My lover is a tsabra,
So tough, with prickles too.
She’s loud and has opinions,
She expects a lot from you.
My lover is a tsabra,
Israeli-born and Jew,
She weeps for others suffering,
She’ll hold the line for you.
She’s funny, smart and tender,
She laughs with all she’s got.
She’s fierce for women’s freedom—
I think she’s smokin’ hot.
She is, too. all that, and then some…
A Canadian Border Guard was shot today. Around 2 pm, I heard a story on the radio. I thought at first it was maybe someone trying to get across the border illegally, I don’t know, maybe someone angry about having to pay duty–but then I heard that the victim was a woman, and that the attacker then shot himself.
“This highlights the dangers that Canadian Border Services Employees face every day” said a somber official for the CBS.
No it doesn’t.
It highlights the dangers that women face every day. Especially women who are in relationships with men.
Which is pretty much all of us.
I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the guy who shot that woman was her current or ex lover or husband. Maybe a pissed-off co-worker, former boss, or subordinate of hers.
they always do this, the news people and official spokespeople. They always try to tell us that an attack motivated by sexism is NOT THAT AT ALL. It was the individual act of an unhinged person. It was a ‘crime of passion’. Oh, maybe it was violence against women, but it was cultural.
Sure, yea. Patriarchal culture.
the shooters’ gun was aimed at a Canadian border guard, not a woman. He might just as easily have driven up to a booth staffed by a man.
sure. but he didn’t, because he was aiming for her.
In the hours and days to come, we’ll learn the truth. Maybe they were married. Maybe the news people will say, it was ‘domestic abuse’ — or ‘spousal assault’ . Stalking. Some other tepid vague phrase that disappears the fact of men’s hate crimes against women.
We’re not falling for it.
Save the date:
this morning over breakfast Mom said, “I used to get up at 7, get breakfast for your Dad and me, shower, do my hair and walk to work to be there in time to start the breakfast program at eight.” she sighed and looked down at her “ode to oatmeal” and said, “now it takes me that long just to shower, never mind any of the rest of it.”
I’ve been home for a few days now, and the sky is magnificent and varied. We drove from Calgary toward and beside and under a gloomy stormy sky–but the storm was somewehre else–looked like rain a few miles to the west for most of the way. it’s been hot hot humid–”sultry” my mom calls it. At night the thunder rumbles in and lightening rents the sky and the rain falls in big fat drops. Not like the constant mist of the West Coast winters i’m used to now.
yesterday i went for a run along the river, and there were fallen leaves on the path. they were lying like upturned bowls filled with last night’s rain water. there were traces of water slipping into the dry cracks of the clay baked trails by the river. The smell of the cottonwoods was sweet and dry. I heard the songs of many birds. usually now in the city there are only crows and jays. Corvids. But in my hometown, there are still songbirds trilling here and there. i remember their songs from my childhood, but I don’t remember the names of the birds.
As Mom and I were driving along 67th this morning, we passed by a dead deer. She was young, looked like. lying on the side of the road against the grassy hillside, her head grazing the gutter. sudden tears stung my eyes, but I swallowed and they stayed back. Mom didn’t see, i told her about it. she said, “oh, that’s sad”, and started telling another story about another road trip she and i had taken. I was driving then, as I was today. It was late at night and we were returning from visiting Grandma in Swift Current. as we left the highway to go into town toward home, we came upon another slain deer–this one on the highway, this one newly killed, and the police and animal control people already there, i think. I don’t remember. Mom remembered. She said it was good i was driving, I reacted fast enough to slow and change lanes. the police had not yet set up traffic controls to redirect the traffic coming from the highway.
it’s like this. mom tells stories about small things that happened; gossip about the neighbours; the daily little miracles of kindness that people perform for her; scattered between reminisceses of her youth. I ask for some details, “what year was that? Were you and [her brother] Jim close then? When did you first make potato salad?”
I want to keep all of it, remember all of these things. The way she used to knead bread dough; the timbre of her voice; the shape of her hands; the way she laughs. i find myself impatient with her continual small stories, like a stream of consciousness running through the still summer air. I know I won’t have her for long, and i want to be patient and loving. Even when i am impatient because she forgets things now, or tells the same story day after day sometimes; or because she moves so slow now. it’s not really impatience, I think–i think it’s fear– a kind of prelude to grieving. She gave me life and saved it over and over again, and there is nothing I can do to save her, or releive her present suffering.
Last week, my brother said, “you’ve come a long way since spending summers in an oxygen tent”. he was proud of me for running those obstacle races and triathlons. Mom said, when i told her that, she said, “Oh, he was alwasy so worried about you when you’d go into the hospital.”
I didn’t know before now about his worry. I didn’t think of his reaction at all. My little brother, sensitive and tender, of course he would worry–even if I was often mean to him–I was his sister. I wish I’d been a better sister to him. I have another chance now–to be good to our mom, to be proud of my brother and loving with him and my sister-in-law. we’re all grown-ups now, and responsible.
Home is always kind of bittersweet for the nostalgic. there’s no way to go back. Every time i come thre are new roads over my memories. another building down, and i can’t remember what was there before. I am a ghost now, haunting this present place.
Mom will be waiting for me, she’s done her physiotherapy appointment now. So i’ll go pick her up, then i’ll go to the gym for a couple of hours. .
Hello, Beautiful People. Easilyriled here. I haven’t written anything ANYTHING (besides comments on students’ papers and the odd email, oh, and a few dozen text messages–but that ain’t really writting) for months. It’s been a whirlwind around here. So, I tell you what–in the last few months, i’ve todl stories at a Senior’s home in the West End of Vancouver; started doing the Grouse Grind once a week with a friend from school (the grind is a terrible thing. so steep it’s almost upside-down, and in the early morning, populated almost exclusively by very buff people of all ages, wearing hardly any clothes and earbuds and going faster than necessary–looking all fresh and tidy even near the top when we are all sweaty and disheveled and wheezing. once a week we do this. one wonders); been to a conference in Kitchener-Waterloo (where i had a lot of questions and comments from women about my poster that showed some of the stories of the women I interviewed for my study about harm reduction policy and anti-violence and social-service practice in relation to prostitution–and not a whisper from men); said goodbye to a solid mentor and friend–a pioneer for women in Canadian Theatre, Jackie Crossland; had the honour of serving as MC at her last show on June 17th; swam in the ocean a couple of times, and only wheezed a little bit; and started teaching a course called “Social Foundations of Education” for secondary school art teachers. Also gone to the gym, cleaned off my balcony in preparation for major repairs (an Herculean task, let me tell you), started work on a history project of a significant Canadian feminist organization, and met nearly weekly with my dear friend Sue to write memoir.
Teaching, teaching is consuming. I love it love it love it. And it’s frightening and exhausting and energizing. For this course, we’re reading Jonathon Kozol’s book, The Night is Dark and I am Far from Home: A bold inquiry into the values and goals of America’s schools. It’s been out of print for 20 years. the first edition came out in 1975; the second in 1990. His tone is damning. Strident. Outraged. His analysis, that America’s schools train the children of the wealthy to become “ethical incompetents”; to become disengaged from the suffering of others; and to rest (sometimes uneasily) with their wealth and privilege and accept they are impotent.
Kozol wrote this book 40 years ago. The civil rights movement was deeply influential. the women’s liberation movement was gaining ground. the people were becoming politicized and even the wealthy were starting to take notice–were starting to become uncomfortable with their comfort.
Now when we talk in my class about class, and sex and race–when we excavate to the roots of oppression and begin to reveal to each other our place in ‘the matrix’– it’s rattling. Some of my students are angry with me. “It’s not my fault I have all this stuff” some of them write in their essays. “my parents worked hard and made sacrifices so I would have a good life”, they say. They are angry with me for ‘making them feel guilty’.
Not all of them, though. it’s okay to feel uncomfortable, i’ll say. Your feelings are fine–sit with them a while. And keep reading and talking and looking around.
Hey, there’s a guy walking in front of the building i’m in with a giant British flag. the Summer Olympics are going on, I guess he’s celebrating something.
But it’s not enough to read and talk and think, either. It’s important to act. and they’re going to be TEACHERS–One of my storytelling friends, Dunc, he came to my class and he told them, “You are going to have one of the most important jobs there is. You’re going to influence young people. You can offer them the world, or you can keep it from them.” He taught for thirty or more years, and loved every minute of it. Even the heartbreaking, frustrating, confusing ones. He loved all of his students, too. “I couldn’t reach them all, but I tried. and i liked all of them.” He’d read Kozol, too, and Freire and he tried a lot of things to help young people take up space, and challenge oppression, and think and act in the world. I watched my students as Dunc talked. Every human emotion was visible on their faces. Except for a couple of people who were using the opportunity to cruise around on their little tablet things–but for the rest–I say tears, and smiles, and furrowed brows.
We all want to do good. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We don’t want to be incompetent or passionless. But we don’t want to be afraid, either. And sometimes teaching in this way, and really trying to make and nurture connections with others, and challenging the powerful –even (or especially)–when the powerful is us–that’s frightening. There’s so many places we could look that would show us that we’re doing just fine where we are. It’s much easier to teach about recycling and capital cities and grammar than it is to teach about the systemic injustices that we’re supposed to perpetuate. It’s harder to teach that there really is no difference between girls and boys, and that the boys do not have a right to sexually harass the girls, and that even though yes, we now talk about fire fighters, not firemen, and police officers, not police men, and trades persons, not tradesmen– it is still the case that women in those occupations are unwelcome interlopers in a mans world, and their male colleagues pose a real danger to them. The language has changed, the structures of domination have not.
My friend Lyn came to talk to my class, too. She talked about Aboriginal Educational policies. How much and how little they have changed since the Residential Schools. Now we talk about Indigenous knowledges, and Native culture and how important it is for Indigenous children to have access to their culture. So, said, Lyn, “the Aboriginal kids make dream catchers at school, and take them home to show their parents. And their parents say, ‘what is this? these aren’t even from our culture!’” and the children still don’t know about the history of their own people. Lyn told me about Susan Dion, who’s a professor at York University, and I went to see her speak. She said, too, “We are not teaching about the relations between Aboriginal people and Settlers from the War of 1812 to now–we teach about the past, we teach a little about contemporary issues–but nothing in between. Nothing about the Colonial history. Susan said, “You live on this land, you have relationships with us.” When we say, “but no one taught me” and assume the role of “perfect stranger”, we avoid accountability.
More discomfort. Good!
Hard. Well. there ya go. I have to go to class now. Today we’re talking about the sanitization of great men and women–how political activists and leaders like Florence Nightingale and Helen Keller and Martin Luther King Jr. were all de-politicized and shrink-wrapped into non-threatening, ‘nice’ historical figures and pasted all two-dimensional into text books. And how we’ve been trained to impotence–to ‘perfect-strangerness’.
I’m bringing chocolate cupcakes.
From Sinfest (click through for a better quality image).
I used to read this comic about a decade ago, and stopped for no particular reason I can remember. Characters seem to have changed, and there are new ones in ongoing story arcs I'm not familiar with, but I don't remember it being so feminist!
Try also:
I’m not getting my hair cut until I hand a first draft of my dissertation to my committee.
That’s what cancer is. it just gets in, and starts marauding all over the place. Giving cellular reproduction and fission a bad bad name. It’s like when the cops send moles into peaceful demonstrations, or when undisciplined politicos go to organizing meetings. They start yelling and fomenting revolution and calling for direct action and mass organizing and “subvert the dominant paradigm!” and all this with Molotov cocktails and chairs smashing windows and it looks like a revolution, but it’s more of the same corruption of power and plays into the hands of the neo liberals. Cancer has no vision. It just lands somewhere and starts tearing shit down and putting up crappy slum housing. Cancer doesn’t care. it reproduces and becomes a mass here and a mass there, and starts taking yacht cruises through the blood stream and just ends up colonizing everything in the body. Cancer is the European of the disease world. Walking right over all the cells that were already there, just going about their business.
Way, WAY more bad-ass than a virus or bacteria. It’s like rabbits in New Zealand. Except not nearly as cute.
Jackie died May 30th. she was a big woman, a humble genius– kinda misanthropic–with an eye for beauty, a soft spot for troublemakers and a devilish sense of humour. She left a box of play scripts and stories, some paintings and collages, art cards, puppets, watercolour series’ of boiled eggs and strawberries; collages with lilies and sparkles; photographs from her life–
and she left a lot of love too. Nora and Polly, the love of her life and her oldest dearest friend — the beautiful people who were lifted by her talent and her eye for beauty. There’s no need to settle for less than bread and roses. She met death the way she lived her life — with curiosity, grace and humour. Surrounded by the people who loved her.
Her memorial is Sunday. She’s gone from us. But she’s still here in her art and her words.
damn, though.
