A Diabolical Turn

There must be some physicists who can back me up on this one: heat makes time flow more slowly.... I experienced it the past three days at work.

My mind's been busy this week (in moments when a cool breeze has disrupted meditation on what lobster death must feel like)...

The Vampire government continues to demonstrate spectacularly deadly short-sightedness on both the foriegn and domestic fronts. Fresh from applauding the PM's outrageous statement on Israel's bombardment of civilians (and now UN observers) in Lebanon (and his cynical encore photo-op), the conservatives have now announced they'll sit back and record the death-throws of Insite before they'll consider renewing the successful program's funding. Click here for an *easy* way to tell Harper that his contemptuous indifference is disgusting.

On a more positive note: as i settled into my new "youth counsellor" duties this week, i was momentarilly relieved when i read about the intuitive approach to recovery outlined in this article (from the straight).

Also, the Tyee posted their Canadian Books story, including a slimmed-down version of my statement. Here's the original:

On Joy Kogawa’s Obasan
by ryan andrew murphy

Canada is full of great writers. Canada is also full of crap. Many of Canada’s best writers know this, but few have indicted Canada as artfully as Joy Kogawa.

While Kogawa may shrink from the credit I wish to give her, I like to think her character Aunt Emily would not. Every page of Obasan is brilliant; however, Emily’s dialogue in particular stands out from the tapestry of memories and dreams. Early in the text, Emily cautions her niece (the protagonist), “You are your history. If you cut it off you’re an amputee.”

If Emily is right, then Canada is a land of amputees; the self-congratulatory exaltation of “multiculturalism” only masks a powerful and long-standing prescription for quiet homogeneity.

Emily, like Kogawa, is Canadian and demands to be recognized as such. But unlike many “Canadians”, especially “white” Canadians (from where?), she refuses to amputate her history, despite all it’s pain and horror, because that would let other Canadians – the ones who bore responsibility for (and inherit the spoils of) the Japanese internment, for example – off far too easily.

Emily even writes a manuscript attempting to “find the right mix [of words]” to “make familiar, make knowable, the treacherous yellow peril that lived in the minds of the racially prejudiced... Like Cupid, she aimed for the heart. But the heart was not there.”

Does the praise that Obasan has won suggest that Kogawa has found the words her character sought, and that, after all, there is a “heart” in this country?

I think it is several generations too soon for anyone to indulge in the luxury of imagining that we live in a vindicated Canada. But if such a vision is deemed worth pursuing, Kogawa’s book may be our best compass.

I had considered flogging the metaphor some more (mentioning that one needs more than a compass to find one's way), but i was already well over the 150-word limit. They seemed to like it anyway, which is nice. Thanks dad, for attending the symposium on my behalf (and getting my prizes signed by the authors)!

On the heels of last week's serendipitous theme of good people, this week seems to have brought visions of bad things happening to them... The first time i heard of Mike Frastacky was this evening, when i read that he'd been killed. Made me think of Rachel Corrie; not because of the circumstances of their deaths, but because of the choices they had made.

Similarly (but of much greater importance - because we can do something to help him), the first time i ever heard of Dr. Gazi Walid Falah was this afternoon, when i learned that he'd been arrested by the Israeli police earlier this month, in a Kafkaesque manner reminiscent of the "Secret Trial Five" in Canada. This news naturally brought the Cuban Five to mind, but it also made me think again of the Portnoy Family (in Newfoundland) for whom i wrote this letter of support two months ago:

Dear Honourable Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Monte Solberg.

In October of last year over one thousand people gathered at the Sacred Heart Parish in the small Newfoundland community of Marystown for a special prayer service in support of the Portnoy family - who have taken sanctuary in the church since early that month. The Portnoys, originally from Moldova, sought sanctuary in the church to avoid deportation to Israel.
As if the threat of deportation weren't sufficiently troubling, Angela Portnoy is pregnant and has been repeatedly denied safe passage to a hospital for medical attention. Thus, the immigration bureaucracy's apparent determination to destroy this family's well-being extends not only to the parents and their four living children (two of whom were born in Canada), but also to their children yet unborn.
I join the thousands of Canadians who have demanded a stay on the deportation order that continues to menace the Portnoys; I join them in demanding that Alexi Portnoy (who has already been deported) be allowed to return to Canada immediately, and that the entire family's immigration application be fast-tracked in recognition of the completely unwarranted suffering they have already endured due to the immigration bureaucracy's unconscionable blindness and callousness.
It is in your power, Honourable Minister, to exercise Ministerial Discretion to overrule this deportation order. I hereby add my voice to the chorus of Canadians urging you to do so.
I further join the many Canadians who are calling for an immediate moratorium on all activities of the Canadian Border Services Agency in light of the number of conspicuously incredible deportations performed by that agency in recent years. This agency should, in the interest of Canada's professed commitment to human rights (enshrined in our Charter as well as the UN Declaration), be publicly investigated for human rights abuses.
The Portnoy family, who have lived in Canada since 1996, are only one of many families who have been denied a life in Canada - after having already built one. Such abuse of power by unelected bureaucrats must be halted immediately.
I await a substantive response to these concerns.

Sincerely,

ryan andrew murphy
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

...Monte has yet to get back to me.

All in all, the heat and the heaviness of this week have fostered a (slightly crispy) black humour in my waking mind, and a straightforward Inferno in my sleeping mind (and the two have been overlapping more than usual lately). If it hadn't been for a couple of therapeutic visits to The Irish Heather, and a couple of well-timed mood-boosting news stories (like this one - which my mom passed on to me), i hate to think what might have become of me... I might've become just a little bit bitter or something.

peace out,
ry