechwriter Rizvi—a first-year biology student nadian failure in the school system. Still, systemic discrimination only Ponte’s diagnosis? “If it’s every- for children between the ages of six for George W. Bush, called “the soft at York University—took his turn to His many papers are erudite, well goes so far in explaining the problem. where, including back home, it’s cul- and twelve, and prescribed a wide bigotry of low expectations.” speak. “Don’t waste your time with researched and deeply felt. You might remark to Nunes, as I tural,” she said. She is right about array of subjects of instruction, from Eunice Machado faced it as a young courses you don’t have to take,” he When I asked Nunes if Portuguese did, that other non-Anglo-Saxon kids “back home”: Portugal is the only Eu- reading to math to “morality and girl in the 1980s. She turned out said. “You’re going to get bad marks. Canadian parents value education less have no more cultural attachment to ropean country, other than Ireland, Christianity.” (For girls, there was just fine—Machado is a lawyer with And the colleges don’t care. They’re than others, his soft choir-boy voice Britain than their Portuguese peers. where immigrant students perform also needlework.) the Ontario government—but she still looking for college-level courses.” grew steely. “The stereotype that is If curricula were alienating newcom- better than their native counterparts But the Blackwood’s correspondent speaks of the school system with a During a break, I sat with Felipe out there is that Portuguese parents ers, you would expect to see a range on a standard international math also found that hardly anyone went to tinge of bitterness. “I know that the Madureira, a Grade 9 student with a don’t care about their kids’ educa- of immigrant groups taking a similar and science test. According to the school regularly, and he guessed that schools at that time in particular were mop of brown hair and a class clown’s tion,” he said. “And I think that’s hit—but that’s not the case. Wall Street Journal, the high-school perhaps 10 percent of the popula- not helpful to our success,” she told sense of humour. Born in Portugal, he very harsh, and very, very wrong.” Marcie Ponte laughed when I asked dropout rate in Portugal is 37.1 per- tion was literate. He pinpointed two me. “And I think that still exists in came to Toronto when he was seven. Nunes thinks that governments her about Nunes’ theory. A com- cent—better only than Turkey and reasons. First, the national govern- some schools.” I asked him if teachers ever tried to at all levels should be working over- munity worker with close-cropped, Mexico in the entire Organisation ment was tired and corrupt, a shell

44 45 of the visionary kingdom that sent ments like “the illiteracy in Portugal it’s 85 percent; in the US, 89 percent. titude this way: “Education is good, has an MSc from the University of I ran into this perception myself. Vasco de Gama around the world. is not recent and that didn’t prevent “We’ve been beaten up since the Sala- but we’re very poor, and we need Toronto. Her dad was a bus driver One cloudless day in late April, I It often didn’t enforce mandatory our literature to be one of the richest zar years to think we’re not worth to eat.” Instead of investing in the for the city, and he tried to instill in walked into a bar at Dundas and Duf- school attendance. It could scarcely in the last centuries.” More signifi- the education, not worth the energy,” future benefits of education, this gen- her his own skepticism of education. ferin, the epicentre of Little Portugal. pay its teachers. The correspondent cantly, he reduced mandatory prima- Ponte told me. “So why bother—why eration—raised in extreme hardship “I asked my dad if he found his job I started speaking to a carpenter, on observed, “One of the favorite sub- ry education to a mere three years. not just go work in a factory?” in Portugal—set its sights on material rewarding,” she recalled. “He said, his day off, who was getting increas- jects of satire in the comic papers Under Salazar, high school was only Decades of grinding poverty and comfort. ‘Yeah, it’s rewarding when I get my ingly drunk. He told me a bit about his is the Prime Minister, or other high offered by expensive private schools, right-wing fairy tales conspired to Portuguese parents often passed paycheck every two weeks.’” life, fairly amiably—“I’ve been milk- Government official, grown fat and or for free by the Catholic Church, as render the first wave of Portuguese these values on to their children. Sometimes the lesson was even ing cows since I was five”—but then rich, while the unfortunate school- Amelia Libertucci points out in her immigrants to Canada shockingly un- In the early 1990s, Portuguese Ca- more overt. “My dad, when I was became suspicious and hostile. He master, reduced to a skeleton by want, 2011 paper “Schooling in Little Portu- dereducated. By the early 1960s, Higgs nadian high-school students worked getting my Master’s, started saying, asked me why I didn’t work with my approaches and begs for payment of gal: The Portuguese Experience.” writes, the average length of time Por- more hours per week in part-time ‘When are you going to graduate and hands like him, like a man, instead his hard-earned salary.” Unlike many of his fascist contem- tuguese men in Toronto had spent in jobs than any other group, and spent get a real job?’” she told me. of scribbling in my notebook—and

A CUSTOMER SITS OUTSIDE SPORTS CAFÉ. LITTLE PORTUGAL IS THE COMMUNITY’S SPIRITUAL HOME IN TORONTO, BUT IT IS GENTRIFYING RAPIDLY.

Second, kids were sent to work poraries, Salazar was not a mad futur- school was 3.7 years. For women, it some of the fewest hours per week ANY PORTUGUESE CANADIANS here he hunched his shoulders and from a young age, and the mostly ru- ist with grand plans for refashioning was 2.8 years. Even starker: in a 2002 on homework. This translated into M say that the problem goes even squinted his eyes in imitation of an ral population was too poor to afford society. He idealized the ancient, the survey, just 1.6 percent of Portuguese young people entering the workforce deeper than attitudes toward school- old woman. the loss of little labourers to the class- agrarian, the traditional. This meant students in Toronto said that their with little training. As a 2000 study ing. For his Master’s thesis, David Anecdotally, Portuguese Canadian room. By 1912, 65.9 percent of mi- urging peasants to be satisfied with mothers had a post-secondary degree. found, “Portuguese-Canadian men Pereira interviewed about a dozen boys do seem to be dropping out at a grants from the Portuguese mainland their station—to till the fields and re- Zero percent said their fathers did. and women were the only group of young Portuguese men in Toronto higher rate than girls. (Although there were illiterate, according to David main simple and uneducated. He was Not only were first-generation European origin, to be found working and asked them what they thought isn’t any good data on this, everyone Higgs’ excellent study The Portuguese terribly successful. Today, only 30 Portuguese immigrants uneducat- disproportionately in unskilled, or it meant to be a man. “When they’re in the community whom I spoke with in Canada. percent of people in Portugal between ed—they arrived with a marrow-deep poorly-skilled occupations, amongst asked to reflect on how their commu- attested to the problem.) Girls, how- Then came Salazar. From the mo- twenty-five and sixty-four—a cohort belief that learning was secondary approximately 20 visible-minority re- nity perceives masculinity, it’s still in ever, haven’t escaped the cultural bag- ment he took power in 1932, the that came of age in the time between to work. Roger de Silveira, who was cent immigrant minorities.” these old-world ways,” Pereira said. gage of the Salazar era either. While dictator’s attitude toward education Salazarian fascism and the chaot- born in the Azorean island of Pico Jennifer Silva is an occupational “Masculinity is still very much seen she was in graduate school, Jennifer ranged from indifference to outright ic early years of democracy—have and now runs a café with his wife therapist who tutors Portuguese Ca- in terms of work, and working with Silva went to a reunion at the family hostility. He issued blithe pronounce- a high-school diploma. In Germany, in Little Portugal, summed up the at- nadian kids in her spare time. She one’s hands.” cottage. As she laid out the table for

46 47 dinner, one of her cousins blurted, Under Salazar, Portuguese par- Smirking, and without missing a Toronto’s Portuguese don’t want to be, charges end up graduating, although Still, he told me to come behind the “See, you don’t need a degree to set ents were trained to think that work beat, he said, “There isn’t any!” and don’t need to be, good at school? they don’t keep detailed statistics. The checkout desk to talk. As he rang up the table.” equaled survival and that more edu- I laughed. So, I asked, does he think Financially, they’re doing fine. staff are passionate and tireless, run- the remaining customers, he told me But the most harmful cultural cation meant less bread on the table. it’s a problem for Portuguese students Enir Bassanni, a community-rela- ning through the halls like a battal- his story. His last name is Gomes. In hang-up of the Portuguese in Toronto Although low-income immigrants to drop out of high school, as many do? tions officer with the Catholic school ion under General Patton. They have the seventies, when he was a boy, he has nothing to do with gender. Ac- from other corners of the world He shook his head. “As long as you’re board, is from Brazil and has lived been so effective with Portuguese stu- and his parents came over from Viseu, cording to many activists, parents might have once believed the same making money,” he said. “Money is in Canada for thirty-five years. His dents, in fact, that the TDSB asked a small city in northern Portugal. often have little interest in becoming thing, they later realized that such a money. A lot of construction workers wife is Portuguese. “We have to look them to take on the similarly troubled When he was fifteen, he dropped out involved in their children’s educa- strict equation doesn’t apply here. In make more money than teachers.” at what’s success,” he acknowledged. Hispanic community. of high school and got a job. He just tion. Last year, when the TDSB’s task Canada, education is a good invest- His coworker, a young woman with “If you look at strictly academics, But it’s hard to escape the feeling didn’t like school that much, and he force on Portuguese education tried ment, and advancement is attainable. pale skin and dark eyes, leaned over they are a failure. But if you look at that tutoring is life support, not a wanted to make some money. “I’m to hold a meeting for parents, just six Not easy, but, unlike in Salazar’s from the cash register and chimed in. other areas, they are okay. They have cure. The issues that make Portu- your typical pork chop,” he quipped. people showed up. Portugal, possible. To succeed in “People who go to university are los- houses, they have cars, they have pos- guese Canadian kids lag in school— Eunice Machado, who was on the Canada, you have to believe in the ing money.” sessions and they work hard.” systemic discrimination, unengaged Eric Andrew-Gee has written for the task force, says that parents don’t system. You also have to want the Okay, I said, but a lot of Portuguese Still, Bassanni thinks that the job parents, pressure to enter the work New Republic and the Daily. His previous ar- engage with educators because of an kind of success—generations getting students are dropping out of high market will soon force Portuguese force—aren’t going to be fixed by a ticle for Maisonneuve, “Our Tar-Sands Man in ingrained tendency to defer to author- progressively richer and better edu- school. 42.5 percent of them, accord- Canadians to care about education. dedicated few people dragging teenag- Washington” (Issue 42), was nominated for a ity. “There’s a huge sort of humility cated—that Canada offers. ing to one estimate. He notes the increasing demand for ers through high school and up to the National Magazine Award. Daniel stopped short. His eyes formal schooling in the workplace. “If podium at convocation. bugged out. “Are you serious?” you can’t read or write, what are you Bassani thinks he has a plan that Now, all these years later, he’s still I nodded. going to do with your BlackBerry?” gets at the root of the problem. In his an assistant manager at a fish shop. “That’s bad!” he said, shaking his he said. “You become an idiot. You’ll years at the Catholic school board, he “Yeah, that was a great step, quitting head. be living in a ghetto, and it’ll be more noticed that Portuguese Canadian stu- school,” he said bitterly. It’s the highest rate of any ethnic and more constricted by verbal com- dents were having a hard time read- “So you regret dropping out?” I group in the city, I said. munication. For the future, the com- ing. He realized that “there is no en- asked. Daniel looked bowled over. Finally munity needs to wake up and make vironment conducive to literacy in the “Anyone with a normal mind he composed himself, tilted his head that change.” house.” His solution: make parents would regret it.” to one side and said, “Even more than I asked when the change would read with their kids. Today, at eighty His boss—a stocky man with a black people?” come. elementary Catholic schools across thick mustache and a mischievous Yes, I told him, a little. “I think they will want to change the city, students have to take books glint in his eye—noticed that we were But as we continued to talk, he and when the water comes to their neck,” home and read with their parents, talking about education. “Joe’s the his coworker maintained that drop- he said, “and they have to swim.” then write a short report and have perfect person to talk to,” he said. ping out wasn’t such a big deal, as long their parents sign a contract vouching “What do you have, Joe? College, uni- as the dropouts were making money. N THE MEANTIME, there are a hand- that they took part. versity?” And that’s the thing: the dropouts are I ful of Portuguese Canadian activ- There are forty-two books in the “Yeah,” Gomes replied, grinning. making money. Many of them are car- ists trying to teach the community Family Literacy Collection—one for “I got an MBA in Portuguese seafood penters and construction workers and to tread water. Maria Rodrigues, the each phonetic sound in the Jolly Pho- stores.” plumbers. Have you ever gotten your TDSB trustee for Little Portugal and nics system, a method for teaching Our conversation turned to Gomes’ pipes fixed, or your deck renovated? environs, floated the idea of a Portu- English using sounds rather than the son, who had struggled through high It’s expensive. The average house- guese-only school in the mould of the alphabet. “Ninety-nine percent of the school. I asked Gomes if he encour- GALEGO’S FURNITURE AND APPLIANCES ON DUNDAS WEST. hold income of a Portuguese resident Africentric ones that have resulted in parents and students are doing it,” aged the boy to continue his studies. of Mississauga, a Toronto suburb, is higher test scores for black students. Bassanni said. Still, he knows that “Oh God, I wanted him to get a $80,210, slightly higher than the city The TDSB task force concluded that Jolly Phonics is not a silver bullet for degree in something,” he said. “Now? average. In Little Portugal, it’s just it was a bad idea. The people on the a problem that’s decades, if not cen- He works at Tim Hortons. Yee haw.” to the community,” Machado told me. N A SATURDAY IN APRIL, I vis- under $60,000—not lavish, but usu- task force whom I spoke with said turies, old. Of everyone I spoke to, I asked if he had helped his son “Going back in history, if you weren’t O ited Pavao, a butcher in Little ally enough to live comfortably, to it would only aggravate the ossifica- Bassanni was perhaps the most coldly with homework. He acknowledged one of the super-educated ones, you Portugal. The metallic smell of fresh own a car, to take yearly trips back tion that’s largely responsible for the realistic. When I asked what it was go- that the kid was often on his own didn’t question those in authority. meat hung in the air. It was busy, so to Europe. community’s education problem in ing to take to make Portuguese Cana- with tricky assignments. “I’d try and And a teacher had far more authority when I asked one of the store’s owners Even in poorer Little Portugal, the first place. “We’re so insular as dians succeed academically, he struck help as much as I could,” Gomes said. than you did, knew a lot more than if she was free to talk, and she told me 66.4 percent of Portuguese own their a community as it is,” Ponte told me. a biblical tone: “Generations. Time.” “But I didn’t have high school, so how you did. They’d been to university, no, I made for the exit. As I reached homes. That’s also higher than the city “So if you separate us out more, it’ll am I supposed to help with certain which was a far-off and distant thing. the door, a young man with a tanned, average. (For Portuguese in Missis- just kill us.” NE AFTERNOON, I walked into things?” So you didn’t question them.” babyish face and a bemused smile sauga, it’s a staggering 88.5 percent.) Instead, the task force recommend- O A Lota (“the auction”) Seafoods Back in the seventies, he said, the Some think the problem is too stopped me. Whatever their incomes, the majority ed a series of pleasant-sounding, small- just as things were winding down. Portuguese in Canada were poor, and rooted to fix. Marcie Ponte, who was “What do you need, man?” he of Portuguese in Toronto are effec- bore solutions in its report, delivered The pungent smell of cod filled my focused on financial stability above also on the task force, gave a full-body asked. His name was Daniel. He was tively living in big piggy banks, ready in March, such as an annual confer- nostrils. A woman mopped the floor. all else. There was a logic to drop- shrug when I raised the issue. “When wearing a white butcher’s overcoat to cash in if times get tough. When ence of Portuguese-speaking students, At the cash stood a short man with ping out—mortgages to be paid, food we started this task force, we started and a Pavao employee hat, with a most of them bought their houses, in cultural training for teachers and a a bristly beard whose nametag read to be put on the table. “Now, I don’t with, ‘We have to figure out a way to Canadian flag on one side and a Portu- the sixties and seventies, they cost a liaison between the community and “Joe.” I walked up to him and said really understand why,” Gomes said. involve parents,’” she said. “And the guese flag on the other. pittance. Now, properties in gentrify- the schools. that I was hoping to talk about educa- “Things aren’t as bad as they used to reality is, our parents don’t want to “I’m looking to talk about educa- ing Little Portugal routinely sell in the On Your Mark, the tutoring pro- tion in the Portuguese community. be.” Still, he said, with a dark chuckle, be involved. So stop beating a dead tion in Toronto’s Portuguese commu- high six figures. gram, is more ambitious. The tu- “There’s none,” he said with a snort. “it’s the same attitude: work first, horse.” nity,” I said. All of this gives pause. What if tors there told me that most of their I’d heard the joke before. knowledge later.” 

48 49 FICTION

HUSBAND By Sara Freeman.

Photograph by R ICHMOND L AM.

SARA FREEMAN, PICTURED.

50 51 I ask him if he has arthritis but he the radio he looks bright, like he did says no and reads in bed wearing my when I used to tell him mine, back bathrobe. In it, he looks gaunt and when his story and my story weren’t thin, like a little girl fighting at the one and the same. I make drawings of edge of her young life. I begin to call the apartment and plan a renovation. FALL IN LOVE and am mar- anything that the other doesn’t know, his loss. I’d like to fast-forward the him Shirley and he calls me Dr. Todd. The apartment is shaped like an L. I ried. No wedding per se, but always saving scraps of food to feed reel, like on the nature shows, flowers I think if he is a young tubercular girl am worried that something about this a feeling of forever in all the one another when we go out sepa- blooming in a titillating instant. I’m then I will be a pedophilic doctor. He is making us die. I strategize. I turn looks swapped, in all the rately, to some place with a friend. frightened by the fact that his body draws a mustache on my upper lip the living room into the bedroom, and furniture acquired. Sexless now, my At the same time, the news starts harbours so much potential change, in the black eyeliner I no longer use. the bedroom into the living room. I husband and I spend evenings play- spreading that the city has lost its old am worried about the seconds pil- He wears my nightgown and bats his turn the bed so that it is facing the Iing backgammon and pick-up sticks. mayor and gained a new one. He says ing into minutes, then hours. In the eyelashes in an exaggerated, sicken- front door instead of the back, and We sleep in and miss appointments one thing and does the other. I am mornings, I squeeze him until he ing way. I suggest I do it to him with a at night, when my husband is sleep- and birthdays. We have jobs that we confused about what a mayor does. says too hard. I lie on top of him and strap-on. He says: You’ve gone too far. I ing, I imagine what I might look like dislike to varying degrees. Then he This one shuts down hospitals and press my face against his as if I am say: We never go anywhere anymore. opening the door and walking out into begins to lose his hair, even though opens up prisons and turns the gar- trying to preserve him like petals I notice that he moves very slowly. the hallway, down the stairs, into the he is still young. And suddenly I am den centre into an ammunition ware- between the pages of a heavy book. I have no idea when this happened. I night and its streets. living with a bald man! I don’t mind a house. People are very upset. I tell the I test him regularly on the subject of have lost track of time, having nothing The prime minister is shot dead man who is losing his hair, but a man people who want me to be upset that his permanence. Would you love me if good or bad to mark its passage. He and a guy paper maches the parlia- who has lost his hair is something I am upset too. Secretly I am glad that I looked like this?—lifting my nose up drags his feet around the apartment, ment with copies of his death cer- else altogether. Fortunately, there are I have an excuse to lean in closer to so I look like a snorting sow. Do you wading through something thick. He tificate. The economy crashes and I many places in the apartment where my husband, to keep his face nearer think she’s prettier than I am?—point- suggests we go out for dinner, but plaster all of the love letters I’ve ever the light hides his baldness. In bed, for mine when we listen to the radio re- ing to a sixteen-year-old’s pert breasts when it’s time to leave, he looks down received onto the living-room wall. instance, when we are lying together, ports. Friends we have and experts on the subway. I let the hair on my at his slippers, trying to remember Some are my husband’s and say funny he looks from the side like the boy I we trust predict that something big body grow thick and maniacal and say what to do with them. He stops touch- things, from back when every word met when we both had skin that fit will have to give. My husband thinks What about now? I move a pant size ing the hairs on his head to realign he knew was chosen for me: I love you taut and smooth on our bodies, when about it all the time, is heavy with it. up, then another, and then another, them in their absence. I am convinced more than I love my mom or I dare you all of our potential lives were still He stays up asking questions into my until his are the only clothes I can quite suddenly that he is dying. I am to grow old with me. He comes home swimming around inside of us. ear: Where will we go from here? What comfortably wear. killing him! When I am back from from godknowswhere and yells that is our place in this place? The worth of I am very concerned about where work and bored, I straddle his back his love isn’t wallpaper. I tell him In “Husband,” Sara Freeman says, very it all? His attentions are divided. I try the plates should go in the kitchen and examine his pores. I dig my nails I am repurposing during a scarcity little happens and everything happens. “It is, to stick my nipple in his mouth. To cabinets and whether the apartment into the crevices, press until he yells economy, that this is what people do. on the one hand, about the end of a relationship, rub him like a chicken ready for roast- can comfortably hold another armoire. too hard. But I keep at it until the pus Doesn’t he know anything about his- about the end of a recognizable political order. ing. When I catch him looking too I begin moving his books to one side of yields. I show him the tip of my finger tory? Then I yell at him for living On the other hand, it is simply interested in the drama of minutiae—the sense of urgency that can long at a newspaper article or staying the bookshelf, as if I am preparing for and say: This is what’s inside of you. in our apartment. He says nothing emerge from living amid domestic objects.” Origi- too close to the television, I say: Look a rift. His books are thick like phone- During this period, our prime min- but leaves his socks all in a bundle nally from Montreal, Freeman is currently com- at me! It doesn’t matter what’s beyond books, with tiny print, written by men ister is the same twice. My husband on the ground next to the bed, like a pleting an MFA in fiction and literary translation right here. who are white and already dead. Mine disapproves of him both times. He booby trap for his fat woman. A trail at Columbia University in New York. Her story “In This Field, This Place” was one of two sec- When we are getting ready to go are narrow tomes that contain words reminds my husband of his PE teacher of reminders set to lead me to some ond-place winners in Maisonneuve’s 2012 Genre to this or that event, which requires like love and loss in their titles. When from high school. Both have offensive, crumpled piece of truth: I don’t love Fiction Contest. leaving our home, I watch him strug- he goes to the bookshelf to find the hypocritical bellies. Big floppy guts you anymore. I give him a crate where gle in front of the mirror, trying to book he has already read three times, that yell: Do as I say, not as I do! People he can leave his socks. But a few days I remember that time. Our begin- make two stubborn hairs stick to the I hope he’ll notice the slight but per- in line at the grocery store and the later, I wake up in the night and the ning. Mostly the colours. Saturated right side of his part. I want to tell him ceptible change in our surroundings, cafés talk about the end of something. socks are on the floor again. You’re yellows and reds calling us up the that one hair won’t make any differ- and ask me if our things have been They talk about cities and suburbs trying to kill me, I yell, and believe it. city’s mountain, keeping us there un- ence at all, that there are hundreds, moving of their own accord. Instead and their hospitals and schools sag- I get a university degree and then til nightfall. Everybody else had the maybe thousands missing. It doesn’t he returns again and then again to his ging with people and their needs. another. I learn and forget, then learn sense to go back down. We thought matter what other people think! I deathly immobility on the couch. My husband is strangely interested more and forget more. I pretend to the night would never reach us. How open the cupboards and arrange the When we met and were very young, in the feelings of others. Every time know things so that I can get a job, could it, when his skin was so bright glasses into neat rows, red cups to the he was bad at building things, like he listens to someone else’s story on have a conversation. My husband and I felt more heat than ever? But right, blue to the left. I move the oxalis bookshelves and beds, and even hang- night does come. Heavy darkness. from one side of the window ledge to ing the shower curtain was difficult. And he ruins the whole thing by being the other, testing how much sun it But I didn’t care back then, could only afraid of the tall shadows, thinking needs before its leaves wither and fall. see the things about him I wanted to the fallen leaves are shapes moving Sometimes I wake up staring at his take note of, to keep for posterity. I toward us, ready to take us away. scalp, the hairs shying away in their would spend many hours staring at He looks dead very suddenly and his centrifugal dance. I spend a lot of time his mouth, watching it as it ate and forehead, well, it’s too high in the looking at his bald patch, monitoring spoke. His eyelashes were exception- moonlight. And then he forces me to the dying out of his follicles. I picture ally long and I observed them like the ask myself: is this a man? setting up a camera in a corner of the flight of a rare bird. And his fingers. AVIS | “Do you solemnly swear on this pizza After the mountain, we do together kitchen, so that when he is eating his They contained every knowledge! D to tell the truth, the whole truth and

what we’d always done alone. We re- cereal at the table, in his upright way, Stubbier now, they are for dropping ESSA N nothing but the truth?”

fuse to watch movies apart, or learn I can get some footage, trap him in sugar onto the floor into dried clumps. VA

52 53 doesn’t believe in universities. He clean. What I mean to say is: Love me doing something! And so I start doing The woman comes back and wants perks up when he talks about the again. So we go to the community it all the time. I do it with the people I her apartment. She yells at me for end of them. He says he’d like us to centre and see a philosopher spit and was friends with and didn’t do it with breaking glasses. I tell her: We’re all join a group of people, like a sect or slur the world into a new order and I because I had a husband. After we do just trying to figure out how to live here, a clan. But the world is already its hold my husband’s hand very tightly, it, they are no longer my friends, but lady! She lacks empathy. I look for certain immutable shape. I suggest he thinking how, next to him, seated people I’ve done it with. I do it with places to go. I find people to do it with. clean under our bathtub, that this is liked this, I am happy to join in his people I meet on the subway, and in I sleep a few hours, pretending that where our troubles live. He says no, struggle. When we get home we try cafés, and in bookstores. I miss dead- the stranger and I are husband and he doesn’t want to spend his time un- to make love, but once I am on top of lines and sleep in late. Some say I love wife. I yell take your socks off. Why? I der our bathtub! He wants us to stand him, the bald patch glares up at me you as if I am their mother or sister want to slip on them. Why? I try to slip outdoors with placards—to yell and like a glistening moon and his body or both. Some don’t, because I am just on their socks, but it’s plain that slip- tap and chant. I say no, I don’t want us is like Saran wrap, dry and sticky someone they are doing it with. They ping can’t be done that way. to yell out there with all those other and suffocating. I try to kiss his bald touch my chin and say pretty you or One evening, my husband stops bodies. Isn’t my body enough? patch, but he is embarrassed, lifts his slap me across the face. I know that I by the café, as if he isn’t dead, when I compromise. We go to meetings knees up to his chest and hums a song am pregnant or at least have a disease. I am taking muffins out of their pan. where we sit cross-legged and talk from his childhood, back when he had I think about my diseased baby and His hair has grown back, to cover about the beginning of some new way all that hair. The next day we wake up how I will love him no matter what. up the spot we fallowed together. He of arranging things. I insist on sitting late again and call in sick and eat food That I will have to be mother and fa- is thicker. I can tell he’s been lifting next to him, move the cushions around brought to us on Styrofoam plates. ther to that sick child. heavy objects, building things for his so there is no centimetre left between One day, I stub my toe on the bed I hear on the radio that my hus- epileptic. Things have really started us, no crack to fall into. There is a and decide that’s it. It’s spring and the band is in love with an epileptic. He happening for me. He tells me about woman there who looks just like a apartment and all of the objects we’ve has become famous for being a leader, his commitment to the cause, about peach—soft and sweet, blond hairs on acquired have turned their backs on for collecting people to love him. She the epileptic and her commitment her face that light her up in gold. She me. The bathtub points its stubby has long hair and looks like a woman to him. He tells me that he and the looks at my husband as if she would finger, the bookshelf elbows me to get from a cartoon. I think of them hav- epileptic are going to pitch tents in like to wrap him around her neck like the fuck out of here, all of the sharp ing seizures together, clinging to one front of some company that makes a thick scarf and furrow into him. edges yelling we’ll kill you. I move another between jolts. At the same the world the shithole it is. He tells She calls me sister and my husband them into the centre of the room, pile time, things start happening. First me I should join them. I say nothing. brother. We go home and I say: Did all of my husband’s things up as if he a slight but perceptible change, then Don’t you care about anything? I care you see that peach? She wanted you to is moving out too. I rummage through big changes, but I miss most of them. about him. I tell him that I’m very take a bite. He doesn’t say anything. the laundry hamper to find my dirty I miss the news about the protests. I busy doing things. What can be more He goes to bed and lies very straight. underwear and socks and oversized t- do it with a waiter, who says, between important than making this place liv- I move the couch to the opposite end shirts—our sweaty things all mingled pants: The revolution has started! I as- able? I get very near to him, so he can of the room and turn the table over so and tied up in knots. I watch myself sume he’s repeating something from smell me, so I can smell him. But he that it looks like a ship, moored but leave, out through the front door, and pornography. I feel it, I say. I miss the doesn’t give off any odours anymore. ready to take me away with it. I watch then I do it, and then it’s done. dissolution of the parliament. I miss His pores have been stopped up. my husband sleep, look at the apart- Husbandless, I don’t know what to the temporary governments and the He leaves. Nobody comes in or out ment from this angle. I watch him do. I don’t know what anything does. debates taking place in the parks and of the café, not even the girls who are until morning when he wakes and What a job does. Or a bus, or a sink, or parking lots. I miss the look of the meant to be working with me that day. reads, picks his nose quickly, as if he a kitchen cabinet. I try to love my job. shopping malls when they are torn Nobody has ever been in the café but suspects that there are cameras set up To watch television like I mean it. To down and turned back into nothing. me. I look at the door and imagine it to catch him. I move the couch back to read every word as if it’s been chosen I rent an apartment, live in some- opening and closing. I hear noises in the other side of the room. It faces the for me. I drink as if the world depends one else’s things. It’s unclear when the street, cheering, yelling, singing. I window and another couple’s apart- on my drunkenness. I am at a bar and the owner is coming back. She tells me turn the radio on. The radio present- ment, where there’s a kitchen table I meet a man and tell him I’ve nev- before leaving that the cities are dead, er sounds animated, like he’s being and two mouths pried open by some er done anything before, have never that they are being flattened out and chased. The words are the shapes of small tender joke. known what anything does. He likes expanded and that their downtowns words but they bounce off of me, don’t Let’s do something, I say one night, that and so we do it. Once I’ve done it and suburbs were arbitrary measures stick. I turn the dial. I hear music. I when the dishes are in their cabinets with him, I feel better, like I have done and can just as easily be undone. She think about my husband, about the and we have wiped all of the surfaces something for someone else. Here I am and others she knows live on trains shape of us, two pieces fitting together now—the only way to live is not to but still so much resistance. I hear the let the stillness settle in. In her apart- crashing of windshields outside the ment, I let everything pile up, limp café. I turn the music up. I hear voices and savage. I work evenings in a café in unison, chanting nearby. I turn the so I can sleep during the day. There music up again. The café is having a are a few girls who work there wear- seizure. The chairs and the tables are ing ethnic headscarves. They have slipping and tilting into a different ar- big tattoos on their chests, screaming rangement. I sit down and think how imperatives: DISMANTLE! SEEK! DIS- I am husbandless, how I will have to SOLVE! They whisper about pickets, raise that sick child. But seated like | “Do you know how fast you AVIS D and blowing up cars and the end of this, I think that there is time yet to were going?”

ESSA prisons, but I am glad not to hear do something about it, about all of the N

VA them over the hissing steel machines. other things too. 

54 55 POETRY

Two Poems BY • RICARDO STERNBERG•

Skills The Bench

The melancholy of fulfillment? The sea moves its blue shuttle Not something he was overly coming to shore and then receding familiar with though he recalled then coming again and each time that around age eight, after months it recedes it hoards away more light of rigorous practice he mastered as it weaves this winter evening three nifty moves on the yo-yo when he decided to come down that briefly made him prince and take the show slowly in: of the playground but since then: the egrets, the buffleheads, the snowy plover, the pelicans nada and perhaps, because of the chill, no one is there to see him slump or rather, decades of a dry spell light-headed, light-hearted, wondering so when that second marriage hit a reef what would become of that boy and began to take on water standing across the dark waters faster than either cared to bail, feeding out line to the small kite he knew precisely the protocols that stutters in the wind then rises (here at last was expertise!) as the sun finally sinks of undoing the binding knots and the roads of the world grow dark. then deftly captained their pirogue to the bottom of the sky-blue ocean.

Illustration by J A S ON R ATLIFF. RICARDO STERNBERG IS THE AUTHOR OF THREE BOOKS OF POETRY: THE INVENTION OF HONEY (SIGNAL EDITIONS), MAP OF DREAMS AND BAMBOO CHURCH (MCGILL-QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY PRESS). HE TEACHES BRAZILIAN AND PORTUGUESE LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO.

56 57 WRITING FROM ! UEBEC We’ve been striking, or boycott- ing—call it what you want—for over six weeks now. It’s been over six weeks that we’ve marched in ever- growing numbers, that we’ve or- ganized events—each more original IF than the last—and that we’ve out- done ourselves trying to find the way YOU DON’T READ to protest the hike in tuition fees, all by remaining peaceful, not too both- maisonneuve.org, ersome. HERE’S WHAT But when a group of students walked from Montreal to Quebec City over the course of a week, they YOU were told that they were chasing pipe dreams and that their actions were HAVE BEEN MISSING: worthless. When a few people decid- ed to jump the fence of the National Assembly during a demonstration in “It’s not always a privilege, being a mishmash, the way we make it sound Quebec City, they were told they’d put when we talk about the Canadian mosaic—being a cultural hybrid doesn’t turn the security of the police in jeopardy you into some give-peace-a-chance tree all ornamented with cultural icons.” and that the pepper spray and tear gas —“A Voice Answering a Voice” used against them were justified. We M ELISSA BULL are called irresponsible, we are ac- cused of committing “violent’’ acts, • • • and these accusations justify clubbing “London 2012 was sold as a regeneration scheme for the city’s East End, as us, deafening us with bombs, arrest- if the entire city weren’t already a cash-flush investment haven for Russian ing and insulting us for the sake of oligarchs and Gulf sheiks looking for places to dump their money.” Pipe Dreams “protecting the citizens.’’ —“The London Olympics and At the start of Quebec’s student strike, Valérie Darveau We students are regarded as being the Pastoral Myth” C HRISTOPHER SZABLA didn’t support disruptive protests. But after weeks of seeing second-class citizens; as if we were a the movement’s ideas dismissed, she changed her mind. group of bright idealists having a little • • • freak-out, and as if we’ll calm down “We locked Stanley up first. Then we all gathered and watched the fire consume when we’ve really understood the cost This article was originally published by École de la his cabin hungrily. He’d been the easiest to trap and then throw in the fire, the one of living. That’s when we’ll be “real whose scream had quickly turned into the most girlish, unraveled complaint.” montagne rouge in March. Translation by Melissa Bull. citizens.’’ But we buy things, we vote, we pay our rent, our tuition. And —“In This Field, This Place” we’ll be footing the bill when the ba- SARA F REEMAN Illustration by C HERYL VOIS INE. by boomers are in their government- • • • funded retirement homes. We are both “Any semi-conscientious observer from English Canada would be bewildered AT AROUND ELEVEN O’CLOCK this morning, the sharp ring of the today’s and tomorrow’s citizens. by the mix of shoddy journalism and anti-strike analysis put forth by the CBC over phone pierced the quiet of my apartment. My father’s aggravat- We’re a generation filled with hopes, the last eighty-odd days of student actions.” ed voice was on the other end of the line. dreams and idealism. Perhaps our par- —“Why is the CBC Doing Such a Terrible “You didn’t go and block the bridge this morning, did you?’’ ents’ cynicism has served as a coun- Job of Covering the Student Strike?”

“No, Dad...’’ terexample: we look at Quebec today F RED BURRILL This morning at dawn, students blocked the Champlain Bridge. Again. with a single wish—to shake it up. The last time students blocked a bridge was February 23, at the onset of So for six weeks now, we’ve Quebec’s student strike, and it was carried out in exemplary peace.Still,watch- Still, watch- marched, shouted and sung in the BLOGS NEWS ing the news that night, I hadn’t been able to contain my frustration with the streets, attempting to create dialogue. CURRENT ISSUE BACK ISSUES thoughtless handful of students who’d managed to completely shift media cov- In reply, we have received a categor- erage away from the main event with their misbehaviour. Their misconduct ical “no.’’ We’re mocked, we’re played EXCLUSIVE ONLINE CONTENT looped over and over the news that night, and did nothing to rally sympathy an endless loop of doing-our-share jar- from the everyday commuters stuck in their cars at rush hour. gon, until the impact of our movement It’s true that maybe, in that throng of drivers, there was someone with an is diminished and our actions are tar- FACEBOOK.COM/MAISONNEUVEMAGAZINE important appointment to keep. And it’s true that kids must have waited for nished with the word “violence.’’ TWITTER.COM/MAISONNEUVEMAG their mothers at their after-school programs well past 6 PM that night. And it’s Blocking a bridge isn’t a violent ac- also true that there could have been people who needed to get to the hospital tion. Far from it. Blocking a bridge is in a hurry that day. what’s called an act of civil disobedi- maisonneuve.org Last February, just a few days after the strike started, I felt that students had ence. And if we’ve done it, it’s because gone too far in blocking the Jacques Cartier Bridge. And I had the impression that’s where we’re at. Because it’s CONNECT TO THE WORLD that all of our efforts to make the strike a national success had been drowned been six weeks that we’ve been trying OUTSIDE YOUR BRAIN out by that handful of students. to be heard. Because our pipe dreams But that’s not what I think today. aren’t cutting it. 

58 59 PROFILE The next day, after a dramatic res- cue (even the RCMP got involved), Cage listened to a piece by a student at the workshop and had an epiph- any. “Hearing several recordings of SOUND OF SILENCE D E P T . his music, was struck by difference between sections, no transitions,” Cage’s journal reads. “Suggested car- rying this to extreme (Satie, McLu- han, newspaper): not bothering with cadences.” In music, cadences are resolutions of harmony that serve as JOHN CAGE’S signposts. Doing away with them, as Cage wanted, is much like doing CANADA away with punctuation in writing. It means that listeners are likely to feel The twentieth century’s most important avant-garde disoriented. composer may have been American, Crystal Chan writes, but Audiences still struggle with Cage’s he found his greatest inspiration north of the border. music for exactly this reason. After returning from Emma Lake, he wrote Variations VI, a work that exemplifies the difficult experience of listening to ABOVE: MARCEL AND ALEXINA “TEENY” DUCHAMP JOIN CAGE FOR A PERFORMANCE Cage. Variations VI, which premiered OF REUNION IN TORONTO IN 1968. at what is now the Art Gallery of On- OPPOSITE: JOHN CAGE POSES FOR A PORTRAIT SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH. tario in 1966, is a hodgepodge of elec- tronic circuitry, microphones, radio, ON A THURSDAY NIGHT in August to the piece is: how is that music? But tape and TV. It is maddeningly noisy 1961, Cage took the podium at Mon- the score doesn’t actually ask for si- and hard to navigate. But that may treal’s Théâtre de la Comédie-Cana- lence. It asks the performer to avoid have been Cage’s intention. He hoped dienne and moved his arms in a cir- making intentional sounds—with the that his music would encourage peo- cle, imitating the hands of a clock. In goal of highlighting the impossibility ple to live and think freely by paying response, eighteen musicians began of that task. In a concert hall, people attention to chaos. Cage understood to play. The piece, called Atlas Eclip- are waiting to listen. So they do. Inev- that liberty can feel, at first, like get- ticalis, was Cage’s first Canadian pre- itably, there’s ambient noise. ting lost. miere, and he had written it by match- These “silent” pieces culminated From the sixties through the eight- ing notes to star positions in an astro- in Reunion, a work Cage premiered at ies, Cage traveled to Canada frequent- nomical atlas. At the time, the whole Toronto’s Ryerson Theatre in 1968. ly. As David Rosenboom, who often world had its eyes on the stars; earlier During the five-hour-long perfor- played Cage’s music north of the bor- that spring, a Soviet cosmonaut had mance, TV screens showing videos der, says, “He loved the landscape be- beaten the Americans to space. Com- of Marshall McLuhan surrounded the cause it was vast and flat, like looking posing music with the help of astron- audience; onstage, Cage and Marcel on a white canvas—this very open omy was still an eccentric method, Duchamp played chess. Chess is typi- plain on which you could imagine though, and one that marked an im- cally a silent game, but the room was things.” Or, as Cage put it in the Em- portant shift in Cage’s career. After filled with sounds: as the two men ma Lake diary, “No tundra, neverthe- Atlas Eclipticalis, Cage moved away made their moves, they triggered elec- less a northern sense of heightened from writing music with notes, rests tronic samples.

Photographs by S TEV EN SPELIOTIS and SHIGEKO K UBOTA. well-being.” and other conventional symbols. In- In this way, Cage showcased his Of course, the composer was al- stead, he went on to create graphic most famous concept: freeing music so inspired by other cultures. He fa- scores—essentially, drawn music— from itself. He had already set out mously used the I Ching, a Chinese and write textual instructions. He this idea in his first book, 1961’s Si- OHN CAGE WAS LOST IN THE WOODS. It was the eve- text, to generate music partly com- started to see himself as a creator of lence. “The use of noise to make music ning of August 23, 1965, and the American composer posed by chance. But it was in Cana- experiences through sound, rather will continue and increase until we was in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan, to give a lecture at da that Cage, a lifelong critic of main- than a composer of music. reach a music produced through the an artists’ workshop. Although he’d briefly strayed off stream American society, felt free This method led to 1962’s 0’00”. aid of electrical instruments, which course on a mushroom-hunting expedition a week ear- to premiere some of his most ambi- That work’s score is just an instruc- will make available for musical pur- ST lier, he hadn’t learned his lesson. “Found a large stand U tious, career-defining works, includ- tion: “In a situation provided with poses any and all sounds that can be TR of Hydnum repandum. When others left for a nearby ing his most explicitly political piece. maximum amplification (no feed- heard,” he wrote. “Whereas, in the lake, refused to leave,” he wrote in his journal that AGE “I think he felt that the new music back), perform a disciplined action.” past, the point of disagreement has N C

night. “Arranged to meet on road at 4:00. 3:30 started OH scene here was much more open and The musician can do nearly anything. been between dissonance and conso- back. 4:00 hurried. 6:30 lost. Yelling, startled moose. J giving in those days than it was many The piece is also known as 4’33” No. nance, it will be, in the immediate fu- THE 8:00 darkness, soaked sneakers; settled for the night places in the States,” says Larry Lake, 2, in reference to Cage’s best-known ture, between noise and so-called mu- OF on squirrel’s midden. (Family of birds; wind in the Y a longtime technical advisor. Canada composition, 4’33”. When 4’33” is per- sical sounds.”

trees, tree against tree; woodpecker.)” Alone in the RTES helped free Cage’s music from conven- formed, the musician is silent; nothing With his three silent pieces, as with U O

muskeg, Cage noticed every movement, every sound. C tion and control. happens. The near-universal response Variations VI, Cage tried to draw at- J 60 61 tention to the unexpected. He wanted From the start, McLuhan and Cage to, where he encountered “this rather can do his or her own thinking.” It is an encyclopedic soundscape of to provide opportunities for people to had bonded over their love of James friendly man” in the washroom. “We Here again was Cage’s fascination everyday life, and the most bewilder- change their minds about what they Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Not surpris- got out to the hallway and he asked me with quietness and free thought. Al- ingly comprehensive work that Cage Get excited! Get very excited! thought were no-brainers: that silence ingly, it’s a confusing, esoteric text. what I was there for,” Rosenberger re- though Lecture on the Weather was ever wrote. “The oratorio is in the isn’t noise, that noise isn’t music, that Cage had first read it serialized as calls. “I said, ‘I’m here to audition for supposed to commemorate the Decla- church; but the roaratorio is every- maisonneuve a chessboard isn’t a musical instru- a teenager in Paris, where he’d run a piece for John Cage.’ He goes, ‘Well, ration of Independence, Cage clearly thing outside the church,” he said. Ro- Issue 46 • Winter 2012 ment. As he once said in an interview, away to be a writer after dropping out I’m John Cage.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, do I get wasn’t interested in patriotism. Be- aratorio is a musical recreation of the ON NEWSSTANDS DECEMBER 14, 2012 he wanted to “show that something of university. McLuhan was working the part?’” fore the broadcast, he told listeners chaos of everyday life; such disorder that is not music is music.” on a book that argued that the “thun- Rosenberger had answered an au- that, as a child, he wrote a speech that represents the ultimate freedom from ders”—ten hundred-letter words—in dition call for American men living “proposed silence on the part of the control. Cage hoped that Roaratorio EDMONTON!BORN Marshall McLu- Finnegans Wake described the evolu- in Canada. A new piece, Lecture on U.S.A.,” which he read at the Holly- would open listeners to the “poetry han, whose image Cage broadcast dur- tion of human technology. McLuhan the Weather, which drew on many wood Bowl after winning a contest. and chaos” of Finnegans Wake. Most ing Reunion, happened to be a friend suggested that Cage write a piece of aspects of Atlas Borealis, would fea- “One of the greatest blessings that the people can hear the chaos in his music. of the composer’s. They had met in music featuring the text of the thun- ture those men reciting excerpts from United States could receive in the near The trick is to hear the poetry. 1965 following a few months of ex- ders. The epic work would be called Henry David Thoreau’s writings, in- future would be to have her industries Why did Cage write such chal- changing letters. “For several years Atlas Borealis with Ten Thunderclaps, cluding Walden and Essay on Civil halted, her business discontinued, her lenging music? It’s a common ques- 46 now, your work is in my mind and and it would be a sonic torrent, blend- Disobedience. Speakers would blast re- people speechless,” he had written. tion, and the answer can be found in entering into what I do and think,” ing the words with recordings of actu- corded thunderstorms as projections “We should be hushed and silent, and the compositions themselves. Chaos Cage initially wrote. It wasn’t surpris- al storms and electronic sounds. Like of Thoreau’s manuscripts flashed in we should have the opportunity to creates open ears, open eyes, open ing that the first man to write musical Atlas Eclipticalis, it would be written imitation of lightning. The CBC had learn what other people think.” hearts. In 1981, he told Toronto jour- *** scores for electronics was bewitched with a star map. commissioned the work to mark the In 4’33”, 0’00” and Reunion, Cage’s nalist Michael Schulman much the by the herald of the information age. In the fall of 1967, McLuhan moved American bicentennial, and Cage theory of silence posited that listeners same thing: “Music can open the THE RISE OF THE Though McLuhan was only a year old- to New York, where Cage lived, for a wanted sensory overload. should notice what they’d previous- mind to things which it wasn’t certain ANADIAN er than Cage, the composer neverthe- year. Cage began to say that he was Wearing the same scruffy black ly ignored. With Lecture, Cage politi- that it liked,” he said. “Being pleasing C less saw him as a mentor. “It was like “studying with” McLuhan. He also outfit at each rehearsal, unshaven and cized this idea. Thoreau wrote Civil is the exact opposite of changing and POLICE STATE striking flint against a piece of metal,” told the University of Illinois that he’d chain-smoking, he hovered over the Disobedience to protest slavery and US of revolution.” Andrea Bennett McLuhan’s son Eric says. “When they submit Atlas Borealis for its centen- proceedings. After receiving direc- imperialism, and Cage used Lecture to From 4’33” to Roaratorio and be- got together, they sparked ideas.” nial commission. But in November, tions from Cage, a technician, as- plead for Americans to rethink the en- yond, Cage tried to convince listen- — McLuhan underwent brain surgery to tounded, asked, “You want me to run tire system upon which their country ers to simply listen. And, whether in remove a tumour. It was, at the time, how many channels of sound?” CBC was built. the form of a strange new landscape, Crystal Chan is the managing editor of the longest neurological operation ever Radio premiered Lecture on the Weath- The CBC prompted Cage to cre- a pacifist attitude or an innovative IS La Scena Musicale, a group of arts magazines. Her previous article for Maisonneuve was performed. He suffered extreme pain er on June 15, 1976, and replayed it ate his most overtly political piece of mentor and friend, Cage often found EGG DONATION “Death in a French Class” (Issue 44). and memory loss, and visits between on Independence Day. “It was unlike music. He seemed to believe that on- the inspiration to do so in Canada. the two men temporarily grew less anything that ever had been heard of,” ly a Canadian broadcaster and audi- He came here until the end of his DANGEROUS? frequent. Atlas Borealis slowed down, Rosenberger says. ence would accept such a work, and life. There were performances, inter- Alison Motluk Like Cage, McLuhan thought that too; Cage didn’t complete the work in The CBC had wanted an American he said, of the Lecture commission, views, recordings; he traveled from artists opened eyes. An artist should time for the Illinois commission. But reference point and suggested Benja- “Since it came from Canada, I accept- Montreal to Vancouver. — help people “notice what the condi- McLuhan’s and Cage’s thinking con- min Franklin, but Cage picked Tho- ed immediately.” Cage never stopped working to- tions are in which they live and try to tinued to overlap. McLuhan’s surgery reau. In an introduction to the work, Cage wanted his art to make a dif- ward revolution through music, and ARPER S AR ON work,” Eric says of his father’s ideas. had made him hypersensitive to nois- Cage linked the writer to his own ideas ference. In Canada, he felt liberated to he kept up his Canadian connections H ’ W “In other words, pay attention to all es that one would normally ignore. about silence: “Music, [Thoreau] said, use music to promote social change. until the end. In the summer of 1992, STRIPPERS the things that they are accustomed to “We’d be walking down the street is continuous; only listening is inter- “If art were more socially effective,” only one month before Cage died of a Ryan Healey ignoring.” The two men also shared and he’d stop and say, ‘Did you hear mittent.” Elsewhere, Cage compared he said, “then it could be the pleasing stroke, Robert Aitken, a friend and the conviction that “the medium is that?’” says Rosenboom. “He’d notice Thoreau and McLuhan. “In [McLu- alternative to holocaust. It could per- the director of New Music Concerts — the message,” a concept McLuhan had every change in the soundscape.” In han’s] writings I like the way he leaps suade people (all of them) to change in Toronto, offered to commission a famously unpacked in 1964’s Under- effect, McLuhan was forced to live in- from one paragraph to the next with- their minds.” work. Cage was still in high demand, standing Media. This was in line with side Cage’s philosophy. out transition,” he wrote. “This also but he wanted to make room in his ANIMALS ON DISPLAY Cage’s thinking: he hoped that his mu- happens in the Journal of Henry Da- IN JANUARY 1982, Cage arrived in To- schedule. He wrote to Aitken: Emily Keeler sic’s meaning would arise from the IN LATE 1975, James Rosenberger was vid Thoreau. Each one leaves space in ronto for the first fully staged produc- very act of experiencing it, of being at the CBC Radio building in Toron- his work in which a reader, stimulated, tion of Roaratorio, a work he original- — shocked and confused. McLuhan lent ly composed for West German radio in Cage the academic theory (and bom- 1978. Though McLuhan had died two So good to hear from you. I don’t AGAINST TUMBLR bastic epigrams) to back up his beliefs. years earlier and never got to see it, Cage gushed about McLuhan in the Roaratorio is a tribute to the theorist, know what to suggest unless it John Semley Toronto Star; the Globe and Mail re- and it features all the elements of At- be that I write a new piece for ferred to Cage as the “Musical McLu- las Borealis, the unfinished work that you. Circumstances alone have — han.” But perhaps McLuhan’s biggest McLuhan and Cage once dreamt up. kept me from doing that in recent influence on Cage came in the form In the live performance of Roaratorio, Plus plenty more! of a suggestion for a new work, one voices chant excerpts from Finnegans years. Now it seems possible… that would confound the composer over a dizzying, sixty-four-track

AVIS Wake | “Welcome to Walmart!” for years, and that eventually evolved D mesh of sounds mentioned in the As ever, into two of his most important Cana- ESSA book, including thunderstorms, cry- N  dian premieres. VA ing babies, car horns and birdsong. John

62 63 LETTER FROM MONTREAL

The Striking Life By Michael Nardone.

Illustration by M ICHEL H ELLMAN.

IT IS JULY 22, and my daughter and have taken to the streets in support of sue of access to higher education in I are marching through Montreal in the student strike and against Bill 78, the future, no matter how the ballots protest of Quebec’s planned universi- the government’s emergency measure have been cast. I am not eager to see ty tuition hike. Together with a hun- to limit the right to assemble. Resi- candidates use this strike to cover up dred thousand others, we walk from dents in many of the city’s neighbour- the Liberal government’s history of the Grande Bibliothèque to Concor- hoods have organized autonomous as- corruption, nor to watch the ideas for dia University, up to Sherbrooke, past semblies to plan strike-related events which students have fought get lost in McGill, and then back home to the and address community concerns a blitz of politicking. Plateau. within the framework of the stu- Along the way, she and I talk about dent movement. Meanwhile, student Michael Nardone is the poetry editor of what brought these people into the groups have networked across Quebec Hobo magazine, the assistant editor of Jacket2 streets to march beside us, about what and beyond to spread their message. and a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Inter- it means—as a student, as a citizen— In response, gatherings and demon- disciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at to be on strike. I tell her that if lead- strations in support of the strike have Concordia University. ers refuse to address an issue that taken place in New York, Vancouver, many people feel is important, then Seattle, Oakland, London and Paris. Tonight, having tucked my daugh- those people call for a halt to all oth- Still, here, in the heat of midsum- ter into bed after a long conversa- er pursuits until the leaders address mer, it’s uncertain where the move- tion about all the songs and chants the issue. ment will go next. Between the time we heard this afternoon, I stay awake But I can’t explain to my daughter I write this and the day in Septem- imagining what will happen. I feel a that, over the last few months, dur- ber when these words will be read, mesh of conflicting sentiments. I don’t ing peaceful demonstrations like to- an election will have been called. Pol- know what the outcome of the move- day’s, I’ve been pepper-sprayed and iticians will have waged their cam- ment will be, but I have great hope in beaten with batons; that I’ve had to paigns. The student demonstrations the convergence of so many people run from charging battalions of riot will have risen to their greatest am- who want to effect change. I hope that police; that I’ve seen fellow protesters plitude yet, or not. We will have vot- the spirit of these challenging and and bystanders bludgeoned, kicked ed, or not. ecstatic times will continue to reso- and cuffed. I can’t explain that this I am curious to see how the strike nate—beyond elections, beyond the brutality is in response to the desire and the mass demonstrations against lines of riot police—throughout our to make education accessible, and that Premier Jean Charest’s government society.  it occurs in spite of the right to public- will inform the platforms of the po- ly articulate that desire. litical parties. But more important Please send submissions for this column to Hundreds of thousands of people for me is how we will take up the is- [email protected].

64